STOP THE PRESSES
Entertainment Weekly #490 - June 18, 1999

HE'S RICH. HE'S FUNNY. AND HE'S GOT NO COMMENT! ADAM SANDLER, AMERICA'S MOST PRESS-SHY MOVIE STAR, GETS THE GIRL (AND THE KID) AND GROWS UP (JUST A BIT) IN BIG DADDY - by Betty Cortina

If you're looking for this summer's real international man of mystery, look not to Austin Powers. Look not to magazines (except, of course, this one) or newspapers, and under no circumstances should you look for him on the critics' 10-best lists.

Look instead among the leafy slopes of Bel Air, where you'll find Adam Sandler's home--a hideout made possible in part by the quarter-billion-dollar combined grosses of his last two movies, The Wedding Singer and The Waterboy. Or, better yet, look inside the minds of Columbia Pictures' executives, who hope his next film, Big Daddy, opening June 25, will be a serious contender in the summer-movie race.

The problem with looking for Adam Sandler, of course, is that he happens to be a surprisingly elusive fellow. In an age when movie stars routinely discuss their sex lives, families, and finances--in an age when any casual viewer of morning television can tell you how Kathie Lee Gifford slept the night before--Sandler is a star who eschews exposure to the spotlight, refuses interview requests from the print media, and even forbids his posse, the handful of New York University buddies who've written, produced, and directed most of his films, to talk about him or his movies.

We might blame it on the critics--dubbed "cynical a--holes" by a character in big Daddy--one of whom described Sandler as having "poor comic timing, little grace, and hardly any acting ability." Says Chris Rock, a fellow Saturday Night Live alum: "The press didn't really give him any respect....Everybody dissed him, and it's like, 'Now you want me to talk to you?' If I were him, I wouldn't talk either."

The star's quasi-Garboesque stance with the press is an ironic joke that we can fully appreciate, because accessibility is the key to his off-the-wall brand of sophomoric humor, embraced largely by young male audiences. At 32, the man who not long ago released a song titled "The Longest Pee" now ranks with Hanks and Cruise when it comes to bankability. And while Columbia may be frustrated at his reluctance to promote Big Daddy in print, the studio can take comfort in knowing that at least one box office analyst is predicting the film will clear $115 million domestically in this hotly competitive season. According to ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY's numerous interviews with Sandler's friends and colleagues, it's clear that Sandler has never been the kind of guy who plays by the rules.

Recalling Sandler's late-'80s gigs at New York City's Comic Strip Live, where he first began honing the avant-garde/dumb-and-dumber shtick that would ultimately morph into Saturday Night Live's nonsensical Operaman character and baroquely oddball movie heroes, former comanager Barry Moss says that Sandler "never prepared his material ahead of time. He liked to go out there, feel out the audience, and then he'd wing it." Women were so smitten by Sandler's boyish looks and charm that they often waited around to meet him. And though he was green at the time, he delivered the rustiest of punchlines with panache. When a heckler once bellowed, "Why aren't you wearing socks?" Sandler responded without skipping a beat, "Because I left them at your wife's house."

Now Sandler's appeal is expected to broaden further with Big Daddy, the female-friendly story in which Sandler stars as a law school graduate who refuses to take on adult responsibilities, but winds up the guardian of a 5-year-old boy. The film--also starring Joey Lauren Adams, Jon Stewart, and Rob Schneider--won't disappoint his core audience. Sandler finds hilarity in spitting, urinating, and vomiting, but he also appears more grown-up. He specified to costume designers that he wanted his Daddy character to look not like the oafish lunkheads he's played in the past, but rather a handsome and approachable regular guy. Big Daddy also flaunts a softer side of Sandler, this time displaying paternal instincts and a sensitive, open-minded attitude toward a gay couple.

As it happens, the film he's banking on to expand his audience is one he did not create. The screenplay had been kicking around Columbia before studio president Amy Pascal (see story on page 31) came up with the idea to cast Sandler after seeing an early cut of Singer. "Adam said 'I'm not gonna do it,'" recalls Pascal, "and as he was walking out the door--and I was really devastated--he said, 'You know how we could make it work? We could make it work if we changed it so that I adopt the kid to get my girlfriend back.' Before, he just adopted the kid, but he wanted to do it with a twist, with an edge. And I said okay."

Columbia signed Sandler for $8 million before The Waterboy catapulted the star's price toward $20 million (it also has an animated movie in the works with him), and Sandler and his creative team--which includes college buddies Tim Herlihy, Jack Giarraputo, and Frank Coraci, plus Allen Covert, a former doorman at L.A.'s Improv--rewrote much of the script. "It took meeting after meeting after meeting," Pascal says. Punchlines were retooled, the setting was switched from L.A. to New York, a bodily fluid joke was thrown in here, a slapstick gag there, and voila!--a Sandler vehicle was born.

"He is incredibly involved in the writing," says Pascal. "He is collaborative, but at the end of the day he knows what works for him." The Sandler touch is so far-reaching that one Big Daddy crew member calls him "the king of tweak." Sandler himself brought on director Dennis Dugan, with whom he'd worked on 1996's Happy Gilmore. Before Cole and Dylan Sprouse, the 6-year-old twins who play the little boy in the movie, were cast, Sandler met with 25 other kids and tested their chemistry by throwing himself on the floor with them to play with action figures. And when filming was finally finished, and most of the crew had gone home, Sandler sat in on the editing sessions. "He's in charge of every detail of his comedy," says friend and Waterboy costar Henry Winkler. "He hears it in his head and guides whatever scene, whether he is in it or not, to his vision."

According to one crew member, the studio was "being frugal" at the outset of production, closely watching what was being spent. But when Waterboy made its box office splash in November, the studio loosened up "and let Adam do whatever he wanted." And while it was understood that Dugan ran the overall show, from the beginning "it was Adam who was the arbiter of what was funny and what wasn't," says costume designer Ellen Lutter. Still, the mood on the set was as light as you might expect. Sandler often broke into a silly song at wardrobe fittings, once ad-libbing an ode to an ugly shirt. Between takes, he spent time with his girlfriend Jackie Pitone, a model, who sometimes visited the set. A guitarist at heart, Sandler also held jam sessions in his dressing room, which was actually in a tour bus. Early on, he traded in his traditional star trailer for the oversize bus, equipped with a big- screen television, because, Lutter says, "to him it seemed more of a guy place, it was just more fun."

Like any pop-culture phenomenon--from the Beatles to Leo--Sandler is the beneficiary of accidental but impeccable timing. His sense of humor coincides with that of a booming teenage-boy audience, delighted when Sandler fashions a hat out of a water-filtering system in Waterboy, croons cheesy '80s tunes in Singer, or gives old Bob Barker a sound beating in Gilmore ("The price is wrong, bitch!").

Of course, stupid-stunt humor is nothing new, and Sandler's persona can be tracked through Hollywood history--from the nonthreatening regular-guy appeal of Jimmy Stewart, to the pathetic shuffling of Jonathan Winters, to the manic grotesqueness of John Belushi. "He's got the Everyman quality," says Daddy producer Sid Ganis. "Guys can look at him and say 'I've got the same problems.'" Indeed, the underdog-makes-good arc to his characters is a Hollywood tradition that has worked for stars as disparate as Joan Crawford and Jim Carrey. In Sandler's case, mindless dolt gets into trouble, manages to overcome ridiculous circumstance, and always gets the girl. And if other legendary comics such as Richard Pryor, Sam Kinison, and even Jerry Lewis were moved by anger and inner demons, Sandler seems to be inspired by nothing more than a childish id and a true love of yukking it up. "He's just a down-to-earth guy who's writing what he thinks is funny and putting it out there," says Stewart.

Sandler's fondness for foils may say quite a bit about his own childhood as a Brooklyn-born Jewish boy reared in suburban, homogeneous Manchester, N.H., where he occasionally endured anti-Semitic remarks on the school bus. The youngest son of Stan, a retired engineer, and Judy, a homemaker, Sandler left for Manhattan to attend NYU in 1984. He also studied--get this--acting at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute, where his humor wasn't always appreciated.

"Some of the teachers didn't think he was serious," recalls Geoffrey Horne, one of the few acting teachers who encouraged Sandler to follow his instincts (and who has a small role in Big Daddy). "One of them wrote an evaluation about Adam never being successful in the business." Sandler ignored the hecklers and continued performing whenever he could, testing his routine on students between classes and in small New York City clubs. "His jokes would bomb all the time, but he would never bomb," recalls Comic Strip talent coordinator Lucien Hold, who hired Sandler for one of his first Manhattan gigs. "It was more about his own personality up there. He was so likable. And he got away with it."

While working the stand-up circuit, he landed a recurring role on Cosby, and within three years he was appearing on SNL, displaying his repertoire of heavily accented screwball characters and trademark silly songs. Once again, his humor was met with resistance; there was considerable contrast between Sandler's deranged dunces and the wry wit of cast members like Phil Hartman.

"His comedy was probably jarring to some people at first because the cast was uniformly of a certain generation, then in comes this guy in his mid-20s," says Conan O'Brien, then a writer for SNL. "But Adam was very confident about the kinds of things he thought were funny and he wasn't about to water it down for anybody." By the time he blended in with the cast, Sandler, as restless as some of his characters, was ready to move on. "He was always ambitious and he was very impatient," says Moss. "He'd want to start a movie tomorrow. He was in a hurry...and he was right."

He left SNL after less than five seasons and survived on roles in funny but forgettable films like Shakes the Clown (1991) and Airheads (1994). But it was such low-budget, high-profit-margin movies as Billy Madison, about a grown-up jerk who repeats grades 1 through 12, and Happy Gilmore, about the hot-tempered goofy golfer, that consolidated his fame in the halls of America's high schools. Meanwhile, two of his comedy albums, with numbers like the surprise holiday hit "The Chanukah Song," went platinum. And yet it wasn't until The Wedding Singer, which gained him female fans, won over a few critics and grossed $80 million, and then Waterboy, which broke the non-summer opening-weekend record previously held by Carrey's Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, that the studios realized there was something about Adam.

Just after Waterboy, Sandler signed a $35 million, two-picture deal with New Line. As part of the deal, he will star in Little Nicky (now in preproduction), playing the reluctant son of the devil. He will also executive-produce Deuce, a Touchstone comedy starring Schneider, and in September he releases his fourth album, Stan & Judy's Kid. Still, one big question remains: How long can Sandler's silliness last? What will he do once his core audience grows up? For one, he could go the Jim Carrey route, try to expand his dramatic range, and find a Truman Show of his own. But, says one agent who specializes in handling comics, "Carrey has dramatic range while with Sandler it seems that what you see is what you get."

Then again, Sandler could continue making up his own rules as he goes along. "At this point we will pretty much buy anything he says, [though] if I came up with his ideas myself, I'd be fired," says New Line Cinema VP of production Richard Brener. "As absurd as anything is, he can pull it off."

(Additional reporting by Stacy Jenel Smith, Chris Nashawaty, Jessica Shaw, Dan Snierson, Zack Stentz, and Frank Swertlow)