Howard Stern almost didn't get to play himself in his movie "Private Parts"

Howard Stern did end up playiing himself in Private Parts, the 1997 biopic based on his own 1993 book. But, Stern told Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett on the most recent episode of their podcast Smartless, the studio behind the film threatened at one point to replace him with none other than Jeff Goldblum. During their conversation, Bateman jokingly asked Stern how many times he had to audition for his starring role.

“I wrote the book and I had no clue when they said they wanna make a movie out of it — how am I gonna make a movie out of this thing? I was involved in writing some of the scripts — we had other writers, this and that,” he continued. “There were 25 full drafts of this thing and each one was worse than the next.”

Stern went on to explain that he’d had a provision written into his contract giving him full approval of the script. “They couldn’t make the movie unless I had full script approval,” he said. “And I wrote half the scripts and they sucked!” He saod that the studio became so frustrated with his failure to approve a script that they threaten to cast Goldblum instead of him.

“They said, ‘Listen, this is crazy. The money that we're spending on these writers and you're not accepting any of these scripts. We're gonna hire Jeff Goldblum to play you since you won't do that,’ ” Stern recalled ."I would love to see Jeff Goldblum as Howard Stern. I think it’d be terrific.’ ”

Of course, that never happened. Stern did play the adult version of himself in the film, alongside a fabulous performance by Paul Giamatti as his boss ("Pig Vomit") and Allison Janney as his wife. Private Parts went on to be number one film in North America during its opening weekend, and garnered positive reviews from critics like Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert.