This image was lost some time after publication.

Sony is hoping that the reported troubles (rewrites, reshoots, money) surrounding the Fun with Dick and Jane production won't show up on the screen, and that Jim Carrey's big holiday movie can help salvage a bomb-riddled year. Today's LAT feature on Dick and Jane answers its own question about how (besides Jim Carrey's usual GNP of Bolivia salary) a movie without CGI dinosaurs or simulated global cataclysms might balloon to a nine-figure budget:

STILL, there is no sane reason why this movie should have cost more than $100 million, as there are few special effects and it has a running time in the 90-minute range. (That new sound you hear is "Waterworld" star Kevin Costner laughing uproariously as we complain about today's film costs.)

"I don't know why movies cost so much," Carrey says, then rambles on that whenever a studio makes a movie it seems that things cost more. [...]

There was a scene, Parisot recalled, in which Carrey and Leoni, dressed as cat burglars, have their victim tied up as they are about to abscond with his valuable paintings. What makes the scene work is the way the couple, Carrey in particular, play with devices that distort their voices, an element not in the script.

"At the last second, my prop guy had these voice boxes that are a kid's toy," the director recalled. "I showed it to Jim and immediately he takes the voice box [and begins improvising]. Literally, there are two hours of footage from that scene where he is going on with that."

And that footage doesn't even include the 30 or so takes of Carrey's improvised conversations with a plate of sandwiches on the craft services table, in which he repeatedly reminded a voice-altered pastrami-on-rye that he was also a producer on the film, and if he decides to do an all-flatulence take of a scene just to crack up the sound guys, Goddamnit, he's gonna do it, even if it pushes the crew into double-time.