During our vacation, when we paid to watch The Replacements, we kind of assumed that we were scraping the bottom of the barrel, movie-wise. Imagine our surprise when we discovered that the barrel had a false bottom which concealed a compartment that contained every movie Lorenzo Lamas has ever made beneath which we found a hatch that led to Coyote Ugly. But you don't need us to tell you that Coyote Ugly's bad. It's the type of instinctive knowledge you can feel in your bones, like the way your bones tell you that you shouldn't put poop in your mouth, or the way they tell you that if you do somehow get poop in your mouth, you shouldn't mistake the experience for the pleasure you get from screwing. On the other hand, as Portal of Evil has proven, the Internet attracts a lot of people with some sort of bone disease that causes them to not only smear each other with crap, but to create and publish glamour shots of themselves doing it.  With that in mind, we decided we'd better tell you how bad Coyote Ugly is just to be safe. 

Girls line dancing! Can't takeee... too much funnnn... nnnnnngggggg..... ARRGGGHKKK!!!

But since this was a Hollywood insider report, we went deep behind the scenes of Coyote Ugly. We went so deep into the Coyote Ugly world that we started to do crazy things like not drink our drinks and instead throw them and scream. For example, where you might still just drink a beer, Erik and I shake them, fire beer foam all over everything and go "I'M ALIVE! I'M FINALLY ALIVE!!!" And instead of not dancing, we dance. We couldn't believe that neither one of us had ever tried having fun or "letting our hair down" before. When I got home really really late at night! I immediately added "I love to have fun" to my computerized dating bio. Erik was more specific and typed, "I love to scream and get sprayed by water." Within weeks we were contacted by two convicted child predators pretending to be girls who also liked to have fun! But on a less personal note, while we were exploring the outrageous pierced underbelly of spontaneous fun, we overheard this conversation between producer Jerry Bruckheimer and the Coyote Ugly screenwriter:

Jerry Bruckheimer: So, let me get this straight: This script is about a strip club where the four employees don't take off their clothes. And they're too busy dancing - completely dressed - on top of the bar to serve anyone a drink. Yet the bar is so popular that there's a giant line to get in. I sent the script to the people who wrote Gilligan's Island and they sent it back with a note that said "This is preposterous!"

Coyote Ugly Scriptwriter: You didn't like the lead character's struggle against her own fears?

Let's talk about that. It says here that she's an aspiring songwriter with terrible, terrible stage fright. Yet she's willing to take a job at a strip club where she'll have to stand on a bar and sing songs in front of a room packed with sailor rapists and bikers every night. Do you know what "stage fright" means?

At first, I thought it meant afraid of spiders. But if you'd just read the script, you'll see where I crossed out all the parts where she goes to the big city to win the spider killing competition and then wins it, and added the parts where she has the kind of stage fright where you're only afraid to sing songs you wrote yourself.

So, you still don't know what stage fright means.

Not totally. But did you get to the part where she has a boyfriend? And the boyfriend is tortured by a dark secret and he even had to leave Australia because of his dark secret and eventually he reveals that he can't go out with her anymore because of his dark secret?

That was kind of interesting. But I couldn't find the scene where you reveal his dark secret.

You missed the part where he tells her he's an orphan?

...

He's an orphan!

I thought that was just a placeholder. Like screenwriter shorthand for "put dark secret here". Are you sure he isn't a ghost or a ghost fucker?

He's an orphan!

Okay. All through the script, you have a running joke about how the main character's father is bad at doing laundry. I liked that all the way up to page ninety where the father goes to the wedding and the daughter sees him and she notices that he's not wearing any socks.  She asks him why, and he says he "had a disagreement with the dryer." Does this mean what I think it does?

Dad: Violet... why aren't you wearing any pants, sweetie? Violet: Because my vagina shows when I don't have pants on. Oh, and Dad-- my Coyote Ugly name is Jersey. Dad: Sorry. Sometimes I screw names up because I'm fat. Violet Jersey: I'm sorry... I didn't know, daddy. Hey, how come you aren't wearing any pants either? Dad: I don't know how to do laundry, so I ate them. Jersey: Why did you eat them? That doesn't make any sense. Dad: Bitch, I can't handle pressing a button on a dryer, do you think a person like me can distinguish between food and not-food? How did I even drive myself to work? You're so insensitive. Jersey: I know, daddy. It's my dark secret. Oh no, I don't want your pity! I'm insensitive! Okay?! Don't give me your sympathy! Dad: I... I'm sorry. I... didn't know. Ever since your mother died, I've been trying so hard to not let go of her memory. Jersey: Is that why you grew those tits? Dad: What? Umm... yeah. Yeah, exactly.

He put the dryer on the setting that burns up clothes!

You've never actually used a dryer, have you?

Let me think... No.

There's no button on a dryer that will destroy a sock.

Maybe on some there are!

No, there.... look, trust me. I can't imagine anyone ever wanting to see this thing.

Jerry, here's a successful company that makes nothing but movies about people eating each other's shit.

Good point. Get me John Goodman for the guy with the dryer that eats things, and we've got a deal!

In one scene where JERSEY is on the roof trying to practice the songs she's too afraid to sing, she's interrupted by a guy across the street practicing his hip hop dancing to loud music. But instead of huffing off to practice her other hobbies like pouring drinks all over her breasts, she listens to this... hip hop. This... magical new world of musical possibilities. And then in a humiliating spurt of drama, she slams her hands against the keyboard and rearranges her crappy love song to be a crappy hip hop song. I'd already been hiding my eyes for most of the movie, since I have trouble looking directly at a triumph of the human spirit set to music, but Erik told me that this scene made him go blind for a few minutes. We feel kind of bad making fun of it though, because her boyfriend in the movie was an orphan.


The song Jersey sang all movie was called "Can't Fight the Moonlight." The only time they ever stopped playing it was to cut to a scene of John Goodman eating. We must have heard it 18 times during the movie, the drive home, then all night while we slowdanced to the soundtrack under the stars. We still never figured out what the fuck it was supposed to mean, and we've been listening to songs our whole lives. It was like the songwriter pieced together their own brand new clichι with refrigerator poetry but forgot to invent a meaning for it. So when Erik and I tried to use it in regular conversations, we're pretty sure we screwed it up.

Like when Erik drew a picture of a bunny on his belly button and pretended it was singing I laughed, "Ha ha, It's funny because it's true! You can't fight the moonlight!"

Later, when I confessed to Lauryn Order that I thought I remembered how to play Dungeons and Dragons, he put his hand on my shoulder and reassured me, "Vanessa Scotc, you can't fight the moonlight."

The last time I remember us using it was when we nursed a baby bird back to life and Erik bit its legs off and jokingly put a Christopher Reeve sticker on its face. I didn't know how to react, so I screamed our new catch phrase into the night to no one in particular. Was my voice passionate enough for Christopher Reeve to hear my cry?

So if the person who wrote the song could please contact us from whatever home for the criminally insane they write songs from, we would love to know if any of these applications is correct or if we're just embarrassing ourselves.

Next... A look back on Jerry Bruckheimer's finest moments.