Buddy Hell

The last blockbuster to be released in the 1980s, Tango & Cash seemed like a no-brainer: a buddy-cop team-up for two of Hollywood’s biggest stars. But it didn’t take long for the wheels to spectacularly come off

- ADAM SMITH

MID-SUMMER, 1989. Inside the offices of Hollywood mega producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters, a production meeting is in full swing.

“I don’t care if it fucking farts, I want Peter to fucking shoot it!” Jon Peters screams at line producer Larry Franco, referring to British second-unit director Peter MacDonald. “Whatever it is, action or dialogue, I don’t care. You gotta get Peter to shoot it!”

“Jon…”

“I hired you to be the policeman,” yells Peters. “The fucking policeman! You gotta figure it out! You gotta figure out how to make this work!”

Welcome to the daily hellscape that is the life of Larry Franco, line producer on Tango & Cash. The grunt of the producing fraternity, a line producer’s role is to supervise the day-to-day running of the project, planning the logistics of the complex, expensive operation that is a Hollywood movie.

And on Tango & Cash, as Franco was discovering, it also involved being yelled at. A lot.

“Tango & Cash was the most screwed-up show I ever worked on,” Franco tells Empire. He pauses, then adds, “And I worked on Apocalypse Now.”

RELEASED ON 22 December 1989, Tango & Cash was the last Hollywood movie of the 1980s, and the decade that didn’t so much forget taste as ball-gag it, tie it to a gurney and torment it with pliers, couldn’t have chosen a more appropriate movie with which to make its exit. It was, it is, one of the most deliriously crazy studio movies of all time. Nominally a buddy-cop movie in the