Wayne’s World is full of memorable cameos, from Alice Cooper, to Meatloaf, to the T-1000. But perhaps the best of the bunch is Chris Farley as the security guard who randomly provides a conspicuous chunk of exposition outlining where and when famed music producer Frankie “Mr. Big” Sharp will be in the near future.
This info, predictably, comes in very handy when Wayne and Garth later climatically hack into Mr. Big’s TV, which convinces him to sign Cassandra’s band — in the “mega happy ending” at least.
The film’s screenwriters, and Saturday Night Live veterans, Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner recently appeared on the Fly on the Wall podcast with Dana Carvey and David Spade. While chatting about Wayne’s World, the husband and wife team revealed that the funniest joke in the whole scene was essentially a derisive response to a lame studio note.
According to Terry Turner, Paramount gave the filmmakers a note asking that they make it a point to “underline” Farley’s info dump, so that audiences would understand that it’s an “important moment” that will pay off later in the movie. You know, just in case they’d never actually seen a movie before. After getting the note, Mike Myers, who shared a writing credit with the Turners, wrote a new line. In addition to Farley’s over-the-top delivery, in the revised script Wayne looks directly into the camera and comments: “You know, for a security guard, he had a lot of information, don’t you think?”
Despite the fact that this was a dig at Paramount’s condescending advice, the studio was “completely happy” with the finished version of the scene. “It wasn’t what they asked for,” Turner explained, “but they said, ‘Oh, that’ll do it. That’ll underline it,’” which Turner thought was “insane.”
It’s not terribly surprising that Myers would turn the note into a joke seeing as that’s exactly what Wayne does in the movie. When the suits bankrolling his show attempt to modify its content, Wayne technically follows the advice, but only in a way that allows him to ridicule them. After all, Wayne’s World is arguably a very autobiographical film.
To be fair, not all of the studio notes that Myers and company received were bad. Paramount also insisted on the Terminator joke, which Myers claimed was “not funny,” only to later discover that people “went shithouse over it.”
And, presumably out of fears that Americans would immediately zone out at the sight of anything even vaguely Canadian, the studio also suggested that the road hockey scene needed “something funny like a girl hitting a car on a bike.”
Myers fought that note as well, arguing, “You can’t dial up a joke like that! It has to be organic!” The studio won out in the end, hence why Lara Flynn Boyle’s character Stacy inexplicably wipes out while riding past Wayne and Garth. Again, Myers was surprised that the joke turned out to be a huge hit with audiences.
If only studio executives had more control over The Love Guru.
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