Word: austins
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...ouch, baby, very ouch, when the original James Bond met his mocker Austin Powers during the Cannes Film Festival last month. "Mistah Myers, is this your first time to Cannes?" asked Sean Connery in his thick Scottish brogue. "Yes!" answered Mike Myers nervously. "And is it going well?" Connery inquired. Myers was so flustered before his childhood hero that he could barely squeak out another affirmative reply. "That was all I said, just yes and yes," Myers recalled later. "I was too intimidated to talk, even though I was dying to meet him. What else was I going...
Well, how about "Things are sooo groovy"? The heavily hyped Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me not only played during the prestigious French festival but, opening in North America this past weekend, also pulled in $20 million on Friday alone. In comparison, 1997's Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery earned just $9.5 million in its entire first weekend. Still, the exploits of the silly secret agent eventually scored more than $100 million in the U.S., nearly half of that from video sales. Not bad, considering it cost only $18 million to make. Also not bad for a movie...
Told and repeated so many times, the genesis of Austin Powers has become industry folklore. Traumatized by his father's losing battle against Alzheimer's, which ended with his death in 1991, Myers was in a slump. He had milked his Saturday Night Live skit Wayne's World for two films, then had appeared in the dud So I Married an Axe Murderer. Driving home from his practice with an amateur hockey team, he heard Dusty Springfield cooing The Look of Love on NPR, and images swirled in his mind: fuzzy memories of free love and Nehru jackets, trashy movies...
...Austin's goofy antics appealed to youngsters who appreciate anyone who's good at behaving badly (in a PG-13 way, of course) and to grownups who wish they could. Soon after the video was released, catchphrases like "Shagadelic!" and "Oh, behave!" caught on in schoolyards and trendy cocktail lounges alike. "I can't walk past a construction site without having 'Fancy a shag?' yelled at me," says Elizabeth Hurley, who co-starred in the first film and has a cameo in the sequel. Laughs Roach: "So many women have blamed us for giving men pickup lines...
Following his small dramatic roles as Steve Rubell in the unsuccessful film 54 and as a repentant drug dealer in the unreleased Pete's Meteor, Myers felt ready to have another go at Austin. Several prequel ideas were tossed about. In one, young Powers and Evil were classmates fighting over the same woman. Roach, returning to direct, suggested making Dr. Evil a square cold-war agent, with Austin "single-handedly creating the British invasion to mess with his head." But Myers and co-screenwriter, Michael McCullers, a former writer for SNL, decided on a plot that had Austin revisit...