The world missed out on a comedy thriller starring Willem Dafoe because Dafoe didn’t feel confident enough to do slapstick. The movie was arrive alive, from screenwriters Mitch Glazer and Michael Donahue, who also wrote Scrooged. The basic premise of the movie follows Mickey Cruz, a sleazy detective out of Florida investigating the murder of a whale trainer. And in the process, he starts up a romance with an exotic dancer. If you’re thinking this doesn’t really sound like a Willem Dafoe movie, you’re right. Which is why the first pick for the role of Mickey Cruz was Bill Murray, especially seeing as how the screenwriters had worked with him previously on the aforementioned Scrooge. Uh, but Bill Murray didn’t want to do the movie because it was very violent. While it was billed as a thriller comedy, there were very dark elements to it. And Bill Murray, being a new father, just didn’t feel comfortable doing it. Willem Dafoe had recently impressed audiences in The Last Temptation of Christ, so he was picked for the part of Mickey Cruz with Joan Cusack playing joy, the exotic dancer. And as the story goes, Willem Dafoe wasn’t quite landing in the comedic portions of the script, so the producers of the film wanted to add more slapstick comedy. This came three weeks into filming for Arrive Alive, and Dafoe just didn’t feel comfortable doing slapstick. So he backed away from the project and the movie was canned, never to resume production. So you could say, arrive alive, arrive dead on arrival. I’m clever