It was ouch, baby, very ouch, when the original James Bond met his mocker Austin Powers during the Cannes Film Festival last month. "Mistah Myers, is this your first time to Cannes?" asked Sean Connery in his thick Scottish brogue. "Yes!" answered Mike Myers nervously. "And is it going well?" Connery inquired. Myers was so flustered before his childhood hero that he could barely squeak out another affirmative reply. "That was all I said, just yes and yes," Myers recalled later. "I was too intimidated to talk, even though I was dying to meet him. What else was I going to say?"
Well, how about "Things are sooo groovy"? The heavily hyped Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me not only played during the prestigious French festival but, opening in North America this past weekend, also pulled in $20 million on Friday alone. In comparison, 1997's Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery earned just $9.5 million in its entire first weekend. Still, the exploits of the silly secret agent eventually scored more than $100 million in the U.S., nearly half of that from video sales. Not bad, considering it cost only $18 million to make. Also not bad for a movie that began as an in-joke, Myers' personal tribute to the British goon shows his late father adored and the kooky spy spoofs young Mike watched on TV with his two older brothers. "This is essentially something I thought only people in my house would get," he says. "It should have been a home movie, really."
Told and repeated so many times, the genesis of Austin Powers has become industry folklore. Traumatized by his father's losing battle against Alzheimer's, which ended with his death in 1991, Myers was in a slump. He had milked his Saturday Night Live skit Wayne's World for two films, then had appeared in the dud So I Married an Axe Murderer. Driving home from his practice with an amateur hockey team, he heard Dusty Springfield cooing The Look of Love on NPR, and images swirled in his mind: fuzzy memories of free love and Nehru jackets, trashy movies like Casino Royale and Our Man Flint. While soaking in Epsom salts that evening, he started spouting randy Brit-speak to his wife Robin Ruzan in what he calls "that well-traveled, jet-setty Englishman voice." She suggested he write up the character. Within three weeks there was a first-draft screenplay. A toothy icon was born.
"I'm not Faith Popcorn, but I love pop culture," says the 35-year-old Myers, invoking the best-selling trend spotter as he explains how he tapped into the retro zeitgeist. "I'd seen a lot of tie-dyed/Volkswagen van/hippie '60s, but not that mod/go-go boots/everybody's-a-photographer-or-in-a-band thing." For his new character's name, he thought of 007's Aston-Martin sports car. For the look, he borrowed Michael Caine's eyeglasses from The Ipcress File, Connery's thatchlike chest hair, the costumes from the Who's rock opera Quadrophenia and the grotty dentures he used in an SNL skit about sugar-filled British toothpaste. The supervillain, bald-pated Dr. Evil, was lifted from the Bond film You Only Live Twice, with Myers adding the pinky-sucking tic of his former SNL boss Lorne Michaels.