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Put yourself into a 1987 state of mind, and imagine you’re using the computer from “Weird Science” to create the perfect young actor. You want it all: A hunk with legitimate performing chops who can do finely composed drama as easily as he does zany comedy. He can be the world’s sexiest man and its biggest blithering idiot. He’s also got an athletic frame onto which you can pack layers of muscle. Can he sing and dance? Probably, but we’re not trying to take roles away from our underserved musical theater stars, so let’s not get greedy. All the other stuff you want a star to do, however, he does it.
So feed your snipped-from-magazine clippings of Robert Redford, Paul Newman, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and the like into the computer, and who do you come up with? Lorenzo Lamas?? You’ve got yourself a virus, pal (and quite possibly worse). Try again. Did you get Brad Pitt? Good.
Now imagine you’re casting a horror sequel in 1987, and a then-23-year-old Brad Pitt walks into the room to audition for a role. You’re under pressure from the studio to find a young stud to make up for the sex appeal deficit left by your balding, 42-year-old co-lead. This is your chance. You get to discover one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood for the next 37 years and counting. But he’s not quite Brad Pitt yet, and you pass. It’s not your fault, really, but years later, you figure what you didn’t get in that screen test you’d find very quickly on set. How do you live with yourself?
Ask Don Coscarelli. He’s the guy who didn’t cast Brad Pitt to be in “Phantasm II.”
A painful, forced recasting brought Pitt to Coscarelli
I don’t mean to drag Mr. Coscarelli here. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever had the pleasure to interview in Hollywood, and he does nothing but make sui generis genre gems like “Phantasm,” “The Beastmaster,” and “John Dies at the End.” But if you read his showbiz memoir, “True Indie: Life and Death in Filmmaking” (which you absolutely should, because he’s a spectacularly entertaining raconteur), you’ll discover he’s incredibly hard on himself when relating the casting drama in the lead-up to shooting “Phantasm II.”
According to Coscarelli, “As casting began on ‘Phantasm Il,’ the Universal executives made it very clear to me that they expected me to cast a working actor in the role of Mike.” The part of Mike, the young protagonist from the first film, was written for the actor Michael Baldwin, but since he hadn’t been working in the years prior to the greenlighting of “Phantasm II,” the studio was dead set against him.
Initially, Coscarelli didn’t let that deter him. Per the filmmaker:
“To try to change the executive’s minds l even cajoled Michael into coming over and allowing me to videotape him reading for the part. In retrospect, this was hugely disrespectful. Michael had originated the role in a hit movie — why should he ever be asked to read for his own role? Well, I thought I could use his reading to convince Universal to allow him to play the role. It didn’t work.”
Coscarelli eventually went with James LeGros as Michael, and was rewarded with as good a performance as he could’ve hoped for in lieu of Baldwin — who, for “Phantasm” fans, is the only true Mike. Fortunately, Coscarelli was able to get his friend back in the role for the subsequent sequels (which /Film’s Ryan Scott advises you to watch in a very specific order), but he was still upset about how everything went down on “Phantasm II.”
What he didn’t know — or, more accurately, remember — at the time was that he had the opportunity to cast Brad Pitt. Amusingly, Baldwin was the one who informed him of this.
Meeting Brad Pitt in his Flock of Seagulls phase
In “True Indie,” Coscarelli wrote that Baldwin had been friends with Jennifer Aniston before she was famous (perhaps back in her “Leprechaun” days). Years later, he went to a dinner party at her house while she was dating Pitt, and was surprised when the star said, “Hey, you’re the ‘Phantasm’ guy!” Pitt then told Baldwin he’d auditioned for the part of Mike for “Phantasm II,” but lost out to LeGros. Baldwin related this to Coscarelli, who didn’t remember this, so the director looked through his audition tapes for the sequel and fast-forwarded until he found his man.
According to Coscarelli’s memoir, it doesn’t sound like Pitt put his best foot forward in this test:
“On-screen, my casting director, Bersy Fels, opens the office door with a flourish and announces, ‘Don, meet Brad Pitt.’ And in walked Brad Pitt, who proceeded to read the cemetery scene from Phantasm II. ‘Reggie, every one of these graves is empty!’ In my defense, Brad was young, twenty-three years old, had this Flock of Seagulls wraparound hairstyle, and at the time was wearing eighties parachute-style exercise pants tucked into his socks and hi-top Reeboks.”
Coscarelli still has yet to work with Pitt, but, in a bit of wild Hollywood irony, LeGros did go on to play a loopy movie star character in Tom DiCillo’s filmmaking satire “Living in Oblivion” that feels like it was at least partially based on Pitt (given that DiCillo had directed Pitt previously in “Johnny Suede”). Even wilder, DiCillo’s movie also features Dermot Mulroney and Catherine Keener, both of whom appeared in Coscarelli’s “Survival Quest” five years earlier. Closing out this saga, Coscarelli wrote that he auditioned a “diminutive, very young actor” for Mulroney’s part in that movie who went on to achieve Pitt-level fame. He won’t say who it was, but I think we can safely assume it could only have been Lorenzo Lamas.
