What the *&#! Is This About?
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the school year at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiations. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose older sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her brother. The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation.

One of the 8th grade pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around looking for something else to do with all the other kids. This includes Slater (Rory Cochrane), a stoner whose access to party favors makes him a VIP presence at whatever party is in the offing, and the beatnik Michelle (Milla Jovovich) who steals two bronze statues to paint them in the likeness of Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons of KISS. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his social circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Born in Houston and raised in the town of Huntsville, Richard Linklater would drop out of local Sam Houston State University and take work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico instead of finishing college. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began making short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature film that Linklater shot in the summer of 1989 for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals two years later. This got the attention of producer Jim Jacks, who – with partner Sean Daniel – had a development deal with Universal Pictures. Linklater recalled, “I told him I had this teenage rock and roll film that I felt was my next movie.”

Richard Linklater added, “I’d always had this idea for a strange high school film. I remember being a high school freshman in Huntsville and driving around all night with three or four guys in a Le Mans, listening to an eight-track tape of ZZ Top’s ‘Fandango’. Eight-tracks never ended; a song would get quiet, you would hear a click, and then it would pick back up. So I wanted the film to start with a close-up shot of ‘Fandango’ sliding into the eight-track player and then have a whole movie in this car, meeting people who drove up next to you, going through the drive-through, getting out and getting beer – basically always in and around the car. But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.”

To assemble a cast, Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel brought in Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met virtually every up and coming actor and actress during the auditions in Los Angeles. Phillips recalled, “Vince Vaughn was there, but he was competing with Cole and Ben, and he didn’t get it. Neither did Claire Danes, whom Rick Linklater and I loved but was more of an Eastern-school type. And poor Ashley Judd – she never even got to meet Rick. Then I get to Austin, and that’s when I met Renée Zellweger. I went, ‘Isn’t this girl interesting?’ When Rick and I saw her together, we read her and thought, ‘Ahh, man! Too bad that everybody’s set, because she would have been perfect.’ So we gave her that teeny part in the parking lot.” Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay convinced him to audition for a part; the 15-year-old ended up cast as Mitch.

Due to graduation ceremonies at the University of Texas, Don Phillips was making due with a room at the Hyatt and hanging out in the bar. A part-time waiter named Matthew McConaughey strolled in with his girlfriend. When the bartender mentioned that Phillips was in town to produce a movie, McConaughey went over to introduce himself. He’d appeared in a music video and a beer commercial, but had never acted in a movie. After drinking and talking golf with Phillips for hours, the casting director proposed McConaughey come in and read for the role of Wooderson. Linklater recalled, “I thought he was too good-looking. Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls; but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy. I thought, ‘Okay, don’t cut your hair. Can you grow a beard and a mustache?’

After Jim Jacks and Sean Daniel had convinced Universal that Richard Linklater might be another George Lucas and Dazed and Confused could be the next American Graffiti, shooting commenced July 1992 in Austin on a budget of $6.9 million. In terms of style, Linklater wanted to make a movie that felt like it had actually been shot in 1976. He recalled, “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

With a 38 day shooting schedule, cast and crew worked on the fly. Linklater recalled, “I wanted a montage sequence at the beer bust to give the essence of the party. But it’s hard to script the essence of a party, and if you don’t have it in the script, you don’t have it on the shooting schedule. So we had about thirty minutes and a couple of cameras to get it. We cranked up the music, asked people to move, and followed them around. I’d run up to Rory Cochrane and whisper, ‘Okay, you’re trying to score some weed off somebody,’ and he’d go with it and we’d film.” When a scripted crush between Tony and Cynthia failed to spark much chemistry between Anthony Rapp and Marissa Ribisi, the director suggested maybe her character should go for Wooderson instead. Ribisi recalled, “I thought, ‘Oh, this is genius.’ He’s everything she’s against. She’s this girl with a future, kind of preachy, and suddenly she’s into this guy who only likes high school chicks. She’s so smitten she can’t speak.”

One of Richard Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The real battle came over the soundtrack. In need of a $300,000 advance to begin obtaining the clearances for the songs he’d selected, the studio suggested that Linklater instead consider using contemporary bands singing cover versions. This was seen as a way to get the movie exposure on MTV. Linklater recalled, “At that moment we didn’t have any money, and I still needed it to finish the film. There was a threat that I’d have to start cutting songs. Dylan’s ‘Hurricane’ alone cost $80,000. Finally the studio said, ‘Okay, we’ll come up with the money, but only if you give up all your royalties from the soundtrack.’ I said, ‘Fine. Just don’t screw with my movie. You can rob me, take everything I have. Just don’t kill my family.’”

When released September 1993 in the U.S., critics were unequivocal in their praise. Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “Dazed and Confused is one of the most exciting movies of this, or any other, year. It’s smart, funny, and wonderfully crafted and performed. The movie is structured as a period ensemble piece about a specific group of teenagers on the last day of high school in 1976. But it also functions as a timeless social study of high school character types and a disclosure of commonplace abuses of power in this social system.” Peter Ranier, the Los Angeles Times: “It’s a highly enjoyable spree that doesn’t add up to a whole lot by the end. But you don’t necessarily want it to add up to anything – that’s part of its charm.” Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “No film whose plot involves the quest for Aerosmith tickets can take itself too seriously. So Dazed and Confused has an enjoyably playful spirit, one that amply compensates for its lack of structure.”

Unfortunately, Dazed and Confused had its box office fate sealed months earlier, when it went before test audiences in Los Angeles. Linklater recalled, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.” Never expanding beyond 214 theaters in the U.S., Dazed and Confused scored only $7.9 million at the box office. Over time though – as the film’s reputation among college students blossomed – sales of VHS tapes and DVDs would ultimately top $30 million. Two volumes of the soundtrack – Dazed and Confused and Even More Dazed and Confused – have sold more than two million copies.

Looking back on Dazed and Confused ten years later, Richard Linklater contrasted the experience to the one he had working independently on Slacker. “It was probably the biggest leap I’ve ever made. Like doing a film where someone else paid for it. It was technically my third film, I had done one film completely alone, then I did one film with a crew of about six or seven and that’s a big leap there, to communicate with a crew and throw your ideas out there. This was a bigger leap even still, like how you make it within the system with a really tight schedule with all the previews and all that stuff. A lot of people fall apart at that level. I think the studio was sick of me and didn’t like me by the end, but I was pretty happy to get out alive with the film that I wanted to make. If I had listened to them and done everything that they wanted, we wouldn’t be talking today, I’ll put it that way.”

Should I Care?
Gramercy Pictures – the short lived distributor launched in 1993 as a venture between Universal Pictures and PolyGram – had apparently exhausted their marketing ideas by the time they arrived on the High Times approach, issuing posters with taglines like “See It with a Bud”. The MPAA objected to the drug references and ordered Gramercy make alterations. Richard Linklater – who had no input into the campaign – lamented, ”They were marketing it for dumb teenagers, but what are you gonna do?” Ultimately, this is a movie that stoners just don’t deserve. Half Baked, they deserve. Dazed and Confused on the other hand is a film whose token toker ends up with maybe three lines of dialogue, tops. Instead of jokes, what Linklater seems to be going for is a brutally honest reevaluation of 18 hours of his childhood. Banned substances play a role, but so do music, clothes, healthy doses cynicism and the relationships recalled by someone who remembers being there.

While the script digs no more than skin deep into its characters, when it comes to casting, Dazed and Confused is a master class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, but Linklater gets terrific performances from both the pros (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi, Parker Posey, Cole Hauser) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this madness. Linklater’s take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the experience is alive and fun, enabling us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth. Dazed and Confused feels like one of the most truthful expositions on high school ever made. This is Linklater’s best film.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Smoke Got In Their Eyes” By Jessica Shaw. Entertainment Weekly, 8 October 1993

“The Spirit of ‘76” By John Spong. Texas Monthly, October 2003

“Making Dazed – Catch You Later Dude, Ten Years Later” By Emily Christianson. Film Radar, 14 September 2005

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

Synopsis
Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the citizens of Southern California brace for an invasion. In a spoof of Jaws (with the same stuntwoman, Susan Backlinie), a nude swimmer goes for a dip in the ocean, but instead of a shark, a Japanese submarine surfaces, dangling her on the periscope. The captain (Toshiro Mifune) is in search of something honorable to attack in California and settles on Hollywood, despite the objections of a German officer (Christopher Lee) that his crew will never find it. We’re next introduced to a busboy (Bobby Di Cicco) who dreams of winning a Jitterbug contest with his sweetheart (Dianne Kay). Serving coffee to a U.S. Army tank crew – which includes Dan Aykroyd and John Candy – the busboy’s dance moves upset one of the tank crewmen (Treat Williams) and a food fight ensues.

Army Air Corps pilot Wild Bill Kelso (John Belushi) lands his P-40 at a gas station in Death Valley. In search of a squadron of Zeros he believes he lost over Fresno, Kelso succeeds only in blowing up the gas station. We then meet the stoic General Stilwell (Robert Stack), who’s been assigned to protect California from attack. Stilwell’s aide (Tim Matheson) recalls that the general’s smoldering secretary (Nancy Allen) is aroused by planes and schemes to get her airborne in one. Meanwhile, the Japanese sub crew wanders ashore, where they abduct Christmas tree farmer Hollis Wood (Slim Pickens) to help them locate Hollywood. Also part of the insanity is a homeowner (Ned Beatty) whose lawn turns into an artillery range, two civilians (Murray Hamilton and Eddie Deezen) stuck on a ferris wheel, and Colonel Mad Man Maddox (Warren Oates) who’s convinced the Japs have an airfield in the alfalfa fields of Pomona.

Production history
Graduating from USC Film School, Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale interned at Universal Studios. They wrote an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker that made it on the air (in January 1975) but what they really wanted was to write and direct their own movies. One of their scripts was about a radical group that steals a Sherman tank and threatens to blow up the corporate headquarters of an oil company. “The Bobs” got their spec – Tank – to John Milius, a USC alum who’d been awarded a four-picture deal at MGM following the success of The Wind and the Lion. Zemeckis recalls, “He wasn’t crazy about the story, but he liked the way we wrote and he said, ‘Have you guys got any other ideas for any other movies?’ And we immediately came up with this outrageous concept of hysteria on the home front during World War II. I have to credit John; it was my recollection that John thought of the title, and he said, ‘Hey that’s a great idea and we’ll call it The Night the Japs Attacked.’”

Gale recalled their meeting with Milius by stating, “And we told him we had come across in the research for Tank, we’d come across this very fascinating historical event where the city of Los Angeles – it was actually February 1942 – thought that there was an air raid, that Japanese were bombing L.A. They blacked out the city for six hours and thousands of rounds of ammunition were shot up at the sky at nothing. And we thought it was just a wonderfully absurd historical event, could make a great movie.” Milius – whose deal at MGM stipulated two pictures he’d write and direct, and two pictures he’d produce – had researched General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell for a script. “And it was Milius who said, ‘Yeah! We can put General Stillwell in this movie! He could be running around, being the voice of sanity in all this insane stuff.’ … So he hired Bob and me to write one of the pictures that he was going to produce and he said: ‘The title of it should be The Night the Japs Attacked.’ And for the first year and a half of it or so, that was what the title was.”

Zemeckis & Gale wrote two drafts of The Night the Japs Attacked for MGM, but production chief Dan Melnick was not amused, particularly by the word “Japs” in the title. Undeterred, Milius raved about the project to a buddy of his named Steven Spielberg, who recalled, “The first time I heard about 1941 it was called The Night the Japs Attacked. And I heard it during an afternoon when I was skeet shooting with my friend John Milius and our then two protégés Bob Zemeckis & Bob Gale. And the two Bobs had come up with this crazy screenplay they had written and they told me about it. And I think what got me to want to read the script was they described at one point the scene where the Japanese they think they’re attacking an important strategic target but in fact have targeted Pacific Ocean Amusement Park and blow the ferris wheel, which rolls down the pier and into the water … And I must say there’s a part of me in my nice conservative life that is probably as crazy and insane as Milius and the two guys who wrote that script that really got me attracted to the project.”

Immersed in pre-production on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Spielberg committed to direct what he was calling The Rising Sun next, inviting Zemeckis & Gale to the soundstage in Alabama where he was shooting his UFO epic to work on the script. Zemeckis recalls, “It was the opposite of a disciplined type of collaboration. It was an outrageous collaboration and we were just sort of topping each other with how we could just put more outrageous spin on every incident that we wrote. And of course Bob and my mission was every time Steven would get an idea, no matter how outrageous it was, we worked very diligently and spent hours and days to try and figure out a way to actually fit it into the structure of the story. So it basically just kept accumulating. That’s why I call it the kitchen sink. We just kept throwing everything into the screenplay, including the kitchen sink until it just became this mountain of gags.”

Spielberg vowed “I will not make this movie if it costs a penny over $12 million” so many times that it ended up (as a joke by Zemeckis & Gale) on the title page of the script. But as the gags piled up, so did the budget. Columbia Pictures – now run by Dan Melnick – partnered with Universal Pictures to finance what would be Spielberg’s fourth feature film at a production cost of $26 million. Columbia attained international rights, while Universal was set to distribute the picture in the United States. Meanwhile, the script continued to undergo changes. Zemeckis recalls, “Mine and Bob’s, our first intention when we wrote the early drafts of the screenplay was that it was supposed to be a very black, black comedy and it was very dark and very cynical. And a lot of that was tempered by Steven and a lot of the cast that came in, so the film shifted from this very dark satire to more of a screwball comedy.”

Wild Bill Kelso was a minor character who flew in at the very end of the script, but was inserted into much more of the action once John Belushi took the role. The character of a farmer – who bumbled onto the Japanese after they wandered ashore – didn’t even have dialogue, but once Spielberg cast Slim Pickens in the part, Zemeckis & Gale were tasked with beefing up his role as well. Dan Aykroyd, John Candy, Tim Matheson, Nancy Allen, Bobby Di Cicco, Toshiro Mifune, Christopher Lee, Ned Beatty, Lorraine Gary, Murray Hamilton, Eddie Deezen, Warren Oates and Robert Stack (taking a role John Wayne and Charlton Heston both turned down) also joined the cast. Once the film’s immense miniature and physical effects work was factored into the schedule, 1941 took 247 days to shoot, wrapping in May 1979. The final budget would rest at $31.5 million.

When 1941 was ready to go before an audience in October 1979, Spielberg chose the Medallion Theater in Dallas, the scene of wildly successful test screenings for all three of his feature films. But as his latest entertainment began to unreel, audience satisfaction evaporated. Spielberg recalls, “That was a preview where, you know, people laughed and tittered at the beginning of the film, then as the film got noisier and more confusing and more riotous, the laughter became just kind of wonderment and wonderment became kind of amazement and I even saw people holding their ears. I actually looked over the whole preview audience and midway through the film – I had never seen this before at a preview – audiences, at least twenty percent of the audience, had their hands over their ears. I’ve seen audiences covering their eyes during Jaws, but never over their ears. That’s a whole new experience for me. And I knew we were in trouble at that point.”

1941 garnered varying degrees of praise from critics like David Denby in the New Yorker, but the bad news was plentiful. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “It may possibly be that Mr. Spielberg has chosen gigantic size and unlimited quantity as his comedy method in the awareness that he has no gift whatsoever for small-scale comic conceits. The slapstick gags, obviously choreographed with extreme care, do not build to boffs; they simply go on too long. I’m not sure if it’s the fault of the director or of the editor, but I’ve seldom seen a comedy more ineptly timed.” Frank Rich, Time Magazine: “While it was generous of Spielberg to employ so large a percentage of the Screen Actors Guild, the huge cast almost immobilizes the movie. It takes too long to establish who everyone is and to knit all the plot strands together. Even though the film is relentlessly busy – there seems to be a physical gag in every shot – it has little of the director’s usual narrative drive. The movie’s story does not so much move forward as gradually selfdestruct.”

John Milius recalls, “We all knew that it wouldn’t get good reviews. We knew when we made the movie that it was politically incorrect and we loved it for that. As matter of fact the term that we used at that time was ’social irresponsibility’ … We even had a Latin motto: ‘Civitas Sine Providentia,’ which means ‘a citizenry without prudence.’ And that was the idea, that this movie was truly socially irresponsible and that’s what we really loved about it. So we knew that critics would hate it because they were all gunning for Steven anyway.” 1941 grossed $31.7 million in the U.S. and $60 million overseas, but the revenues paled in comparison to Jaws or Close Encounters of the Third Kind and stigmatized the film as one of the biggest box office letdowns in memory. The film industry did bestow three Academy Award nominations on 1941: Best Cinematography (William Fraker), Best Sound and Best Visual Effects.

In the intervening years, an appreciative cult following has sprung up around 1941, which was released on laserdisc in 1996 and DVD in 1999 with a behind-the-scenes documentary by Laurent Bouzereau and 28 minutes of additional footage restored to the running time. Around the same time, Spielberg – who remains refreshingly candid about the failings of 1941 – offered his post-mortem: “Power can go right to the head. I felt immortal after a critical hit and two box office hits, one being the biggest film in history up to that moment. But 1941 was not a screw-you film, I can do anything I want, watch me fail upward. I was very indulgent on 1941, simply because I was insecure with the material. It wasn’t making me laugh, or any of us laugh, either in the dailies or on the set. So I shot that movie every way I knew how, to try to save it from being what I thought it actually became, which is a demolition derby.”

Opinion
If a movie is supposed to be a better union formed between material and a director, then 1941 is one of the all-time Hollywood marriages from hell. Below the pandemonium of glass breaking, houses crumbling, buildings exploding and bodies flying, there is evidence that Robert Zemeckis & Bob Gale set out to write a comedy that simply mocked truth, justice and the American way in an acidic, outrageous and frequently juvenile manner (for further evidence, see Used Cars). There’s a sly, “everything is not all right” sensibility buried in 1941 that may be responsible for winning it admirers, particularly in Europe or among people who’d read the Huffington Post. But Zemeckis didn’t direct this movie; Steven Spielberg did and in hindsight, this arrangement works out about as well as a geek taking a cheerleader to the prom. Actually, the results are more like the twister from The Wizard of Oz hitting the prom.

The scenes in 1941 dealing with children or vintage aircraft seem to elicit a sparkle in the eye of Spielberg, the greatest director of boys’ adventure movies of all time. But most anything involving his principal cast – particularly humor – flies around the room like a balloon with the air farting out of it. An end credits curtain call featuring most of the actors screaming sums up the approach here; nobody is given a character to play or the encouragement to deliver anything in an unhurried, unforced manner. Dan Aykroyd, Murray Hamilton, Slim Pickens and Wendie Jo Sperber (as a Jitterbug contestant with the hots for servicemen) are a lot of fun to watch, but they aren’t at any time permitted to be funny. John Williams – who Spielberg credits with writing a march for Belushi rivaling the one from Raiders of the Lost Ark – turned in a fantastic musical score for what amounts to a giant model train wreck.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
The Making of 1941. Directed by Laurent Bouzereau. 1941 (Collector’s Edition). MCA/Universal Home Video (1996)

Steven Spielberg: A Biography. Joseph McBride (1999)

Easy Riders and Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ‘N’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood. Peter Biskind (1998)

Synopsis
On a typical, stifling summer day, three men shuffle into the “First Brooklyn Savings Bank” as it closes. Stevie (Gary Springer) is a kid. Sal (John Cazale) is a dim, quiet type who holds the manager at gunpoint. Sonny (Al Pacino) struggles just getting his rifle out of a box, then suffers a major setback when Stevie decides he can’t go through with the job and leaves. Sonny knows bank procedure, but takes so long getting the robbery going, the NYPD surround the building. The head teller, Sylvia (Penelope Allen) gets upset at the would-be robbers. “Did you have a plan, or what? What did you do, just barge in on whim?” Detective Eugene Moretti (Charles Durning) phones from a barbershop across the street. Sonny bluffs that he’ll start shooting hostages if the police come in.

As Sonny tries to figure out what to do next, the sidewalks fill with onlookers. The 250 cops outside the bank grow as nervous and blundering as the robbers inside. Sonny gains the upper hand by leading the crowd in chants of “Attica! Attica!” Doing his best to attend to the needs of his hostages, Sonny gains their support as well. One of his demands is to talk to his lover, Leon Shermer (Chris Sarandon), a nervous wreck wacked out on sedatives he’s been given at the mental hospital. It comes out that Sonny staged the robbery to pay for a sex change operation for Leon. Sonny asks for a jet to fly him, Sal and the hostages to a foreign country, but FBI agents Sheldon (James Broderick) and Murphy (Lance Henriksen) ultimately prove to be one step ahead of the would-be robbers.

Production history
P.F. Kluge was a Los Angeles based journalist dispatched by Life Magazine in August 1972 to cover a bizarre bank robbery unfolding in Brooklyn. With Tom Moore, Kluge interviewed hostages, NYPD officers, FBI agents and onlookers who had gathered to watch the event. Their article – “The Boys In The Bank” – ran in September. When budding producer Robert Greenhut read it, he brought the material to Martin Bregman, a one-time talent manager producing a movie – Serpico – starring a former client, Al Pacino. Bregman recalls, “What was wonderful to me about it is it portrayed a life or a lifestyle that nobody had ever seen before. It was about a guy who’s in love with another man; it was a gay relationship, but without the dirty jokes, and the extent that one character went through to prove his love. And it was a first. It was different.”

Screenwriter Frank Pierson was hired to adapt a script. “Nothing was ever quite the same in the way the police handled hostage situations after Dog Day Afternoon. It became and still is part of police training for dealing with similar kinds of situations where crowds are out of control … Was that what it was about? Was it the teller’s story, was it the policeman’s story, who has to struggle with the situation and deal with something he doesn’t understand? Many of the police were morally offended when they discovered the issues of sexuality involved. And after a while I decided that the best way to tell the story was from the point of view of the bank robber himself; why he went there, how he conducted himself and what the results were for that character, and made the decision that we would tell it entirely from inside the bank.”

In the real incident, a Chase Manhattan bank in Brooklyn had been held up by John Wojtowicz in order to afford a sex change operation for his lover, a pre-operative transsexual. Wojtowicz was serving twenty years in Lewisburg and withholding cooperation from the producers over how much they would pay him. Pierson instead poured over testimony from those who knew Wojtowicz – his wife, his mother, hostages – but each eyewitness contradicted the last. Pierson considered dropping out of the project, but had already spent his advance. “So I went back to see if there was one element in common that everybody had about John. Well, basically he would be looking at you and he would say, ‘I’ll take care of you. I’ll make you happy.’ And then he’s going to fail. And that’s the story of the bank. Now I knew I could write it.”

Just after Christmas 1973, Pierson had finished a script for Dog Day Afternoon. He accompanied Bregman, producer Martin Elfand and Al Pacino to London, where Sidney Lumet had transitioned from Serpico to direct Murder On The Orient Express. Pacino had agreed to play “Sonny Wortzik” – as the bank robber was now named – but was having second thoughts. The actor recalled, “It basically, I really didn’t want to work. Because I knew with Sidney Lumet, you sort of have to work, he really puts you in there and works you. And at the time I just thought, ‘Why would I want to do this now? I’m tired, I want to go back on the stage eventually.’ So they understood that and they were very gracious and I thought it was over.”

Bregman called Pacino and implored him to read the script again. “So, I read it. And it became so clear to me, I thought – especially having been reading the script – I keep getting scripts all the time and they’re never up to that kind of quality, that intensity, that writing and characters and all of these characters in this piece. And I just put the script down and said, “Marty, I’ll do it. I’m there.’” Lumet recalls, “I think that Al was as concerned if not more concerned than I was about the subject matter. He was the one with the greatest risk. By the time this picture had come out, he was now a major star. And no major star that I know of had ever played a gay man. He kept looking for disguises. So he grew a moustache and it looked terrible. We shot the first day and Al is one of the few actors I know who is wonderful at rushes … And he leaned over to me and said the moustache has got to go.”

During a three-week rehearsal, Lumet worried whether audiences were going to accept the gay content of the film, or revolt against it. His decision was to make Dog Day Afternoon feel as real as possible. The cast was asked to show up in their personal wardrobe. Other than fake sweat, there was no makeup. Lighting on the set was practical, mostly the fluorescents that were inside the real bank, and for the first time in his career, Lumet permitted actors to supply their own lines. Improvisations during rehearsal were taped and Pierson injected them into the shooting script. On three occasions, Lumet allowed Pacino and Charles Durning to improvise on camera, resulting in Pacino roaring “Attica, Attica!” to the crowd.

Opening September 1975 in the U.S., Dog Day Afternoon was embraced by critics. Writing in the New Yorker, Pauline Kael called it “One of the best ‘New York’ movies ever made.” Gene Siskel ranked the film #4 on his list of the year’s 10 best, while Roger Ebert notched it at #10. In Hollywood, the staff of Daily Variety raved, “The entire cast is excellent, top to bottom. Dog Day Afternoon is, in the whole as well as the parts, film-making at its best.” It was nominated for six Academy Awards in an extraordinary year which saw five masterpieces vie for Best Picture: Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Only Pierson received an Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay. The industry overlooked Pacino’s performance to award Jack Nicholson for his portrayal of R.P. McMurphy.

While many consider Dog Day Afternoon a modern classic, others criticize Lumet for lack of a signature visual style. On an audio commentary for the film’s two-disc DVD in 2006, he stated, “I hate the word ‘style’ because it’s misused so much because most people don’t know what they’re talking about really when they’re talking about style, that the important thing in style is stripping away everything except what that picture needs. So style is one of the most misused words in movies. It’s easy to talk about style when you see a picture like A Man and a Woman, the Claude Lelouch movie. I’m not picking on that. But it does look like a Ford commercial. And so they think, ‘Oh that’s style.’ Well, it’s not style, it’s just a long lens, that’s all it is. Using 150mm, 300mm lenses, it’s not style because it doesn’t belong only to only that movie.”

Opinion
Unlike a lot of the great films of the 1970s, journeyman cinematographer Victor Kemper doesn’t move the camera all that much, and “Attica! Attica!” aside, the movie doesn’t make sweeping social statements or teach its characters any lessons; they start the story tired and end up exhausted. But Dog Day Afternoon is a minor masterpiece and still holds up as the best movie ever made about a hostage event because of Al Pacino’s harrowing performance, as well as its documentary immediacy, capturing the social decay, shifting attitudes and funky fashions of one of the all-time great settings for a movie, New York of the 1970s. With the exception of Taxi Driver, no movie of its era is as gritty, comical or tightly wound as Dog Day Afternoon.

Lumet’s decision not to feature a musical score – Elton John’s “Amoreena” during the opening credits is the only music – strips any artificiality that the cops and robbers tale might have been saddled with right off the screen. By documenting how the police, the press and the public over-react to the events inside the bank, the film has a terrific black wit to it. The presence of the late, great John Cazale and the revelations of Sonny’s personal life give the film even more edge, and in the middle is a ceaseless performance by Al Pacino. This is my favorite performance of his because when it’s all done, you feel almost as drained physically and emotionally as Sonny. Along with the mid-‘70s vibe the film bottles for all time, Dog Day Afternoon is unlikely to ever be topped.

Mike Sutton at DVD Times writes, “Dog Day Afternoon is renowned as one of the definitive film portrayals of New York life and that reputation is well deserved. Perhaps only Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing has done as good a job at catching the combination of lazy indolence and near hysteria that the summer steam heat and humidity can create, and while the intentions of the directors are very different both are surprisingly indulgent of the flaws of their characters and both are willing to find the difficult, messy truth of an initially straightforward situation.”

Christopher Null at Filmcritic.com writes, “Today Dog Day Afternoon is an unabashed classic, a template by which other movies are based and a formula which is periodically tweaked and refined. There are few things you can complain about in Dog Day — a second act that relies on a few too many variations of the same ‘the cops are scheming’ bit, and that’s about it. But Pacino’s fiery performance and Sidney Lumet’s perfect direction does more than create a great crime movie. It captures perfectly the zeitgeist of the early 1970s, a time when optimism was scraping rock bottom and John Wojtowicz was as good a hero as we could come up with.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the semester at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiation. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her kid brother.

The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation. One of the pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around with all the other kids. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Production history
Richard Linklater was a Sam Houston State dropout who left college to find work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began to make short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature that Linklater shot for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals in the summer of 1991. During the press tour, Linklater mentioned an idea he had for his next project, a teen movie.

Linklater recalls, “But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.” Producer James Jacks was a fan of Slacker and when he read the idea, flew Linklater to Los Angeles. This resulted in a script Linklater wrote called Dazed and Confused.

To assemble a cast, Jacks and his partner Sean Daniel hired Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met every up and coming actor and actress for parts. Vince Vaughn was passed over for the roles Cole Hauser and Ben Affleck were given. Claire Danes was found to be too East Coast to play a Texas teen. Ashley Judd didn’t even get a callback. One person who did stand out was Renée Zellweger. Though all the roles had been cast by the time she came to Linklater’s attention in Austin, Zellweger was awarded a walk-on part. Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay discovered him.

Phillips was at the bar in the Hyatt he’d been booked into in Austin. Matthew McConaughey was there with his girlfriend and when the bartender mentioned that Phillips was producing a movie, he went over to introduce himself. McConaughey had appeared in a beer commercial and a music video, but had never acted in a movie. He ended up drinking and talking with Phillips for hours. Linklater recalls, “Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls, but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy.”

With a $6.9 million budget from Universal, Dazed and Confused began filming July 1992 in Austin. Linklater wanted a movie that felt like it had been shot in 1976. “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

One of Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The studio had so little faith that a soundtrack comprised of forgotten ‘70s artists would sell that they pressured Linklater to abandon his meticulously selected music cues and replace them with current bands singing cover versions. To keep the songs he wanted, Linklater gave up his profit points in the soundtrack.

When Dazed and Confused was put before test audiences in L.A., its box office fate was sealed. Linklater recalls, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.”

Released in September 1993, Dazed and Confused was praised by critics. Rolling Stone labeled it, “The ultimate party movie, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible.” Entertainment Weekly called it, “The most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made.” Audiences missed the film in theaters, but over time, video cassette and DVD sales topped $30 million as its reputation among college students grew. Two volumes of the soundtrack have sold more than two million copies. Don Phillips adds, “To this day you can’t go to a video store on a Friday night and get Dazed and Confused, because the kids still have Dazed parties, and everybody knows every line in the movie.”

Opinion
Perhaps more than any other movie in recent history, to watch Dazed and Confused is to step into the Way Back Machine and spend a couple of hours in another place and time. Not only did Linklater dial the clothes, the cars, the tunes and the film’s sensibility back to 1976, but the filmmaker’s laid back take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the film empowers us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth.

Spanning less than eighteen hours, Linklater’s script digs no more than skin deep into these characters, but when it comes to casting, the film is in select class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, while Linklater gets terrific performances from the pros (Milla Jovovich, Rory Cochrane, Nicky Katt) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this wild and crazy world.

The Vocabularist at Movie Cynics writes, “I want to say that this movie is great, but the only reason I would be doing that is because of some sick sense of nostalgia that I have from my high school days of getting wasted. I relate to the film, but in the end the movie is about nothing. It’s just serves as a reminder of how stupid we all were when were in high school, how idealistic and self-serving we were in the name of a good time. Dazed and Confused is a movie about the past, so if you like living in it, you’ll probably like the film.”

“Much more than the superficial teen romps that passed for generational insight during the 1980s, Richard Linklater has crafted the definitive adolescent allegory. Illustrating how music makes our experiences more ethereal and touching on almost every issue inherent in the high school of eras past (and present), this drunken, drugged out comedy is a benchmark in the way young adulthood is illustrated and explained in the modern motion picture. Without gimmicks, it achieves a greatness that few films can ever hope to emulate … Without a doubt, Dazed and Confused is a great film,” writes Bill Gibron at DVD Talk.

Brendan Babish at DVD Verdict writes, “Dazed and Confused gets nearly everything right … After a Little League baseball game the teams are forced to line up, slap the other team’s hands, and mutter, ‘Good game’ (remember that?); on the way to the parking lot everyone yells ‘Shotgun!’ at the same time; at night everyone drives around town looking for fun, and nothing much happens … Linklater said with Dazed and Confused he was looking to make the American Graffiti of the ’70s. I think in about ten years another young director making a period teen comedy is going to say he wants to make the Dazed and Confused for the ’90s.”

Visit Jeremy Richey’s week long tribute to the images and music of Dazed and Confused at Harry Moseby Confidential.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In a small California town in the early 1960s, several stories unfold on the night of high school graduation: Terry “The Toad” (Charles Martin Smith) crashes his Vespa into Mel’s Drive-In. Class president Steve Bolander (Ron Howard) is ready to leave “this turkey town” in the morning, while Curt Henderson (Richard Dreyfuss) isn’t sure if he wants to go to college. John Milner (Paul LeMat) – a drag racer who cruises the strip in his yellow Ford Coupe – laments the local scene. “The whole strip is shrinkin’. You know, I remember about five years ago, take ya a couple of hours and a tank full of gas just to make one circuit. It was really somethin’.”

Steve is under the delusion that he wants to see other people and tries to convince his girlfriend Laurie (Cindy Williams) it would strengthen their relationship. She goes along at first, but cools to her boyfriend as the night goes on. Steve turns over the keys to his ’58 Chevy Impala to Terry to take care of while he’s at school and the geek hits the strip in his new wheels. While Steve, Laurie and Curt check in on the high school hop, Milner is stuck cruising around all night with “a grungy little twerp” (Mackenzie Phillips) that he can’t get rid of. Word reaches Milner that a stranger (Harrison Ford) in a ’55 Chevy is looking to race him.

Terry manages to pick up a car loving blonde named Debbie (Candy Clark) by telling her she looks like Connie Stevens. Terry’s savoir faire with Debbie is ruffled when he loses Steve’s car. Curt spends the evening searching for a blonde (Suzanne Somers) in a white Ford T-Bird. He gets sidetracked when a gang of greasers adopts him into their gang. With his time running out to find the dream woman, Curt seeks the help of Wolfman Jack, the mysterious rock ‘n roll deejay known to the kids only as the wild voice spinning platters over the airwaves.

Production history
George Lucas’ first feature film – a full length version of a short he’d made at USC titled THX-1138 – had been so poorly received by Warner Bros. in 1970 that the studio terminated its development deal with executive producer Francis Coppola, sending his Zoetrope Studios packing. Lucas was 27 years old and disillusioned that there seemed to be no audience for American art films. Coppola issued his protégé a challenge: “Don’t be so weird, try to do something that’s human. Don’t do these abstract things. All you do is science fiction. Everyone thinks you’re a cold fish, but you can be a warm and funny guy. Make a warm and funny movie.”

Lucas recalls, “Like most kids that grew up in the Valley, I had a strong interest in cruising. When I got to college and actually studied a lot of anthropology, I began to realize that was a uniquely American mating ritual involving automobiles. I came up with the idea of doing the movie. It was in the ‘60s. It was, you know, the hippie culture, drugs. Cruising was gone and I really felt compelled to sort of document the whole experience of cruising and what my generation used as a way of meeting girls and what we did in our spare time.” After THX-1138, Lucas swore he’d never write another screenplay. He drafted a treatment and hoped to raise money for his friends Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz to write a screenplay.

None of the studios Lucas approached were interested in giving him money. He sought out the president of United Artists – David Picker – at the Cannes Film Festival in 1971 and was given $10,000 to expand his treatment. By this time, Huyck & Katz were busy directing the horror flick Messiah of Evil and were unavailable. Lucas contacted USC alum Richard Walter to write a script, but was not happy with the results, which did not reflect his experiences growing up in Northern California. Walter’s response was, “I’m a Jew from New York. What do I know from Modesto? We didn’t have cars. We rode the subway, or bicycles.”

With no money and no usable script, Lucas broke his vow and in three weeks, banged out a screenplay for American Graffiti based on the treatment he’d developed with Huyck & Katz. United Artists hated it, telling Lucas, “It’s a musical montage. There’s no characters. There’s no story.” After a year of rewriting and pleading, Lucas got the attention of Universal vice president Ned Tanen, who’d grown up in Southern California’s cruising culture. To prevent a repeat of THX-1138, Tanen required Lucas get a big name involved. Handed a list of producers the studio was willing to work with, Lucas selected Francis Coppola.

Coppola had just finished shooting The Godfather and became intrigued with the idea of bankrolling American Graffiti himself. He secured a $700,000 bank loan against his cut of The Godfather. Coppola’s wife Ellie – who didn’t particularly like Lucas’ script – talked her husband out of it, convincing Coppola that the time to borrow against The Godfather would be on a project that the studios were unwilling to finance. Huyck recalls, “Francis got the movie made. George would be at the airport and he’d see two guys arguing and he’d say, ‘They’re the exact people I want for my movie,’ so he’d bring them in for a reading and Francis would say, ‘George, I think we need real actors.’”

Casting director Fred Roos selected a number of actors to make their big screen debuts: Richard Dreyfuss, Ron Howard, Cindy Williams and Harrison Ford. Huyck & Katz punched up the script at the last minute, adding the material concerning Howard & Williams’ characters. After working with a $1.2 million budget on THX, Lucas accepted $750,000 for Graffiti. Shooting commenced in June 1972 and did not proceed smoothly. On the first night, it took so long to get cameras mounted on the cars that filming didn’t start until 2 o’clock in the morning. The next day, the city of San Rafael threw the production out. Shooting resumed in nearby Petaluma, but a fire in town prevented any filming that night.

Lucas recalls, “American Graffiti was unpleasant because of the fact that there was no money, no time and I was compromising myself to death. But I could rationalize it because of the fact that, well, it is just a $700,000 picture. It’s Roger Corman, and what do you expect, you can’t expect everything to be right for making a little cheesy, low-budget movie.” Lucas wanted the film to look like a jukebox – strong, saturated colors – but feel like a documentary, with handheld cameras capturing action as it was happening. Difficulty keeping the actors in focus led to Lucas bringing in cinematographer Haskell Wexler to consult.

Walter Murch was hired to design the sound for American Graffiti. He recalls, “It was really the first film to have wall-to-wall classic rock soundtrack, something that has set a precedent and is fairly common today. Such that now you have a credit for somebody on films called ‘music supervisor’ and that’s their responsibility, choosing the song. Well, this position didn’t exist at that time and George really created it and he did it himself, so as he was writing the screenplay, he had his sister’s 45 rpm record player and this stack of rock ‘n roll 45 rpm records from the late 1950s early 1960s.”

Even after a boisterous January 1973 preview at the Northpoint Theater in San Francisco, Ned Tanen and Universal had low expectations for American Graffiti, which seemed to be just another youth picture like Two-Lane Blacktop or The Hired Hand that the studio had failed to sell to audiences. Lucas recalls, “It had become depressing to go to the movies. I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better coming out of the theater than when they went in.” Opening August 1973, American Graffiti broke house records on its way to a whopping $55.1 million in the U.S., making it the third highest grossing film of the year.

Stephen Farber wrote in The New York Times “The nostalgia boom has finally produced a lasting work of art. Lucas has brought the past alive, with sympathy, affection and thorough understanding … at 28 he is already one of the world’s master directors.” Vincent Canby’s review later tempered the hype, but admitted “American Graffiti is such a funny, accurate movie, so controlled and efficient in its narrative, that it stands to be over praised to the point where seeing it will be an anticlimax.” Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert ranked it #8 on their lists of the year’s ten best films. The film industry responded with five Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay.

Opinion
Though its success was indirectly responsible for Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley and so much styrofoam packaging that littered the TV landscape in the ‘70s, American Graffiti is a minor masterpiece, American neo-realism breathlessly propelling its narrative forward with ‘50s bubblegum pop and vintage cars as opposed to a traditional plot. The result is a film of rhythms, moods and life. It remains continually amusing, not because of jokes, but for the fleeting moments it captures: Terry the Toad trying to score some beer, Milner trying to get the attention of a carload of cute girls, even Ronny Howard telling a teacher to “go kiss a duck, Marblehead.”

George Lucas isn’t interested much in character and probably won’t ever win an Oscar for writing, but his skills as a graphic designer, gearhead and mythmaker are on parade here as much as they were in Star Wars. The cast – notably Richard Dreyfuss, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark and Harrison Ford, who’s hilarious as a drag racing bumpkin – relate to each other and their surroundings with believability. The film bottles the spirit of the Baby Boomer generation without imposing a message on the audience, using the voice of Wolfman Jack as a sort of spirit guide through the sights and sounds. Dreyfuss’ enigmatic, face to face encounter with the deejay late in the film is magic and worth the price of rental alone.

Raphael Pour-Hashemi at DVD Times writes, “Although American Graffiti is highly regarded as an American classic, it falls flat on a number of reasons. Firstly, the film relies too heavily on fifties nostalgia, and though this may have seemed a novelty in 1973, it has been severely worn out in 2001. Don’t forget, that this film was made a year before Happy Days and the numerous other rehashes. Secondly, because it relies so heavily on nostalgia, the film puts less stock in a properly structured screenplay, and American Graffiti lacks a strong enough thread to pull the audience through the film.”

“The most flippant place to start is with George Lucas – specifically, what happened to the George Lucas who made American Graffiti … For a film with [three] cinematographers listed in the end credits, American Graffiti is beautifully lighted. I first saw the film when I was in my early teens and to this day, all my memories of teenage late nights are in the film’s day-for-night lighting. The street scenes are amazing. The scene with the police car is fantastic, but Paul Le Mat and Mackenzie Phillips’s entire ride is probably the best. It’s all just so perfectly executed – and only made better by the exceptional editing,” writes Andrew Wickliffe at The Stop Button.

John Puccio at DVD Town writes, “Besides my very personal reasons for liking it, American Graffiti is a landmark film in several matter-of-fact ways. It was the first mega-hit for George Lucas, enabling him to go on to make Star Wars and the rest. It featured an astonishing array of young actors who basically got their start in this film … It was one of the first movies, maybe THE first, to involve a series of different, inter-cut stories shaped into one cohesive picture. It was the first film to use a continuous montage of classic rock and roll music from beginning to end to reinforce its plot. And it was made on a shoestring but became something like the second biggest-grossing film of 1973.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Real estate salesman Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) begins his evening in a phone booth outside a Chinese restaurant, speaking to his hospitalized daughter and promising to visit her after a sales meeting. Dave Moss (Ed Harris) is furious over the “Mickey Mouse sales conference” and confronts office manager John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) about the poor quality leads being handed to them. Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) is excused from the meeting due to his status as top salesman. He stays at the restaurant to work over a potential mark named James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce).

At the office, George (Alan Arkin) is in a state of dread over the weak leads he’s expected to go out and close. The three salesmen receive the strategy session of a lifetime from Blake (Alec Baldwin), who notifies them: “We’re adding a little something to this month’s sales contest. As you all know first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anybody wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.” Williamson hands his salesmen two leads each for the night, which Shelley appraises. “These leads are shit, they’re old. I’ve seen that name a hundred times.”

Shelley presses Williamson to hand out the new leads – the Glengarry leads – but the company man is under orders to save the prized cards for closers only. With his job on the line, Shelley offers Williamson a kickback of 20% of his commission plus fifty dollars per lead, but without the cash on him, the manager turns him down. Moss tries to talk George into burglarizing the office and stealing the Glengarry leads so they can sell them to a competitor. When the salesmen arrive for work in the morning, they discover the office has been broken into. Williamson and a police detective try to find out who’s responsible.

Production history
After attending drama school in New York, David Mamet returned to Chicago in 1969. He worked as a taxi driver, a restaurant delivery boy, and as an appointment setter for a real estate office. Mamet described his employer as “a fly-by-night operation, which sold tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans.” Though not very good at his job, Mamet was impressed with the salesmen. “They were amazing. They were a force of nature . . . they were people who had spent their whole lives never working for a salary, dependent for their living on their wits, their ability to charm. They sold themselves.”

In 1983, Mamet wrote Glengarry Glen Ross. Not satisfied with the play, he sent it to Harold Pinter and asked him what it lacked. Pinter responded that the only thing lacking about it was a production, and passed it on to the artistic director of the National Theatre in London. The play had its world premiere at London’s Cottlesloe Theatre in September 1983. The U.S. premiere took place at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, February 1984, with Robert Prosky as Shelley Levene, Joe Mantegna as Ricky Roma and William Petersen as Lingk. It opened on Broadway the following month and ran until February 1985 after receiving four Tony nominations.

Enthusiastically reviewed, the play won Mamet the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Former head of production at Columbia Pictures turned producer Jerry Tokofsky read the play in 1985 at the suggestion of Irvin Kershner, who wanted to direct a film version. Tokofsky caught a performance on Broadway and though he found the plot confusing, contacted Mamet. The celebrated playwright asked for $500,000 for the film rights and another $500,000 to adapt a screenplay. To find the money for this, Tokofsky partnered with a Washington D.C. real estate developer and aspiring movie producer he’d worked with named Stanley Zupnik.

Jack Lemmon – who Tokofsky approached to play Shelley Levene in 1989 – later summarized the film’s commercial potential: “It’s got no women, it’s got no sex, it’s got no violence and it’s got no special effects. So even if it’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning play, it’s got nothing that the studios are interested in.” Al Pacino had wanted to join the cast of the Broadway run and expressed interest in the movie, but before Tokofsky could set the project up, Kershner opted to direct RoboCop 2 and Pacino left to star in Frankie and Johnny.

Alec Baldwin, who also attached, left when Tokofsky was unable to raise a letter of credit guaranteeing the actor would be paid. In early 1991, James Foley received Mamet’s script via his agent and agreed to direct, but with his cast falling apart, he exited the project as well. Tofosky begged Baldwin back on board. “Alec said: ‘I’ve read twenty-five scripts and nothing is as good as this. Okay, If you make it, I’ll do it.” Lemmon and Foley returned to the production, as did Pacino, who told Tokofsky that the material had been obsessing him.

Tokofsky ultimately raised half of the film’s $12.8 million budget through foreign sales. The rest came from Live Home Video and Showtime for domestic video and cable rights, then New Line – looking to expand their image beyond the Freddy Kruger pictures they were known for – picked up domestic distribution, guaranteeing $3 million to promote the film in theaters. The cast cut their fees to get the film made. Pacino reduced his usual asking price of $6 million to $1.5 million. Lemmon received $1 million. Baldwin accepted $250,000.

Shooting commenced in August 1991 at Kaufman Astoria Studios in Queens and on location in Brooklyn over 39 days. Premiering at the Venice Film Festival in September 1992, Jack Lemmon was awarded the Volpi Cup for Best Actor. The film opened in the U.S. a month later and though it received generally favorable reviews, grossed only $10 million at the box office. Assessing the film ten years later for the DVD’s audio commentary, Foley stated, “I’ve always thought of it as a nature documentary, as if one was watching the Animal Planet channel seeing predatory beasts trying to survive.”

Opinion
Even with rain and thunder on the soundtrack and a few scenes that take place outside the two primary locations, there’s never any doubt we’re watching a play about guys in a room. Glengarry Glen Ross isn’t a classic because of its visual palette; it’s a classic because the seven best actors on the planet were cast in its seven roles. Alec Baldwin turns out one of the greatest movie monologues/rants of all time, but the film is way better than just a fireworks display of snappy dialogue. It’s the quiet desperation of the salesmen that stays with you long after the show is over.

Jack Lemmon spends the film hanging by a thread, using his voice to stave off personal disaster moment to moment. On a long list of triumphs, this is one of the greatest of Lemmon’s career. Ed Harris and Pacino lace into their dumbshit boss with all the virtuosity you’d expect – and a lot of the profanity you might not – while Kevin Spacey achieves the icy calculation of a man who knows he’ll get the last laugh. Ironically, Glengarry Glen Ross has become a sort of sales motivation video, which was probably not what Mamet had in mind. This story is about what happens when men who lie for a living finally run out of things to say.

Mike Sampson at DVD Clinic writes, “My wife finds the film boring and gets annoyed at how I stop and watch it every time that it’s on. She says the movie makes her so depressed and she feels so BAD for some of the characters in the film, she can barely sit through it. I can see that also, but I look past that and see the craft by the actors and Mamet in creating characters that were so pathetic that you couldn’t help but feel embarrassed for them at times. Truly a great movie.”

“Glengarry Glen Ross is a thinking man’s drama, perhaps too dry and stagy for some mainstream audiences, but it’s not in the message, but the delivery where the film scores the most points. No gunfire, no explosions, just acid-laced contempt and hatred bubbling under the surface. Guts and glory filmmaking of the highest order,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Brian Calhoun at digitally Obsessed writes, “This depressing look at the sorrowful world of real estate sales is not the type of film that everyone will enjoy; it lacks the overt, brash approach found in most of today’s Hollywood blockbusters. Yet, it is a throwback to the olden days of cinema, a pensive yet engrossing examination of human behavior. Those who crave a strong character-based film will undoubtedly be riveted by Mamet’s unadulterated vision of immorality and misery.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Ronna (Sarah Polley) spends Christmas Eve finishing her grocery store shift. On the verge of being evicted, she agrees to cover for co-worker Simon (Desmond Askew), a Brit who begs off work to join his buddies on a road trip to Las Vegas. Working with her pals Claire (Katie Holmes) and Mannie (Nathan Bexton), Ronna encounters two customers, Zack and Adam (Jay Mohr and Scott Wolf) looking to score some ecstasy for a holiday rave they’re headed to. Going against the advice of her pals, Ronna seeks out Simon’s dealer, the menacing Todd Gaines (Timothy Olyphant).

Ronna convinces Todd to supply her by leaving Claire with him as collateral. Meeting her customers, Ronna is introduced to a stranger named Burke (William Fichtner). Spooked, she flushes the tablets down the toilet, but comes up with an ill-advised scam to repay Todd and rescue Claire. Meanwhile, Simon wakes up in a trunk as his friends make their way to Vegas. Tiny (Breckin Meyer) and Singh (James Duval) get sick eating buffet shrimp, but Simon’s sophisticated buddy Marcus (Taye Diggs) takes him to a strip club. The Brit forgets his etiquette and ends up on the bad side of the club’s owner (J.E. Freeman).

Moving back to L.A. and back in time, Zack and Adam are revealed to be TV actors busted for possession and forced to work with Burke – a narc – to entrap their dealer. Simon is out of town and Ronna slips away, but Burke agrees to sign the boys’ release if they agree to join him and his wife Irene (Jane Krakowski) for dinner. Irene comes on to Adam and the narc parades around naked in front of Zack before offering the boys an unusual proposition. The paths of all these characters intersect at the rave.

Production history
Even before he came to Los Angeles to attend grad school at USC, John August toyed with the idea of staging a modern day version of Alice In Wonderland around a rave. The White Rabbit would be substituted with a white Volkswagen, etcetera. “Fortunately, I never wrote that script, because it would have been horrible, clever for the sake of being clever.” The first script August finished was a “romantic tragedy” set in his native Colorado. The screenwriter didn’t care for that script either, but it was good enough to land him an agent out of USC.

August still had Alice In Wonderland on his mind in 1994 when a friend with directing aspirations asked August to write a short for him. Titled X, August’s script followed a supermarket clerk and her efforts to score an ecstasy deal on Christmas Eve. Nothing ever came of the script, but August’s friends liked it enough to ask him about the other characters and what their story was. After being commissioned to adapt the children’s books How To Eat Fried Worms and A Wrinkle In Time, August expanded X into a feature length screenplay titled Go.

Every major studio August’s agent submitted the script to found the subject matter too dark and passed on it. A company called Banner Entertainment was interested. They couldn’t offer August much money, but guaranteed he would be the only writer on the film, could buy his script back in eighteen months if it hadn’t gone into production, and would be brought on as co-producer. To direct, August helped land Doug Liman, “flavor of the month in Hollywood” after an ultra-low budget comedy he directed called Swingers made stars out of Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn in 1996.

Foreign financing fell apart weeks before filming on Go was set to begin, but with Doug Liman on board and Christina Ricci and Katie Holmes interested, Paramount, Miramax, DreamWorks and Polygram all bid to distribute the film. TriStar won out and with $6.5 million in financing, shooting commenced in L.A. in March 1998. Liman served as his own director of photography and shot so fast – with August picking up second unit to save even more time – Go was in theaters in twelve months. Critics generally loved it. Audiences mostly ignored it, buying up $16.9 million of tickets in the U.S.

Opinion
Few titles have the finesse to sum up a movie as brilliantly as Go, a drug fueled rollercoaster ride that alternates between dark comedy and light suspense with terrific verve. The film’s appeal lies in its modest scale and the fact that it was made mostly by starving artist types. A down and dirty B-picture subsidized by Sony, nearly everyone involved in the production was a relative unknown or comer. With no pressure to supply an entertainment to the masses, the writer, director and most of the actors deliver the best work of their careers.

While most episodic movies feature one segment that towers over and renders the others superfluous, all three episodes of Go are invested with the visceral quirks to stand on their own. My favorite bit involves a character so baked on ecstasy he holds a telepathic conversation with a housecat. Timothy Olyphant steals the film as the brooding dirt merchant softened somewhat by the allure of Katie Holmes, who gives her best screen performance to date here. Brian Transeau – alias “BT” – and Moby contributed the film’s butt-kicking house music.

Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “Released at a time when there’s no shortage of poorly-written teen movies, Go comes on the scene like a breath of fresh air, or at least an invigorating puff of pot smoke. Rather than following spoiled brat rich kids through yet another reworking of a classic story, we get screwed-up regular folks and an original tale of bad judgement, questionable morality and repeated near-disaster.”

“Go definitely has great style and good acting, but the story left me a little flat. Liman tries to make this film edgy, by loading it with drugs and raves and sex and fast cars, but it’s all flash and no substance. This film just made me glad I didn’t know anyone like these people,” writes Lisa Skryniarz at Crazy For Cinema.

Christopher Null at filmcritic.com writes, “Go is a seamier look at life than Swingers, brilliantly deconstructing Gen X life in latter-day Los Angeles, giving a new perspective on rave culture, drug dealers, the lure of Vegas, and even Amway distributorship. Through the lead characters of Ronna (Polley), Claire (Holmes), and Simon (Askew), you’ll never look at grocery store clerks the same way.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
A multi-ethnic street gang from Coney Island known as the Warriors sends nine of its members to a citywide gang summit in the Bronx. The chosen few include their leader Cleon (Dorsey Wright), a cool headed “war chief” named Swan (Michael Beck), and the cocky Ajax (James Remar). A truce enables the Warriors to move via the subway through turf controlled by rival gangs. At the rally, the charismatic leader of the Gramercy Riffs makes a plea for the gangs to unite and take control of the streets. Before he goes into specifics, a sociopath named Luther (David Patrick Kelly) shoots him dead.

Amid the confusion, Luther blames the assassination on the Warriors. The gang flees and finds themselves far from home in hostile territory. A radio DJ (Lynne Thigpen) keeps a running tally as the Warriors cross the turf of other gangs. The Orphans are so sloppy that one of their members, Mercy (Deborah Van Valkenburgh), joins up with the Warriors. The skinhead Turnball ACs prove more ferocious, as do a female crew, the Lizzies. After being chased by the sinister Baseball Furies, the surviving Warriors make it back to Coney Island to find Luther waiting for them.

Production history
Producer Lawrence Gordon was browsing the discount rack at a bookstore in the mid-1970s when he came across a paperback called The Warriors. Published in 1965 and authored by a former employee of the New York Department of Welfare named Sol Yurick, the story was inspired by The Anabasis (loosely translated: The March Upcountry), an account by the Greek general Xenophon of 10,000 mercenaries stranded in Babylon circa 401 B.C. To reach the safety of the sea, the Greeks battled through a thousand miles of hostile enemy territory in Persia.

Yorick’s novel concerned a night in the life of a Coney Island street gang called the Dominators who face a similar peril when they venture to a peace summit in the Bronx and have to fight their way back to the ocean. Gordon liked the concept enough to option The Warriors. David Shaber adapted a screenplay. To direct, Gordon had Walter Hill in mind. Gordon had produced Hill’s two films – Hard Times and The Driver – and was prepping a western Hill had written with Roger Spottiswoode called The Last Gun. Financing fell through on the western eight weeks before shooting was set to begin.

Gordon had shown Hill the paperback and his script for The Warriors. An aficionado of terse dialogue and hard hitting, stylized action, Hill’s response to the material was, “I thought it lent itself to a very pure, chase kind of atmosphere. I think the immediate attraction was that kind of purity and simplicity.” With its lack of roles for marquee stars, Hill didn’t think any studio would be interested, but Gordon informed the director that Paramount was looking for youth oriented fare, and if he could be ready to shoot right away, they could make The Warriors instead.

Hill rewrote the script. “At the very beginning, I said, ‘Look, to do this properly and to do the vision of the novel, it really only makes sense if you do it all black and Hispanic. And the studio was not very keen on that idea.” Instead of doing a realistic take on street gangs, Hill went in the other direction. “And I later came to realize that the studio forced me into the comic book idea, I think, because it was about the only way I could make it all make sense to myself. You had to create a different kind of reality.” Hill encouraged costume designer Bobbie Mannix to go more and more extreme in her wardrobe ideas for the various gangs.

After casting in New York – David Patrick Kelly and Lynne Thigpen were discovered performing on Broadway in Working – shooting commenced in June 1978. The romantic leads were to be the characters of Fox and Mercy, played by Thomas Waites and Deborah Van Valkenburg. Waites’ attitude didn’t endear him to Hill, who rewrote the script to have Fox thrown under a subway train. Michael Beck’s chemistry with Van Valkenburgh prompted their relationship to become a focal point. Other than the brawl in the subway men’s room – which was done in Astoria Studios in Queens – the film was shot on the streets of Coney Island, the Bronx and Manhattan over four months.

Paramount vetoed a number of Hill’s ideas; a title card reading, “Some time in the future” was deemed too much like Star Wars, while post-production was too rushed for the director to insert comic book splash panels as the action progressed from chapter to chapter. Orson Welles had been approached to give an opening narration on The Anabasis, but the studio didn’t feel that a lesson in Greek history was necessary to the film either. Released in February 1979 without press screenings – the same weekend as six other films – The Warriors was panned by The New York Times, The Village Voice and most of the newspaper critics of the day.

Audiences had a different reaction. The film opened number one at the box office with blockbuster returns of $3.5 million. In some cases, audiences got too wild. In its first weekend in Southern California, a fatal stabbing in Oxnard and a shooting at a Palm Springs drive-in were linked to The Warriors. So was a stabbing in Boston a week later. Paramount responded by pulling TV and radio ads, and notified exhibitors that they were free to cancel bookings out of concern for security (at least six theaters did.) Two weeks without incident – and a rave from esteemed film critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker – resulted in a renewed advertising blitz.

By 2005, The Warriors had spawned action figures, a video game in Xbox and PlayStation 2 formats, a couple of fan websites and an “Ultimate Director’s Cut” DVD in which Hill was permitted to insert his opening narration and animated splash panels to heighten the comic book effect. Lawrence Gordon commented on the film’s enduring popularity by saying, “In the business, all the young screenwriters, all the young directors, everybody was just always … one of their favorite films. As far as I was concerned, we made a cartoon that people would not take seriously. I was way off base.”

Opinion
At first glance, The Warriors lacks the craftsmanship to overcome its dumb bell characters and dialogue (my favorite bad line comes from Mercedes Ruehl: ”Whoa, look at those muscles. I bet the chicks love all those muscles!”) There have been far better action movies, but that said, The Warriors stands out as a classic because of its creative panache. By wiping the real New York right off the screen – along with anything that would indicate the film was shot in 1978 – The Warriors achieves a very basic, yet highly stylized feel.

For a breakneck 93 minutes, we enter a nocturnal universe whose parks, subway stations and streets belong to gangs with names like the Boppers. Everyone has an insignia or affiliation. There are few guns. Combatants wail on each other with fists and bats, but no one gets injured. It’s a visceral, hypnotic and even addictive vision from Walter Hill, certainly on the short list of greatest “guys movies” ever made. Joe Walsh performed a sensational theme – “In The City” – co-written by Barry DeVorzon, who also composed the electric, frequently eerie synthesizer score.

Keith Breese at filmcritic.com writes, “There are certain films that by some unforeseen circumstance tap into a generation, a culture, a time, perfectly. The Warriors is just such a film. It is by no means a perfect movie. It is well crafted and dramatic, but what moves it beyond cult adoration and fanboy drooling is its epic storyline and intensely rendered narrative … It’s an archetypal tale of survival, of revenge, of power and corruption and the human spirit. Sounds like a load of over-educated under-paid horseshit, I admit. But The Warriors really does have that kind of power.”

“Despite being corny and dated as hell, The Warriors is a film fondly remembered by many, possessing an odd sense of timelessness, even by the harsh and modern standards of action films today. A quarter of a century later, and The Warriors remains as tense, as action-packed, and as entertaining as ever. Unfortunately, in this climate of cinematic unoriginality, this makes it ripe for a Hollywood remake … I suggest writing a letter to your congressman now, and beat the postal rush,” writes Adam Arseneau at DVD Verdict.

The Vocabulariast at Movie Cynics says, “The Warriors is an almost perfect movie. Sure some of the lines are corny and you’ll laugh out loud. Yes, some of the gangs are stupid. I’m thinking of a particular gang fond of dressing like mimes. Of course, the cast is fairly terrible except for a few exceptions, but that is what makes cult movies great, they manage to overcome all of their shortcomings and transcend the nature of their parts to create one classic experience that connects with moviegoers across all cross-sections of society. In this sense, The Warrior is the cult movie.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Max (Jamie Foxx) starts his shift driving a cab in Los Angeles. He picks up a fare named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) headed to the Federal Courthouse. Ignoring her instruction to take side streets, Max bets he can get her there faster on the Harbor Freeway. He tells Annie that the cab is only a fill-in job and that he plans to start his own limo company. She’s on the eve of prosecuting a big federal case. To ease her nerves, he gives Annie a tropical postcard he uses to relax. Touched by the gesture, she gives Max her card.

His next fare is Vincent (Tom Cruise) a non-descript man with graying hair and a gray suit. Headed to Pico Union, Vincent declares that when he’s in L.A. he can’t wait to leave; it’s too sprawling and no one knows each other. He claims to be in town to close a real estate deal, and offers Max $700 to drive him around for the night. But on their first stop, a body plunges through a window and lands on the cab. A terrified Max asks Vincent if he killed the man. “No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him.”

Vincent gives Max no choice but to drive him to their next four stops as planned. “You drive a cab. I make my rounds. You might make it through the night, come out $700 ahead.” An attorney in West Hollywood, a jazz musician in Leimert Park and a gangster in a Koreatown disco are Vincent’s next targets, as contracted by a Mexican drug kingpin (Javier Bardem). To keep him focused on their job, the hit man tries to break the cabbie out of his passive shell, which is what Max does when he discovers their last stop is Annie.

Production history
Stuart Beattie was 17 years old and living in Sydney when he took a cab home from the airport. It occurred to Beattie that he could be “some homicidal maniac sitting back here,” yet the driver entered into a long conversation with him, trusting his passenger implicitly. Beattie drafted this idea into a two-page treatment, which – while enrolled at Oregon State University – became the first screenplay he ever wrote. Titled The Last Domino, Beattie put the script on the shelf, revising and rewriting it every few years.

Waiting tables, Beattie ran into a friend named Julie Richardson, who he’d met in a UCLA Screenwriting Extension course. Richardson was now a producer looking for ideas for thrillers. Beattie pitched her The Last Domino, and she liked it. Her boss Frank Darabont did as well and set it up at HBO. After the writer turned in a draft, HBO passed. Beattie begged his agent to set up a meeting at DreamWorks, where an executive named Marc Haimes read the script over the weekend. Within a week, the studio made a purchase on Beattie’s screenplay.

Over the next three years, DreamWorks tried to kick start Collateral. Mimi Leder was attached to direct, then Janusz Kaminski. It wasn’t until Russell Crowe became interested in playing the hit man that the project started generating heat. Crowe brought in Michael Mann to direct, but by June 2003, the star had grown weary and dropped out. Mann immediately went to Tom Cruise about taking over the lead, with Adam Sandler to play the cabbie. Negotiations with Sandler didn’t pan out, and Jamie Foxx took the part instead.

Frank Darabont and Beattie had taken turns polishing each other’s script revisions, which were set in New York City. But Mann had always wanted to shoot a movie that took place in a compressed period of time in nocturnal Los Angeles and relocated the action there. Realizing that 35mm film wouldn’t pick up details visible to the naked eye at night, Mann conceived Collateral as a digital project, shooting half the film on HD video, a format that also lent the character drama greater intimacy.

Opinion
The reaction from some critics and audiences was that the film’s third act degenerated into a somewhat generic thriller. While it’s true that the psychological and verbal sparring between Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx is more exciting than their physical face off, Collateral is one of the decade’s great film noirs, a poised and taut unraveling of ten hours almost entirely at night. Just as impressive is the guided tour of Los Angeles that Michael Mann takes us on, and how the city itself emerges as a major character.

Confined to a taxi, the film is filled with claustrophobic dread, a certain gallows humor and finely tuned dialogue between its characters, without ever becoming repetitive. Instead of cliché, there are reversals and surprises. Each actor in the cast shares moments of real chemistry, even in the case of the hit man and his jazz club mark (Barry Shabaka Henley.) Foxx earned a well deserved Academy Award nomination (his first) as the stressed cabbie, while Javier Bardem’s menacing appearance is worth a rental alone.

Sara Michelle Fetters at Moviefreak.com writes, “What’s special about Michael Mann’s new crime thriller Collateral isn’t that it treads new ground or goes in new directions … No, this is a movie about the here and now, about the actions required when extreme circumstances knock, and this compression of time and space gives Collateral an epic, almost nausea-inducing, urgency most contemporary thrillers lack.”

“This was a pretty good film that could have been great, if it had not been as interested in the thriller elements. The best scenes demonstrated Michael Mann’s tendency toward creating the cinematic equivalent of a lonely saxophone solo in the wee hours of an existential LA morning. The rest was sturdy, if uninspired, thriller plotting, which was not bad, but was unwelcome,” says Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Nick Schager at Lessons of Darkness writes, “Mann’s interest in the codes of honor shared by men is diluted by the increasingly silly plot twists orchestrated to prevent the film from running out of gas, but the director’s sleek visual eye – everything in Mann’s world looks tailor-made for a men’s cologne commercial – turns nocturnal Los Angeles into a thing of jet black, star-twinkling beauty.”

“It started like any other night …” View the theatrical trailer for Collateral.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Leaving Los Angeles and driving through the desert for a business appointment, David Mann (Dennis Weaver) gets stuck behind a 1955 Peterbilt dripping with grease and billowing diesel fumes. Mann’s road etiquette appears to offend the unseen trucker, who gains speed and cuts back in front of Mann before slowing to a crawl. Mann passes him again, but when he stops at a filling station, the truck pulls next to him. All Mann sees of its driver is a pair of boots.

The trucker goes from road hog to road rage, signaling Mann to pass and almost getting him hit by oncoming traffic. The trucker then runs Mann into a fence outside a diner before disappearing. Mann pulls his thoughts together in the men’s room, but when he comes out, discovers the truck parked outside, waiting for him. Attempting to identify his assailant among the diner’s customers proves unsuccessful. Climbing back into his Plymouth Valiant, Mann realizes the trucker wants to take him off the road permanently.

Production history
Novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson was golfing when he first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Distraught by the news, Matheson and a friend headed home. Driving through a narrow pass near Simi Valley, a huge truck began tailgating them. They sped up, but so did the truck, and the day’s events only made them more anxious as they pulled off the road and the truck blew past. Matheson felt he had a story and scribbled the idea on the back of an envelope his friend had in the car.

Matheson presented the idea of a man being chased by a truck to the producers of several TV series, including The Fugitive. None of them felt there was enough of a story there. Seven years later, Matheson wrote Duel as a novelette, which was published in the April 1971 issue of Playboy Magazine. Universal Pictures obtained the film rights. This came to the attention of assistant Nona Tyson, whose boss was Steven Spielberg, a 25-year-old director looking to move from episodic television to feature films.

Spielberg read the novelette and felt it was a Hitchcock movie, “It’s like Psycho or Birds on wheels!” Tyson found out that producer George Eckstein controlled the property. Spielberg met with him and shared Eckstein’s enthusiasm for the story, as well as his idea to keep the point of view with the driver as much as possible. Spielberg showed Eckstein an episode of Columbo he’d just directed. Three days later, the producer made Spielberg an offer to direct Duel.

Eckstein had set up the project with ABC as a Movie of the Week. Spielberg was given 10 days to shoot a 73-minute film. His production manager Wally Worsley told the young director there was no way he could make a movie of this scale in that time frame on location. He advised Spielberg to shoot it on a soundstage. When Spielberg persisted in going on location, he was allowed to shoot the process plates of the road and continue making the film on location if he could stay on schedule.

Working on a fifteen mile stretch of Highway 14 north of Los Angeles in Palmdale – with Dennis Weaver in the lead and stuntmen Dale Van Sickle and Cary Loftin driving the car and truck – Spielberg wrapped only three days over schedule. Quickly edited in order to make its airdate in three and a half weeks, Duel drew a huge market share in November 1971. Spielberg shot some additional scenes (such as the truck pushing Weaver toward a train) and expanded to 90 minutes, his debut feature was released theatrically in Europe.

Opinion
Given what Steven Spielberg went on to accomplish as the most successful film director of all time, it’s easy to overlook his first feature as a TV Movie of the Week or a work in progress and little more. But Duel holds up supremely well as both a taut and riveting entertainment, and as the ideal blend of terrific material being adapted by a hungry filmmaker. Though it aired almost 40 years ago, there wasn’t a moment in the movie where I lost interest in what was happening on screen.

Technology is making great thrillers more and more rare. All a character has to do when placed in jeopardy now is pull out a cell phone. Duel is old school all the way, stripped down in narrative, with only a businessman, two vehicles and some dimes for the phone booth to develop its conflict. Spielberg’s decision not to reveal the trucker demonstrates what an ardent student of Hitchcock he was, while Billy Goldenberg’s musical score – shunning melody in favor of disorienting sounds – also punctuates dread on the road.

Dennis Prince at DVD Verdict writes, “Duel is a film that is fully captivating as it drops us into perhaps one of modern life’s most frightening situations … The viewer experiences the events from Mann’s perspective, and shares in his mounting feelings of unease and dread; the situation is all the more disconcerting because, in addition to the fact that there seems to be no reason for the trucker’s extreme actions, Mann (and, therefore, the viewer) is left slack-jawed asking the most disconcerting of questions, ‘Why me?’”

“It’s a worthwhile thriller, ingeniously conceived and masterfully executed in almost every way. Perhaps the only thing that would make me love Duel more is if Spielberg could have made it without voicing the thoughts of Weaver’s character throughout, as it seems unnecessary (at least to me). Highly recommended for all Spielberg fans, or just thrillers in general. Duel has been often imitated, but far from duplicated in sheer tension,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Matt Day at DVD Times writes, “Duel is a film that transcended the boundaries of both the genre and the medium it was designed for and became a huge influence on a generation … It still works today as a tense thriller, even if the originality of the film has long been diluted, not to mention it being such an important film in the career of a man that has become synonymous with movie-making.”

“Okay. You wanna play games.” This is awesome stuff. View the original theatrical trailer for Duel.

© Joe Valdez