It’s hard to imagine Chevy Chase having any hesitation about saying “yes” to film projects these days, given some of his recent roles in movies such as Panda vs. Aliens, The Christmas Letter and The Very Excellent Mr. Dundee.
But, weirdly, Chase had some serious reservations about playing his iconic character, Clark Griswold, in 2015’s Vacation reboot, which starred Ed Helms as Clark and Ellen’s son Rusty.
Back in 2013, Chase’s on-screen wife Beverly D’Angelo stated that she had to talk the Fletch star into entertaining the pitch from writer/directors John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
“I called Chevy, I said, ‘Have you read it yet?’” D’Angelo explained. “He goes, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Read it and then call me back.’ I said, ‘Do you realize the way that they popped in on us, we could answer the door in towels or smoking a joint, just insane. We just could have gone berserk in the meantime. There’s some freedom here.’ He was laughing, but we haven’t gotten to that state.”
Chase’s reluctance to return to the Vacation-verse seemed especially odd considering that he happily reprised the role of Clark for a series of Old Navy commercials, which were still better than Vegas Vacation, to be honest.
Well, it seems as though Chase was primarily doubtful about Daley and Goldstein’s reboot because he had his own idea for a Vacation movie he was trying to pitch to Warner Bros.
“Beverly D’Angelo and I have been working on our own script which is pretty dang funny,” Chase explained during a 2011 interview with Collider. “I’ve written an idea that would be basically like a ‘Swiss Family Griswold.’ There’s a cruise, there’s a fire on the ship, we think the whole ship’s on fire and we jump — it’s just a little fire — and we end up on an island where we meet Randy (Quaid) somewhere who’s been left there from an old Survivor series. I like that idea.”
Chase did admit that “it’s hard to sell these things to the Warners people. It depends on who’s there and what their mood is and what they think people are gonna like.”
Obviously, Chase’s movie idea never came to fruition, either because it was terrible, or because it was nearly identical to another Vacation sequel that had already been made. The 2003 TV movie National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure, starring Quaid, similarly found Cousin Eddie’s family (plus Audrey Griswold for some reason) being shipwrecked on a deserted island during the holiday season.
Hilarity did not ensue.
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