Trivia / Bad Boys (1995)

• Ability over Appearance: The Internal Affairs officer's part was originally written for a man to play.
• Actor-Shared Background: Vic Manni, who plays one of Fouchet's bodyguards, was the actual bodyguard of producer Don Simpson, who had hired him after being threatened by the Mafia. It's basically how he got into acting.
• Breakthrough Hit: This was the first film for Michael Bay, and it made back its budget several times over (although he did note in interviews for The Rock that he hoped Bad Boys wouldn't be a fluke).
• Creator Backlash: Michael Bay has gone on record about his dissatisfaction with the ultimate cut. He expressed dissatisfaction with several specific shots, including the car chase following the Club Hell sequence, and one shot in which a character is thrust from an exploding airplane.
• Darkhorse Casting: The stars were a stand-up comedian and a rapper, both of whom had sitcom success.
• Doing It for the Art: After the studio refused to fund the final action sequence, Michael Bay paid the studio 25,000 dollars to shoot the scene.
• Enforced Method Acting: According to the commentary, while filming the Driving Miss Daisy scene, Martin Lawrence had complained to Michael Bay that Will Smith had called him a bitch and he didn't like it. You can guess what Bay told Smith to do next.
• Referenced by...: beatmania has a couple of songs, "Schlagwerk" and "Radical Faith", that sample a couple of lines from the movie, particularly "Oh, this is bad..." and "[No, let me call it what it is,] this is fucked up!"
• Throw It In!:
  • Lawrence's "two bitches in the sea" line was totally improvised, as was his reaction to Leoni calling him gay.
  • The scene in the convenience store, wherein the clerk puts a gun to Burnett and Lowrey's heads and yells, telling them to "Freeze, mother bitches!", is also improvised. They came up with: "No, you freeze, bitch! Now back up, put the gun down and get me a pack of Tropical Fruit Bubbalicious". "And some Skittles."
  • Much of the script included some degree of this. Since the script was originally written for two white main characters, Lawrence and Smith helped Bay rewrite a lot of the dialogue on the spot.
• Wag the Director: Michael Bay wanted Will Smith to be topless for his footchase. However, Smith would only go so far as to do the scene in an unbuttoned dress shirt.
  • According to Bay on the DVD Commentary, he had a fight with Smith over the ending. Three days before they shot the ending, Will agreed that he would say "I love you" to Martin Lawrence. The day they were about to shoot the ending, Will changed his mind and didn't want to say it. Bay fought with Will for over a couple of hours about why he should say it. By the end of the fight, in complete frustration, Michael told Will that he didn't care anymore, because he only had about fifteen minutes to shoot the ending by this time, or he didn't have an ending (he wasn't given additional days at the time of filming). When the scene was shot, Will finally says "I love you" to Martin. That shot appears in the final cut.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The script was originally written for Jon Lovitz and Dana Carvey because of their work on Saturday Night Live. But when Simpson took the pair on a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate the upcoming movie, Simpson's notoriously wild behaviour scared Carvey into pulling out of the project altogether, sending the film into turnaround and leading to the rights going from Disney to Columbia.
  • The two leads were originally intended for Eddie Murphy and Wesley Snipes.
  • Laurence Fishburne turned down the role of Mike Lowrey. Arsenio Hall was also considered.
  • Saffron Burrows and Marisa Tomei were considered for Julie.
  • An introduction to Mike was originally in the film, but it was cut. Bay explains it was structured the same way as Marcus' introduction, but, instead of a wife and kids, Lowery woke up with two, Latina twins.
• Working Title: Bulletproof Hearts

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