The Science Guy
Looking back at Val Kilmer in Martha Coolidge's Real Genius.
No disrespect to Heat or The Doors, but when I heard of the untimely death of Val Kilmer, it was the comic roles I thought of. Gay Perry, obviously, in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Nick Rivers, the blond Elvis in the great Top Secret! Dieter von Cunth in MacGruber (truthfully, I find that one a bit hard to take, but it shows how willing he remained to lend himself to silliness). And, certainly not least, Chris Knight, the eccentric but soulful physics prodigy in Martha Coolidge’s 1985 Real Genius—not the most celebrated college comedy of its era, but beloved by its fans, said to include many scientists and engineers.
Those were the days when the nerds got their revenge, when the geeks outpaced the freaks, when Hollywood went all in on nutty inventors stronger on bright ideas than fashion sense or social skills (and, say it with me, those were just the directors). By way of illustration, Real Genius was released within a week of both Weird Science and My Science Project, all of them rushed out to capitalise on the phenomenal success of Back To the Future, to say nothing of Ghostbusters the year before.
It hardly needs pointing out that many of these movies were just as chauvinistic as what preceded them, even if Hollywood was getting slightly more open to letting women call the shots (the breakout girl-geek comedy wouldn’t arrive till 1986: Whoopi Goldberg as a dreadlocked computer whiz in Penny Marshall’s altogether inexplicable Jumpin’ Jack Flash). Coolidge, certainly, was a surprising person to be catching this particular wave, a feminist who started out making documentaries in New York before drawing the attention of Francis Ford Coppola with her gruelling 1976 docudrama Not A Pretty Picture, based on her teenage experience of date rape. Having been fired during post-production on National Lampoon’s Joy Of Sex, she wasn’t thrilled by the Real Genius script she was originally sent: just another “gross, boy-oriented teen comedy,” as she told one interviewer many years on.