The Steve Martin Comedy That Beefed with the U.S. Military
Steve Martin’s movie career is replete with comedy classics such as The Jerk, Roxanne and Father of the Bride, in which Martin and Martin Short appear in several scenes together and somehow resist the urge to relentlessly roast each other.
But he also made a number of not-so-memorable comedies. One movie that didn’t make much of a cultural dent was Sgt. Bilko, the 1996 remake of the ‘50s sitcom The Phil Silvers Show. The story of a scheming, amoral U.S. army sergeant flopped at the box office, and has since been largely forgotten. Even Martin himself wasn’t a fan.
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In retrospect, perhaps the most interesting thing about Sgt. Bilko is that the filmmakers ended up feuding with the U.S. military while making it.
It’s not uncommon for Hollywood movies to negotiate deals with the Pentagon that allow them to use real-life military equipment and facilities in exchange for certain concessions. This is why Top Gun was full of real jets and aircraft carriers and was basically a two-hour way-too-horny recruitment ad aimed at America’s impressionable youth.
According to Spy Culture, the makers of Sgt. Bilko similarly asked the U.S. Army for “access to an Army base and other support for the film.” But the “entertainment liaison” took a look at the script and deemed it to be totally unacceptable. As one memo noted, “The hero was a crook and the ‘bad guys’ were officers.” They also objected to the movie’s “antiquated” portrayal of the military, which they claimed was “incompatible with the film’s present day setting.”
So Sgt. Bilko was rewritten to accommodate those concerns/demands, but the army still wasn’t happy. The chief of the Army’s Hollywood office complained that “every character in the film is either corrupt, corrupted or witless and that I considered several of the jokes quite vile and gratuitous.”
And they still believed that the old-fashioned vibe would create “false impressions about today’s Army.” The Army was so adamant on this point that they tried to get the Bilko producers to turn it into a period piece, arguing that “the 50th anniversary of WW2 might spike audiences’ interest.”
Yup, nothing says “Let’s reflect on the history of World War II” quite like a movie starring Steve Martin and Beldar Conehead.
Ultimately, the two parties went their separate ways after realizing that the expenses that the movie could save with military cooperation would have been negated by the cost of setting the movie half a century earlier. But the Sgt. Bilko team clearly wasn’t happy. In fact they were so displeased that they added a disclaimer to the film’s end credits reading, “The filmmakers gratefully acknowledge the total lack of cooperation from the United States Army.”
Sadly, this wasn’t followed by a post-credit scene in which Sgt. Bilko is recruited by Nick Fury.
