The Director of 'Men in Black' Says a Will Smith Fart Shut Down Filming for 3 Hours

Eduardo Parra. Getty Images.

Time, as the say, is money. And in the film industry, where everything is insanely expensive, it follows that any delay in production can be the difference between success and financial ruin. So the tales where production has to shut down are the stuff of legend, documentaries, and DVD commentary. The stories of a young Steven Spielberg not being able to get the mechanical shark to work is the subject of a Broadway play. Francis Ford Coppolla's wife made Heart of Darkness about the making of Apocalypse Now, where he husband almost suffers a nervous breakdown when his star has a hear attack and a typhoon wiped out his set. And don't get me started on the time Mr. Belvedere sat on his balls:

RIP, Gilbert. The world truly misses his grandiloquence. His kind passes this way but once.  

And so it is that we just learned of a major halt in production on one of the most commercially successful film franchises of all time. Thanks to its costar's butthole:

Source - “Men in Black” director Barry Sonnenfeld appeared on the “Let’s Talk Off Camera With Kelly Ripa” podcast and revealed the set of the 1997 action comedy once had to be evacuated “for about three hours” because Will Smith farted. …

According to Sonnenfeld, the incident occurred during the scene in which Smith and [Tommy Lee] Jones are in a transforming car that travels at hyper speeds and flips over. In order to film the sequence, the two actors had to be “hermetically sealed” in the pod that was being used for the car.     

“There are locks to prevent it from opening and falling,” Sonnenfeld said. “I say, ‘Roll camera.’ And I hear Will Smith go, ‘Oh Jesus, so sorry. Tommy, so sorry. Baz, get the ladder.’ And you hear Tommy saying, ‘That’s fine, Will. No worries, Will. Don’t worry, Will.’ Anyway, I don’t know what’s gone on, right?” 

“So we race the ladder over. Yeah, Tommy reaches his leg out as the ladder is coming over, races down the stairs. And what happened was, Will Smith is a farter,” the director continued. “It’s just some people are. And you really don’t want to be inside a very small hermetically sealed space with a Will Smith fart. You don’t even want to be sitting next to him at the Disney ranch.”

   

Sonnenfeld concluded, “We evacuated the stage for about three hours. And that’s incredible. No, he’s, you know, a lovely guy. Just, he farts. Some do, some don’t.”

Annnddd … scene. 

First off, I have newfound respect for Tommy Lee Jones. I mean, clearly he's a great actor. I just always assumed he was a difficult, ego-maniacal prick to work with. Jim Carrey has spent decades talking about how much Jones despised him for horsing around when they were making that gawdawful Batman movie together. And Harrison Ford has said that when was struggling to figure out how to play a scene in The Fugitive, Jones told him to quit wasting his time because "No one's going to win an Oscar for this movie." Which he then of course proceeded to do. 

But anything negative we've heard about the man was wrong. Jones is obviously the consummate acting professional. Being able to withstand a blast out of Will Smith's sphincter so thermonuclear it cleared a Hollywood sound stage for three hours and then climb right back into that locked pod with the one who smelt it and dealt it? Not only that, but to be so gracious to a guy making his feature film debut like that? That is nothing short of heroic. 

As for Smith, he had to be - pardon the pun but no other way to express this comes to mind - sharting himself in that moment. Here it is. The culmination of all your dreams. When he was rapping and doing TV, he and his inner circle sat down and crunched the numbers of what the highest grossing films of all time were. The majority were action films. A high percentage were Sci-Fi. And a fair number of those involved aliens. Here, he was getting to star in his first movie and it involved all three. And in that moment, he had to have thought he'd (another pun) blown it. Dozens of union crew members sitting around on the clock, not doing any work. Tens of thousands of dollars of the studio's money going up in a mushroom cloud of the Fresh Prince's gas. He had to been thinking he and his noxious ass would never work in that town again. 

But thanks to Barry Sonnenfeld and Tommy Lee Jones, he got a second chance. In fact, it was like it never happened.

Because this was 27 years ago and we're only just now hearing about it. 

After getting a break like that, one that launched his career into the stratosphere, thanks to the support and professionalism of those he worked with, you'd think Smith wouldn't have so much pent up rage. It's amazing what having Jada Pinkett in your life can do to a man.