I don't even need to TELL you about Adam Sandler.
Even though he's... a bit reviled for his hit-or-miss humor and awkward characters, Adam Sandler, in my opinion, is someone who deserves at least some defending. He did an amazing job in Uncut Gems, and there's another movie of his, Eight Crazy Nights, that's animated and... honestly pretty good.
Not everyone has seen this movie, I do realize, so I'll do my best to summarize the plot for those who haven't seen it, with the help of Great Saint Wikipedia.
Adam Sandler plays a 33-year-old alcoholic Jewish guy named Davey Stone whose rap sheet runs for pages and pages, who opens the film by refusing to pay a (honestly kind of offensive) Chinese restaurant owner, stealing a snowmobile and wrecking some ice sculptures. He's arrested for this, but a 69-year-old basketball referee named Whitey Duvall steps in, offering to take him in as a player for the team instead of sending him to jail. The judge agrees, but only if Davey doesn't commit a crime within a year; if he does, he'll be sent to jail.
After Whitey has a seizure and the first game Davey plays in is sent into hysterics, they head to the mall where Davey sees his ex, Jennifer, who has a son now, Benjamin. Even though they're done, Davey still secretly has feelings for her.
Whitey and his diabetic twin sister Eleanore take Davey in after Davey's trailer gets burned down, but even though things seem well and Davey's on his way to reforming, tensions rise and eventually, after Whitey brings up the incident where Davey's parents died, Davey blows up at the two of them and is kicked out. He spends the next day binge-drinking and (I still can't believe this part was in the movie) after he stumbles drunkenly into the mall, the mall mascots come to life in his alcoholic stupor and sing a song about how Davey's inability to grieve for his parents has lead him down a road of alcoholism and petty crime. Davey finally cries over it for the first time in his life after opening a Hanukkah card that has a message that tells him to always be good from his parents in it.
After a bus to New York he was going on gets derailed, Davey then wants to go out and make amends with Whitey, and finds him at a town celebration where an award for community contributions, for the 35th year in a row, is taken from Whitey. Davey eventually sings a song about how everyone's assholes to Whitey and they should recognize him more instead of putting him down just because he's a bit weird. This leads to them finally giving Whitey the patch, Davey and Jennifer reconcile... and then Whitey has another seizure. "Happiest seizure of his life," he calls it.
Oh, one more thing: it IS a musical. Davey sings about how much he thinks the holidays suck as he goes on his snowmobile ride and when Davey first rooms with the Duvalls Whitey sings a goofy little song about different rules around the house, calling breaking them "technical fouls."
Beautiful storytelling, really.
But, and I know you saw this coming, this wasn't the first version of the film.
I know that sounds obvious, because drafts are an essential part of writing any film, but I mean that the concept wasn't even the first. It was originally far less comic (and I say that while knowing that the plot was surprisingly melancholy).
At the time of the first draft, Adam Sandler was going through some unfortunate personal issues. Out of respect for the poor guy, I won't detail them here, but it involved a former friend of Adam's breaking things off rather roughly and the death of a family member that wasn't related to him very closely, but who he still loved dearly.
Therefore, he wrote the first version of Eight Crazy Nights as sort of a vent art piece, as it were. This was apparent from the original title alone: the nights weren't crazy anymore, it was just "Eight Nights." (By the way, "Eight nights" references Hanukkah, but I'm assuming you knew that from how Davey was Jewish and this was set around the holiday season.)
One animated test of the movie was made, but Adam fortunately found healthy coping mechanisms and finally managed to come to peace with these issues, so he decided that the film was outdated. He then tweaked and retooled it into the Eight Crazy Nights we... tolerate (and I personally love) today.
There isn't an official MP4 out there of crisp 720p (or at least 480p) video of this test, but we have some blurry phone camera footage from supposed "studio aides," a script that was circulating for a couple days after Eight Crazy Nights officially released, and the ending sequence in full HD uploaded from a YouTube account named after a bunch of random letters and numbers that was later deleted.
I have managed to piecemeal put together a plot and some notable scenes, as well as general details, from Eight Nights, and I will be presenting them here.
Enjoy.
The animation in the movie, firstly, was obviously very rough and scratchy. After all, it was sort of a test run. As well, every character was voiced by Adam Sandler himself, and he seemed bitter and almost hateful (although that probably wasn't the case) throughout most of the dialogue. He barely distinguished the voices as well. It felt like he was being forced to do the voices for Whitey and Eleanore, as his voices for them sounded like sarcastic caricatures; Whitey was gravelly and sounded like Adam was about to vomit, and Eleanore sounded like someone doing a really bad Adam Sandler impression; she didn't even sound remotely female, like she did in the final product. Davey sounded the most normal, but he barely emoted; even when he was supposed to be happy or sad he always maintained this bitter, disaffected sort of voice, a bit much even for the kind of character Davey was.
However, there was one exception to this rule, which I'll get to later.
The opening no longer had Davey's musical number; it was simply Davey running rampant through the neighborhood on a snowmobile, breaking decorations as the police chased after him. Notably, there was one scene where someone in the background yelled "Oh my God, he ran over my baby!" even though there clearly was nobody in the way of the snowmobile. The movie, presumably due to its "vent" status, had a lot of this dark, only mildly comic humor.
Eventually, at the end, he runs headlong into a barn, causing a loud (VERY loud, according to some who have watched it; one person claims to have gone partially deaf in one ear from accidentally leaning in too close) crash. The wood shards from the barn's side flew everywhere, and the scene transitioned via a huge wood shard falling from the top of the screen to the courtroom. Davey, looking totally disaffected as usual (but with a hint of concern in his facial expression), is sitting with his attorney as the judge is about to give his sentence: 10 years in prison as a repeat offender for destruction of private property and refusing to pay for a meal. However, just when he's about to bring down the gavel, in comes Whitey, just like in the original, and he explains that he runs a youth basketball team, and could Davey possibly work for him as community service? The judge considers this for a short while, and then says that that is permissible, but only if Davey commits no crimes within the year that he works for community service; if he does, he will be sent to jail for 5 years, but without bail.
The movie progresses almost identically until the scene where Whitey has a stroke during the basketball game. (At this point, instead of a seizure, it's a stroke.) The scene where this happens is now an extended shot of Whitey clutching his heart, twitching errantly and eventually falling to the ground, unnervingly smoothly animated even compared to the rest of the movie, almost as if it was motion capture. This is one of the few scenes that has the most YouTube coverage, with lots of channels uploading it only for it to get taken down by Universal, so (relatively) a lot of people know about this scene, if not the rest of Eight Nights.
Jennifer has totally been written out of the story (or, rather, she was later written in), so Whitey and Davey kind of awkwardly enter the mall, talk for a bit about how much Whitey's stroke sucked, and then leave. There's a faint remnant of The Mall Song here, but it's just Whitey naming random places and making halfway-funny jokes.
After this, it almost instantly cuts to Davey in Whitey and Eleanore's house. The framing device of Davey's trailer burning down wasn't quite here yet, so it was replaced with a short lecture from Whitey about how Davey needed to be watched over, so he had to stay with Whitey and Eleanore. The scene felt unusually tense; instead of the goofy, light-hearted "Technical Foul" song, Whitey sounds somewhat nervous as he explains "there are rules, in this house, and if you break them... well... that's a technical foul, to put it in language you'd understa-"
Suddenly, Davey angrily interrupts Whitey. "Listen, old man," he spits, sounding the angriest an Adam Sandler character has ever sounded, "you're treating me like a child. I know what rule-breaking is, I know not to do things that a person tells me not to do, and I definitely know not to trust pathetic rejects like you with watching over me! I'd rather be in jail than have to listen to you and your stupid fuckin' sister chatter on about whatever dumb shit you mentally-handicapped slobs think about! I'm leaving, because I never wanted to be here in the first place, and I hope to God that one of your fuckin' strokes finally kills you!"
Whitey looks absolutely devastated at this, but before he can say anything, Davey storms out of the house, grabbing a 6-pack of beer near the door.
The next sequence of the film is crushing.
There isn't any HD video of this, but from what blurry videos I can find and the script, I can describe sort of the basic gist of it.
The scenes that follow Davey storming out of Whitey's house are a totally musicless montage of Davey drinking. Just drinking, anywhere he can find. Bars, backs of buildings, sometimes even in public, lying down on the floor looking defeated. There's little to no dialogue throughout most of this, and what dialogue is there is slurred "fucks" and "shits" from Davey and angry, shocked passerby commenting on how "that man's life must be so sad," and other such things. A lot of the lines aren't miked at all, and some don't sound like Adam, so it sounds like someone's sloppy phone recording of an intoxicated Adam Sandler. Scenes can go from 3 minutes to just 20 seconds.
This goes on for almost 20 minutes.
20 minutes of the most miserable sequence in any Adam Sandler movie, including Uncut Gems.
After this, however, things become odd.
After almost exactly 20 minutes of this montage, there's a scene of Davey stumbling, drunk, into the same mall he entered with Whitey. Distorted, pitch-shifted and bizarrely modulated dialogue from Whitey rings in his (and the audience's) ears, and he falls down on the floor, slamming violently onto the tiles and leaving a striking and surprisingly large puddle of blood around the mouth area. When he gets up several real-time minutes later, his mouth is caked in blood and two of his teeth are missing. He slurs out something unintelligible and it cuts to his viewpoint, blurry and tinted red around the edges.
Several of the mascots from the mall (I only remember one being reused in the final product, the red dress), begin to waver and move, eventually detaching themselves from the signs and surrounding Davey.
After this, they begin what I can only describe as a cultlike chant, saying gibberish syllables as the front, who appears to be a shoe store mascot, begins to list transgressions from a long piece of paper, each and every transgression Davey's.
Breaking and entering. Theft of private property. Tax evasion. And, "the most heinous of all, avoiding your grief."
Davey nods blindly to every single transgression, which takes up over 2 minutes, until the last, when he becomes furious, grabbing the shoe store mascot and shaking him by the neck, causing some almost uncomfortably realistic choking sounds as he hisses, "My grief goes by my rules, got it? And I'm not grieving for shit. I have everything I could ever want until that fucking midget came along and messed everything up for me, so if there's anything I should be sad about, it's the loss of my privacy."
"Well, there's no other choice for it," the dress sighs. "Check your pocket."
Davey stops temporarily, drunkenly fiddling around in the dark until he grasps something in his pocket. He opens it, and he sees a Hanukkah card from his parents. He opens it, and reads the inscription, sounding as if Adam was close to tears in real life.
"We love you, Davey. Never change. We will always support you."
Davey gets down on his knees, puts his head in his hands, and sobs.
This is the most realistic crying I've heard in a while, definitely sounding as though Adam broke down in the recording booth. It goes on for several minutes, but not nearly as long as the 20-minute drinking scene. After roughly 3 minutes, the ground underneath him split into a veritable rainbow of different shades of blue, as guitar chords rang out. I now recognize the music in the background as a slowed version of Pink Floyd's Eclipse.
What follows is a trippy, psychedelic montage of bizarre sights and sounds, Davey floating through each and every one, still teary-eyed.
Whitey angrily spitting insults. The snowmobile crashing straight into the camera. The mall mascots twisting and morphing into one being. The judge bringing down a hammer on his head. This takes the entire length of the song, until the final lines.
"And everything under the sun is in tune/But the sun is eclipsed by the moon."
Davey lands back on the floor of the mall. Faint police sirens are heard in the background, and the movie cuts itself off right as someone in the back yells "David Stone, god damn it, come out w-"
There are no credits, just a black screen for 5 minutes, until at the end, Adam Sandler is heard in the back, saying, "I fuckin' hate it. I hate it so much," still clearly recovering from his sobbing fit.
There's no real way to get ahold of this footage. You might get lucky having it recommended to you on YouTube, or a friend might send you some footage, but I'd suggest not looking for it actively.
And if you see Adam Sandler, or meet him in real life, please don't mention this to him.
Be a good person.
Davey got better in the end, why shouldn't you?
——————————
Author's Notes:
Geez. This one was LONG. And pretty heavy, actually.
This started as sort of a dare from a friend to make an 8 Crazy Nights creepypasta, funnily enough, but I chose to take it as seriously as possible to make it... even more funny, I guess. I don't remember my thought process.
I actually do think Adam Sandler's an OK guy, unless he's said some heinous stuff I'm unaware of. I think he doesn't really deserve all the bashing his movies get.
I am also an 8 Crazy Nights defender, so maybe this is why I chose this to be the thing I worked the most on. Who knows.
——————————