Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan: ‘Couple of Dicks’?

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Even before Barack Obama was a gleam in his mother’s eye, Hollywood, responding to the first stirrings of the civil rights movement, dreamed up a new twist on the old buddy-picture formula -- using the action thriller genre as an opportunity to team a black actor with a white actor.

It was the safest way for the movie business to acknowledge the aspirations of the civil rights movement without having to deal with the more controversial politics of the time. On screen, you could see a black man and a white man together, solving a problem or fighting a common enemy, without having to worry about the nagging issues that existed outside the theater, like whether their children should really go to school together.

The genre really got its start in 1958 with ‘The Defiant Ones,’ which cast Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier as two escaped convicts, handcuffed together, who must put aside their differences and work together to elude capture. In the years since then, the commercial fortunes of the ebony-and-ivory movie has waxed and waned, even being embraced by TV in the mid-1960s with the arrival of ‘I Spy,’ which launched Bill Cosby’s TV career.

The genre was revived in a big way by Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in 1982’s ’48 HRS.,’ which re-energized the genre by interjecting some of the young Murphy’s comic volatility to the mix. Michael Mann soon followed up on that success with the creation of ‘Miami Vice,’ while producer Joel Silver took the genre to new highs and lows with the ‘Lethal Weapon’ series and such films as ‘The Last Boy Scout.’ By the time ‘I Spy’ was rebooted as a big-screen film in 2002 with Murphy teaming up with Owen Wilson, the whole genre felt old and in the way.

But according to this item from ERC Box Office, Warners has figured out a way to breathe some new life into the genre, teaming Bruce Willis and ’30 Rock’s’ Tracy Morgan with filmmaker Kevin Smith in a buddy cop comedy called ‘Couple of Dicks.’ Warners hasn’t made an official announcement about the film, but Smith has told friends that the movie will start shooting in New York in May. Unlike previous Smith films, ‘Dicks’ isn’t an original script -- it’s penned by TV writers Marc and Robb Cullen (‘Heist’). But Smith is expected to add a liberal dose of his edgy humor to the proceedings.

It’s hardly a surprise to see Smith working with Willis, since it was Willis who was instrumental in having Smith cast in ‘Live Free or Die Hard,’ where the filmmaker played a mastermind hacker (in the movie, Willis calls him ‘Dumptruck’) who operates out of his mother’s basement. With Smith on board, it’s likely that ‘Dicks’ will be an R-rated comedy. But if it somehow ends up being within range of a PG-13 rating, my Warners spies say the studio will simply retitle it ‘Couple of Cops,’ which would probably help with the rating, but as you can tell from saying the title out loud, isn’t half as much fun as ‘Couple of Dicks.’