Brian Abrams, the author behind well-regarded oral histories of Late Night With David Letterman, Gawker, and Die Hard, is back with You Talkin’ To Me: The Definitive Guide To Movie Quotes (Workman). This deep dive into hundreds of Hollywood’s most iconic and beloved lines is a must-have for every buff, and currently available for purchase in bookstores everywhere. What you’re about to read is an excerpt from Abrams’ research for the book, wherein he reports out on the highly amusing backstory of how Philip Seymour Hoffman and director John Hamburg overcame their initial differences and collaborated together to craft PSH’s memorable character in Along Came Polly, the 2004 cringe comedy classic. Let the RAIN DANCE begin!

There’s Something About Mary made way for the gross-out comedy with a heart, a prototype for modern toilet-humor romances featuring the likes of Kristen Wiig or Seth Rogen. Writer-director John Hamburg can attest that Mary “unconsciously” enabled him to “push the envelope” with Along Came Polly, a boy-meets-girl feelgood that otherwise might not have included a character’s catastrophic failure to discreetly pass gas. 

There’s Something About Mary made way for the gross-out comedy with a heart, a prototype for modern toilet-humor romances featuring the likes of Kristen Wiig or Seth Rogen. Writer-director John Hamburg can attest that Mary “unconsciously” enabled him to “push the envelope” with Along Came Polly, a boy-meets-girl feelgood that otherwise might not have included a character’s catastrophic failure to discreetly pass gas. 

The blundered fart, authored by a well-meaning degenerate, the washed-up child star Sandy Lyle (Philip Seymour Hoffman), astutely functions as a plot device for Polly—providing a necessary ending to the cocktail-party scene during which the film’s love interests, Reuben (Ben Stiller) and Polly (Jennifer Aniston), are briefly acquainted. “Hey, Reuben,” Sandy whispers, upset. “I’m in a situation here, we have to leave now.” 

“Well, no,” protests a lovestruck Reuben, “can we stay a couple more minu—”

“—ah, dude, no, this is serious.” Sandy is sweating. “I just sharted.” 

“. . . I don’t know what that means.”

“I tried to fart and a little shit came out, I just sharted. Alright, now let’s go.” 

“. . . You’re the most disgusting person I’ve ever met in my life.”

Sandy’s misfortune introduced a vulgar yet inventive slang term to the American mainstream, and its repeated use in the hurried exchange was intentional. “I was like, Oh, I am sitting on a gold mine here,” Hamburg said. “I’m sure somebody had [previously] put it together, but I had never met them. With a term like that, there is a guarantee that other people were using it. It’s just that I hadn’t heard it.”  

During post-production and at test screenings, friends and colleagues asked Hamburg if he was the genius who first decided to fuse “shit” and “fart” into one convenient verb. “I’m not claiming I made it up,” he clarified. “All I know is, in my mind I was like, This seems like a term for when this thing happens and that has happened to everybody at least once in their lives, and I’m gonna write it like that. I assumed, because it seemed obvious to me, that somebody else out there had also thought to put those two words together.”

What must have made the slang soar from obscurity and into everyday dialect was its impeccable reading from Hoffman, a powerful and emotional actor whose on-screen appearances consistently evoke a lurid sense of loss and self-pity. More accurately, his characters are all pitiful losers, with a “willingness, rare in a celebrity actor,” read the 2014 New York Times obituary upon his untimely death at 46, “to explore the depths of not just creepy or villainous characters, but especially unattractive ones. He was a chameleon of especially vivid colors in roles that called for him to be unappealing.”  

Accompanying that fearlessness was also an unpredictability in which he’d unleash himself in something so purely harebrained as Along Came Polly, the most unserious turn in his filmography but arguably one of his most beloved. Hamburg was adamant with Stiller and Hoffman in their deliveries, admirably meticulous dialogue direction just a few years shy from comedy extinction, before Judd Apatow’s open-mic, ad-libby approach would reign. “I remember really wanting to have that scene done exactly as I wrote it on the page,” Hamburg said. “The rhythm of it—I just heard it—and I remember doing take after take, because it wasn’t done right.” In an early take, Hoffman stressed a faint high note on the wrong word: “I tried to fart, and shit came out.” 

“Phil,” Hamburg corrected on set, “I think it’s like, ‘I tried to fart and a little shit came out.’” Hoffman gave a tired stare that plainly communicated What the fuck is wrong with this guy? “I know he was annoyed,” Hamburg continued, “but it’s that thing where you go, I know these guys are going to hate me, but I’m not getting what I need. I need one more take. And it was worth it.”

Fortuitously, Hamburg got even more gold out of Hoffman, who had not fully embraced Sandy at the outset. He had just turned in a passionate series of portrayals for visionaries Spike Lee (25th Hour), Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous), Anthony Minghella (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain) and in indie darlings (Owning Mahowny, Love Liza). What was he doing in this one? And who was this no-name director, a fellow New Yorker for whom he once auditioned (for 1998’s Safe Men) but had not completely trusted. “I do recall John talking to me and struggling a bit about getting Philip to feel his part,” recalled editor Bill Kerr. “Maybe [Hoffman] was at first shy because, if Sandy really wasn’t this way, it could come off silly.”

Only Hamburg and Kerr could possibly detect the distinction between the Lyle audiences have loved and forever celebrated in GIF form, and the Lyle that hadn’t quite yet been discovered by Hoffman. The writer/director points to the first scene in the production schedule, an exchange between Reuben and Lyle at Joe’s Pizza. It is a milder Lyle, a juvenile slob who thinks he’s cool but “that day took a lot of work to get him to give the performance you see on screen,” Hamburg recalled. “He was such a wonderful actor that I don’t think anyone but my editor and myself would know he had not fully found Sandy Lyle yet.”

That discovery happened a little while later—somewhere weeks into production (and prior to filming the “sharted” sequence)—during a two-day shoot that was underway for Polly’s pickup streetball scene, a New-York-in-Los-Angeles location setup made to look like the courts at Manhattan’s West 4th Street.

Hamburg pulled Hoffman aside to adjust Sandy’s half-hearted approach, at first gingerly muttering “Let it rain” and weakly lobbing the ball toward the hoop. In between takes, the director went into explanation mode. “Phil,” Hamburg said, “in his mind, Sandy thinks he’s Michael Jordan. His confidence is totally misguided, and he’s blind to his actual abilities. But he does not know that. And, so if you low-key it, it’s not gonna work.” Hoffman pushed back, conceivably worried he’d embarrass himself at a time when his career had attained legitimate prestige. That was not lost on the production. The actor garnered third billing in the comedy; his name appeared before the title in the opening credits. 

“I promise,” Hamburg appealed, “just give me one at full blast. If it doesn’t work, we’ll never use it and we’ll talk about this character and how to make it work for you. But just go with me on this, because this is what I think is gonna work.” 

Hoffman shrugged. “All right, Hamburg.” 

The subsequent take made it into Along Came Polly. The camera locked on Sandy’s pensive brow as he belts “Let it rain!,” followed by a harsh clang against the backboard. “The entire crew lost it,” Hamburg said. “They just started cracking up, and from that moment on, directing him was like a dream. Phil found the character of Sandy. A light switch went on.” 

You Talkin’ To Me: The Definitive Guide To Iconic Movie Quotes (Workman Publishing Company), a new book from Brian Abrams, is now available in bookstores everywhere, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.