Did the success of the DVDs of “Sledge Hammer” not create enough demand for a reunion?
You mean for a feature film?
In any format.
Yeah, people have talked to me about it. They periodically do. I didn’t enjoy the conversations I was having because I had complete control of “Sledge Hammer.” It was the auteur theory back then. They talk about recasting.
No, no, that’s not what we want. We want new adventures of the same “Sledge Hammer.” We want to see them now. You’d have to get Anne-Marie Martin out of retirement.
Or create a new partner for him. But yeah, Clint Eastwood continues to act in his older years so you could certainly do an older “Sledge Hammer,” though I thought Russell Crowe would be funny as Sledge Hammer too.
We went far along with a negotiation at one point and I was about to sign the deal, this was a few years ago, the head of the studio right before I signed said, “Could Sledge Hammer be played by Larry the Cable Guy?” So I put the pen down and walked away. I’m not opposed to reviving it but it was a product of the time so I kind of like it the way it is. I prefer to do new stuff and that’s what “Bullet in the Face” is.
I learned from your commentaries on the DVDs, were Sledge and Doreau supposed to be a thing? I may have been too young to get that.
Well, it was a romantic triangle. It was Sledge, Doreau and his gun. That was the tension. If it had run longer we’d be forced to get into that. That’s always a dubious thing because a lot of the times the shows go downhill when the two leads get together. It was unique sexual tension. He was in love with his gun and that was a difficult choice for him to make.
There’s fan fiction and all that sort of thing. I like leaving a show with a question mark. We certainly did that with “Bullet in the Face.” To this day on Twitter and everybody who sees it, they want more even though I viewed it very subtly as closure. If you pay close attention to it, that’s the ending even though I certainly didn’t spell it out.
Were fans upset that on the “Sledge Hammer” commentaries you kept pretending you were going to answer it and then something kept happening?
They always wanted more. They always want closure. They want a period as opposed to a question mark but that’s part of the fun. The shows that I enjoy don’t dot their t’s and cross the i’s, I’m making a joke. I love the ending of “The Prisoner.” I never saw the remake, but I like ambiguity.
I like ambiguous endings to things. Everybody sees something in their own way. I’m sure some people look at the ending of Planet of the Apes and wonder, “Hey, how did they apes build the Statue of Liberty?” It’s all in the eye of the beholder. I hate when everything is spelled out. It’s kind of fun to have that question mark going on and see what people say. What, did you want more? Did you want Sledge and Doreau to get married?
Like I said, I never thought about it when I was a kid, until I heard the audio commentaries and thought it was funny that you kept avoiding it. In the last one, you had an earthquake.
Thankfully there was no earthquake when I recorded the commentary for Shout!
If they ever did another “Sledge Hammer” or Hexed DVD, are there any more materials that weren’t on the previous Anchor Bay and Sony releases?
Probably not on Sony. I don’t know about Anchor Bay. That was pretty complete. I went to the treasure trove of everything I had. I would always do more commentary. You could always certainly do that.
In the case of “Bullet in the Face” a lot of people have tweeted asking whether it will come out on Blu-ray because it was shot hi-def. I don’t know how “Sledge” would look in Blu-ray. They were talking to me about a Blu-ray release of “Sledge Hammer.”
Actually there was a live tribute show to “Sledge” that there’s footage of that the could include on that. “Bullet in the Face” was shown in Los Angeles to an audience and I did a Q&A for it. It looks really good on the big screen so that’s kind of nice to see the cinematography doing favors it does with a movie.
