Twenty-nine years ago, filmmaker Roland Emmerich knew what would sell tickets to an American audience: getting to see their seat of power blown to smithereens by malevolent, powerful beings from outer space. On the Fourth of July, no less!
The trick worked. The picture made $96 million domestically in its first week of release, and stayed the No. 1 movie for three weeks, ultimately earning $817 million worldwide, which is $1.68 billion today adjusted for inflation. The appeal wasn’t just cool special effects and weirdo-looking aliens. It was the top-notch ensemble of performers including Will Smith in his Bad Boys follow-up, cementing him as a star, and it was the fact that the movie was PG-13. Which almost didn’t happen.
Independence Day‘s ensemble cast a wide net: Bill Pullman as the noble President of the United States, Jeff Goldblum as a geek-whiz, Judd Hirsch as his father, Randy Quaid before his, uh, current career path, Data from Star Trek, Robert Loggia, Mary McDonnell, Vivica A. Fox, Harry Connick Jr., a young Mae Whitman, a very well-trained dog… the whole world was in this movie! The best surprise, though, was seeing the playwright, performer, gay rights activist, and very new to big budget action-adventure spectacles Harvey Fierstein as “Marty,” the zany coworker to Goldblum’s egghead David Levinson.
20th century studios
Harvey Fierstein having a rough go of it in ‘Independence Day’
Emmerich let Fierstein play to his strengths — chomping up the scenery with a few big, brash, comedic moments. (Indeed, he gets one of the funnier “moments of demise” in cinema history.)
Fierstein’s character works at a New York City cable company, where his underling, the genius played by Goldblum, first pieces together that the signal sent among the alien ships all perched over Earth’s major landmarks is actually a countdown. (Gee, no one else put this together?)
Fierstein freaks out and, in his inimitable voice, cries out, “I gotta call my brother, I better call my housekeeper, I gotta call my lawyer!” And then, taking an easy zing that dates back all the way to Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 2, corrects himself and says, “Eh, forget my lawyer.”
But if you’ve watched this scene enough, you may have noticed that the audio is a little off when Fierstein makes his joke. That’s because at first it was a different and more profane joke.
20th century studios
Harvey Fierstein with Jeff Goldblum, at the moment he realizes he can do without legal representation after most of Earth’s cities are destroyed
In the original script, that “forget” was a different word that began with the letter F. But the movie already had enough destructive violence in it that it was on the edge of losing that PG-13 rating. In the end, it would only be the aliens and the U.S. military with the bombs. All F-bombs were removed. The PG-13 rating was saved, parents took their kids to watch millions of people die in a fire, and everyone was happy.
Everett Collection ‘Independence Day’ came on the heels of ‘Bad Boys,’ securing Will Smith as an A-list action star
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Whether of not Fierstein’s foul-mouthed jibe was in any way inspired by Shakespeare’s classic “let’s kill all the lawyers” line is hard to know, but one thing that was a direct reference to the Bard was Pullman’s address to the troops, an interplanetary spin on Henry V’s speech at Agincourt. Don’t watch this unless you want to FIGHT FOR YOUR FREEDOM!
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