The Merry Pranksters
There’s one scene in “Jackass 3-D” where Jason Acuña, better known as Wee Man because of his diminutive stature, is dressed as a leprechaun and is standing beside a big pot of gold. After last weekend’s incredible box office take – $50 million, with some of that about to come out of Easy Reader’s coffers when I turn in my expense receipt – that pot of gold is no longer just a movie prop.
Wee Man and I are sitting at one of the outdoor tables in front of Chronic Tacos, the dining establishment on PCH and Torrance Boulevard in Redondo Beach. He’s one of the principal owners, and business this afternoon is brisk. “Jackass 3-D” opened at 12:01 a.m., much earlier in the day, and those midnight screenings alone raked in $2.5 million. So Wee Man’s not only sitting, he’s sitting pretty.
Even with just three hours of sleep the night before and an appearance on KROQ that very morning, Wee Man is in good spirits. People approach our table every few minutes. I assume that most of them recognize me as well, but choose to respect my privacy. On the other hand, no one’s shy about chatting up Wee Man.
“It’s a crazy life I live,” he says when I mention that it must be quite something to be so well recognized. “I’ve gone out on the road with all the boys from the movie and TV show” – “Jackass” started out on MTV ten years back – “and due to the Mother Nature circumstances that I’ve ended up with I’m the most recognizable person from the movie.” As he rightly points out, all the others are “just average-looking guys. People have come up to me and Steve-O (another jackass) and said, ‘I thought it was Steve-O, but I was a little iffy – and then you walked up next to him and I knew it was both of you guys.’” He laughs. “You can’t put sunglasses on me and cover me up.”
A couple more people approach, sensing a photo op. Wee Man gladly obliges. He’s a local celebrity, no two ways about it. I compliment him on being such a good sport.
“Like, what did that take, maybe 30 seconds out of my life? It didn’t hurt me; I get more hurt just hanging out with my friends. This is the easy part.” He laughs. “Plus, if my mom and dad heard that I said no to somebody or was disrespectful to somebody, they’d still kick my butt.”
State of the (f)art
Like its two older siblings, “Jackass” and “Jackass 2,” “Jackass 3-D” (which is also showing in banal 2-D) doesn’t have a plot or a narrative flow where boy meets girl and girl sleeps with boy’s best friend. Instead, the films are linked together by a series of “funny,” and mostly gross-out interludes. In one scene, a port-o-potty, fully stocked, and with an “astronaut” along for the ride, is bungee-corded into the lower stratosphere (big bounce here, big bounce there) – and it’s more than just all hell that breaks loose.
In another, ah, memorable vignette, a nude fat man on all fours has an apple wedged between his cheeks (and not the ones near his mouth) – and then a pig wanders over and starts munching on it (the apple or the behind, it’s hard to be sure). Later on, this same person’s sweat is collected into a glass and one of his buddies attempts to drink it. Sublime! And you, too, will groin with empathy when a batted baseball strikes somebody else between the legs. Double sublime, no?
While at the Easy Reader we often play Pin the Rap on the Co-Worker, the game of choice in “Jackass 3-D” is Pin the Tail on the Donkey, and here it’s done literally. In what could be described as one jackass meeting another, the human participant – blindfolded and wearing only underpants – approaches the donkey from behind. Whenever he gets close, well, let’s put it like this: the donkey has a mean backwards kick. And he goes for the jewels.
In other words, the economy isn’t the only thing in the toilet.
At first, Wee Man and his cohorts were a little skeptical about shooting in 3-D, but then were quickly won over. “Maybe [the camera] took a hair longer to set up wherever we were, but we still did the ‘Jackass’ stuff the way we wanted to.” Even better, they could don their 3-D glasses and see the results right then and there.
The camera, Wee Man explains, is a Phantom super-slow motion camera of the sort employed to capture hummingbirds and speeding bullets, adapted here for 3-D. “And so we added stunts that were like if something comes and hits you in the face, you can totally tell that a person’s face goes waaaay out here and comes back. Because of that camera, the only thing that was scripted was the intro and the outro, and we scripted it towards this camera.”
Technically, if nothing else, the result is quite an achievement; so if you go, stay for the beginning and stay for the end.
You mentioned that there isn’t any scripting, but obviously somebody has to sit down and think up different stunts.
“Yeah, our ideas and stunts, the pranks,” Wee Man replies. “People ask who writes them, who comes up with these ideas. A lot of us will get together, go out, have a couple of drinks one night, and just start shooting the breeze.”
Occasionally they’ve already got an idea in their back pocket. Johnny Knoxville has been influenced by cartoons – and that’s likely where he conceived of the idea of a large open palm that seemingly comes out of nowhere and wreaks havoc. Every public performer appreciates a big hand, right? – but not like this. Knoxville’s creation is more like a swinging door.
Sometimes the idea works in theory, but only in theory. They may have been out on location trying to film it, but at the same time pulling pranks on one another on the side and filming those, too. In the end, it may be one of the spontaneous pranks that actually makes it into the movie.
It sounds like these pranksters are simply having a grand old time, but Wee Man also paints a picture of paranoia:
“The guys that we are, being around each other, we always have to have our guard up. If we were filming today, and we were sitting here and you were talking to me, I would have been so nervous and always on edge, making sure I know where everybody was…”
Because somebody up there – I point to the rooftops – is going to throw something down on you?
“Yeah,” he says. “There is a bit in this movie where guys are talking like this… and bam. It’s called the wiener cam.” It’s a view from the wellspring, so to speak, of people being urinated on.
I zip up my raincoat, pull up the waterproof hood, and bring out a shotgun. The enemy, I assume they’re still up there, has retreated.
“We’ve come to realize, doing these movies and setting ourselves up for these stunts, how we always want to one-up each other,” Wee Man says. He and his friends have an analogy, which is that of a car pulling into a parking lot. If the driver changes his mind and suddenly puts the vehicle into reverse, the car backs over the spikes and punctures its tires. “With us,” Wee Man continues, “if you step into the stunt and you say, nah, I don’t feel like doing it, you’re gonna have severe tire damage from the rest of the guys. So we’ve kind of made our own thing where we make each other do this stuff. But it’s fun; we love it.”
And has this sense of camaraderie been consistent?
“It’s been consistent since day one, and that’s why it works. People ask me all the time, How come there’s no girls in there? Well, this wasn’t something that was cast for; this was something that was brought together and it so happens to be the perfect mold. It’s like a band, Black Sabbath or The Rolling Stones. They were never cast to make those bands, they just came together, and they made something that will be forever known. You can’t match that. You can’t put four or five guys together and make a band that will ever be like those bands. That’s how I feel about ‘Jackass.’ You can never bring that many guys together and make the exact same thing.”
So you’ll keep on making these films as long as everybody is…
“Healthy? Yeah,” Wee Man says. “The Three Stooges did it till they were 60, so did The Rolling Stones. Plus, Johnny Knoxville does this character where he’s the old man, Irving. I’m kind of waiting now until we’re still filming and he doesn’t have to put makeup on anymore, and he can still do Irving.”
That’ll be like “Jackass 47” or something. It’ll be way up there.
“Yeah, way up there.”
That is, unless one of them croaks in the meantime. Fate is often a sleeping lion; you only want to poke at it so many times, and from the other side of the bars. Watching the stunts and pranks in “Jackass,” one can imagine paralysis, blindness, deafness, and so forth, just lurking around the corner.
“We take things to a whole other extreme,” Wee Man is saying. “My friend, Danger Ehren, had a crooked tooth and he wanted to get it straightened. So we decided to put fishing wire around it, and attach it to a Lamborghini, and it’s called The Lamborghini Tooth Pull. That’s how we wanted to extract it – and we got it extracted that way.”
Did it just remove one tooth, or the whole dental plate?
“No, but it’s a good question,” Wee Man replies, “because it did extract the whole tooth, root and all, but it was such a hard yank” that it cracked the bone under his nostril. Presumably that required some, uh, professional treatment, and one doubts that the Tooth Fairy was around to pick up the tab.
“It made it a little more riskier,” Wee Man says of the stunt. “It didn’t do nothing for his looks, but…”
While we’re on the subject, the viewer may want to focus on or recall the scene with the idling F-18, its turbulent exhaust like the strongest fan you’ve ever encountered. Various members of the Jackass brigade try to withstand intense blasts of air, with success ranging from zero to zero. Just remember the guy with the umbrella. That’s Loomis Fall. He’s attempting to do a sort of Mary Poppins thing, Wee Man says, and he does fly – horizontally, for 30 feet or so. “He broke his collar bone really bad. He’s got two surgeries on it and his wrist. When you see it on film it doesn’t look like it was that hard of a fall, but he got beat up pretty bad.”
Even the indomitable Johnny Knoxville – who tempts bulls and buffalos and gets bit on the ass by a police dog – didn’t come out unscathed.
“We had dildos explode out of a cannon,” Wee Man says, “and it hit him in the cheek, and it broke one of his molars. So now he has a gap right where a molar was.” He pauses and smiles. “Now we’re done filming; everybody’s alive, everybody’s well.”
Then and now
Although he was born in Pisa, Italy, Jason Acuña – in those years before someone pronounced him Wee Man and it stuck – has lived in the South Bay pretty much his whole life.
“I live in Hermosa,” he says. “I’ve lived there for over seven years. I lived in Hermosa when I was five and then my mom and I moved to Torrance. Then I lived in Redondo, and then I moved back to Hermosa.”
Although his proportions might have one thinking otherwise, Wee Man became quite a skateboarder and ended up with the magazine Big Brother, based in El Segundo.
“We would put out skateboard videos,” he says. “The way ‘Jackass’ was born, is in between the actual skateboarding we were doing these ‘Jackass’ stunts. We noticed our videos were selling a lot, and we couldn’t believe why. We came to realize that people outside of the skateboarding world were buying our videos to see the “Jackass” stuff. On the East Coast, Bam Margera and Ryan Dunn were doing the CKY videos, and they were doing the exact same thing – skateboarding videos with ‘Jackass’-y kind of stunts in between. So we collaborated and said, Hey, let’s give this a shot where we just do the ‘Jackass’ stuff and see what happens.
“I thought we’d have about ten minutes of fame on TV, and I’d have to go back to day jobs,” Wee Man adds. “And now, here we are,10 years later, through three seasons of the TV show and now the third movie. It’s crazy. I never expected it or thought it would be this huge or this successful or where we’d be today.”
Some final words about the new movie?
Wee Man doesn’t hesitate: “I will say that for our ‘Jackass’ fans, this is the best movie that we’ve ever done, and as of right now this is the best 3-D movie ever.”
Take that, James Cameron!
And now a plug for “Jackass 3-D” and Chronic Tacos: “I’m having everybody who goes and sees the movie bring back their ticket stub,” Wee Man says. “They get a free drink, but it also enters them in a chance to win a lunch with me. I know my fans are gonna come here anyway, and I know they’re gonna go see the movie, but now it’s like an added little bonus.” Chronic Tacos is located at 306 S. Pacific Coast Hwy, Redondo Beach, and the phone number is (310) 316-8226. The contest deadline is Nov. 15, and the winner is to be announced during the first week of December at chronictacos.com.
