Once a week while in the midst of principal photography on “Men in Black,” Sonnenfeld had a Sunday routine, which he began on the “Addams Family” movies, where he would re-read the script and watch his assemblage. Every week, he learned something new about his movie, while being constantly reminded that, as he wrote in his memoir, “WE HAD NO ENDING.”
What did they have? Per Sonnenfeld, “Our film’s climax consisted of Will Smith debating the nature of the universe with a million dollar, 15-foot-tall animatronic Rick Baker-designed Edgar Bug.” He would hop on a call with Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald (who’d just teamed with Steven Spielberg to launch DreamWorks SKG’s film division) and Sony’s vice-chair Lucy Fisher, and remind them that their ending, in his words, “sucked.”
The screenplay is credited to Ed Solomon, who is a brilliant writer and who, to the best of my knowledge, richly deserves that solo credit. Evidently, he wasn’t available to fix the ending, which I’m guessing is why they brought in a “Friends” writer to figure it out. According to Sonnenfeld, aside from contributing a few gags, that person didn’t get the job done.
Sonnenfeld had a vague idea of what they needed to do:
“‘We need to lose the debate,’ I kept whining. ‘We need Edgar in motion, climbing up the tower to his flying saucer and we need Will fighting Edgar, trying to keep him on the planet. When that fails, we need Will to do something that makes Edgar turn around and climb back down from the tower.'”
Edgar (played to oddball perfection by Vincent D’Onofrio) had a couple of weaknesses. One was his love for “sugar water.” Perhaps he flings Will from the tower into a Coke machine, which starts spraying sugary soda all over the ground. The other option was to have Will start squashing Edgar’s Earth-bug relatives, cockroaches, as they scurried across the pavement.
Spielberg liked the cockroaches, so, buoyed by some inspired Will Smith improv, they went with the finale you see in the movie now.
Aside from some awkwardness with the cockroach wrangler (Sonnenfeld was perplexed by the need to treat each roach life as sacred), they got what they needed on set. Alas, the director had a new problem — two new problems, actually. He had to ask for extra money to shoot the CGI-heavy opening and closing credits sequence, and he needed more cash to complete the also-CGI-laden World’s Fair set piece. The price tag: $4.5 million.
How did he pull it off?