Picture, if you will, this harrowing New York City scene. You’re an aging bank security guard about to lock up for the night, when some joker jams his big red shoe in the door and sticks a gun in your face. Once inside, he rolls up a novelty tuxedo top to reveal he’s wired with clock-ticking explosives and yes, he’s robbing the joint. Knowing you are responsible for the safety of the dozen or so people left inside, you hand over your gun without being asked, but not before asking ask the bandit in front of you–holding a bouquet of balloons while decked out in full jestery makeup and japery regalia–the only question that matters:
“What the hell kind of clown are you?”
“The crying-on-the-inside kind, I guess.”
It’s the perfect line, delivered in perfect Bill Murray deadpan, setting the perfect Pagliacci-meets-Pretty Boy Floyd tone for the criminally underappreciated 1990 heist movie, Quick Change.
“I can’t tell you the number of people over the years who’ve asked if Bill really wrote the ‘crying-on-the-inside kind,’” says Howard Franklin, the film’s writer and co-director (with Murray, his lone credit). “I have the unique skill of being able to channel Bill’s voice. It’s the line I’m best known for and it will be my epitaph, because it does sound exactly like something he would say.”
For the uninitiated, here’s the Quick Change breakdown. Three first-time bank robbers–Grimm (Murray), a city planner whose only goal in life is to get the hell out of New York City, Phyllis (Geena Davis), his yet-to-tell-him-she’s-pregnant-girlfriend, and Loomis (Randy Quaid), a loyal dopey friend/wheelman whose blundering keeps them from a clean getaway—make off with a million dollars and go through a Gotham gauntlet trying to make a flight out of JFK before midnight. At 90-minutes, the film really flies as they deal with sweaty mobsters (Stanley Tucci’s hair!), a cabbie of mysterious ethnic origin (Tony Shalhoub’s bullseye film debut) with zero sense of direction, traffic laws, and English, an agitated yuppie with a gun (Phil Hartman, R.I.P.), a fascistic bus driver who will make damn sure you’re behind the white line, and random street weirdness best exemplified by two shirtless Mexican men bicycle jousting in a ratty Brooklyn playground with the metal ends of sponge-less butterfly mops. To which Loomis, as he hightails it out of there, delivers the movie’s second best line, “It’s bad luck just seeing a thing like that.”
“The amazing thing is our call sheets from the scary desperate areas where they get stranded on the way to the airport, are all completely gentrified now. We filmed the jousting scene on a burned-out block in Red Hook using Woody Allen’s crew, because he prefers overcast days and didn’t shoot in the summer,” says Franklin. “It was so funny how fascinated the crew was with our neighborhoods because they’d only filmed in Woody’s ‘romantic’ New York, the Upper East Side and Greenwich Village. Our bank location was across from Grand Central Station, but everything else was outerborough. It might as well have been a different country, especially given how many scenes we shot at night.”
It’s been more than a decade since I last took in Quick Change, but I was thinking about it recently because its defining emotion, across all characters, is frustration with “the greatest city on Earth.” You know, the one doesn’t seem to care about making life better for its workaday citizens.
Other than a west coast grad school detour, I’ve called New York City home since 1993, when I moved to the Bronx and worked with young kids growing up in the last years of the crack era. To be clear, no matter what your dipshit Fox News-pickled Long Island uncle says, these times aren’t those times. The crime rate is nothing like it was in 1990 when the movie came out–2,262 murders in a calendar year–but there is widespread aggravation with the stasis of things, with nearly 70% of voters across all demographics, boroughs and party affiliations saying New York City is on the wrong track. I’m not going to turn this into a political manifesto–we’re here for the larcenous clown–but post-Covid I’m certainly among them. Unlike Grimm & Co., I have no desire to leave Brooklyn, but it would be cool if perhaps the powers-that-be come up with a housing-employment-plain-old-human-decency plan for the 4,000 newcomers to our residential neighborhood, or do anything to ease the gridlock, or not abandoned anti-dangerous driving plans, or make it impossible to have nice things, or eliminate the family-friendly pandemic improvement most everyone loves, or just not be the guy in charge whose main “Vibes” are endemic corruption, or maybe spread a little of that $5.8-billion budget to help the unhoused living in the subways instead of open-firing over $2.90….
No civilians, or cops for that matter, got lit up in Grimm’s grand plan, movie or book version.
Yes, in reacquainting myself with Quick Change I discovered that two decades before it tanked at the box office and years before it was reborn in the catch-all “cult classic” realm, whatever that means, it was a book by an Oklahoma writer named Jay Cronley. “Quick Change” was the fourth novel by the scribe-of-all-trades, a man who spent decades as a local columnist, national magazine feature writer, and with his regular ESPN horse racing pieces, in the words of David Hill (who has a terrific southern crime saga of his own right), “our latter-day Damon Runyan…who made people laugh and feel good.”
“Jay was a Tulsa newspaper institution, 46 years, often writing three columns and other pieces a week,” says ex-wife Connie Cronley. “Reader surveys showed he was the most popular part of the papers and they identified with his personal sardonic take on life. Fans felt like they knew Jay, so they’d send him gifts at Christmas like a ham.”
Cronley’s career was a life of riches. Of his eight books, five were made into movies, a hit rate even Stephen King would tip his Red Sox cap to. As Hollywood versions go, they range in quality, “Good Vibes” was turned into the rollicking beloved-by-railbirds Let it Ride with Richard Dreyfuss, while “Funny Farm” became a Chevy Chase vehicle of the same name that at least lives up to the farm half of the title. What’s wild is that the exact same scenario played out for “Quick Change,” because before Murray and Franklin’s NYC flick, Alexandre Arcady’s French-Canadian Montreal-based version was released, in France anyway.
It takes all of about ten seconds of the synthesizers and saxophones intro to stamp Hold-Up as an absolute 80s movie that will soon reveal itself to be a cutrate Tango & Cash-level action flick, dipped in enough French cheese to make it a jarringly unpleasant experience all around. Filmed in Montreal, it stars Jean-Paul Belmondo, who made an American name for himself as a regular face in films of the French New Wave like Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless and Francois Truffuat’s Mississippi Mermaid. Back in France, however, he was equally known as a guy who did his own stunts in thrillers and comedies, a la Tom Cruise or Jackie Chan. Unfortunately, the sole legacy of Hold-Up is that during filming of a gratuitously dumb tow truck chase scene, a heavy metal pulley struck Belmondo in the face and he gave up the Colt Seavers lifestyle for good. Belmondo definitely suffered for his commedia dell’arte, Hold-Up–despite what the IMDB user reviews say–is pas bon, although for “Quick Change” completists it’s free at “the cave of forgotten films.”
Unless of course, the French art of clowning is your thing, then you’re in luck. The laborious bank scenes take up nearly a third of the movie’s run time, all to enjoy Dollar Store Pierrot’s wacky antics like red smoke billowing out his floppy hat, a honking light-up nose, and water shooting out of his flower lapel to put out the ACME-ass-looking dynamite fuse… Oh monsieur le clown, rouler sur le sol! Oui, oui!
Other things in the movie include a pizza injected with a “sleeping agent,” a vehicular crash into a huge pile of road salt, a clarinet solo, and (because it’s mandated in all of her contracts) Kim Cattrall completely naked. There is no reason to ask if this movie holds up, it fell to Earth on arrival. Connie even says plans to go to Paris fell through and doesn’t think they ever saw it.
“Helen Scott was a close associate of Francis Trauffaut, acted as the interpreter during the conversations with Alfred Hitchcock that served as the basis for the famous book. After the overwhelming success of Ghostbusters, Bill decamped to Paris for a few years, went to the cinema everyday and took classes at the Sorbonne, which is how he became good friends with Helen, who actually gave him Cronley’s novel,” says Franklin. “Bill gave Quick Change to me, I really liked it, but he also said there’s already a Canadian version we should see. Bill arranges a screening, and I hate to be this hars, but I loathed Hold-Up. Belomondo was so unappealing from early on in the movie, I wanted to leave. But I thought if Bill can take it, so can I. Another twenty minutes go by and I turn around to tell Bill, ‘I don’t know about this,’ and he’s sound asleep.
I don’t think he ever saw the movie, but I know we did a much better job.”
They certainly did, although the City of Saints street footage really makes Montreal pop, which actually warrants pointing out one last major flaw in Hold-Up, it’s missing the civic defeatism at the core of the book and movie. Cronley’s “Quick Change” is much more cynical and felonious than the movie that bears its name. Take for instance the film role of Chief Rotzinger, the man in charge of catching Chuckles, played by Jason Robards. In Quick Change, he’s the quintessential exasperated “I’m too old for this shit” lifer cop who springs into action when they catch a break spurred on by Loomis idiocy. He loves the clown-and-mouse game.
In the book, Rotzinger says “people are of the mistaken opinion that crime can be prevented” and cares only about being mocked on the front page of the tabloids, “laughed at by hundreds of thousands of people.” Grimm becoming a folk hero is the real crime and if he has to pull some dirty strings to tie-up loose ends, so be it. He’s also prone to Bernie Goetz-esque revenge fantasies such as, “when some rotten bastard guns down a citizen and complains about too many flies in his soup, it’s almost time to pack your bags to someplace where crime equals punishment… You char-broil a killer, it is a scientific fact he will never kill again.”
The 1981 book feels much aligned with the bombed-out 1970s Serpico, Son of Sam, Travis Bickle, “Ford to City: Drop Dead” era, where it did seem like the Big Apple might not survive. What’s ironic about all of these terrifying touchstones is that they were part of the violent Manhattan after-dark milieu, but Cronley wasn’t. He was a happy-go-lucky tourist.
“Jay loved New York City, we used to go back a lot to see shows, eat at all these different restaurants, just have a great time,” says Connie. “He’d talk to cab drivers, bartenders, guys at the newspaper stands, and was never in a hurry to leave. I think the idea of characters who will do anything to get out there came from his overall dark sense of humor.”
Cronley’s gallows creativity is why, in the book, Grimm is a failed crook. An art gallery heist went sideways when somebody sneezed, while his kidnapping of an oil company president was fakakta when an old horse meant to saddlebag the ransom money got spooked by lightning and broke its leg. The equine escape seemed awfully convoluted, but Grimm got away in both cases. The bank job is his one last shot at a big score, and perhaps, infamy.
“Jay told me he wanted to write a caper novel because he was intrigued at the idea of solving a puzzle he created, but I don’t know where he got the idea of a clown robbing a bank,” says Cronley. “I do know after Quick Change came out, someone did exactly that. Jay was worried he was going to get sued, again, because he’d been through a frivolous Hollywood lawsuit over the French movie. After a week, Judge Charles Older threw that case out. Jay was thrilled it ended abruptly and that it was the same judge who presided over the Charles Manson case.”
No doubt Cronley appreciated the mass-murdering mindmeld with Grimm’s tossed-off screenplay line, “Where was the Clutter Family from?,” but the smartest decision Franklin made was actually having the trio be novice crooks. They’re at wit’s end with New York City, and a one-time crime is their only solution. They’re easy to root for, even if Ron Howard said otherwise when initially approached to direct it in the pre-production phase. (According to Franklin, in true Irish fashion, Murray still holds a grudge.) In the movie, Grimm lets the hostages know their bank money is federally insured and even makes sure one guy gets a receipt from the teller before she starts bagging the loot. He’s a clown of the people.
Turning Grimm and Phyllis into a decent couple who don’t see another way out allows Quick Change to be driven by their spiky relationship. The earned sarcastic chemistry between them supersedes all the madness swirling around, including an ever-escalating series of self-sustained Loomis injuries. (It should be noted Davis says Murray harassed and berated her on set.)
One thing Quick Change did however, miss out on, was Cronley himself. Some detail is lost to time, because Cronley writes the intro to the 2006 University of Oklahoma press “Quick Change” re-release of that he was in the Newark Airport at 3am during filming: “I got to see a bathroom scene in which a man stood at a urinal.”
Franklin recalls it a little differently. “Bill loved Jay, so we invited him to be in the movie. There’s a scene in the men’s room near the end where Grimm and Loomis are in a closed stall together getting the money off their bodies, but on the other side of the door it sounds like two guys having sex. There’s an out-of-towner washing his hands and he says in a rage, ‘You people can keep this city!’ It was written for Cronley. He had the All-American good looks and the Tulsa accent to nail it, but I think he lost his nerve. He said it had something to do with his flight maybe, don’t exactly recall, but I do know we had to scramble to fill the part. Too bad, Jay would’ve been perfect.”
The other major plot changes from book to movie–and yes, this section is about to get spoilery–all come near the end. The film walks-it-off with Rotzinger’s “Goddamnit, they got me!” face as realizes he took the metaphorical pie in the face. He watches them flying off to Martinique while inside the plane, the happy couple canoodle as Loomis drifts into blissful sleep. It’s the payoff we all wanted, the three of them living happily ever after Gotham for good, following the civic circus our heroes were forced to endure.
Cronley’s tie-up is more fitting his overarching theme that everyone is out for themselves and nobody deserves nothin’. Lategoing, “Quick Change” meanders, and there is a bit of a dueling deus ex machina thing going on, but the first twist is logical and plausible, and the second lives snuggly within the grimy heart of the novel. To wit, our anti-heroes are escaping to London, but after Grimm is a jerk about his carry-on bag and then goes too hard on the Bloody Marys, a new character–Lucy, the put-upon stewardess–takes a peek inside. One fake appendectomy and an emergency landing in Ireland later, guess who ends up in Heathrow men’s room with a bag filled with in-flight magazines… And as for Rotzinger, he convinces a family of small-time moronic hoodlums, recently busted for knocking off parking meters for pennies, to take the fall for the robbery in exchange for $75,000 of dirty cash and a five-year hitch.
The button on the book actually finds Grimm back in a clown suit jaywalking to a small British bank, his two cohorts already inside, setting “Quick Change” up for a sequel (“Quicker Change?”), but that wasn’t Cronley’s style. Connie explains.
“He was impatient, always moving on to the next topic, the next story, so he never had any interest in writing a detective series. His novels were similar in style, short books that moved quickly and featured a lot of punchy dialogue, but different settings, milieus and characters in each one,” she says. “I didn’t like the last two “Walking Papers” and “Shoot!” as much, because it was after we divorced and the subjects are trying to kill an ex-wife. Very funny, Jay!… I loved him, and our estrangement was short-lived. He was my best friend for fifty years. He put so much care into his books, I’d love for a new audience to get to know him.”
I don’t want to oversell genius in either version, neither is a huge artistic statement, but neither book, nor movie intends to be. Thematically they differ to a degree, but Quick Change the movie is where I started and where we will end. In its understated-hilarious-hangdog way, it captures being stuck here in the Big Apple with the hard-working trustworthy “for all New Yorkers” corrupt politicos we know, love and wnat to see in a Turkish prison. The movie is great because it delivers on its promise, a taut well-paced funny caper flick where every obstacle is familiar enough to be recognizable to the grind of NYC life.
In 2017, Jay Cronley died of natural causes in his Tulsa home at the age of 73, having left a literary (and film) legacy that warrants a wholesale rediscovery. I’m definitely going to start with “Fall Guy” and make my way through the Cronley canon. I got a greater feel for Jay’s writing style from a handful of his columns Connie sent along, one of which “A Meal with Star Appeal” detailed a 1991 breakfast he ate at the Route 66 Diner with BIll Murray. The Quick Change star promised to stop by and made good on a family drive from New York to Arizona. It’s a fun piece about how much better the service was that morning, but what I think best captures Jay Cronley’s dedication to craft, sharp way with a pen, and love of people–even those rotten jaded Gotham bastards–comes in a paragraph from a 2005 column about screenwriting:
The way it seems to work in this region is that everybody who does their first screenplay sends it to me because I know Bill Murray and had breakfast with him at the Route 66 Diner here in town. He loved the oatmeal.
Jay Cronley loved the whole meal. And his unheralded work touched a lot of people along the way. Particularly those of us who never walk into a bank lobby without smiling at Bozo strapped with a bomb, happy knowing the entire crew is still lounging on the beach, living off the federally-insured finances of miserable New Yorkers.
“When he died in 2017, Bill Murray sent Jay’s daughter Samantha, my stepdaughter, a note,” says Connie. “It said ‘your father’s death left a hole in the floor.’ That’s such a tender way to put it, isn’t it?”
Yep, the crying-on-the-outside kind, I guess.
