Nearly 30 years after its release, Men in Black remains one of Will Smith’s best movies , though it took some convincing from Steven Spielberg for him to sign on . There’s a lot to enjoy from the Malibu Comics adaptation, from the dynamic between Smith’s Agent J and Tommy Lee Jones ’ Agent K, to how the movie’s various aliens were realized with practical and CGI effects. What wasn’t so enjoyable during the making of Men in Black , however, was the time Smith let out a fart that was so bad, it resulted in the set being evacuated for three hours.
This gas of a story comes to us from Men in Black director Barry Sonnenfeld , who stopped by Let’s Talk Off Camera to plug his new book, Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time , which is filled with stories from his film and TV career. During the episode, Sonnfeld recalled to host Kelly Ripa about the time he and the Men in Black crew were getting ready to shoot Smith and Jones (whom the director said “does not suffer fools”) in a device that functioned as a car turning into a “hyper car.” The actors had to get into this device via the kind of ladders you’d find at an airport tarmac, and then they were “hermetically sealed” in.
The actors being locked in was done for safety reasons so that they wouldn’t fall out of the device, but there was an unfortunate consequence to this. Sonnenfeld heard Will Smith apologizing to Tommy Lee Jones and asked for someone named Baz to get a ladder, and Jones was simply t.