CHIPS’ Dax Shepard and Baywatch’s Dwayne Johnson turn old TV classics into movie gold
CLASSIC TV is new again with big-screen remakes CHIPS and Baywatch. Masterminds Dax Shepard and Dwayne Johnson on the fun and perils.
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TURNING old TV shows into movies might seem like easy money, but it’s not a simple trick to get right.
For every 21 Jump Street, there’s a Bewitched; for every Charlie’s Angels, there’s The A-Team.
When writer-director and star Dax Shepard pitched a big-screen remake of US TV series CHiPs (which initially aired from 1977-1983) to Warner Bros, he reckoned he was pretty safe putting a Big Boys style action-comedy spin on the source material.
The 42-year-old even threw in a couple of Back to the Future references — burning tyre tracks and a “Where we’re going, we don’t need doors” quip — for retro good measure.
My absolute favorite @daxshepard1, known him for years and I absolutely adore him. @ChipsMovie is the funniest I’ve seen in a long time pic.twitter.com/Wls5lNOEQV
— Sharon Osbourne (@MrsSOsbourne) March 27, 2017
Then he tested his CHIPS movie with its target audience.
“The audience was largely 18 to 25,” says Shepard, “and I don’t think a single person knew what (the Back to the Future nods were) in reference to. It’s all very scary. I’m very old.”
If teens and twenty-somethings don’t know Back to the Future, they’d have little hope of remembering an old TV series about California motorcycle highway patrol cops that ended a couple of years before Marty and Doc even drove into cinemas.
Shepard had already factored in that he couldn’t trade on nostalgia alone, so had made sure his CHIPS “stood on its own, 100 per cent”.
His movie sets up Jon (Shepard) as a former motocross champion who’s joined the highway patrol in an attempt to rescue his marriage to the trashy Karen (Shepard’s real-life wife Kristen Bell). His new partner Ponch (Michael Pena) is an FBI agent sent undercover into the highway patrol when a heist looks to be an inside job.
But then the test audiences surprised Shepard. Again.
“This peculiar thing happened,” he recalls. “The recruiter would say only 17 per cent of the audience knew or had ever heard of CHiPs. Yet when the theme song would come on, I would notice like at least half the audience was visibly smiling. Then when Erik Estrada (the original Ponch) comes in at the end, 70 per cent of the audience clapped.
“So it’s a very confusing, incongruous data and response.”
All Shepard could figure is that younger audiences “don’t know they know it” — that the original CHiPs has seeped into their subconscious over decades of repeats.
“Then they hear those auditory queues or they see Estrada and they do have a familiarity with it.”
CHIPS isn’t the only retro TV remake headed to cinemas.
Baywatch, the lifeguard drama which ran from 1989-2001 and introduced the world to a red-swimsuited Pamela Anderson running slow-mo on the beach, gets an action-comedy movie makeover in June.
Dwayne Johnson has been working on the project for five years and steps into David Hasselhoff’s famous red shorts as Mitch Buchanan, alongside Zac Efron.
Hasselhoff and Anderson will both make cameos.
While Shepard was certain he didn’t want to go the parody route with CHIPS, Johnson knew going into Baywatch that he’d have to approach it tongue-in-cheek — because even in its heyday, Baywatch was kind of cheesy.
The route his team appears to have taken is embracing and modernising the source material while fondly making fun of it at the same time, a la 21 Jump Street.
In a similar vein to that Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill do-over, the Baywatch movie sets up a lifeguard team in need of some good publicity — enter new recruit Matt Brody (Efron), a brash Olympic gold medallist. Though personalities clash, the crew has to get it together when their beach is infiltrated by drugs and murder.
Naturally, slow-mo swimsuit jogging remains a big feature.
Speaking after the first trailer was released, Johnson admitted to feeling “a nice amount of angst” as to how it would be received.
“The reason there was a little bit of angst was because when you have a title like Baywatch the tone is so important. If you don’t get it right, it could easily go sideways and become a mess.
“So I was very happy to see all the responses. What I was really happy with was the fans were responding to the winking humour. We’re well aware of our title and really leaned into it.”
For Shepard — who has increased his focus on writing and directing after staring in the likes of Zathura and TV series Parenthood — picking up CHiPs from the TV remake pile was no accident.
He’s been riding motorised bikes of some sort since he was 12 and worked as a motorcycle messenger when he first moved to LA.
“I’m always searching for some way to combine motor sports with comedy. Cars and motorcycles are by far my first love ... I mean, just barely second to my family. Then the thing I write best is comedy. So to me, CHiPs just seemed like a vehicle to do that. I thought there could be a Bad Boys version or a Lethal Weapon version of this property,” Shepard says.
“I would also have been happy to do The Fall Guy or Starsky and Hutch — any of those ’80s shows that had cars or motorcycles among the stars of the show.”
Besides comedy and motorbikes, the only other thing Shepard was certain his TV remake needed was Michael Pena, star of The Martian, Crash and Ant-Man.
“I did not want to make the movie without Michael Pena, so I had a blind date with him after I had sold the movie and basically begged him to do it,” Shepard recalls with a laugh.
“He has a very impressive body of work and does mostly pretty cachet dramas, so I was very consciously making sure he was the bad-ass and I was the buffoon, because I didn’t at any point want him to step off of the movie.”
Though they’d never met prior, it’s a pairing that works.
Similarly, if there’s one thing everyone involved knew Baywatch needed, it was buff bodies.
No surprise, then, that the trailers thus far have been wall to wall abs.
“I have some decent pecs, but the abs department goes to Zac Efron,” Johnson laughs. “I like to tease him, I say that he’s got ‘27-pack’ abs. That guy really came in some kind of shape for this movie. Woah. I’m really proud of him because to achieve that ridiculously ripped look, he had to put in a lot of work.
“That goes for the whole cast, by the way. On the very first day I got to set — I’ll never forget it — we’re shooting our scene and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I am surrounded by aliens here’. Between Kelly Rohrbach and Ilfenesh (Hadera) and Alexandria Daddario and Zac, these are the most good-looking people ... Just silly. Silly.”
To Shepard’s mind, the silliest concept he had to deal with on CHIPS was selling Kristen Bell as the world’s crappiest wife when everybody knows the star of Bad Moms, Frozen and Veronica Mars — and mother to Shepard’s two daughters — is “innately likeable”.
“Also, people seem to enjoy us together, not apart,” he laughs. “But she thought she could pull it off, and I certainly care more about my marriage than my film career, so I was happy to let her do it.”
CHIPS opens today; Baywatch opens June 1
Originally published as CHIPS’ Dax Shepard and Baywatch’s Dwayne Johnson turn old TV classics into movie gold
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