Kevin Kline's Great American Sandwich

The search for a fake president's special midnight meal

The 1993 film Dave has an interesting legacy. It did great at the box office, ended up a premium, and later basic cable staple, and everybody loved it. Ebert loved it, and so did Siskel. It’s a movie about a normal, everyday Joe having to take over the most powerful position in the world, and the person at the time who actually had that job, Bill Clinton, also loved it. Watched alongside other political comedies of the 1990s like The Distinguished Gentleman, Wag the Dog, Primary Colors, and Bullworth, it’s the sweetest and easiest to digest, but it’s also difficult to see a film like it being made today without angering people from all parts of the political spectrum for too much attention to this side, and not enough to that one. It feels in some ways like a precursor to Veep, but a little more saccharine, a little more hopeful that America and the people that run it can find a way to make things work. It’s a great movie. I highly enjoy rewatching it from time to time. Kevin Kline and Sigourney Weaver are excellent, Ving Rhames in a pre-Marsellus Wallace role is as well. It’s got Charles Grodin, and that alone makes me like it. But most of all, it’s got what I consider one of the great sandwich-making scenes in cinematic history.

I won’t give you an entire synopsis of the film since you can go read it on Wikipedia, but I will say the specific scene is an important one in the movie. Kline’s Dave is a dead-ringer for the president who is in a coma, and in order to make things continue to run smoothly, they get Dave to pretend he’s the guy running the country. How hard can that job be? They feed you some lines, you smile, you wave, you get in and out of a limo, and you shake a lot of hands. But in this particular scene, Dave is starting to realize that he’s not the president, but he also sort of is. When he’s in front of millions of Americans, yes, he’s the president. And, as he’s talking to the secret service guy played by Rhames, he also wonders if somebody tried to take a shot at him because they assume he’s the president, if the people paid to take a bullet for the actual president would do it for a guy who is only playing the president. And he does all of this while making his sandwich. From what I can tell, it’s mayo, turkey, American or cheddar cheese, tomatoes, pimento-stuffed olives, cucumber slices, mustard, possibly some ham, and definitely some shaved carrots on top, all loaded up in a big old hoagie roll or whatever you call it in your neck of the woods. It’s his special sandwich, but it looks to me like anything that’s in the fridge. And since he’s in the White House, that’s everything. It ends up looking about the size of a football and I think it has inspired how I view the construction of a sandwich for nearly 30 years now.

I’m such a fan of the sandwich, that five years ago, a website offered me a nice opportunity to write an essay about a sandwich for a package of stories and essays on, well, sandwiches. They asked me for ideas, so I shot back that I’d like to write about being an adult and still loving a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a glass of milk. The editor responded, “Sorry. We’ve actually already got an essay about a Swedish immigrant moving to America and trying their first PB and J.” Ok, I said. That’s cool. What about an essay about how much I miss Quiznos and how for a few years I actually tried to get flights to the airport in Milwaukee because there was one there? The editor responded, “I think there would be some conflict with our advertiser if you wrote about a sandwich chain.” Then the editor gave me a list of all the sandwiches that had been taken. Grilled cheese, the classic Italian sub, the sloppy Joe, everything was pretty much claimed. The editor asked me if I had any thoughts on a place in northern Florida that does an alligator meat sandwich, and I said “No, but I do have thoughts on the sandwich from the 1993 movie Dave.” The editor replied, “That’s great. I haven’t seen the movie but I was born in 1993.” I said “Wonderful. That’s really wonderful.”

I started sketching an outline for my piece on the sandwich from Dave. The only problem was that old artistic conundrum of trying to find the motivation for the thing I wanted to write. I knew I was going to do something about the sandwich from this movie, but I didn’t know what I could say besides “I saw the movie when I was 13. The sandwich looked incredible. I wanted every sandwich to look like that and I hold most sandwiches on hoagie rolls up to it. The end.” How would I pay tribute to this scene that I think is deserving of recognition as a truly great cinematic food scene that should be talked about along with Paulie slicing garlic in Goodfellas or any single cooking part of Tampopo? I decided I was going to track down both Kevin Kline as well as director Ivan Reitman and I was going to get them to talk to me about it. What would I learn? How many takes were there? Was it Kline’s recipe? Did they eat the sandwich? I wanted to know the details, so I did a little digging, first to try to find a way to Kevin Kline. He seems like a good guy. He can do Gilbert and Sullivan, was in The Big Chill, and has been married to Phoebe Cates since 1989. I love that movie. I love Phoebe Cates. I really like Kevin Kline in general, but since I’d already used up my IMDbPro trial and didn’t want to pay for one, I had to be resourceful and find another route to finding some sort of contact for Kline or his management. I ended up about five pages deep into a Google search when I found one result that had a half-obscured e-mail address, and then some words in Cyrillic that looked somewhat promising. I clicked on it, and after Xing off a dozen pop-up ads for testosterone pills, I saw the name Larry Schneider. Next to Larry Schneider’s name was “management and/or consulting.” Underneath that, it said “Clients include” and just said, Kevin Kline. There was no website, no phone number, and no real info on Larry Schneider, but there was a Hotmail e-mail address for Larry that I used to fire off a message saying who I was, what I was writing, and that I was hoping to talk with Mr. Kline if he had a few minutes to spare. I sent it and figured I’d never hear back, but later that night I did.

“What’s your number? I’ll call you.”

Underneath was what I can only guess was a signature that everybody got. “Thanks and gratitude, Larry”

Two days later, and no call from Larry. I resumed my search for a way to get to talk to Kline when another e-mail from the editor who assigned me the article on the sandwich hit my inbox. It was one of those Friday afternoon deals where the editor was telling everybody that they were moving on, that they’d accepted a job editing a website about “crypto culture,” and mentioned another editor who was taking on their workload. Since I was coming up on the hand-in date for the article and was probably going to be late, I decided to e-mail the new editor to say hello and also ask if I could have a few extra days. An hour later, the new editor told me that the old editor must have forgotten to tell me that the sandwich article package had been killed because of a problem with the sponsorship money but “Feel free to total pitch me any other ideas.”

Two months later, the site shut down.

I moved on from my dream of writing the great tribute to the sandwich from Dave. I had other work to do. I didn’t think about it for a few days and got back to work on Monday. And just as I was getting ready to leave the office I worked at in Midtown, my phone rang. It was an Arizona number. I picked it up. The guy on the other end said “Hi. This is Larry Schneider.”

Oh man, I thought. I forgot to tell this guy that the piece wasn’t happening. I apologized for forgetting, telling him I had Friday brain when I’d found out and just forgot, but that if Mr. Kline was ever available to talk for a few minutes, I’d love to try to pitch it somewhere else.

Larry laughed. Then he apologized. “I’ve never even met Kevin Kline,” he told me, then went into this story about how his name ended up along Kevin Kline’s. It turned out Larry’s wife had passed away a few years earlier and his family thought it would be healthy for him to get back out there, but they knew he wouldn’t sign himself up for it so they did it for him. He tried the app once, and a week or so later he got an e-mail that his account had been hacked, but it didn’t go into specifics besides that he needed to change his password. He did that and didn’t use the app again.

Then, a month later, he got the first e-mail asking if he could help put somebody in touch with Kevin Kline. Then another, then one from an independent director who sent some heartfelt message about how he wrote a role thinking about Kline for the part, but figured Kline was out of his league but wondered if Larry could pass the script onto Mr. Kline and see if he’d offer his opinions and thoughts. For months, he kept getting these kinds of e-mails, and then he realized why.

Larry’s brother who had filled out the profile mentioned his job was as a managing partner at the firm he worked at and in his bio claimed that everybody said he looked like the actor Kevin Kline. Larry said that he never saw the resemblance, but people did tell him that a lot. The website his name ended up on was from some former Soviet backwater, some scam that steals info then feeds it into a website so certain combinations can be found on Google and basically the whole point of trying to get people to click is to entice them with the pop-ups for vitamins and testosterone capsules that if they were dumb enough to buy, they’d basically give up their info to some guy in Siberia or someplace with “stan” at the end.

“Ah,” I said. But at this point, I had to ask why he had bothered to call me if he wasn’t in any way associated with Kevin Kline. Wouldn’t an e-mail have sufficed?

Larry said yeah, maybe. But my e-mail reminded him of how great that sandwich scene was. He told me he saw Dave in the theater when it came out, and he also thought about the sandwich from time to time but hadn’t seen the movie since 1993. He was having a bad day when he got my e-mail, and the message gave him a reason to go back and watch it, and doing that really turned his whole day around, especially because right after, he drove to the store and decided to recreate the sandwich, and it was as good as Kline made it look. He normally didn’t bother responding to people asking about Kevin Kline since he got a few e-mails a month about it, but he felt obligated since I accidentally made his day better.

“I guess that’s the power of a good sandwich,” he said before hanging up.

I think about that weird phone call a lot, mostly because getting phone calls from strangers and having a nice conversation with them is sort of a rare occurrence these days. In fact, I think Larry’s is the last of those kinds of calls I remember getting. I’d rather not receive that many calls from people I don’t know, but sometimes I think a little randomness is good for the heart, and it made me believe that someday I’ll get to write about that sandwich somehow or another. So if Kevin Kline is out there and he’d like to talk about this sandwich, I’m here waiting. I know he’s got at least two fans out there who want to know the story of the special sandwich from Dave.