Two Scenes In There’s Something About Mary Led To A Six-Month Behind-The-Scenes Battle

Nearly thirty years later, There’s Something About Mary is widely regarded as one of the best remembered and most successful comedies to come out in the 1990s, but prior to its release, it wasn’t exactly considered a sure thing. In fact, its directors, The Farrelly Brothers, got locked into an extended power struggle with Fox before the cameras started rolling. The studio wanted two scenes removed from the shooting script. The Farrelly Brothers said no.

The standoff was so heated that the film apparently sat in pre-production for months. Eventually, Fox executives backed down and gave the filmmakers $23M to make their movie with the two scenes in question. They were, of course, the infamous zipper and hair gel scenes, and based at least partly on the outrageous nature of those two scenes, the film went on to gross nearly $400M at the global box office and was nominated for multiple Golden Globes.

CinemaBlend’s Riley Utley recently interviewed Peter Farrelly as part of the promotional day for his new film I Play Rocky, and he told her the story. Here’s a portion of his quote…

The bigger fight for us was Something About Mary, when you know the hair gel scene and the zipper scene. The studio is like, cut those and we'll greenlight your movie. I was like, no, those are the two funniest scenes in the movie. And they're like, we're not greenlighting it with those scenes in it. So we held out on that for six months. I said I don't want to make the movie and cut the two funny scenes. And luckily, they finally caved.

Now, you might be wondering why it took The Farrelly Brothers six months to get their way, especially given Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz were interested in starring. They made Dumb & Dumber just a few years earlier, which was a massive hit and remains a cultural touchstone. They were the toast of Hollywood after their debut grossed almost $250M, but their follow-up, Kingpin, worked for some fans but did not do so well at the box office. It barely made back its budget, and there were concerns the Farrelly Brothers may have been one hit wonders.

Because of that, I get the apprehension from the studio to greenlight another project, but for the life of me, I have no idea why that apprehension would have had anything to do with cutting the zipper and hair gel scenes from the movie. They’re both over the top and utterly disgusting for different reasons, as the former involves a character getting his zipper stuck in the worst possible place and the latter, which still gets referenced today, involves using ejaculate as hair product, but they also quite obviously fit the overall tone of There’s Something About Mary. If an executive didn’t like those two scenes, it’s hard to imagine they’d enjoy the rest of the movie, which contains more than its fair share of sex, drugs, serial killers and violence toward the developmentally disabled.

Fortunately for both the filmmakers and the studio, There’s Something About Mary was shot as intended and has been making people laugh for decades. In recent years, Peter Farrelly has branched out on his own and started making some more serious films. Green Book, of course, won Best Picture, and his latest I Play Rocky is getting serious Oscar buzz, especially for lead Anthony Ippolito, who is fantastic as Sylvester Stallone. The latter opens this weekend and is worth checking out.

TOPICS