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The Brothers Grin
Luke says he was at Owen's house a few weeks ago, hanging out. Owen said he had just received some bad news: Those damn Wayans brothers! "Little Man" (starring Marlon Wayans, directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, written by Shawn Wayans) will be opening the same day as Owen's big stab at summer comedy, "You, Me & Dupree."
Like any brother, Luke chose to tease Owen: "Yeah, I saw the preview, 'Little Man' looks really good." (On David Letterman a few days later, Luke, promoting "My Super Ex-Girlfriend," will tease that "You, Me & Dupree" doesn't open until Thanksgiving. It opened last week, accepted its predictable drubbing from critics, and took in $21.3 mil, a few hundred thousand dollars behind "Little Man.")
  "I always had the sense that he's an underutilized, unvalued resource," Ivan Reitman says of Luke Wilson, above, who stars in the director's latest, "My Super Ex-Girlfriend." (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post) |
This is actually the first time in Wilsonbrother Land that each has a big movie opening within a week of the other. Every interviewer tries to make something of the competitiveness between them. "I gotta find a better way to answer it because people seem to want to hear about it, but really you just want the best for the other person," Luke says.
Really, it's more a genetic question, about our culture's propensity for siblings. These are not Kennedys, or Bushes -- unless you run a movie studio, in which case, you don't question it, you just sell it. Same if you're a Wilson brother. You get used to seeing your brother or yourself or any of your friends on the covers of magazines. Will Ferrell's on GQ. Owen is on Blender. Luke is a tiny cover line, the "20Q's" subject in this month's Playboy, "And, hey, Vince is on the cover of Us again," he jokes.
You carouse. You hang out. Some of it is filmed. That's all it is.
Only that's not all it is. What got the Wilson brothers where they are was a spate of complete and counterintuitive originality -- "Bottle Rocket," the 1996 film they made with Wes Anderson that charmed Sundance and got remade as a studio film. This was supposed to be their stock in trade: Owen kept writing with Anderson and made "Rushmore," and Luke gave the best performance of his career so far in "The Royal Tenenbaums" as Richie Tenenbaum, the morose tennis pro.
In the past few years, Luke Wilson and the other Wilson brother -- Andrew, the oldest, the beta version, perhaps just as talented, but seen by the world mainly in bit parts -- co-directed a screenplay of Luke's called "The Wendell Baker Story." Luke also starred, as a con artist who works a scheme in a retirement home. Owen plays the bad guy, the head orderly. This at last was the All-Wilson Project. They wanted to give it a '70s comedy feel. Luke's original, longhand screenplay turned out to be more than 250 typewritten pages, twice as long as a movie script should be. Kris Kristofferson and Harry Dean Stanton have big parts. Ferrell does a cameo. Brother the dog played the dog, "and he was great," Luke says. They screened it last year at Austin's South by Southwest film fest.
Either it was totally brilliant or it was barely watchable. You hear both things. It has still not been released, either in theaters or straight-to-video. He crosses his arms and looks only slightly pained to be talking about his baby this way.
"I want it to come out, and I want people to see it," Wilson says simply, offering the excuse that the original financiers went broke and sold their rights to the film, which cost $8 million. "I've just been so through-the-mill with it. It's just a bummer more than anything else."
Why Indeed?
He goes home a lot.
"My dad calls me and asks, 'When are you coming home, when are you coming to visit?' and I'm like, 'Dad, I come back more than anybody I know.' I go back all year, for a few days or a week. I keep a car at my folks' house. And then I get there and they don't really seem to want me around. So I just kind of hang out. Maybe it's a Tex-Mex thing, but I haven't found good Mexican food in L.A., so I just hit the same restaurants. A couple of my oldest, best friends live there. My girlfriend makes fun of me, but all I'll do when I'm in Dallas is drive around, drive around and look at old buildings. I'm like a cop when I go back to Dallas, I just cruise around and point to this and that, and just look.
"I'll say to my girlfriend, 'You want to see the first house I grew up in?' and she's like, 'I see it every trip, Luke.' "
Nevertheless it must be some hallowed ground. It's where they make Wilson Brothers.
And people wonder: Why those guys? "People say that all the time, I'm sure," Wilson affirms. "Why? Whyyyy? Why them? Not even a question, just a statement -- why. "
