THE WAY OUT WEST DANCE
Arguably the most iconic Laurel & Hardy
routine, in which the pair dance amiably
against a rear projection, Baird bookends
the film with two very different
performances. The second time, coming
after Ollie has suffered a heart attack and
is told he can’t perform again, is an
emotional highpoint. The first is a slavish
recreation of the original, which Steve
Coogan, John C. Reilly and choreographer
Toby Sedgwick worked on over a four-
week rehearsal period. “They noticed that
Laurel and Hardy had made a few
mistakes in the dance, so they built the
mistakes into their routine as well,” says
Baird. “CBS in America played the
original movie and our recreation side
by side, and it’s pretty much as close
as you could get.”
Interestingly, Baird confesses that
the number wasn’t in Jeff Pope’s
original script. “It started with them
on set of Below Zero, dubbing their
own movies into different
languages,” says Baird. “We
changed it to Way Out West
because we thought it was a far
more iconic routine. It has energy
and momentum, and it really
helps the storytelling. It
wasn’t a case of
recreating it for
the sake of it.”THE STAIRS SCENE
“The movie they won the Oscar for was
The Music Box,” says Baird. “The most
iconic moment from that is when a piano
falls down stairs. We wanted to give a nod
to that.” With no budget for a piano, Baird
and Pope instead came up with a scene
where Stan and Ollie, during their travels,
lose control of their luggage. Baird planned
it. He storyboarded it. He had figured on
12 camera angles. Then it all started going
wrong. “We were near the end of the day at
this train station and we had 30 minutes,”
he recalls. “It’s the most unprepared thing
I’ve ever done. In the end we had just two
camera set-ups. We did most of it in two
takes, and thankfully it worked. Simplicity
is the way forward.”THE HIGH HAT
A scene where Stan goes to see a movie
producer, and is forced to wait by a stern
receptionist, contains what Baird calls a
“buy one, get one free of Easter eggs”. One
is a reference to a similar scene in Martin
Scorsese’s The King Of Comedy (“Scorsese
was a real mentor to me on this film”), and
the other is taken from the Laurel & Hardy
film Toad In The Hole, in which Stan
makes it appear that he’s making his hat
levitate. “If you look carefully, the hat has
a brim on it,” explains Baird. “He leans
that back and puts a little bit of pressure
on the back of the hat and pushes it
against the wall behind him. If you push it
gently enough it starts to raise up. It’s
simple, but took me ages to work out how
he did it.” Don’t try this at home, folks.
Steve Coogan is a professional. CHSTAN & OLLIE IS OUT 19 JULY ON DVD, BLU-RAY
AND DOWNLOADAbove: Stan and Ollie’s
iconic dance in Way
Out West (1937).
Below: The stairs
set-piece in The Music
Box (1932), there
involving a piano, and
referenced in Stan &
Ollie when the touring
pair lose a suitcase
at the station.ROBIN HOOD
Throughout the film Stan is hoping to have
one last shot at making another Laurel &
Hardy movie: ‘Robin Hood’, their take
on... well, you know. In fact, Laurel did
write a script for the film, which was never
made. And although Baird and Pope never
saw that script, they were inspired enough
to recreate a chunk of it for a fantasy
sequence in which Stan and Ollie imagine
what the film might have been like. The
recreation sees Hardy, as Little John, fall
into water. “Because John’s fat suits were
so expensive to make, we only had one shot
at that,” says Baird. “We had one spare, so
we had three cameras set up to make sure
we got it right. John did it in one take.”ANOTHER NICE MESS
That same sequence sees Ollie deliver the
duo’s catchphrase, “another nice mess”.
Yes, nice. Not fine. “Everyone thinks it’s
‘another fine mess’,” says Baird. “They did
a movie called Another Fine Mess, but it’s
actually ‘another nice mess’. We wanted
to use that line once, and we figured that
was the right place, when they were both
dreaming of what might have been.”ALAMY