Adam Sandler, known throughout golfdom for his iconic swing perfected by Padraig Harrington, has a loyal movieland posse that includes his wife, Jackie Sandler, and their daughters, Sunny and Sadie. Also, Jack Giarraputo, Sandler’s longtime producer, and Tim Herlihy, Sandler’s longtime writing partner. Sandler has worked more than a few times with Jordy Scheinberg, a costume designer. The ridiculous over-the-knee shorts worn by Haley Joel Osmont/Billy Jenkins in “Happy Gilmore 2” —that’s a Scheinberg touch. Billy J. doesn’t care about the penalty for wearing shorts in a pro event, that’s how good he is! How good is that? By the way, ridiculous is a term of art, in this context.
Various and sundry actors are in Sandler’s core group, including Ben Stiller and Steve Buscemi and Sandler’s daughters. Lee Trevino is in the original “Happy Gilmore” and in new “HG2,” which has had, per Netflix accounting, far more viewing minutes in its first month than hamburgers that McDonald’s sells worldwide in a year. (Billions and billions served, in both cases.) Sandler is loyal to various and sundry below-the-line industry talents, too. In the closing scroll of different Happy Madison/Adam Sandler productions, you see the same names again and again. Tim Wiles, for instance, Sandler’s longtime property master, the person responsible for a movie’s props.
You might recall the thermos in Sandler’s comic horror movie “Hubie Halloween.” The thermos carries matzo ball soup but also sees action as a telescope and a blender, and it can spray pepper in a pinch. The modest thermos as Swiss Army knife — Tim Wiles could have a patent on the thing.
He’s a bear of man, 63 years old, not a golfer, who works in T-shirts and carries himself with casual big-man confidence, as you might expect from a former two-way star lineman on his small-town high school football team. Bangor Vikings, Bangor, Mich., class of ’80.
With the cones of silence down — plot secrets could not get out! — Wiles read a draft script of “Happy Gilmore 2” and could see immediately the deep pathos running through it. (Happy accidentally kills his beloved wife with a wayward tee shot and drowns his sorrow in booze.) Soon after, Wiles, by way of a Sandler text, received a dream directive:
More gags!
The Herlihy-Sandler script already had Happy, former golf star, working in the produce section of his local Stop & Shop, drinking on the job from a long, thin cucumber hollowed out to serve as a drinking flask. (It’s a moving nod to the cucumber used in an early scene in “Animal House” in which Otter, rush chairman of the Delta Tau Chi fraternity at Faber College, compares his supermarket cucumber with one held by the wife of the college dean. “Mine’s bigger,” Otter declares.) Tim Wiles considered Happy’s chronic drinking and the two-word directive he received from Sandler and went to town.
More flasks!
“They already had some flasks in the script,” Wiles said on a recent Sunday, a rare day off as he works on two back-to-back Happy Madison movies in northern New Jersey.
“HG2” was shot in the Garden State, too, last year. Wiles and his wife live near Los Angeles, but this summer he’s been living in an apartment complex with a crowded pool in Clifton, N.J. “Drinking flasks and golf are a thing anyhow, so I just added more flasks into every scene I could.” More gags, indeed.
There are about a dozen surreptitious drinking flasks in “Happy Gilmore 2,” and a about a dozen more that never made the final cut. It all gets started with the cucumber.
“I don’t golf no more, brother,” Happy tells Frank Manatee, the main sponsor of the upstart Maxi Golf League. They’re in the Stop & Shop. Manatee is played by Benny Safdie, wearing a ridiculous bandana.
“Cucumber juice in there?” Manatee asks. Oh, the snark. You’d like to drive a 1-iron through his left eye, if you could find a 1-iron.
Later in the movie, at a family dinner, there’s a pepper mill that doubles as a drinking flask. There’s a golf ball that unscrews in two and holds a shot of courage. A rangefinder holds hooch. A World’s Greatest Dad trophy on a mantle doubles as a drinking flask. John Daly, artfully playing a permanent house guest, thinks a bottle of hand sanitizer is actually a secret drinking flask, but finds out the hard way it’s not.
For a while, Sandler’s character is doing OK with his sobriety. He goes to meetings and announces, “I’m Happy and I’m an alkie.” But, Wiles notes, clean-and-sober is a one-day-at-a-time balancing act for Happy. In the middle of a high-stakes round with Billy Jenkins, Happy locks himself in an on-course loo and resumes his drinking life out of his oversized cellphone. That flask is one Wiles bought via an internet search. Actually, he bought two dozen. “You don’t want to have to refill it after every take,” Wiles said. Time is money on a movie set. For the cellphone’s wallpaper there’s a photo of Happy and his late wife in happy times, “the kind of image that would remind Happy of all he’s lost,” Wiles said. The line between comedy and tragedy is a paper thin, Erma Bombeck once noted. Or was it Shakespeare?
There are other prop moments containing deep truths. There’s a prop made-for-the-movie golf instruction book called “The Science of Golf” written by a legendary and fictional golf instructor, Chubbs Peterson from “HG1.” (It brings to mind another prop golf book, “Extreme Golf,” by George J. Abdy, which appears in a party scene in the movie “Garden State.”) The fake blurbs for the fake golf book in “Gilmore 2” are word-for-word perfect, and the butchery of the spelling for the book’s foreword is willful, too.
Comedy is a serious business. Verne Lundquist’s sober delivery of one line in particular — “Gangster shit, indeed” — is dead solid perfect. Ridiculous sportscaster paisley sport coat courtesy of Jordy Scheinberg. Sitting beside the broadcasting legend is Jack Giarraputo, the producer, in a cameo.
Sandler likes cameos. Bob Barker makes one in the sequel, or his tombstone does. The longtime host of “The Price is Right” was an important presence in the original “Happy Gilmore,” from 1996. In real life, Barker died in 2023, at age 99. Wiles created Mr. Barker’s movie tombstone for “HG2.“
Wiles put a spike in a ball marker to keep it in place for a ship-at-sea style putting green. He created Chubb’s son’s fake right hand with breakaway fingers. The trick, he said, “was to find the right kind of ridiculous,” to insure it tracked from the original “Happy.”
Wiles didn’t work on “HG1.” He did work on “Magnolia” and “Fight Club,” to cite two classics that are not Adam Sandler movies. Also, the movie versions of the TV shows “Get Smart” and “Charlie’s Angels.” It’s been an interesting career. His older brother, Mike Wiles, is a veteran actor with a long list of credits.
Wiles said John Daly was “absolutely lovely to work with.” He found the drinking flask cucumber by starting a Google search with the words “display fake foods.” To get Sandler’s approval for the various gags, he and his team put on a “dog and pony show” for him. Wiles spent a lot of money and time converting a real rangefinder into a drinking-flask rangefinder. There’s a lot of MacGyver in him, that knack for on-the-spot ingenuity.
He retrieved the original “grandpa clubs,” including the set’s wooden woods, from the original Happy Gilmore by knowing the right prop person to call at Universal Pictures, the studio that made the original movie. Studios used to put thousands of props in vast storage facilities for future use. Wiles made it his business to get himself on a first-name basis with salespeople at LA Golf, as he loaded up on collection of wedges and putters used by Bryson DeChambeau in the movie. They were going for verisimilitude, and keeping DeChambeau happy. Tony Finau and his son, Jraice, have cameos in the movie, the father playing himself and Jraice his caddie. “Lovely people,” Wiles said.
As for the leftover flasks, oversized prosthesis right hands, Bob Barker tombstone and the many other artifacts bearing the fingerprints of both Happy Gilmore and Tim Wiles, they are now in storage, in a Netflix facility somewhere in greater Los Angeles, waiting for another shot at fame.
“I am so sorry,” Happy says to Chubb’s son, shaking his hand and taking some fingers off with it.
The set roared, take after take, the prop master’s backup hands always nearby.
Michael Bamberger welcomes your comments at Michael.Bamberger@Golf.com
