Renaissance Man
Short description
Bill Rago is an advertising executive in Detroit whose career collapses when he loses his job and discovers he has no qualifications for anything else. Unable to find work on his own, he takes a temporary position through the unemployment office: teaching basic thinking and language skills to a group of army recruits at a training base. He arrives to find no classroom, no materials and no structure prepared for the course, and his students show little interest in the subject. Their skeptical sergeant, Cass, has no faith in the arrangement. Bill gradually reaches the recruits through an unlikely route, introducing them to Shakespeare's Hamlet, and gains their trust despite the army's disapproval.
Penny Marshall directed the film, the fifth of the seven features listed in her filmography, following A League of Their Own and preceding The Preacher's Wife. Jim Burnstein wrote the screenplay, and Robert Greenhut and Andrew G. Vajna produced. Danny DeVito leads as Bill, with Gregory Hines as Sergeant Cass, James Remar, Ed Begley Jr., Lillo Brancato and Stacey Dash among the credited cast of fifty.
Released in June 1994, the film had a budget of 40 million dollars and took about 24 million worldwide, a commercial shortfall. Audiences rate it modestly, at 6.2 on IMDb from roughly 20,000 votes and 6.1 on TMDB from just over 300. A critics' rating of 4.5 out of 10 from 24 reviews places it below those audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Throughout the film, the soldiers torment Private Haywood, played by Mark Wahlberg, believing he has absolutely no ear for music or sense of rhythm. Prior to becoming an actor, Wahlberg was a professional rapper.
- Scenes set in the fictional "Fort McClane" in Michigan were filmed at "Fort Jackson" in South Carolina.
- The role of Sergeant Cass was initially offered to Wing Rimes, but he declined it because Quentin Tarantino (with whom he had been friends for a long time) had specifically written a role for him in the drama "Pulp Fiction" (1994). After his refusal, the role was offered to Gregory Hines (1946-2003). The film's director, Penny Marshall (1943-2018), was only concerned that Hines looked too positive and well-mannered for his character – even when the plot required him to shout at his subordinates.
- Bill is asked if he has served before, and he replies that he only participated in an anti-war march to Arlington Cemetery. In reality, Danny DeVito, who is just under 1.5 meters tall, was 5 cm shorter than the minimum height requirement for draftees in the United States.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
