Bill Pullman wanted to quit “While You Were Sleeping” but couldn't...since he'd just quit prior film
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The rom-com got off to a bumpy start, including numerous script revisions that led to "one of the worst table reads of all time."
Working on 1995's While You Were Sleeping was apparently no sweet dream.
On a new episode of the podcast Hollywood Gold, producer Jonathan Glickman says leading man Bill Pullman wanted to quit the 1995 romantic comedy, but was told by his agent that after quitting his most recent film gig, he couldn't quit another one.
Mary Evans/Ronald Grant/Everett
Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman in 'While You Were Sleeping'The film was only a few weeks away from starting production but the script was a hot mess, having gone through multiple revisions and the addition of a new writer, whose rewrite was also "not working," Glickman tells host Daniela Taplin Lundberg.
"We went to Chicago and we did a read-through, a table read of the script," Glickman explains. "And the script was kind of a cut-and-paste of the stuff that the original guys had written and the new person had written. And then Jon [Turteltaub, the director], I think, did sort of a polish to make it make sense."
"We had a table read and it was one of the worst table reads of all time," he continues. "It just tanked. Nothing got a laugh, The energy was dead. We had these incredible professional actors there, real pros — it was painful. And we knew it didn't work."
Later that night, at a kickoff party for the film, Pullman and his cinematic brother Peter Gallagher approached Glickman about switching roles as a potential fix. "Bill Pullman said — he had just quit a movie that he was making before — said his agent said he wasn't allowed to quit another movie, otherwise he would quit this movie," Glickman says.
Eventually, the original writers returned and vastly improved the script during the final week of preparation, and the rest is rom-com history: The tale of a luminous Chicago Transit Authority worker (Sandra Bullock) accidentally lying her way into the life of the handsome, heavily-browed, comatose stranger (Gallagher) she's never spoken to, only to fall in love with his younger brother (Pullman) grossed $182 at the global box office and nabbed Bullock a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, while establishing her as a rom-com queen for the next decade.
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