Zucker gave Farley the script and, concerned that Farley’s agent would advise him against accepting the role because of the film’s politics, told the actor not to show it to anyone. Farley, best known for his recurring role in a series of Hertz commercials, read the script and called back the next day to accept.
When he met Zucker and Sokoloff on the set as shooting on the film began, he told them that he, too, had long considered himself a conservative. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Sokoloff. “We were afraid that he would not want to be involved in something that was so directly taking on the left and that he would not want to play the Michael Moore character.”
Farley told me this story during a break in filming at the Daniel Webster Elementary School in Pasadena, last April, with Steve McEveety, the film’s producer, listening in.
“I thought that the minute we started talking about politics that would be the end,” Farley recalls. “There was this dance that we did–a dance familiar to conservative actors in Hollywood. Lots of actors have done it.”
“All three of you,” said McEveety.
“Yeah, all three of us.”
…On one of the days I was on set, McEveety had invited Vivendi Entertainment president Tom O’Malley to meet Zucker. Vivendi had just agreed to distribute the film and had promised wide release–news that had the cast and crew of An American Carol in particularly good spirits.
O’Malley and Zucker chatted about the fact that O’Malley is the nephew of Candid Camera’s Tom O’Malley and that they are both from the Midwest, among other things. Zucker thanked him for picking up the movie, which will be one of the first for Vivendi’s new distribution arm. O’Malley told Zucker that he was particularly interested in this film in part because he, too, leans right.
Such revelations are common occurrences at the periodic meetings of the secret society of Hollywood conservatives known as the “Friends of Abe.” The group, with no official membership list and no formal mission, has been meeting under the leadership of Gary Sinise (CSI New York, Forrest Gump) for four years. Zucker had spent a year working on a film with Christopher McDonald without learning anything about his politics. Shortly after the film wrapped, he ran into McDonald, best known as Shooter McGavin from Adam Sandler’s Happy Gilmore, at one of these informal meetings.
“It’s almost like people who are gay, show up at the baths and say, ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were gay!’ ” Zucker says…
Let’s hope that they can come out of the closet some day.