As a teenager and young man, Orenthal James Simpson idolized the football great Jim Brown, and it’s no stretch to state that he tried to follow in Brown’s footsteps. Like Brown, he was a record-setting collegiate running back. In the NFL, he had a career slightly longer than Brown’s, playing eleven seasons to Brown’s nine. While both men were arguably equals in terms of athleticism and physical strength, their public images presented a distinct contrast. While Brown was a man of few words and wore a glower on his face by default, Simpson was a smiling, sunny presence off the field. Guess which one white America took a more immediate liking to?
Maybe that’s why Simpson, unlike Brown, didn’t wait until his sports career ended before dabbling in acting – while playing at USC, for instance, he took a guest role in an episode of Dragnet. On a Tonight Show appearance in 1979, he described what made him seriously consider the silver screen as a desirable second career. Working on the 1974 movie The Klansman, he was sitting around one evening in Irvine, California, with the film’s stars, Lee Marvin and Richard Burton, and legend Elizabeth Taylor, Burton’s wife at the time. “Liz was saying that the best chili in the world was at [iconic Hollywood restaurant] Chasen’s,” Simpson told Johnny Carson, “so somebody made a call, and in an hour and a half they had a private jet bring a pot of chili from Chasen’s to Orville, California, and two hours later we’re eating chili and I’m saying, ‘I like this life.’”
He was not moved to apply to the Actor’s Studio the better to pursue said life, however. (And it’s unlikely he got any useful acting tips from Burton, who worked with Simpson in all ignorance of who the sports star was and reportedly downed thee bottles of vodka a day on the film’s set.) The Klansman was a forgettable potboiler in which Simpson plays a Black man who’s just minding his own business when he’s radicalized by white supremacist violence and then works with libs Marvin and Burton to seek some payback.
Also in 1974 was the higher-profile blockbuster disaster picture The Towering Inferno, spotlighting another pair of white leading men, ones who did not drink as much as Marvin and Burton: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. Simpson played a firefighter in the all-star ensemble. He saves a cat, because he’s a very nice firefighter.
It was sometimes observed during his football career that Simpson did not have an air of danger, which his idol Brown most certainly did. For Brown’s first major film role, in Robert Aldrich’s grimy 1967 WWII classic The Dirty Dozen, the director and screenwriters concocted a climax to showcase Brown’s sprinting skills: he has to throw a batch of grenades down a series of air vents to blow up a bunch of Nazis and get clear before they all go off. So that was a not inapt calling card. Brown couldn’t do something like that in every picture, but he retained an weighty aura. He could project strength and menace without much effort, and his swagger had a sexy side too, as when he paired off with Raquel Welch in 100 Rifles, performing a controversial-for-1969 love scene with sex goddess Raquel Welch.
We don’t remember O.J. ever doing anything quite so provocative in any of his movie roles. Because, well, he didn’t. As a performer he delivered his lines and he didn’t bump into the furniture, but he was a trifle bland. He was a persuasive TV ad pitchman — his running skills were put to use in a famous series of Hertz Rent-A-Car commercials, for whom he was a very long-term spokesperson – but eventually proved a lightweight on the big screen. He plays an Interpol agent masquerading as a priest in another disaster movie, 1976’s The Cassandra Crossing, whose title makes it sound like a WWII movie, only it isn’t –- it’s a convoluted tale of bio-terrorism. The only reason Simpson doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb in an ensemble that also features Richard Harris, Sophia Loren, Burt Lancaster, Ava Gardner and Lee Strasberg (speaking of the Actor’s Studio) is that they’re all clearly in it for the money and not taking the proceedings at all seriously. Simpson is reasonably credible as a hoodwinked astronaut in the 1977 faking-a-moon-landing conspiracy thriller Capricorn One, in part because he’s checked out of the movie about halfway through. A slope was inevitable given his performing limitations. A-list projects gave way to TV movies and, yikes, the 1979 Michael-Winner directed Firepower. That movie is one of the notorious British director’s more entertaining slop barrels, and one which allowed Simpson to hang out with James Coburn, ever a consummation devoutly to be wished.
The question that hung over his acting career became: What, exactly, was he good for? In 1988 director David Zucker, of Airplane! fame, figured it out. Simpson made a great comedic prop.
Zucker cast Simpson as Nordberg, the partner of spectacularly inept cop Frank Drebin, in The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad, a spinoff of the cult TV hit starring Leslie Nielsen, whose own career was revived via a talent for straight-faced delivery of ridiculous dialogue. Simpson’s function as Nordberg was different: the unfailingly cheerful cop always walked directly in to the line of fire. His introduction in the movie is one of its most hilarious set pieces, as he attempts a one-man raid on a drug smuggling ship and is ambushed in a variety of ways constituting a series of comedic non-sequiturs (at one point he falls into a frosting heavy birthday cake). Once hospitalized, he’s nearly killed by Drebin himself in a variety of ways. His sendoff in the picture is a remarkably tasteless sight gag in which he’s propelled from a wheelchair.
You have to give Simpson credit where due: he doesn’t function just as a prop in this, or in the subsequent Naked Gun sequels in which he appeared in 1988 and 1994. He had a real gift for physical comedy, no doubt tied to his athleticism. Nordberg’s consistent sunniness as he gets pummeled and pureed is actually winning. The skills on display here wouldn’t help him out in any other role besides that of Nordberg, to be sure. But he was the costar of a hit franchise — a lynchpin of the slapstick mirror of the Lethal Weapon pictures, and that was better than enough.
And then, after 1994, boom. Nothing. And nobody knows why.
Just kidding! Everyone knows why! In the summer of ’94 Simpson was indicted for the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman, one of the grislier crimes of its day, and one that Simpson quite probably did commit. But also one that a fair portion of the American population really wanted to see him acquitted of. And so he was!
Not that it helped him career-wise. Simpson went from being a film and television actor to being a film and television subject. And also a convict, eventually, for kidnapping and armed robbery, in 2008, for which he served nine years in prison. When he got paroled, one of his ostensible victims wanted to cast Simpson in a movie about the memorabilia misadventure that landed The Juice in prison. It was likely one of the only such offers he got.
In 1997, for Premiere magazine, I visited the set of Baseketball, a new comedy directed by David Zucker, this time teaming him with South Park iconoclasts Trey Parker and Matt Stone. They were shooting sports-reaction footage on a soundstage, getting groups of extras into bleachers and having them cheer or boo or what have you. After a few takes one of the movie’s co-writers called Zucker aside and pointer out one of the extras. “Do you see it? Do you see it?” he asked Zucker. After squinting a bit, Zucker practically recoiled and said “Holy shit, “or something like it. Because the extra was a dead ringer for O.J. Simpson. The writer and Zucker and a couple of producers huddled to try and deal with the situation. It’s not as if the extra had done anything wrong, after all.
They fired him.
Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the upcoming The World Is Yours: The Story of Scarface, published by Hanover Square Press, and now available for pre-order.
