- The cast of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation wore placards with Chevy Chase’s dialogue around their necks.
- Chase confirmed that he couldn’t remember all of his lines in a pivotal meltdown sequence.
- “It was just impossible for him to do because his brain doesn’t work that way,” Randy Quaid said.
Chevy Chase got a little lost while filming National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.
Stars from Christmas Vacation and the original National Lampoon’s Vacation reunited at a panel at Chicago Fan Expo earlier this month, where Randy Quaid and Beverly D’Angelo both recalled the Fletch star’s difficulties portraying bumbling patriarch Clark Griswold during the 1989 holiday sequel.
Quaid, who portrayed the imposing Cousin Eddie in the movie, said that Chase had trouble memorizing his dialogue while filming a particularly verbose breakdown scene near the climax of the film.
“When Clark has the meltdown, that was a tough scene because [Chevy] had to remember all these lines,” the actor recalled. “It was just impossible for him to do because his brain doesn’t work that way.”
Chris Cosgrove for EW
D’Angelo, who played Clark’s wife Ellen, recalled that the crew engineered an unusual solution in order to display Chase’s lines as the cameras rolled. “We had ’em around our necks because for him to act, there was no point in him thinking about the words,” she explained.
Chase confirmed his costars’ recollections. “I had to cover all of those words,” he said. “Every one of them had a sign in front of ’em.”
D’Angelo went on to explain that the Saturday Night Live alum’s performance skills stemmed from live comedy, which she said requires less word-for-word memorization than film acting.
“Chevy’s a comedian, he’s live. That’s how he stays alive,” she said. “So we all wore these placards around our necks with the lines so that he could just act, instead of going, ‘What do I say now?'”
Quaid added, “Yeah, we were all wearing the dialogue.”
Chase took credit for writing the meltdown scene, which had to be toned down because the film was rated PG-13, unlike the R-rated 1983 original.
Chris Cosgrove for EW
“They all had my lines in front of ’em,” he said. “So I just went from dirty word that I wrote to nuts dirty word that I wrote, and this went on like that for a while. But it wasn’t actually that dirty, come to think of it. I had to come up with a lot of strange stuff, instead of, like, ‘You f—in’ this or that.'”
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The scene in question saw Clark freak out upon receiving his long-awaited Christmas bonus check, which turned out to be nothing more than a subscription to a jelly of the month club. Clark lashes out and breathlessly screams that he wants to tell his boss that he’s a “cheap, lying, no-good, rotten, four-flushing, low-life, snake-licking, dirt-eating, inbred, overstuffed, ignorant, blood-sucking, dog-kissing, brainless, dickless, hopeless, heartless, fat-ass, bug-eyed, stiff-legged, spotty-lipped, worm-headed sack of monkey s—.”
Christmas Vacation was the third of four entries in the original Vacation series headlined by Chase, following the 1983 original and 1985’s European Vacation. The saga originally concluded with 1997’s Vegas Vacation, though Chase and D’Angelo both returned in supporting roles in the 2015 semi-reboot Vacation, which focused on their on-screen son Rusty, this time portrayed by Ed Helms.
Reporting by Chris Cosgrove.
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