Modified On January 7, 2005
From the Catholic Telegraph (“The official newspaper of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati”) article on Steve Harvey voiceover work in the new Disney flick “Racing Stripes”:
At least 90 percent of the lines he and Spade have in the movie were ad-libbed, Harvey admits, forcing other actors such as Frankie Muniz, Mandy Moore, Jeff Foxworthy, Joe Pantoliano and Dustin Hoffman to return to the studio as many as 10 times to re-record their lines.
Chuckles Harvey, “Yeah, the writer is a nice guy. But he ain’t that funny!”
Considering the considerable expense of asking top-shelf Hollywood actors to return to the studio even once, we suspect that the above anecdote is total… horseshit. Having decided that, we question the wisdom of portraying oneself as one or more of the following:
unprofessional
rude
costly to employ
arrogant
Odd, considering that we’ve heard (and have experienced firsthand) that Harvey is none of these things. Hmmm… Later on in the piece, Harvey says, “There’s no such thing as luck,” he insisted. “These are blessings. You can’t be ashamed to get up in front of people and tell them about God. God thought He could trust you – He gave you this talent. I ain’t perfect, you dig? But without God, you got nothing.” We suspect that the screenwriters, David Schmidt and Kirk De Micco, don’t feel terribly blessed that Steve Harvey turfs their script and subsequently trashes them in print.