The scene Nicolas Cage watched so much he destroyed a VCR: “The machine jammed and the tape broke”

Posted On October 7, 2024October 7, 2024

Some people can’t sanction the idea of watching a movie twice in quick succession, but Nicolas Cage was so entranced by one scene in particular that he watched it on repeat until his VCR simply couldn’t take it any more and ended up being sent to the electronic scrapyard in the sky.

This didn’t happen during his formative years when he was first falling in love with cinema, either, but in the mid-1990s when he was already an established star. Not quite an Academy Award winner, A-list superstar, or bankable action hero, but far from an unknown.

Not to state the obvious, but Cage has never approached cinema from a regular perspective. He took a myriad of influences dating back centuries and lobbed them all into an idiosyncratic melting pot of his own making, and the concoction that emerged on the other side was a performative style that nobody had ever attempted before.

With that in mind, it does make sense that a single exchange between two actors would leave him so captivated that he felt compelled to watch it on repeat until the tape wore out, but the movie is far from an expected one. Or maybe it is, if only because it was Cage who couldn’t get enough.

Director Paul Flaherty’s black comedy Clifford was shot in 1990 and planned to be released in cinemas the following year, only for the financial mire studio Orion Pictures found itself in to cause a four-year delay between the end of principal photography and the finished article being seen by a wide audience.

When it did release, it was resoundingly panned by critics and panned at the box office. Martin Short plays a 10-year-old boy who ends up in the care of Charles Grodin’s uncle, but unfortunately for the uneasy family dynamic, the titular kid is a nightmare, causing plenty of friction that threatens to derail Clifford’s dream of visiting the theme park that Grodin’s Martin Daniels coincidentally helped design.

Nobody in their right mind would call it one of Short’s best works or even one of his most memorable. However, as he revealed in his autobiography I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend, Cage would be one of the few to vehemently disagree.

“Half an hour into the flight, I noticed a figure hovering in the periphery of my vision: Nic Cage, crouched in the aisle beside me, his eyes locked on mine,” he recalled. “’Can I just say something to you?’ he said, a very Nic Cage-y intensity in his voice. ‘The dining room scene in Clifford, with you and Charles Grodin, where he’s confronting you, and you keep lying to him. Well, I broke my VCR watching it. I watched that scene 25 times in a row, and I rewound it so much that the machine jammed and the tape broke.”

The lasting legacy of Clifford may be virtually nonexistent in the grand scheme of cinema history, but there’s a high chance Cage can quote one of its scenes verbatim, having watched it two dozen times on repeat, and it probably would have been even more if his VCR was willing to play ball.

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