Stanley Kubrick demanded 70 takes from actors. He let this medically discharged Marine improvise.
In 1985, R. Lee Ermey stood on a film set in England with nothing but memories and a voice that could cut through steel. He was not supposed to be there. Not as an actor, anyway.
Stanley Kubrick had hired him as a technical advisor for Full Metal Jacket. The role of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman was already cast with a trained professional. Ermey's job was to teach actors how drill instructors actually behaved.
But Ermey had spent years watching Hollywood get it wrong. He approached Kubrick with a request that bordered on audacity.
"Let me show you what a real drill instructor sounds like."
Kubrick was skeptical. This was a director who shot scenes 40, 50, sometimes 70 times until they were perfect. He controlled every word. Every gesture. Every breath.
But he agreed to watch.
Ermey positioned actors in formation. The cameras rolled. And he began screaming.
For two hours, he unleashed a torrent of creative, devastating verbal assault. Stagehands pelted him with tennis balls and oranges to simulate chaos. He never flinched. Never broke rhythm. Never repeated himself.
Because he wasn't acting.
He was remembering.
Ronald Lee Ermey had enlisted in the Marines at seventeen after a Kansas judge gave him a choice: jail or the military. He chose the Corps. From 1965 to 1967, he served as a drill instructor at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego, breaking down civilians and rebuilding them as Marines.
In 1968, he deployed to Vietnam for fourteen months.
Then injuries ended his career. Medical discharge. Twenty-seven years old. No college degree. No plan.
He drifted to the Philippines, enrolled in university using his GI Bill, and stumbled into film work as a technical advisor. Small roles followed. A helicopter pilot in Apocalypse Now. A drill instructor in The Boys in Company C.
But nothing that changed his life.
Until Kubrick watched those tapes.
The director saw something no acting class could manufacture: authenticity so complete it became art. Ermey had produced 150 pages of original insults. His intensity never wavered. His knowledge was absolute.
Kubrick made a decision almost unheard of in his career.
He fired the original actor. He gave Ermey the role. And he allowed him to improvise more than half of his own dialogue.
Stanley Kubrick, the perfectionist who demanded endless takes from every performer, needed only two or three takes from a former drill instructor with no formal training.
Because you cannot fake what is real.
When Full Metal Jacket premiered in 1987, Ermey's performance became instantly iconic. Real drill instructors said it was the most accurate portrayal ever filmed. Veterans said it triggered memories they had buried for decades.
Ermey earned a Golden Globe nomination. He went on to appear in over sixty films. He voiced Sarge in Toy Story. He hosted military programs on the History Channel.
But he never forgot his brothers and sisters in uniform.
In 2002, the Marine Corps awarded him an honorary promotion to Gunnery Sergeant, making him the only retiree in Corps history to receive that recognition. He spent years visiting troops overseas, supporting veterans, and keeping the military spirit alive.
R. Lee Ermey passed away on April 15, 2018. The Marine Corps called him a great American and an even greater Marine.
Think about that journey.
A troubled teenager from Kansas. A drill instructor. A combat veteran. A medical discharge. Odd jobs in foreign countries. And then, at forty-three, convincing one of cinema's most demanding directors to trust him with creative freedom.
He did not succeed because he pretended to be something he wasn't.
He succeeded because he refused to be anything else.
That is not a Hollywood story.
That is a Marine who improvised, adapted, and overcame, all the way to immortality.
One thing that cannot be overstated is the damage caused by inner city policy being set by white liberals who live in the suburbs and get their idea of the world from progressive journalists and nobody else.
If you are a suburban white leftist, please indulge me in a little experiment.
First, read how The Intercept describes this event, and picture it in your mind based off this description.
Then, watch the videos of the event.
Then extrapolate that to everything you read about, rather than see.
Maricopa County woman denied ballot because election machine stated "MULTIPLE VOTERS" were attached to her driver's license and S.S. number.
One of the "multiple voters" turned out to be a dead man from Salt Lake City, Utah, who died on 4/26/2020.
She was then directed to cast a provisional ballot, which she later learned was REJECTED in the Arizona 2022 election.
ORANGE COUNTY, FLORIDA — Police responded after an armed suspect entered a gas station following reported criminal activity at a nearby residence.
Officers discharged their weapons, and the suspect was pronounced dead at the scene.
To her lover in a Neo-Nazi group: anyone who claimed the SPLC was "just collecting intelligence" is eating their words today.
For the record, I don't have lovers in terrorist or extremist organizations. I work with the good guys to investigate them.
Some people fight terrorism.
Others enable it, fund it, use entrapment operations, create fake events for outrage, and then build careers pretending they're fighting it.
Not the same!
So what we have is a Signal Chat with 25 people if they logged into Signal and went into that chat or even read it, they are accessories to a terror attack on D.C
Expect this to speed up, and many people will be cuffed in the next 24 hours.
🔥 LMAO! JD Vance after he walks out to appear on The View
"This is a show of MAGA Republicans, right?! That's what my media team told me." 🤣
Vance is going head first into the witches' den 😂
Investigative Journalist Reveals the Truth Behind Newsom DOJ Investigation After Meeting with the IRS
The Gavin Newsom's scandal is only just beginning:
- Suspicious financial disclosures
- Income vs. spending does not add up
- He was "gifted" a $3.7M home
- Fraudulent activity in Jennifer Siebel Newsom's LLC
- Former Newsom chief of staff took a plea deal in a corruption case.
Jennifer Van Laar: "They should be very worried because they have multiple ways they've been committing fraud, tax fraud, unreported income, because there is no way the lifestyle they're living is funded by the income they report."
NYTimes didn't mention that Newsom asked the Native American tribe to donate huge money to his wife's charity JUST AFTER he used his office to block its rival tribe from opening a competing casino.
Details on that here -- https://t.co/xc29FdxLx0
"Oh no, a crying migrant baby. Quick, suspend immigration law and burn the Constitution!"
Benjamin Michael tells Brian Shapiro that public policy can't be based on emotional appeals and sob stories. A country either enforces its laws or it doesn't.
Judge Roach made a huge mistake keeping cameras out of the Karmelo Anthony trial. He underestimated the capacity of the young man's supporters spreading outright lies in the BLM social media ecosystem.
This is a long clip, but it must be seen to be believed. Morris Dwayne Turner, who protested outside the trial, tells a YouTuber with 100k+ subscribers an insane series of outright lies that would have been DOA if the arguments had been broadcast on video:
-A cell phone video of "the whole fight" was shared on Snapchat and Reddit
-Austin Metcalf pushed Karmelo so hard that he hit his head on a bleacher
-Karmelo "suffered from seizures" so any blow to his head was perceived as a potentially fatal threat
-Karmelo got "jumped" by a group of young men
-Jeff Metcalf invited all the witnesses to a barbecue and threatened their parents. This was "alleged in court"
-"The first person to throw a punch was Hunter. Hunter cold-cocked the boy"
-After the first punch, "they all start beating on Karmelo"
-Karmelo escaped the group but "Austin grabbed his hoodie and pulled him back. And on the video you can see his gray hoodie stretched out"
-Austin put him in a headlock -- "that's why you can see the ligature marks on the bottom of his neck"
-An "older white lady" who was inside the courtroom said "it was clear from what she saw that he fell" on the knife
-Karmelo was on the ground when Austin was stabbed --"Karmelo, sitting down, could never muster up that type of pressure. So, he had to fall on it."
-Karmelo ran away and went directly to coaches to tell them what happened
-The whole group chased after him, including Austin. Austin didn't go down until he came down the steps of the bleachers
-Hunter never went back to his brother to put pressure on the wound -- "never got close enough to him"
-Frisco PD policy mandates that when someone claims self-defense, everyone involved in the altercation must be arrested and taken in for questioning
-"They had Karmelo already booked and charged with the murder of Austin Metcalf before Austin Metcalf was even pronounced dead, because they already knew what they wanted"
-"The paramedics said he was he was purple and they had to administer blood to him and then he perked back up. His color came back."
-"They didn't think they were going to lose him" because the stab wound "wasn't anything grave"