“I hated the script”: the movie Jim Carrey felt forced to rewrite
During his initial rise to superstardom in the 1990s, many predicted Jim Carrey would fizzle out just as quickly as he ignited, with his most vocal detractors adamant the actor’s signature schtick only had a finite shelf life.
It wasn’t without merit, in fairness, because there’s no way Carrey could continue to coast by on mugging, gurning, and pratfalling forever without having to change up his approach. That’s exactly what happened, too, with his repeated forays into drama underlining that he was an excellent performer when the histrionics were placed to one side.
The triple-whammy of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber released within months of each other, turning Carrey from a relatively unknown sketch performer, stand-up comic, and impressionist into a household name. However, it may not have happened at all were he not afforded the leeway to inject his own sensibilities into the first of the three.
As he revealed to Roger Ebert, the production company behind Ace Ventura “was after me for about two years to do the movie,” with an array of bizarre backup plans being considered. Rick Moranis and David Alan Grier both turned down the title role, and there were conversations about making the protagonist female and hiring Whoopi Goldberg before Carrey eventually relented.
However, there was one major obstacle that still needed to be overcome. “I hated the script,” he admitted. “It was horrifying.” It was Jack Bernstein who penned the first draft before director Tom Shadyac took a pass ahead of making his feature-length debut on Pet Detective, with Carrey, the third and final name, credited for the screenplay after taking it upon himself to refit the film to his sensibilities.
“They said, ‘It’s a no-lose situation. You can rewrite it. When you finish rewriting it, you don’t want to do it, you still don’t have to,'” he explained, inspiring him to take Ace Ventura apart on a foundational level and rebuild it in his own image. “So I just wrote it down scene by scene, and there literally isn’t one line from the original script in there. I said, ‘First of all, what do people want to see? What do I want to do? What are people fascinated with?'”
Shadyac proved to be the perfect collaborator, with the director informing his leading man, “I want to let you go; I want to let you do what you do onstage,” except as the lead in a feature. In the end, Ace Ventura would open at number one in the United States, recoup its budget seven times over at the global box office, and fix the rocket to Carrey’s back that would launch him into the stratosphere before 1994 had drawn to a close, which wouldn’t have come to pass had he not been granted the rewrite.