Attention reboot-obsessed Hollywood. You've been tiptoeing around a "Fletch" revamp for a while now, but know this: No one but Chevy Chase can play intrepid reporter Irwin M. Fletcher. Just ask Chevy Chase.
“I'd want to play Fletch,” Chase tells PopcornBiz of the beloved role he first played in 1985, taking novelist Gregory MacDonald’s crime-solving journalist and adding his own absurdist improv. “I'm still Fletch. I made the guy up. I winged it. The first one was good, the second one was not. I'd like to go back and do 'Fletch'. I could play Fletch in a minute. I don't know that I’d need to be the mentor for some young Fletch. I AM Fletch.”
“I think people love 'Fletch'. If I were running a studio or an independent, whatever, and the right script sort of came along halfway, I'd send it to me. I'm not being ambitious. I've made a lot of movies and made a lot of money. I don't give a crap if I work or not. The real fact of the matter is that, if you're asking, I am Fletch. Now I'm Fletch older, but that's not going to change much. I made it up as I went along, anyway.”
With no pressure to work, surely Chase has lots of time to sit around the table with the Gourmet Poker Club – a nigh-legendary regular card game between himself, Steve Martin, Carl Reiner, Neil Simon, Barry Diller, and, for a time, late studio exec Daniel Melnick and talk show icon Johnny Carson.
“I haven't been at one in a long time,” says Chase. “I love Steve, I love those games, but I'm usually probably working or Steve hates me. Steve and I can be so close and then he can hate me and I'll have to figure it out over a couple of years.”
He adds that despite the jaw-dropping assortment of comedy talent, no one worked to hard and topping each other’s one-liners. “I don't think that anybody was trying to be funny, really,” says Chase. “Johnny was the funniest to watch because he was always mumbling to himself and folding.”
