Over the Edge (1979)
Screenplay by Charlie Haas & Tim Hunter, based on the article by Charlie Haas
Directed by Jonathan Kaplan
Produced by Orion Pictures
Running time: 95 minutes

What the *&#! Is This About?
Walking through the planned suburban development of “New Granada,” 14-year-old Carl Willat (Michael Kramer) and his buddies – Richie White (Matt Dillon), Claude Zachary (Tom Fergus) and Claude’s mute brother Johnny (Tiger Thompson) – debate whether a girl that Carl likes named Cory (Pamela Ludwig) is a “fox” or stuck up. Meanwhile, two kids on the highway open fire on a police car with a BB rifle. Sgt. Doberman (Harry Northup) loses the snipers in a chase and grabs Carl and Richie instead. On probation for breaking and entering, Richie refuses to cooperate with cops’ questions. “I only got one law. A kid who tells on another kid is a dead kid.” Carl’s record is clean and his Cadillac salesman father (Andy Romano) wants to keep it that way so his son won’t end up in reform school on “The Hill.”

All Carl wants to do is to listen to Cheap Trick on his headphones and get out of New Granada. He wanders over to a basement party, where he finds the juvenile punk (Vincent Spano) who shot at the cops making out with Cory. “You could do a lot better,” he tells her, and gets pummeled on the way home as a result. With investors from Texas arriving in town for a tour, Doberman stages a raid on the rec center where the kids hang out after school and busts Claude for possession. Carl and Richie end up crossing paths with Cory, who spends her spare time breaking into houses and has scored a pistol. While Richie confiscates the weapon and uses it for target practice, Carl and Cory bond over their shared loathing of the town they’ve been uprooted to.

When Carl pulls a prank on the Texans that successfully runs them out of town, his parents forbid him from seeing his friends. Carl opts to run away with Richie, but an encounter with Doberman ends tragically for his friend. Trying to figure out what he should do, Carl hides out in an abandoned townhouse, which Cory visits to keep her new boyfriend from getting lonely. Meanwhile, the Richie White tragedy provokes the concerned parents of New Granada into holding a meeting at the high school “cafetorium” to discuss what’s happening to their children. With the town’s kids in a furor over what Doberman did to Richie, Carl comes out of hiding and leads a march to the school for an evening the community won’t ever forget.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
“Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree” was a feature story by Charlie Haas appearing in the San Francisco Examiner in 1974. It chronicled the Bay Area bedroom community of Foster City, which in a two-year span had the highest percentage of juvenile crime equivalent to any area in the country. Haas had a friend named Tim Hunter who read the article and told him, “What you have here is a classic exploitation picture, in the best sense.” The pair spent three years talking to people in Foster City and writing a screenplay together. Hunter – son of blacklisted screenwriter Ian McClellan Hunter – took the script to George Litto, his father’s literary agent. When Litto agreed to produce the film, Hunter introduced the producer to Jonathan Kaplan, who had directed drive-in pictures like The Student Teachers and Truck Turner for Roger Corman.

Unable to shoot in California due to its child labor laws, Kaplan found eerily similar architecture in Aurora, Colorado, ten miles from Columbine. Kaplan recalled, “What had happened in Colorado is they’d gone into this big investment in architecturally cutting edge schools and the one in Greeley, Colorado had this great sort of pre-Frank Gehry, sort of waves and roof that was lower than the sides of the building, which presented a problem in a place where there’s a lot of snow and the roof had collapsed the first year. So the Greeley, Colorado school district was in desperate need of funds to repair their schools, and they’d not just designed one, I think they designed five on this principle, so they’d had five schools with collapsed roofs, so that’s why we were given permission.”

Kaplan auditioned the five leads in New York. 15-year-old Matt Dillon was found at a high school in Larchmont being thrown out for smoking in the boys’ room. He was cast in his first movie. Haas & Hunter searched Colorado for an ensemble of 40 additional kids. Haas recalled, “It was a similar experience in terms of – just as Jonathan was sort of being shown commercial actors who were wrong for the thing – we would go around to junior high schools in Denver and Boulder and Aurora itself I think and these places and we’d explain ourselves, what we were doing there – looking for kids to be in a movie – and of course the schools always wanted to show us the kids who had been in Bye Bye Birdie the year before, their sort of actor kids, and we would politely excuse ourselves and go interview the kids getting stoned out on the hill behind the school. And those were the kids we ended up with.”

George Litto recalled, “Well I was blown away because we were doing a story about 12, 13, 14-year-old kids and we were using 12, 13, 14-year-old kids instead of 22-year-old actors who looked 14.” Newly formed Orion Pictures agreed to finance what was then being called On the Edge. Shooting had wrapped by the end of 1978. Then the studio got a look at the film. Kaplan recalled, “Over the Edge was slated as Orion’s second release. Two of the executives, Arthur Krim and Eric Pleskow, were big fundraisers for the Democratic Party. These guys were very conscious of their image. I don’t know if they ever read the script. It was budgeted at just a million dollars, and I think they thought they were going to get some kind of teenage high-jinks movie. While we were shooting, the L.A. Times did this article that said that the coming trend was gang movies. The movie got lumped in with The Warriors, The Wanderers, Boulevard Nights.”

The Warriors was a surprise hit in February 1979, but it was also blamed for a stabbing in Oxnard and a shooting at a Palm Springs drive-in. Kaplan continued, “So that was the environment in which the executives at Orion sat down to watch the first cut of Over the Edge. In the movie, one kid gets beat up, and one kid gets killed by a cop. That’s really it – most of the violence is done to cars. But the guys were scared. They did a test campaign in a couple of cities, with this kind of Children of the Damned marketing campaign – the kids had empty eye sockets with fire shooting out … They wanted this embarrassment to go away. It was one thing to have kids knifing each other in the cities, but they didn’t want to have their image soiled by this thing that might incite teenagers to go berserk in the suburbs and kill each other.” Orion made the decision not to release Over the Edge in theaters.

Screening the film for his peers in New York and Los Angeles, George Litto recalled “I had had two successful movies before, you know, and so they said, ‘Over the Edge is great! It’s gonna be a big hit, you’re gonna have three in a row, George.’ So for me it was a huge letdown, from like a three in a row to almost nobody saw the picture! But I think it was a series of unfortunate circumstances – even for the distributor – because the distributor always gets lots of pressure from the exhibitors that they don’t want another theater where they’re gonna rip up the seats and gangs creating hell and havoc, so there was vandalism in the film and that’s what they were afraid of. The distributor found it difficult to take the plunge.”

Undeterred, the Public Theater in New York heard about Over the Edge and in December 1981, booked it for a two week engagement as part of a series it called “Off the Shelf.” Getting a look at the film for the first time, New York Times film critic Vincent Canby wrote, “Except for Carl and Richie, the teen-agers aren’t characters but a chorus of attitudes. Unlike other such films, though, Over the Edge dramatizes the boredom and pointlessness of their world with extraordinary conviction. New Granada is a nearly perfect visual representation of the built-in obsolescence that is supposed to keep the American economy going, but which creates junk faster than the junk can be recycled. If New Granada’s kids are zonked-out zombies, they are simply a little more rude and less self-satisfied than their zombielike parents.” Several more New York theaters ran the film in February 1982, but the largest audience for Over the Edge came when HBO started airing it that year.

Speaking to the Village Voice in 2001 – four years before Over the Edge would finally receive a long awaited DVD release – Jonathan Kaplan mused, “The fact that it was so highly visible in these New York circles was good for me; it was good for Tim Hunter, who co-wrote Over the Edge and then got financing for River’s Edge, which he directed and co-wrote; and of course it launched Matt Dillon’s career. But it never got the audience it was intended for. It was heartbreaking because I knew we’d captured something, and when it got that little burst of life there, it was thrilling, because people actually got it. It’s had a life of its own because of cable, though it’s not readily available at the Blockbusters and it’s not out on DVD and it was never out on laserdisc. They still don’t really know what they’ve got.”

Should I Care?
If Rebel Without A Cause, The Graduate, Fast Times At Ridgemont High and Boyz N The Hood all charted exactly where teenage angst was at in every decade from the ‘50s to the end of the century, then Over the Edge would represent that point in the graph for the 1970s and occupy space in the same holding cell as those classics. While positively innocent by today’s standards – the sex is absentee and what drug use there is comes across as trifling – the movie endures as a wildly entertaining exploitation picture, a social document of the American suburbs, and as a daring independent film that has a lot to observe about where the country was at the time and in many respects, still is.

Jonathan Kaplan deserves a lot of credit for the casting – not a single one of the kids ever gets caught “acting” – while also recognizing the peculiar effects that the monstrous architecture would have on the kids. The climactic riot is audacious in its scale and execution, yet the style of the movie never threatens to get sensational. The filmmakers instead have enough respect for the kids to simply follow them around, watching and listening to how they interact, as opposed to herding them through any well worn plot. The director’s father Sol Kaplan composed a delightfully subtle and eerie musical score, while the songs of Cheap Trick, The Cars and The Ramones effortlessly transport us back to the days of vinyl records and headphones.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Edged Out” By Jessica Winter. The Village Voice, 14 August 2001

Over the Edge. Warner Home Video (2005)