You’ve heard of comic-book heroes with super speed, but what about a hero with super seed.
Picture, if you can stomach it: Will Smith – America’s most huggable actor, personal friend to Nelson Mandela and endless fount of charisma – lying alone on the bed in his room, doing. . er, “stuff.”
We don’t know if there’s a copy of Juggs magazine present, but we do know this: When Smith finishes, the explosion is so powerful, it blows a hole clean through the ceiling.
When pundits talked sunnily about this being the summer of the superhero, this is probably not what they had in mind.
The subversive scene appeared in the original draft of “Hancock,” the dark superhero movie opening Wednesday, that is such an edgy take on the genre that it’s been giving Hollywood executives ulcers since it was written 12 years ago.
Although the original script, penned by Vincent Ngo in 1996, has been toned down and rewritten to feel more like a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster, don’t expect “Hancock” – featuring a hard-drinking, womanizing, selfish jerk who spews curse words like a sailor – to supply the same kind of popcorn fun as “Iron Man.”
An early review in Variety warns that the film “treads the very edge of PG-13 permissiveness and will no doubt catch many July 4 weekend kid-herding parents unhappily unaware.”
Now imagine if it had been shot as originally envisioned. Will Smith might never work again.
The movie, which stars Smith as a depressed, alcoholic superhero who has his image rehabbed by a pr exec (Jason Bateman), was initially called “Tonight, He Comes.” It was written by Ngo, a Vietnam-born screenwriter who’s a bit of an enigma in that he’s never given a mainstream interview. (And he still hasn’t; he declined The Post’s request to chat.)
Dustin Nguyen, an actor and good friend of Ngo’s, says his buddy is shy and incredibly quiet.
“He’s not seeking any sort of spotlight,” Nguyen says. “He considers himself lucky to be doing what he’s doing, and that’s good enough for him. He doesn’t have a need to speak out.”
For years, Ngo’s script was doing the speaking for him. In the late ’90s, it was one of those legendary pieces of writing that got passed around Hollywood and everyone in town seemed to have read it.
“He told me the motivation for [the idea] was that he loved Superman,” Nguyen says. “It inspired him, and he wanted to do a version of Superman that was more real and challenging. He wanted to take the Superman genre and turn it upside down.”
Ngo turned the genre so far upside down that what he created was considered un-filmable. The movie that eventually became “Hancock” went through years of revisions and false stops and starts, with various studios and directors coming and going.
“People really responded to the writing, the storytelling, but it was a tough sell, perhaps because it was not quite as accessible to an audience,” says Vince Gilligan, the writer hired to revamp Ngo’s script. “It was more dark and moody and somber.
“When you make a superhero movie with lots of special effects, you know it’s going to be a high-budget movie,” he adds. “The original draft was more like an art film, and as we know, no one makes high-budget art films.”
But Smith, long known for his good-guy roles, was looking for something more complicated. Hancock’s dark tale resonated with the former Fresh Prince.
“Hancock is not your average superhero,” Smith says. “Every day he wakes up mad at the world. He doesn’t remember what happened to him and there’s no one to help him find the answers.”
Another scene excised in rewrites saw Hancock as the victim of an attempted robbery. The invulnerable hero grabs the mugger’s gun, jams the muzzle into his own mouth and empties the magazine, each shot lighting up his head.
“That image really stuck with me, and it’s the kind of image you wish you could keep, but you know it’ll never make a PG-13 rating, and it won’t be something that the executives would love having in the movie,” Gilligan says. “There was a lot to be said for that original draft. You kind of wish you could see that movie.”
Keep dreaming. That original draft has frightened more Hollywood types than the thought of being cornered at a party by a Scientologist.
Early on, Ngo’s script was offered to Warner Bros., but executives there emphatically declined, presumably because “Tonight, He Comes” read like a kick in the crotch to one of the studio’s most valuable properties, Superman.
Michael Mann was at one point attached to direct, but he left to do “Miami Vice.” Jonathan Mostow (“Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines”) came onboard, but he too eventually walked over “creative differences.” “The Pursuit of Happyness” director Gabriele Muccino was given the reigns, but his sensibilities didn’t quite mesh with a big-budget superhero project.
Finally, Peter Berg (“The Kingdom”) was hired, and he and Smith managed to wrestle the film into something that was deemed releasable for a “Will Smith audience.”
But not without a few more hurdles.
Two early versions of “Hancock” that were submitted to the ratings board were slapped with an R -unthinkable for a Smith-driven movie. In order to earn a PG-13, Berg had to hit the editing room and cut or tone down objectionable elements, including a scene in which Hancock boozes with a young boy, another in which the hero drinks and flies, and a third which Berg says involved “statutory rape.”
Last month, Smith and the “Hancock” crew were seen in Times Square filming new scenes – an alarmingly late date to be still working on the film. The reshoots forced the film’s June 10 Australian world premiere to be cancelled and led some to speculate that portions of the film misfired with test audiences and required last-second changes.
The Times Square sequence runs over the closing credits, suggesting that the film’s ending was indeed changed.
So what’s left after all these tweaks? A black comedy that audiences will no doubt still feel is much edgier than the average superhero fare.
Hancock remains a loser and an incorrigible drunk who guzzles whiskey like water. He doesn’t give a rat’s rear about political correctness. He also throws around the F-word, calls women the B-word and uses a slur similar to the one that got Isaiah Washington kicked off “Grey’s Anatomy.”
Plus, whenever he reluctantly springs into action to save someone, he ends up destroying millions of dollars worth of property. Smith knows this isn’t his typical Independence Day fare.
“There’s this idea that summer movies are about action and that fall movies are about character,” he says. “Well, what happens if you take a powerful, dramatic story with rich character arcs and set it in a world with all the bells and whistles of a July 4 movie?”
“Hancock” has an abrupt tonal shift in its second half that may turn some people off, but as far as the movie’s fortunes go, it may not matter. The presence of Smith alone should guarantee that the film earns back much of its estimated $150 million budget in its opening six-day run. Something tells us Hancock will go out and celebrate with a drink.