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You guys oughta do a story about me sometime.
Why should we do a story about you?
Well, I’ll tell you--because the story of this actor going from playing Gunnery Sergeant
Hartman to the Door-Gunner is so brutal, it’s a wonder he didn’t lose his mind.
Ain’t war hell?
We begin when former drill instructor R. Lee Ermey arrived in England.
Ermey had actually trained recruits for combat
during the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1967 and he was the only Marine
on the set training the actors to act as Marines. Ermey would end up training all of the actors
and background extras to march, spin rifles, and shoot all by himself.
When Ermey traveled to England to be the technical advisor for Full Metal Jacket, he had read
the novel the film was based on--The Short Timers by Gustov Hasford--and the character
of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman caught his eye (Wygant).
Ermey: “I agreed to be Stanley’s technical advisor simply so I could get my foot in the
damn door and audition for Stanley, I wanted to be Gunnery Sgt. Hartman, no question about it.
I couldn’t imagine anybody that could do it any better than I could.”
He’d done some acting and, in the 60s, he did the same job as Hartman training recruits
for Vietnam, so he thought he would be perfect for the role (Wygant).
Ermey: “Once I got over to London I went up to Stanley and I said, ‘Look, you know,
I think I could do this part real well, how about giving me a shot at it, I’d like to audition.’
And he told me, well, he had seen me in The Boys in Company C, and he says,
‘You’re just not mean enough Lee, you’re too nice.’”
But I’ll tell you what, Washington, I respect your judge of character. You think they’re
any more fucked up than the rest of this shit we got in this goddamn platoon?
Ermey tried to tell Kubrick that he played the role in The Boys in Company C the way
the director wanted, but Kubrick replied that
he already had a contract with a Hollywood actor (Wygant).
However, Ermey was so passionate about this role that he decided he would continue to
pursue it even if the role had already been cast.
This is the story of how one of the most tortured Kubrick actors lost his starring role…
Get some, baby!
The actor Kubrick first hired to play Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was Tim Colceri. Colceri
would end up playing the Door Gunner who shoots at random civilians
from the helicopter in the film.
Kubrick had originally considered Robert De Niro and Ed Harris for the role of Hartman.
Part of why Kubrick didn’t pursue De Niro was that he thought the audience would “feel
cheated” when the character is killed off halfway through the movie (Vanity Fair). Ed
Harris turned down the opportunity because he wanted to take a year off from acting (Vanity Fair).
Now, in my mind, Tim Colceri would certainly be on the short-list of most tortured Kubrick
actors. And he didn’t even wind up as a star of the movie like Shelley Duvall was
in The Shining.
Duvall: “I pulled hunks of hair out, on the windowsill. When the bag got caught.”
Kubrick: “Hunks of hair.”
Kubrick: “Ok.”
During pre-production on Full Metal Jacket in 1982, Kubrick posted an ad in The Hollywood
Reporter saying that he was willing to look at anyone’s audition tape for his new movie
about the Vietnam War.
Colceri served in the marines from 1969 to 1971 and if you look at him, he seems like
the obvious choice to play a big scary drill instructor. At this point Colceri had written
a screenplay for a film about his experiences in the Marines called “The Birth of Pride,”
so acting as a drill instructor in the movie was totally in his wheelhouse (Gratwick).
His friends certainly thought so and had him send in an audition tape of him yelling at
a young Marine recruit (Couch).
Remain count!
Three years go by and, in 1985, Colceri got a call from Kubrick’s right-hand man, Leon
Vitali--who played Lord Bullingdon in Barry Lyndon (Couch). Vitali informed Colceri that
Kubrick was impressed with his tape and they also really liked the kid he was yelling at (Couch).
Colceri told them that the kid playing the Marine was an actual Marine who still
had a year left of service (Gratwick). The production tracked down the kid who was on
leave and had Colceri do three more scenes with him on video and send it back (Gratwick).
Ain’t you follow orders?!
Three days later, he got a call from the president of Warner Brothers…
“Hello Tim, this is Louis Blout, president of Warner Brothers. Tim, I have a tremendous
amount of faith in Stanley Kubrick. Tim, Stanley Kubrick has a tremendous amount of faith in
Tim Colceri.” I took the phone and I looked out the window,
“Stanley Kubrick has a tremendous amount of faith in me!”
Next thing he knew he had an “eight-week contract with Warner Bros. for $2,500 a week” (Couch).
When Colceri arrived in London, Kubrick gave him 28 pages of dialogue to learn and had
him rehearse in his hotel room for three days with Vitali (Couch). After those three days,
he met with Kubrick who reassured him that the stories about him having actors do hundreds
of takes were not true (Couch). Colceri replied, “Mr. Kubrick, if you need 1,000 takes I'm
prepared to give you 1,001” (Couch).
It would be “more than a year” before Colceri would see Kubrick again. Kubrick was
off filming the second half of the movie and wanted to keep the drill instructor isolated
from the other actors in order to keep him from forming friendships and becoming less
intimidating when they film the boot camp half of the film (Couch).
During this time, Colceri spent “six days a week” and “12 hours a day” rehearsing
lines with Vitali (Couch). These rehearsal sessions were videotaped and sent to Kubrick
to modify the dialogue based on seeing it performed (Couch). That said, Colceri was
not allowed to improvise during these sessions, yet Kubrick was constantly sending back modified
dialogue that Colceri would then have to memorize from the beginning (Couch).
Colceri said, “I had to memorize so much dialogue that I couldn't sleep, and they sent
me to a doctor… The doctor said, 'Here, take this yellow pill. It will knock you out.'
I took it and it knocked me out, but I felt groggy the next day. I said, 'I don't want
to take any more of these.’” (Couch).
What’s interesting is that, during this time, Colceri became friends with his neighbor
Michael Biehn who was in London working on James Cameron’s Aliens (Couch).
After three months, they told him that he was going to shoot a scene. They put him in
a trailer for 12 hours to memorize two pieces of dialogue (Gratwick). At the end of the
day, Vitali brought him out and rolled the camera (Gratwick).
Colceri: “The dialogue was, ‘You’re about to receive your first Marine Corps recruit
haircut. You will be shaved completely bald. If you have a mole, a bump, a scar, or anything
else protruding from your head, and by protruding I mean anything else sticking up out of your
head, the minute you sit in that chair––’ ‘Wait, stop.’ ‘What, what, what?’
‘It’s the minute you sit down in that chair.’ And I went, ‘down in the chair,
I didn’t say down and you’re stopping me?’”
Colceri: “You’re about to receive your first Marine Corps recruit haircut. You will
be shaved completely bald. If you have a mole, a bump, a scar, or anything else protruding
from your head, and by protruding I mean anything else sticking up out of your head, the minute
you sit DOWN!”
Colceri: “He put his arm around me and he says, ‘Stanley’s going to be impressed,
he wants to make sure you can do your dialogue.”
Meanwhile, Lee Ermey was deeply embedded in the production while shooting the Vietnam
half of the film. Ermey said, “I didn’t keep my distance from the actors as Kubrick
would have preferred. I couldn’t keep my distance as Hartman, but also teach the actors
how to do things as the Technical Advisor” (Commentary).
So how did Colceri lose the role?
Well, it’s not so much that Colceri lost the role as Ermey won the role. Colceri was
tasked with auditioning extras for the boot camp half of the film. They needed new extras
after filming the Vietnam section to fill out the Boot Camp section. Colceri would yell
his lines at auditioning actors and interact with them and the actors’ reactions would
be videotaped (FMJ Diary). Because Colceri already had the part and these were just auditions,
the focus was on the extras and Colceri would kind of go at half-speed as you do when doing
line readings for someone else’s audition.
Modine: “He’d do it for five minutes and his voice would get sore––because it hurts
to yell like that for a long time––and he’d leave. But they still had extras to audition.
So Lee Ermey would get in front of the camera and start auditioning these people.
And the difference was that Tim Colceri was like, ‘Hey, what’s your name, soldier?’
And then you had Lee Ermey going, ‘What’s your major malfunction, soldier?!’
What are you looking at, you wanna fuck me?!’”
As you might have seen in my series on 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick often didn’t want
his actors to act, but instead build the character off their own personality. There’s a story
about Kubrick being annoyed on the set of Eyes Wide Shut when he found out that Alan
Cumming wasn’t American and was, instead, putting on an American accent in his audition tape.
Cumming: “He was all like, ‘You’re not American.’ And I was like, ‘Uh, I know.
I’m Scottish.’ And he went, ‘Well you were American on the tape.’ And I went,
‘Yeah that’s because I’m an actor, Stanley.’”
So, Ermey, who was not allowed to audition properly, was sneaking his own audition onto
the tapes of auditioning extras (Pinewood Dialogue). Ermey had the idea to audition
30 extras at once by treating them as if they were new recruits and he was the drill instructor
while Leon Vitali videotaped (Wygant). Ermey would do the dialogue for the first scene
of the film and then address each actor individually and dress them down as if they were a recruit
and he was their drill instructor (Wygant). Ermey knew that Kubrick would have to watch
these tapes and see him as if he were Hartman (Pinewood Dialogue).
You’re so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece!
So, even though it wasn’t really fair because Colceri wasn’t auditioning and still learning
his lines, Kubrick saw the difference between Colceri and Ermey-- someone who was playing
Hartman and someone who WAS Hartman (Pinewood Dialogue).
Also remember, Colceri wasn’t allowed to improvise, but Ermey (as technical advisor
and former drill instructor) was and he came up with all sorts of ridiculously creative
insults from his experiences as a drill instructor (Wygant).
Ermey: “Anyway we submitted this to Stanley that evening and Stanley looked at it, and
the next morning he was all smiles when I went out to the set and he knew what the hell
I’d done, y’know. He says, ‘I wouldn’t let you audition, well you found a way to
audition anyway, didn’t you.’ And of course I had, but he liked the dialogue and he enjoyed
the dialogue enough where he had it sent down to the secretary and she typed it all up.
And it was 45 pages of typewritten dialogue.”
Kubrick asked Ermey to work with Vitali to add in some of his “colorful” dialogue
into scene 2 and scene 5 and do them on videotape for him to look at (Wygant). They did, and
next thing Ermey knew, he had the part.
Colceri is a fine actor, but Ermey didn’t have to reach for any inspiration--the experience
and dialogue was already inside him and Kubrick thought of everyone involved in his films
as a potential writer and his role as director was that of a [quote/unquote] “taste machine”
filtering ideas.
Kubrick said, “A director is a kind of idea and taste machine; a movie is a series of
creative and technical decisions, and it's the director's job to make the right decisions
as frequently as possible” (Gelmis).
What’s cool is that Colceri did a touring show called “Get Some” where he gives
us an idea of what his Gunnery Sergeant Hartman may have been like--although it should be
noted that his stage show is light-hearted with funny characters and stories from his life.
I am your senior drill instructor. From now on you will speak only when spoken to, and
the first and last word out of your mouth will be sir.
Do you maggots understand me?!
Sir, yes, sir!
I can’t hear you!
Sir, yes, sir!
Sound off like you got a pair!
Sir, yes, sir!
Vitali hand-delivered the letter from Kubrick. Colceri said, “He looked at me and he had
death on his face” -- he asked Vitali if he was being fired (Couch). Vitali told him
to read the letter.
Vitali: “The hardest thing I think I actually had to do on that film was go to this guy’s
house and give him a letter that Stanley had written.”
A small note here--during this time Hartman’s name was Gerheim. The letter reads...
“Dear Tim, I am very sorry to have to tell you that after a hell of a lot of painful
deliberation I have decided to use Lee Ermey to play Sergeant Gerheim.
This has been a very difficult decision to make. I have been in the position of a coach
who has two starting quarterbacks and has to choose one. I know what a disappointment
this will be to you just as it would have been to Lee, and I would have been a lot happier
if someone else could have made this decision, but it is my responsibility to Warner Bros
and to the film to do what I think is best for the film and I have had to do that. You
are a very fine actor and the work you have done here with Leon is excellent but I believe
Lee’s work is, on balance, just that extra bit more interesting almost certainly due
to the direct personal knowledge he brings to the part from his experience
as a Parris Island DI.
If I can ever be of help to you with other producers or directors in a casting situation
you can count on me to do everything I can, and it goes without saying that I will be
happy to work with you in the future in any role for which you might be suitable.
The production company will, of course, make the payments to you to the end of your contract
period, and will take care of the lease on the apartment I believe you have rented.
In view of the circumstances, I don’t know whether or not you would be interested in
this idea, but if you would like to stay on to play the helicopter door gunner which is
a smaller but very strong part in a very good scene. I would be very happy to have you do it.
Yours sincerely, Stanley Kubrick”
Colceri: “Well, it crushed me. And I didn’t want to be around people so...I could see
that they were––everything became like a blur to me, TV was kind of blurry. And I
was angry, because I had that role for 8 months, that he couldn't come to me as a man and talk
to me about it. He sent Leon with a letter.”
Colceri responded to Kubrick in his own letter:
“You think it’s hard for you to tell me, it’s hard for me to accept it. You wanna
write me a letter? Here’s my letter--you give me three minutes of your time, if I can’t
do exactly what you want me to do, I can go back to California with a clear conscience.
As far as the door-gunner role is concerned, just as a painter loves to paint and a singer
loves to sing, I’m an actor who loves to act and nobody can do this role better than I.
Very depressed, Tim Colceri” (Gratwick).
Kubrick didn’t write back, but had Vitali call to tell Colceri that the letter hurt
his feelings (Couch).
Colceri: “‘He hurt me. Why am I always talking to you?!’ Wham,
I slammed down the phone.”
They sent Colceri back to LA to wait for them to be ready to shoot the door-gunner scene.
Seven months later, the production sent Colceri’s agent a letter saying that the door-gunner
scene had been cut (Couch). At this point, Colceri hired a lawyer who wrote up a letter
to Kubrick and Warner Brothers [quote] “arguing that the actor had kept his head shaved for
two years, which kept him from going out for commercial work” (Couch). It is unknown
if it was the letter or not, but Colceri was welcomed back to England to shoot the scene (Couch).
Also, at one point, Lee Ermey was in a terrible car accident and they asked Colceri if he
would be available to come back and play Hartman and then the next day, he was told ‘nevermind’
because the insurance company agreed to pay for the production delay (Couch).
Vitali gave Colceri the door-gunner dialogue to memorize, but when he arrived and recited
the dialogue for Kubrick, it turned out that Vitali had given him the wrong lines (Couch).
Colceri was rightfully pissed. He started to think Kubrick was trying to intentionally
make him crazy for the role (Gratwick). Kubrick had him come to his house where he sat at
a typewriter and wrote up the new dialogue with Colceri’s help (Couch).
They shot a few takes without Kubrick--I’m assuming this is because Kubrick likely wouldn’t
have gone up in a helicopter with his fear of flying. Kubrick watched the playback and
didn’t like Colceri’s [quote] “joyful laughter” in the scene and gave him one
direction (Couch). He said, “Tim, don't laugh like that anymore.
Give me an everyday killer smile” (Couch).
Colceri: “I started shooting the weapon and went, ‘I want to talk.’ And I did
the scene without laughing, just very serious with a little smile. ‘Anybody who runs,
is a VC. Anybody who stands still, is a well disciplined VC. Why you oughta do a story––’
just like that. He goes, ‘Good Tim, do it 13 more times just like that.’ I did.”
Then they had to shoot the parts of the machine gun firing at extras playing civilians and
they were finished by the time night came (Couch). Both Vitali and Colceri were completely
wiped, but Kubrick “ordered” them to drive 100 miles back to production headquarters
to look at and sign off on the quality of the film (Couch). Colceri said, "We were exhausted.
I don't know how Leon even drove. I was nodding out the whole way, I was so tired” (Couch).
I’m assuming that they did the shots of Joker and Rafterman on the ground because
you can’t see outside in their shots and there is a small continuity error where this
little bottle disappears from Joker’s helmet in the reverse shot.
Colceri: “Warner Brothers called me up and said, ‘He had a hell of a time putting all
your original laughs back in when he wasn’t even on the set. And we showed the film last
night to 300 Vietnam vets and he said the best guy that they filmed was that door gunner.’”
Colceri: “And he was smart enough as a general, as a director, to know that his way wasn’t
the right way and whatever I did might work. And it did work.”
Colceri says that he is grateful to have been given the role of the door-gunner even if
he had to go through losing a starring role as Hartman. Of course, he acknowledges that
it would have been a much more pleasant experience if he had only gotten the door-gunner part
from the beginning and didn’t have to go through all the torment (Gratwick).
When the movie premiered, Colceri was surprised to see that Kubrick had given him a starring
credit with his name on the screen all by itself. Cocleri said, “I almost cry every
time I get to that point because all that I went through, at least he showed me the respect.
I'm so proud of that. And I went through hell to get to that point” (Couch).
After Lee Ermey passed away in 2018, Colceri was invited to speak at the funeral and he
told a bunch of stories about working on Full Metal Jacket (Gratwick). Kevin Major Howard,
who played Rafterman in the movie, was there and wanted to help Colceri produce a one-man-show
about working on the film and his experiences as a Marine (Gratwick). I believe this is
the touring show called “Get Some” after one of his great lines in the movie.
Ha ha, get some baby!
Hopefully it will be back after the pandemic is over because I’d love to see it.
Colceri went on to appear in over sixty films and television shows and several of his roles
were drill instructors (Gratwick).
He may have only appeared on screen for a few minutes, but ‘cause he’s so fucking
good, Tim Colceri became one of the most memorable characters of Full Metal Jacket,
and that ain’t no shit, neither.
This episode’s bonus material is a PDF with a Full Metal Jacket trivia game. Now, it’s
a little difficult, but it’s multiple choice and I added some additional factoids, so even
if you don’t know the answers, you’ll get some interesting facts about the movie.
It’s just a dollar and really helps the channel and this time I’m going to start
transitioning to a digital marketplace that I helped create! We’ve been working on it
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get access to all the bonus content I’ve made.
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