10.10.2005
Obi-Wan Boukadida
About a week ago I'm just on my way out of my apartment to meet Scotty Bakula for lunch when the phone rings. I pick it up,Matt Evans here. Reaching me is the easy part. The hard part? - impressing me. Let's hear it.
Silence.
Hello? I know it must be daunting but just go for it, you might get lucky.
Still nothing. It occurs to me that it might be Travolta, giving me the silent treatment after his most recent attempt to convert me to Scientology. So I lay it out for him again:
Travolta, you know where I stand. The Evans brand is nondemoninational. I appeal equally to all--
I'm cut off by LeAnn Rimes How Do I Live piping through the phone.
How do I,
Get through the night without you?
If I had to live without you,
What kind of life would that be?
I smile. There's only one person it could be. After the first verse he starts to speak over the music:
If this goes bad, uh... you tell her I love her. Uh... she's my hummingbird. But I can't leave a man behind. You'll do that for me, uh... won't you, Larkin?
Sure,
I reply,
What are you gonna do for me?
Uh... What do you think I'm gonna do? I'm gonna save the f***in' day!
As soon as he finishes the line, we start laughing. This is a thing me and Nick Cage have done since I told him how much I love Con Air. He stops the music so we can talk.
Uh...
Hey Nick, great to hear from you. What's up?
Uh... Hey Matt. I just called to tell you the good news. Alice just had the baby. Uh...
That's fantastic Nick!
To the untrained ear he wouldn't have sounded particularly pleased, but this is Nick Cage we're talking about - He doesn't express emotions in words, tones, facial expressions or anything else so simple. To really know what's going on inside The Cage, you've gotta learn to decipher the drawn out moans he makes mid-sentence.
Uh...
He was ecstatic! I congratulated him and Alice some more and then we talked over a couple more things. Eventually I ask him,
So Nick. What's the kid's name?
Uh... Kal-El. After Superman's Kryptonian name. Uh...
I don't know what to say. The name triggers the memory of a story that I start running through in my head. When I finally tune back into the conversation I realise Nick's been talking for about a minute on the effect of Earth's yellow sun on Superman:
Uh.. and these wavelength's wouldn't have been as abundant on Krypton. The mitochondria in his cells therefore have evolved to, uh...
As soon as he pauses I jump in,
Nick! I need you to listen to me for a second!
Uh...
Have you ever heard of Obi-Wan Boukadida?
He stops to think.
Uh.. no. What the hell kind of name is Boukadida?
It's Tunisian Nick, but's that's not important.
I tell him Obi-Wan's story: Back in the mid-ninties a couple living in Tunisia have a baby boy. They're both big Star Wars fans so they name the kid Obi-Wan. Raises afew eyebrows but nobody says anything about it - After all, what harm could it really be? A couple years pass and then one day they receive a letter from a laywer working for Lucasfilm. Apparently an employee scouting locations for the Phantom Menace heard about the boy and told George. The Boukadida's get taken to court for using a name that George Lucas owns.
At this point in the story Nick cuts in,
Uh...
Listen Nick,
I say, cutting him off,
this is the important part!
I continue. The court finds in favor of George Lucas - the Boukadidas have to sell damn near everything they own and George get's custody of little Obi-Wan. Of course George didn't expect that. He figured he'd squeeze enough dinars from the case to cover an extra set of prosthetic feet for Jar-Jar, now he's got a 5 year old Tunisian kid to look after! Not knowing what else to do with him, George puts Obi-Wan to work inside an R2-D2 suit.
"Well that's that", Lucas thinks, until he gets a call from the head of the SPAG. That's the Small People's Actor's Guild. One of the most powerful unions in Hollywood - I learnt the hard way not to mess with them. SPAG's all over Lucas for giving a small person's part to a kid. Lucas is starting to regret the whole thing and almost cancels production of the picture. At the last moment Ricky McCallum steps in and gives George some advice - SPAG'll step off if they're offered something in return. George sees where he's coming from and heads back to the negotiation table with the only two words SPAG can't ignore:
Willow 2
SPAG's off his back and he gets on with the picture. By the end of filming Obi-Wan has caught the acting bug - as well as a mild case of tetanus from a scrape on the inside of R2. He leaves Tunisia to continue working with George on the rest of the trilogy. Rumor has it George even let him write some of the dialogue in Revenge of the Sith... The Boukadidas never saw their son again.
Nick is shocked!
Uh... but that's means someone from DC could take Kal-El away from us.
Exactly.
I uh.. can't let that happen. He's my hummingbird. What should we uh... do?
I think about it for a moment.
He needs another name Nick. Something that won't draw the same kind of attention.
You mean like a secret identity? Cos we could--
Nick, you can't call the kid Clark Kent.
Uh...
I realised then that Kal-El Cage's future depended on me. Nick couldn't be counted on to see beyond references to things that he liked with his son's name. I racked my brain. Kal-El needed a name! But not any old name - this was the son of one of Hollywood's most explosive actors: the man who blew everyone away with his performance in Jerry Bruckheimer's National Treasure and gave the nation the wake-up call it needed with the cold hard truth of Gone in 60 Seconds. His son needed a name that would say,
I come from greatness and am destined for greatness!
but it must also say
I am not the intellectual property of DC comics!
It hit me. Only one name would do.
Nick, how do you like the sound of Matt Cage?
He didn't reply. What was wrong? Had DC just arrived on his doorstep? Had they bugged his phone? Then I heard it. A quiet whimper which built into full-blown weeping.
It's perfect Matt! You've saved my boy!
he cried out amid the tears. I could hear him trying to do something, pressing buttons or--
I need you in my arms, need you to ho-oh-old!
You're my world, my heart, my soul
If you ever leave,
Baby you would take away everything, good in my life!
There's now three people I trust! Uh...
I had just saved Nick Cage's family, and he was expressing his gratitude in the only way he knew how: By quoting Con Air.
Somehow they uh... managed to get every creep and freak in the universe on this one plane!
Put the bunny back in the box!
This went on for some time. After awhile he moved onto The Rock at which point it hit me that Scott Bakula must still have been waiting for me in the Pizza Hut two blocks away. I say my goodbyes to a tearful Nick and hurriedly leave my apartment. When I get to the Hut Scotty was gone. He'd eaten a Hawaii pie, an ice-cream sundae and finished off three cups of coffee. And he left the bill for me.
Scott Freakin' Bakula.