Brandon Cruz - Bad News Brandon (by Jay Hale)

Every artist — whether it be a songwriter, sculptor or a suburban geek with a can of spray paint and a chip on his shoulder — takes pride in his or her work, past and present. So it came as no surprise that when former child actor and Dr. Know frontman Brandon Cruz caught wind that one of his old flicks, “Bad News Bears,” was being remade, he was filled with trepidation. Cruz wasn’t nervous that the update of the unrelenting and knee slappingly hilarious baseball comedy was going to overshadow the original, he feared that the redo would huff the proverbial dong. Let’s face it, when you tamper with a classic you’re destined to screw something up. Although no one from the original cast popped up in 2005’s go ’round — not even in a one-line cameo — notorious Hollywood asshole Billy Bob Thorton was a perfect match for the role of Morris Buttermaker, the notorious asshole Little League coach made famous by Walter Matthau. Cruz’s first meeting with the new coach may have been a bit choppy, but he agreed .

“I saw Billy Bob at a party before the movie started [filming] and walked up to him and said, ‘I like your shit,’” Cruz recalls. “He said, ‘Well thank you, I shit a lot.’ I told him we should work together to which he replied, ‘Well sure, I work a lot.’ But then he looked at me and said, ‘I think I’m remaking your movie. Weren’t you in ‘Bad News Bears?’’’ I told him that yes, I did work on that and he explained who the writers and producers were and then we talked about Walter Matthau and Vic Morrow. He seemed into the original and it was cool that he was a fan. I hope it transfers onto the big screen.”

In this day and age, duplicating the brand of juvenile humor that ran rampant in the 1976 version of “Bears” is damn near impossible. Thirty years ago it was much easier for a less politically correct Hollywood to use gender, nationality and race as punchlines, even if done tongue-in-cheek. Bill Simmons, columnist for ESPN: The Magazine and espn2.com refers to the string of chronically insensitive epithets belched forth by Bears shortstop Tanner Boyle as “11 words my editors will never let me write” yet they are repeated several times throughout the film. As naughty as it was on the written page, Cruz added his own debauchery to the film behind the scenes. When asked what his most vivid memory of his time spent portraying Joey Turner, ace pitcher of the hated Yankees, in “Bears,” he simply replied: “I remember getting high before every scene.”

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