

Arguably the best movie to star Chevy Chase, Fletch celebrated its thirty-year anniversary this year. To commemorate the occasion, we’re looking at some totally awesome facts you need to know about Fletch.



Fletch is based on a mystery novel by author Gregory Mcdonald published in 1974. McDonald was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best first Novel from the Mystery Writers of America. The novel was popular enough to inspire a series of prequels and sequels. McDonald wrote a total of 11 Fletch books. The last two books in the series, Son of Fletch and Fletch Reflected, starred the original character’s son. McDonald also wrote a spin-off series about a police detective named Flynn. If you include the Flynn books, McDonald wrote a total of 15 novels related to Fletch.

McDonald’s contract gave him approval over the casting of Fletch. Prior to the casting of Chase, McDonald rejected both Mick Jagger and Burt Reynolds. According to McDonald:

Everybody else who tried it had a mean twist or was too much of a wise guy. There is none of that in Chevy Chase. He has the puckish quality that is Fletch.

So does that mean the author likes the movie? McDonald stops short of fully endorsing the adaptation of his work:

I didn’t write the movie. It’s not the way I would have written it. But if I had written it, it probably wouldn’t be the success it is. There are things in it I get a great kick out of.

The adaptation was written by Andrew Bergman who would go on to write and direct The Freshman, Honeymoon in Vegas, It Could Happen to You and Striptease. According to Bergman, the script for Fletch came together very quickly:

I wrote it very fast – I did the first draft in four weeks, and I usually can’t write a check in four weeks. Then there was a certain amount of improv, and something that we used to call dial-a-joke. Michael [director Michael Ritchie] found this aircraft hanger, and called me and said we need a scene set in an aircraft hanger. So I wrote it that afternoon. It was like old-time movie-making, seat-of-the-pants style.



Tim Matheson was cast as Alan Stanwyk, a rich man who offers to pay Fletch to murder him. A key plot point in the book and the movie is that Stanwyk and Fletch are roughly the same build. Matheson is of course best known for playing Otter in Animal House – a role he inherited from Chase who turned it down to star in Foul Play.

The movie contains an Animal House reference. The award banquet that Chase interrupts is in honor of Fred Dorfman. That was the name of Kent “Flounder” Dorfman’s brother in Animal House.

According to Matheson, Chase encouraged him to improvise:

When I worked with Chevy, he’d say, ‘Just ad lib and try to break me up. Just insult me. Anything.’ When we were doing his close-up, or when my back was to the camera, I would come up with jokes or quips or anything, to get a real reaction out of him. He was smart enough to know that was gold.

It was at the height of my career in film, and it was as close to me as a person as any part I’d played. It’s for that reason that people in the street felt they could say, ‘Hey, Chevy’ and do some lines from Fletch, because they were very Chevy.

I fought the whole time against it. I said it’s not going to work. It was during the writer’s strike and I couldn’t write for it. We had no script. We had a director who was doing the writing, and he couldn’t write. All I could do was go out and improvise. Basically I had to hold that picture together by winging it.

Geena Davis was cast as Fletch’s Girl Friday, Larry. It was only her second movie role after Tootsie in 1982.Harold Faltermeyer replaced Tom Scott as the composer on Fletch. He had originally composed a piece of music for a dream sequence in Fletch, but Billy Idol was recording nearby. Idol stopped by and told Faltermeyer that the piece would be perfect for the movie Top Gun. So Faltermeyer dropped it from Fletch and it became the Top Gun anthem.Chase enjoyed working with director Michael Ritchie who would shoot the scenes the way he wanted them and then allow Chase to improvise his own take. As a result, Chase has called Fletch his favorite of his movies:Fletch was a modest hit at the box office. It opened in second place behind Rambo: First Blood Part II. It ended up grossing just over $50 million dollars which was enough to warrant a sequel. Fletch Lives, released in 1989, was based on an original idea instead of one of McDonald’s many novels. The end result was disappointing. Chase has said he “didn’t like it at all.”

Bergman, who had written a script based on McDonald’s book Fletch and the Man Who, said that if Universal had used his script, Chase could have made a lot more Fletch movies:

I think Chevy could have done five Fletch movies. It really could have been his Clouseau. It should have been.

Fletch Lives grossed a paltry $35 million dollars which more or less killed the franchise. For decades now, there has been talk of a Fletch reboot.



In the late 90’s, things got heated between Chevy Chase and writer-director Kevin Smith. Smith had been hired to direct a Fletch sequel which would have focused on Fletch’s offspring. Chase would have appeared in the movie but not as the lead. He had a meeting with Chase to discus the project, but eventually he abandoned the idea to focus on directing Dogma. When Chase heard the project was canceled, he called Smith out:

Kevin has never called me. He promised to write a Fletch for two years but never called me. Then, after two years, he told a friend he wasn’t going to do it. It’s Hollywood-type crap treatment, so rude. I could have been writing a Fletch with someone else during that time. There’s no hard feelings, but I’ve never done that to anybody.

Smith shot back with a very lengthy and detailed description of his meeting with Chase. According to Smith, the studio begged him not to involve Chase because they thought the actor was difficult and he hadn’t had a box office hit in a long time. But as a fan, Smith insisted on meeting with Chase. The meeting, according to Smith didn’t go well. Smith describes Chase as an ego-maniacal blow-hard who couldn’t stop bragging about himself. According to Smith, the movie just didn’t work out due to his other commitments.

Since then, there have been several attempts to reboot the franchise. According to Gregory McDonald’s manager, David List:

There’s not an actor that’s ever said anything funny that hasn’t been talked about. One executive said, ‘Why don’t we write the role female and go to Ellen DeGeneres?’

The rights to Fletch languished with the Weinstein Company for more than a decade with Smith on and off the project. Eventually, the Weinstein Company released the rights to Fletch and they landed at Relativity Media. Since then, there have been rumors of a reboot starring Jason Sudeikis.

More Facts You Need to Know

Text Directory

0 0 vote Article Rating

Advertisements