Trick ‘r Treat (2009)
Written by Michael Dougherty
Directed by Michael Dougherty
Produced by Legendary Pictures/ Bad Hat Harry Productions
Running time: 82 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In “Warren Valley, Ohio” on Halloween Night, a Yuppie couple (Leslie Bibb, Tahmoh Penikett) are paid a visit by a demonic trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head. In the first of four tongue-in-cheek horror tales to follow, a junior high school principal (Dylan Baker) poisons an obnoxious candy seeker and attempts to dispose of the body before his young son finds out. Three sexually aggressive party seekers (Lauren Lee Smith, Moneca Delain, Rochelle Aytes) get separated from their more precocious friend Laurie (Anna Paquin). Costumed as Little Red Riding Hood, she soon draws the attention of a psycho killer dressed in black.

Four adolescent trick ‘r treaters (Britt McKillip, Isabelle Deluce, Alberto Ghisi, Jean-Luc Bilodeau) let an outcast named Rhonda (Samm Todd) join their expedition to the local quarry. The trick ‘r treaters intend to make an offering of eight pumpkins to the eight children who as legend has it were driven off the quarry by a homicidal bus driver; their ceremony does not go as planned. Finally, the reclusive Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox) wants to be left alone on Halloween, but receives a visit from the burlap headed trick ‘r treater, who’s been wandering in and out of all the stories. The imp seems to have retribution on its mind for All Hallow’s Eve.

Who Made It?
Michael Dougherty was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio. He attended New York University, graduating in 1996 from Tisch School of the Arts. Dougherty spent three years toiling on Nickelodeon’s Blue’s Clues, while an animated short he’d written and directed titled Season’s Greetings made it to television. Director Bryan Singer read a spec script Dougherty had written titled Trick ‘r Treat — expanding the character and themes from Dougherty’s short — and introduced him to aspiring filmmaker and screenwriter Dan Harris. After moving to L.A. independent of each other, the duo won jobs writing X2 (2003) and Superman Returns (2006) for Singer.

Championed by late makeup effects maestro Stan Winston — originally slated to produce the film — Trick ‘r Treat was developed by Legendary Pictures, the Burbank based production company behind Superman Returns, Lady In the Water and 300, co-financing and co-producing in partnership with Warner Bros. Bryan Singer of Bad Hat Harry Productions came on board as a producer in the fall of 2006 and was present on the set of Doughtery’s live action directing debut in Vancouver. Despite overwhelmingly positive word of mouth, Warner Bros. backed away from giving Trick ‘r Treat a theatrical release, finally rolling it out on DVD in October 2009.

How’d They Do It?
Seasons Greetings (1996) was a 4-minute, hand drawn and hand colored short film, which writer-director Michael Dougherty spent nine months drawing with pencils and paper at NYU. Each frame was colored with magic markers instead of paint with fellow film students helping him color many of the cels. The short — about a trick ‘r treater with a burlap sack for a head being menaced by a stalker — was broadcast on MTV’s Cartoon Sushi and Sci-Fi Channel and played a few film festivals. As Dougherty brainstormed ideas for short films or short stories he noticed they all ended up being about Halloween.

Dougherty recalled, “So I started thinking, well how neat would it be to put them all together into one movie and I guess it was kind of my way of cheating and saying here’s, look, here’s my feature film screenplay, it’s an anthology movie. But then they also started interweaving and it became one movie, just with a lot of characters whose lives start intersecting. I realized I could take this character and make him the next door neighbor of that character and make these trick-or-treaters show up at the door of this guy and so it all ended up coming together. And Sam became a character that wandered though all of their stories.”

He continued, “The first story is really just about a father and a son and introducing the son to the holiday and its traditions. The next one, it’s a group of kids who are between ages 12 and 15 and it’s when you break away from your parents and you’re walking around the town by yourself trick-or-treating. And then the next one, you’re in your twenties and the holiday becomes about nothing but partying and having sex and trying to find the hottest costume possible. The fourth one is the twilight years, when you’re old and alone and celebrating the holiday by yourself, which hopefully none of us end up like, but it’s kind of these weird four seasons of Halloween in a sense.”

Dougherty’s spec script — Trick ‘r Treat – became his calling card to meeting the director of The Usual Suspects and X-Men, Bryan Singer, in 2000. After working with his writing partner Dan Harris on drafts of X2 and Superman Returns, executive producers Thomas Tull, Jon Jashni and William Fay of Legendary Pictures were prepared to give Dougherty a shot making the transition from screenwriter to director of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty revealed, “I think the transition was made easier by the fact that Bryan Singer always had me and my writing partner Dan Harris on set throughout X2 and throughout Superman Returns and it’s interesting to realize how much I picked up just from osmosis.”

Dougherty added, “In terms of preparing, interacting with the crew, knowing how to set up a shot, getting your coverage, etc. I think I’m blessed in that I’ve had Bryan to show me the ropes as well as my writing partner Dan who directed a feature film a few years ago called Imaginary Heroes. They’ve both been available to give me pointers and tips and help me out. As well as Alex Garcia; he’s been on the set of Bryan’s movies and produced his TV projects. It’s been good, but I definitely know that those two movies, Superman Returns and X2 were basically boot camp. I’d be twenty times more terrified doing this if I hadn’t been on set for 131 days on each of those two movies.”

With Bryan Singer and Alex Garcia of Bad Hat Harry Productions as producers, Trick ‘r Treat commenced filming November 2006 in Vancouver. Singer was reportedly on set throughout the film’s nine-week shoot. Also working with Dougherty was NYU alum Breehn Burns, who’d come on board as a concept artist and would also design the film’s comic book panel title sequence. Of Burns, Dougherty added, “He referred me to a storyboard guy named Simeon Wilkins, who’s a young guy who has an amazing resume. He worked on The Ring, Monster House, he just finished Beowulf for Bob Zemeckis, and we click really well too.”

Scheduled for release October 2007, Halloween came and went without Warner Bros. giving audiences Trick ‘r Treat. Legendary Pictures screened it December 2007 at the annual Butt-Numb-a-Thon in Austin, Texas, an invitation-only film festival hosted by the architect of Ain’t It Cool News, Harry Knowles. Avid dispatches from film geeks who’d seen the movie would trickle through the popular website for the next two years. “Massawyrm”: “Horror fans are going to have a ton of fun with this and I fully expect this to take its rightful place as the holiday classic that gets pulled out every year, much the same way Halloween was for many of us in our youth. It is a film very much about the holiday and its spirit, and it captures that wonderfully.”

Warner Bros. began to license Trick ‘r Treat T-shirts, graphic novels and action figures, but the studio was at a loss over how to market the movie. Dougherty mused, “I remember having a conversation with, you know, an executive who shall remain nameless about this, and he said, ‘Oh, it’s a horror movie.’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ He goes, ‘Well, we’ll target the Saw and the Hostel demographic.’ And I said, ‘No, no, no, that’s not them.’ ‘Well but they’re the horror audience.’ ‘No, they’re not this horror audience.’ Horror itself isn’t just a genre. There’s so many subgenres to it, just like there’s so many types of comedy. You have your Wayans Brothers comedies and you have your Judd Apatow comedies. Very different audiences. And so, sometimes it can be difficult to try to explain horror as a genre to people.”

Despite successful screenings at Screamfest L.A. in October 2008, Comic Con in July 2009 and recently at L.A.’s New Beverly Cinema, Warner Bros. shuttled Trick ‘r Treat onto Video On Demand and DVD in October 2009. Reviewers were effusive with praise. Bill Gibron, Pop Matters: “Almost too clever for its own good, Trick ‘r Treat is a really good film. In fact, it’s so unusual in its practical F/X approach and retro direct to video charms that a second viewing is definitely needed before confirming its almost masterpiece status.” Alex Billington, First Showing.Net: “There hasn’t been a horror movie this original and this inventive since Wes Craven brought us Scream in 1996. I guess it only took twelve years to finally find the next great horror franchise.”

Commenting on his film’s winding road to release, Dougherty suggested it was caught between two business models, one dying out, the other taking its baby steps. “We’re reaching a day and age where the generation of kids growing up expect to have the option of going to the theater or watching a movie at home. I think that window is going to close completely, soon. But I think, in the meantime, I think it’s smart for distributors to look at that limited-release fan demand method of distribution.” He added, “Why not try to open it in two cities and let the fans post on Facebook or send out tweets about getting it in their hometown? I really wish we could have tried that model with Trick ‘r Treat, but by the time the decision had been made it was too late.”

Should I Care?
Here’s a movie stoked by such an outpouring of love from its target demographic that I’m left to ponder whether I even saw the same film the fanboys did. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t really for people who read reviews, it’s for the people who love those movies that aren’t screened for critics. It’s also blatantly the work of a first time screenwriter and director. At 82 minutes with credits, Doughtery gets in a hurry introducing too many characters without giving us a reason to care about a single one. Some of his ideas are sketchy and poorly executed. Burlap head — referred to as “Sam” in the credits for reasons that are never explained — never makes the leap from doodle to compelling screen creep.

There’s a segment here — the film’s best — about 13-year-olds trick ‘r treating that recalls those Saturday afternoon, kids on a mission movies I grew up with like The Goonies or The Monster Squad. That’s nice, and so is Breehn Burns’ gorgeous title sequence with comic book panels illustrated with scenes from the movie flipping by. Douglas Pipes supplements this with a fantastic musical score that easily surpasses anything Danny Elfman has composed in 16 years. Trick ‘r Treat isn’t a bad movie. I can name 10 recent horror movies that were a lot worse. But if this is destined to become a Halloween standard, I’ll be watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Superman Returns Writers Ride a Wave of Success” By Torquin Hedd. Moving Pictures Magazine, July 2006

“Quartet are in for Treat” By Pamela McClintock. Variety, 9 November 2006

“Trick ‘r Treat: Writer/Director Michael Dougherty, On Set in Vancouver, BC Canada” BloodyDisgusting.com, 11 January 2007

“Director on what the long-delayed release has meant for Trick ‘r Treat” By Patrick Lee. Sci-Fi Wire, 28 July 2009

“Q&A: Trick ‘r Treat writer-director Michael Dougherty” Heat Vision Blog. The Hollywood Reporter, 8 October 2009

Trick ‘r Treat. DVD audio commentary with Michael Dougherty. Warner Home Video (2009)

Surveillance (2008)
Written by Jennifer Lynch & Kent Harper
Directed by Jennifer Lynch
Produced by Lago Film/ Arclight Films/ Blue Rider Pictures
Running time: 97 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Following a gruesome murder, FBI Special Agents Sam Hallaway (Bill Pullman) and Elizabeth Anderson (Julia Ormond) arrive at a rural police station to interview three witnesses. A drug whore (Pell James) recounts driving out to the middle of nowhere with her boyfriend (Mac Miller) to score; the couple stops to assist a family station wagon stranded by a flat tire. The family’s only surviving member — an observant 8-year-old (Ryan Simpkins) — recounts noticing a strange van earlier in the day, but her mother (Cheri Oteri) and stepfather (Hugh Dillon) ignored her when The Violent Femmes tune “Day After Day” came on the radio.

Officer Bennett (Kent Harper) is a wreck following the murder of his partner out on the road. Under questioning, Bennett admits that his partner (French Stewart) and he liked to pass their time shooting out the tires of passing motorists and victimizing the drivers. Each surviving witness recounts the arrival of two masked killers along the roadside differently. Also participating in the investigation is Captain Billings (Michael Ironside), a receptionist (Caroline Aaron) with intimate access to coroner’s reports, an eager to please rookie cop (Charlie Newmark) and another local policeman (Gill Gayle) hostile towards the FBI.

Who Made It?
Jennifer Lynch is the daughter of painter Peggy Reavey and filmmaker David Lynch. Growing up in Michigan, she would serve as a PA on the set of Blue Velvet and adapt The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, the bestselling book tie-in to her father’s heralded TV mini-series Twin Peaks. Lynch made her screenwriting and directorial debut at the age of 23 with the critically reviled Boxing Helena (1993). The gothic drama about a surgeon (Julian Sands) who kidnaps the object of his desire (Sherilyn Fenn) and amputates her arms and injured legs incurred a frenzy of bad press when producers took the picture’s original star — Kim Basinger — to court for backing out of the film at the behest of her agents.

Taking time to recuperate from several spinal surgeries, kick drug and alcohol addiction and raise a daughter by herself, Lynch paired with a friend — Kent Harper — to rework a script he’d written about witches into a Rashomon-like take on the serial killer genre. After numerous rejections, David Lynch agreed to lend his name to his daughter’s project as an executive producer. Germany’s Lago Film agreed to finance Jennifer Lynch’s second feature film at a budget of $10 million. American audiences got a look at Surveillance in May 2009 on video-on-demand, followed by a limited theatrical release the following month.

How’d They Do It?
Jennifer Lynch recalled the genesis of the Boxing Helena fiasco. “I was reading poetry at a fucking nightclub before I was old enough to drink. This person came up to me and said ‘I have this screenplay I’d like you to write about a woman who is cut up and put into a box.’ I said ‘I won’t do it.’ They said, ‘What would you like to do?’ I said ‘I’ve always had a fascination with the Venus de Milo, who has no legs and no arms. I have a story I’d like to tell based on that.’ But I didn’t think in a million fucking years — I mean I was reading goddamn poetry, which is the most schmaltzy fucking thing you can do in L.A. — and I never fucking thought it would go anywhere.”

18 years old when given the idea, 19 when she wrote the script, Lynch’s directing experience was limited to watching her dad work. To her amazement, Madonna expressed interest in starring in Boxing Helena. The pop icon would graciously back out to do Evita for Alan Parker and Andrew Lloyd Webber instead, but Kim Basinger came on board to replace her. Four weeks before shooting was to begin, Basinger’s reps at CAA coaxed her into dropping out as well. Main Line Pictures would retaliate with a breach of contract suit carried out in a televised trial. The jury awarded the producers $8.1 million in damages, but the ruling was later overturned.

Lynch recalled the tumult with Kim Basinger by stating, “If the creative folks had been left to themselves, it would have been settled over a dinner. But because suits got involved, they decided they were going to wipe the slate clean. You don’t bring an army sergeant into a sandbox with kids. She was ordered not to speak to me. I wasn’t allowed to speak to her. The whole thing was stupid. It became a nightmare for all of us. None of us look back on it well.” Scathing reviews, three surgeries to repair critical spinal injuries (suffered in an auto accident at age 19), getting clean from drugs and alcohol and raising a daughter as a single parent all kept Lynch from jumping behind a camera again.

Surveillance began when a friend of Lynch’s — actor/ producer/ screenwriter Kent Harper — approached her with a script he’d written. “It was called Three Witches, Tres Brujas, and it was a really great story, but I didn’t want to do something about witches and I wasn’t quite sure what had happened and this conversation was born about things that happen in the middle of nowhere and what terrifies you. We just started throwing things out on the table and he did have two very corrupt cops in the story. I said, ‘That interests me, and the clarity with which children see interests me, and I haven’t seen a serial killer film the way I want to see a serial killer film and I want to confuse people about what good and bad look like.”

Jennifer Lynch sent a rough draft of Surveillance to actor Bill Pullman. He turned it down, but Lynch remained a big enough fan to recommend her father cast the actor in Lost Highway (1997). Lynch would finally share her script with her dad, prompting an urgent late night phone call. Lynch was aghast at the way his daughter wrapped up the story and challenged her to write a more optimistic ending. Even after Jennifer heeded the fatherly advice, no one expressed much interest in bankrolling the movie. She recalled, “This was very hard to get off the ground. My father called me after he read the script a couple of years ago and he said, ‘You’re the sickest bitch I know!’”

She added, “But he called ages later and said, ‘What’s happening with your movie?’ and I said ‘Zilch.’ I told him I don’t know if it’s the material, if it’s the 15 years raising a kid, if it’s Boxing Helena, but nobody’s interested. And he said, ‘What if I put my name on it?’ I’m like, ‘C’mon Dad, you know how I feel about it.’ Because, believe me, it’s a big issue for me. But that day I typed: ‘Executive producer: David Lynch’, and within 48 hours I had more offers than I knew what to do with. I swear, any screenwriter wanting a little attention should just write ‘Steven Spielberg’ on their script. Who’s checking?” Kent Harper traveled to Germany and in November 2005, it was announced that he’d hooked producer Marco Mehlitz and Lago Film to provide $10 million in financing.

Nine months later, actor Billy Burke (Twilight) agreed to take the lead role and Surveillance was slated to begin shooting in October 2006. But Burke became the latest actor to get cold feet with Lynch and dropped out. Lynch phoned Bill Pullman and begged him to give her script another read. Lynch recalled, “He said, ‘Why did I say no?’ I said, ‘I don’t know. You never told me. Can I send it to you?’ He said, ‘Do it right now.’ And two hours later he called me and said, ‘I’m in.’ And Julia actually found me. She read the script and called and I said, ‘The Julia Ormond? You’re so classy and beautiful and awesome.’ And then I thought, that’s a genius idea. That’s the perfect FBI agent.”

Surveillance commenced a 22-day shooting schedule April 2007 in Saskatchewan, Canada near the town of Regina. “They call it the town that rhymes with fun. It’s just outside Big Beaver too so it’s just crude joke after crude joke.” Lynch had envisioned shooting the film in Santa Fe, but the New Mexico Film Office did not embrace the script. Lynch added, “There we were in Regina where they give amazing tax breaks because it’s Canada, incredible crews, incredible production facilities, and their prairies look like middle America and really afforded me the opportunity to aim the camera in any direction and just see that vast nothingness and feel how everything is seen and yet there’s nowhere to go. It’s like there’s all this space but you can’t go anywhere.”

Critics were not favorable to what they saw. Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: “It seems doubtful that Surveillance, a would-be transgression that tries to squeeze dark laughs from the spectacle of human suffering, would be taking up space in theaters if its director were not the daughter of a name filmmaker.” Robert Abele, The Los Angeles Times: “At the end, all is horrifically explained, the body count inflates, yet hardly anything makes sense. In Papa Lynch’s films, little is explained, yet because he’s so gifted at mining our deepest fears and scariest desires, logic is excused.” Scott Mendelson, Film Threat: “In the end, Surveillance is a puzzle box film that has nothing to offer except the various puzzle pieces. The characters do not stand out, the drama is not compelling, and the screenplay is light on even remotely interesting dialogue.”

After playing in Europe summer 2008, Americans got a look at Surveillance on HDNet Ultra VOD in May 2009 and in a limited theatrical release in June. Playing only three theaters, it took in $27,349 at the U.S. box office and grossed $974,522 overseas. Jennifer Lynch appeared content to have finished a film after her 15-year hiatus. “The good news is: everybody can make a film. The bad news is: everybody can make a film. And everyone should. It’s just really tricky so it makes those available spots and moments of financing really hard to get and you really earn it. Making a film is hard enough. Starting it’s hard, doing it’s hard, finishing it’s hard, and so I champion everyone who gets it done whether they’re doing it themselves or through a studio or independent financing.”

Should I Care?
Loaded with enough gore to win Best Director for Jennifer Lynch at the 2008 New York City Horror Film Festival — and to get her the job directing Nagin: The Snake Woman, a straight-up horror flick — Surveillance is more coherent than I remember Natural Born Killers being, so as Joe Bob Briggs might opine, if you liked that, you’re gonna love this. Lynch keeps the blood flowing, but her film is dry as a bone everywhere that counts. If you expect suspense, interesting characters, atmosphere or passable dialogue, don’t waste your time on this. Lynch is a fine person, I’m sure, but after two films in 15 years, she’s yet to demonstrate why she should be making movies.

Like The Boondock Saints — which was also ridiculous past the point of being watchable — Lynch is either unable or unwilling to involve the audience in anything emotionally and in an effort to compensate, goes for farce. Instead of Dennis Hopper or Robert Blake, Lynch’s boogeyman is played by … French Stewart, TV’s French Stewart, the guy most likely to be confused for Fred Schneider of The B-52s and least likely to terrorize anyone. Like the ultraviolence, Stewart’s mere appearance seems to be the joke. I didn’t laugh. What’s least amusing about Surveillance is seeing Bill Pullman and Julia Ormond — two actors still rolling strikes and not working near enough in film — wading through garbage like this.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Jennifer Lynch: Life with David and the Turkey of the Decade” By James Mottram. The Independent, 22 February 2009

“Even Hitler Deserved To Be Loved” By John Patterson. The Guardian, 27 February 2009

“Director Jennifer Lynch Interview Surveillance” By Sheila Roberts. The Collider, 22 June 2009

“Jennifer Lynch” By Alex Simon. The Hollywood Interview, 25 June 2009

“LiC Interview: Jennifer Lynch — Surveillance” By Craig Kennedy. Living in Cinema, 25 June 2009

The Promotion (2008)
Written by Steve Conrad
Directed by Steve Conrad
Produced by Dimension Films
Running time: 86 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“Hi, I’m Doug Stauber. I’m assistant manager at Donaldson’s Grocery, where customers come first. Even customers who are nuts,” explains Stauber (Seann William Scott) as a man babbling in some unknown language harangues him over a box of Teddy Grahams, slaps Stauber in the face and flees the store. Despite his unenviable job, Stauber tries to stay positive, hoping to earn a promotion to full manager of a new Donaldson’s. With assurances from his clueless boss (Fred Armisen) that he’s “a shoe-in”, Stauber buys a house so that he and his wife (Jenna Fischer) will no longer have to endure the banjo playing couple next door.

Trouble arrives from Quebec, where assistant manager Richard Wehlner (John C. Reilly) transfers from a Canadian store. With his Scottish wife (Lili Taylor) in tow, the born again, exceedingly nice Wehlner reveals he’s applied for the managerial position Stauber desperately needs. Neither man wins over their needling area manager (Gil Bellows): the tightly wound Stauber eventually blows his cool with a crew of antagonistic black kids who hang out in the parking lot, while Wehlner — an addict in recovery — seems a bit slow paced for Chicago. As their competition becomes more intense, niceties between the men quickly go out the window.

Who Made It?
Steve Conrad grew up in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, but ultimately made his way to Northwestern University, where he got involved with the media group Chicago Filmmakers and directed a few shorts. An exercise assigned to him in a creative writing class about two old men in a park became the basis for a screenplay Conrad wrote at the age of 19 titled Wrestling Ernest Hemingway. The script not only landed Conrad an agent, it was produced in 1993, with Robert Duvall and Richard Harris starring. The film was a commercial failure, but worse, Conrad struggled for the next 12 years, going into debt and falling out of the industry, unable to support himself as a writer.

A script Conrad banged out in 10 days titled The Weather Man brought him back, filmed in 2004 starring Nicolas Cage. It wasn’t a hit either, but a life story Conrad had been entrusted with adapting — The Pursuit of Happyness — was a blockbuster. While the Will Smith drama was still shooting in 2005, the heat around Conrad and his latest script — Quebec – got the attention of Chicago-based producer Steven A. Jones and an executive VP at Hyde Park Entertainment named Jessika Borsiczky Goyer. The pair optioned the script and when Seann William Scott agreed to play the lead, Dimension Films stepped up to bankroll Conrad’s directorial debut, which would change its title to The Promotion.

How’d They Do It?
Talking with AustinDaze correspondent Bree Perlman in June 2008, Steve Conrad recalled the genesis of The Promotion. “About six years ago I was just writing a lot about men and work and the different dramas and conflicts that happen in the work place. I felt like I had a few more things to say about work but I wanted to write from the perspective of a younger person who had reached a phase of life where they realize there are demands on them to provide for their loved ones. I wanted the character to be in his early 30s and not be exceptional; to not be able to play the violin or be a physician. He was one of those kids that didn’t buckle down in school. I wanted a C student to wake up one day and realize he is in a race to carve out some space in the world.”

“Anyway I watched some weird stuff happen in my neighborhood grocery store with this assistant manager. My neighborhood is strange and tense — it’s a mix of professionals and street gangs. There was this grocery store employee who is like 30 and he was on the far side of the parking lot, the other side of which was occupied by this gang. The gang was messing around and just slinging curses at the customers and I thought: ‘Wow, this kid is going to have to walk over there and ask these guys politely to leave.’ And I thought: ‘They aren’t going to listen to him.’ This is going to be good. He walks over and they completely ripped him to pieces. He was demeaned and humiliated. The only thing he had to represent his authority was this little yellow vest that said ‘Courtesy Patrol’ on it. And on the back it said, ‘Have a nice day.’”

Conrad continued, “Part of me thought it was the funniest thing but I was also moved to admire him greatly because he went back to work. He didn’t go jump in front of a bus or take off his uniform and walk home naked. He didn’t quit. I found that, after having laughed at it, I was overcome with total admiration for the strength of will for this kid to just go back to work — because you know tomorrow it’s going to be the exact same. And I thought I could make a movie that demonstrates that you win when you don’t quit like that. I also realized the landscape was great because you can make a smaller movie if you have the grocery store but get a bigger picture because you have the battleground for this. So started messing around with grocery store comedy.”

Jim Carrey spent time attached to the Richard Wehlner role and was interested in seeing Tom Cruise play the straight man opposite him. Neither of those options panned out and Conrad went to Seann William Scott instead. “I wanted Seann for The Promotion really, really early. He’s very good at making people laugh, which is beyond a knack: It’s a skill. I knew my movie wouldn’t go as broad as the things he’d done before, but if he could make me laugh in that setting, he could make me laugh in other settings for sure. He actually came recommended to me from Old School [director Todd Phillips], who said, ‘Look, he stole a scene from Will Ferrell, and that’s not easy to do. You should take him seriously.’”

With Seann William Scott on board, Dimension Films agreed to bankroll the picture at a budget of $6.4 million. John C. Reilly — finally getting attention as a comic actor — joined him and a 30-day shooting schedule commenced July 2006, with director of photography Lawrence Sher behind the camera. Conrad recalled, “We shot over the summer in Chicago, and our summers are as hard as our winters, just in the opposite way. It was hot outside, and then we went inside we couldn’t run the air conditioners because the sound of the machines kept killing our sound, so, we shot without any air conditioning. And it’s, you know, there’s harder jobs than that, but it was unpleasant for sure. We had food that was not being warmed and not being cooled and so after two days, it wasn’t edible, and became sort of an awful environment to work in.”

Screened March 2008 at the South By Southwest Music and Film Festival in Austin, The Promotion went over great with an audience, but presented marketing challenges for Dimension. Conrad mused, “I think I stay in the awkward moment too long. I live in it. I make a scene around it. And there’s often an energy in watching films where some people just want to get to the ‘higher moment’ … But at some point — and this is another way I miss people — you know the pay-off, the fulfillment of what the character is trying to chase, can feel very, very modest, unless it’s you. Unless it’s you trying to make a difference in renting or buying your house. I think, at the end of the day, people don’t want it to be that small in the movies.”

Critics registered indifference. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “It’s one of those off-balance movies that seems searching for the right tone.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “The Promotion edges toward some pretty bleak stuff. Then it steps back and laughs, like an office slacker.” Josh Rosenblatt, The Austin Chronicle: “Over and over again, The Promotion hints at the movie it might have been — slapstick comedy or social satire or relationship tragedy or, most promisingly, an exploration of the damaged, neutered American male psyche — if it had just bothered to decide which movie it wanted to be. Instead, it tries to be everything at once and ends up failing to be much of anything at all.”

Opening June 2008 in the United States, The Promotion never expanded beyond 81 theaters, where it only made $408,709. Conrad remained upbeat about his film’s reception. “My dear friends, the people who when I make laugh it means the most to me, they don’t even go to movies anymore. They rip ‘em or they watch ‘em on DVD. It’s hard to say. And it shouldn’t be that immediate. I think there’s time for movies to get under your bones and last more than two weekends. For me, just staying busy is my aim, just trying to keep a job. My aim in shooting it was just trying not to be fired, literally. I’m working for Harvey and Bob Weinstein — it’s not to be taken for granted. They care about their movies. They watch the dailies. They watch the auditions. So, they know what you’re up to. And if you’re ‘in it’, they know how deeply in it you are.”

Should I Care?
The Promotion is so sharp edged and so funny — I laughed three times in the first three minutes — that before you can really wonder if it’s going to stay this good, it doesn’t. First-time director Steve Conrad is all over the shop, veering from broad office satire to buddy movie to dark comedy to light drama and at its lowest point, a motivational seminar for the contemporary male. Despised equally by upper management and by their goofy employees, Scott and Reilly’s characters seem kicked in the balls far more often than really called for, while neither Jenna Fischer nor Lili Taylor (looking luminescent) are permitted to have much of an impact on the story at all.

While I was never able to get comfortable with the concept of Seann William Scott playing the straight man (part of the problem lies with Conrad for writing such a lackluster part), the reason to watch The Promotion is John C. (Motherfuckin’) Reilly. Perpetrating a pitch perfect Canadian accent and embodying all the good natured, White Bread goofiness our northern neighbors can exhibit, Reilly is so good, bringing wit and sympathy to the one character that seems to have excited Conrad: a loser trying to keep it together long enough to gain some respect out of life. Conrad had The King of Comedy in his sights here, but even if he misses the bullseye, the dude tries.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“The Long Road Back to the Big Screen” By Ed Koziarski. The Chicago Reader, 6 March 2008

“Seann William Scott and Steve Conrad” By David Wolinsky. The A.V. Club, 5 June 2008

“The Promotion writer/director Steve Conrad” By Bree Perlman. AustinDaze, 18 June 2008

The Promotion. DVD audio commentary by Steve Conrad, Jessika Borsiczky Goyer and Steven A. Jones. Dimension Home Video (2008)

“The Promotion’s Steve Conrad Promotes Himself” By Brian Tallerico. The DeadBolt

Quid Pro Quo (2008)
Written by Carlos Brooks
Directed by Carlos Brooks
Produced by Sanford-Pillsbury Productions/ HDNet Films
Running time: 82 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you. I only know what the police and coroner reports said.” So begins a personal remembrance from Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl), correspondent for “Public Radio New York”. His editor (Jessica Hecht) shares with him a tip from an anonymous caller — known only as Ancient Chinese Girl — who claims a man entered a bayside hospital and tried bribing an intern to chop off his leg. The tipster wants to meet Isaac, who’s been paralyzed and restricted to a wheelchair since the age of eight, the only survivor of a car accident that killed his parents in upstate New York.

After Ancient Chinese Girl dispatches him to a clandestine gathering of “wannabes” — able bodied men and women who share the unusual desire to be disabled — Isaac finally meets his wily tipster, an art conservator named Fiona (Vera Farmiga). Fascinated by why someone would want to be paralyzed who isn’t, Fiona agrees to tell Isaac what she knows about this underworld if, quid pro quo, he helps her understand what it’s like being disabled. Daffy and unpredictable, Fiona’s complicated feelings for the reporter change when a pair of antique spectators shoes suddenly give Isaac the ability to walk.

Who Made It?
Carlos Brooks attended Western Washington University as an English major and was later accepted into USC on a merit scholarship to study film and writing. Brooks would win an Abraham Polonsky Award for screenwriting at USC and marry classmate Helen Childress, who was hot as a bottle rocket after authoring the 1994 Winona Ryder/Ethan Hawke flick Reality Bites. Brooks spent the next decade carving out a career as a screenwriter. Among his scripts was a spec called Empire – which Robert Zemeckis was to produce through his company Imagemovers — that took place amid construction of the Empire State Building.

In 2004, Brooks appeared to finally be getting his shot at the director’s chair through HDNet Films, a division of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment. Mark Cuban is the billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and once spent a day managing a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas after Cuban accused a game referee of being unfit to run a DQ. Sticking his big toe into film financing, Cuban has had an energetic run, producing Good Night and Good Luck, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bubble, among many others. HDNet Films was launched to develop, finance and produce feature films to be shot in High Definition.

How’d They Do It?
The idea that would become Quid Pro Quo began germinating in 2000 with Carlos Brooks, whose focus of study at USC had been Alfred Hitchcock. “I wrote the script just to write. I didn’t write it to direct or anything; I just wanted to write something different. I’ve always wanted to write a detective story, and what this really is is a detective story in disguise. It’s an investigative journalistic piece, and the best detective stories are the ones where the detective ultimately realizes he’s been investigating himself. I would never write an actual detective story — at least I don’t think I would — but that’s what this secretly is.”

Brooks’ original idea involved an agoraphobic and a pair of headphones that gave him access to the outside world, Rear Window style. Googling through disabilities, Brooks stumbled upon the wannabe subculture. “I kind of vectored in on them. I’ve never met anybody who had Body Dysmorphic Disorder — that’s what it’s really called, I guess. I just kind of lurked, and I was fascinated by the tone of their writing. They knew they sounded quote, unquote ‘crazy.’ It’s entirely different talking about something we think is crazy without knowing you’re crazy. They were incredibly self-aware, painfully self-aware and wanted acceptance despite what they were saying.”

Intended as a writing sample, Quid Pro Quo started attracting interest from directors. Brooks decided he could do no worse himself and working with producers Midge Sanford & Sarah Pillsbury, landed a $2 million commitment from HDNet for his directing debut. He faced a long slog after being greenlit in 2004. Pre-production was shut down for 11 months after Brooks reached an impasse with the producers over casting. For the female lead, Brooks was set on an unknown named Vera Farmiga. “To find an actress who can make that role sympathetic and living and breathing was too good to pass up. When you find the right actor, you stick by them.”

Vera Farmiga mused, “I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote and Love Boat. Quirky detective stories and oddball romances. I imagine initially that’s what drew me. I love romance. I am always on the quest for an unusual romance, and this was it. There always has to be something about the character in the script that really turns my head and Fiona — I have a stiff neck from craning at this one. My initial response was she’s that woman in your life that you are absolutely terrified of but at the same time have to be around. She fascinated me. And the fact that it is just an unusual detective love story, and also a taboo subject that you don’t hear anything about.”

Quid Pro Quo began rolling October 2005 for an 18-day shoot in New Jersey. Brooks revealed, “I shot on a Sony 900 camera, and we used the 950 for a few scenes where it was a tight space. My production designer, Roshelle Berliner, and the DP Michael McDonough, and I experimented with shiny metallic surfaces to trick the video lens into thinking it’s film. I don’t know why this works, but it does. It tricks the chip in the video camera into softening those hard video lines and edges. If you walked on the set, you would think it’s the strangest looking place because Isaac’s apartment was full of wallpaper with metallic inlays. But on video, it looks like film. It gives it this Sidney Lumet-circa-The Verdict look, and that’s what I wanted.”

Joining Vera Farmiga was Nick Stahl, the best John Connor (in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and the lead in the HBO series Carnivale. Stahl elaborated on the film’s difficult journey. “We actually ended up re-shooting some stuff, and adding a couple of scenes. I think it was the kind of thing that, it was so clear on the page, the story, and the tone of it was so clear, but, for whatever reason, it’s such a different process once you actually film it and then you actually go to start editing it.” He added, “A lot of people didn’t get it, and that was the reason why we had to go back and retool some stuff. Carlos Brooks worked endlessly for so long. He kept cutting it and working at it.”

Screened January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, critics went along with Quid Pro Quo, for the most part. Justin Chang, Variety: “An exceedingly odd meeting of the minds (and bodies) occurs in Quid Pro Quo, a strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters’ feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.” Jenni Miller, Premiere: “Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.”

Should I Care?
Quid Pro Quo has been unfortunate to draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash, but I didn’t find anything disturbing about the movie. It’s edgy and a bit dark, but immensely fresh, sharp witted, impeccably well cast and I would even describe this as a film David Fincher might have shot if given only $1.6 million. I don’t care for the title and wonder why Mark Cuban is producing so many movies that barely see the light of day. Distributed by his Magnolia Pictures in June 2008, Quid Pro Quo never expanded beyond four theaters in the United States, grossing $11,864. This movie deserved an attentive publicity campaign and a much better commercial fate.

I liked how Quid Pro Quo defies categorization — if I had to, I’d label it an unusual romantic comedy with mystery — and forced me to both pay attention and react to it, as opposed to just watching passively. The dialogue has a lot of crackle and pop, and for a film with such a grotesque sounding premise, is pretty funny. Rachel Black puts in a cute performance as Stahl’s office buddy. But the chief reason to see this is the daffy Vera Farmiga, who once again spins through a movie like a punk ballerina. Carlos Brooks demonstrates a sharp ear, a terrific eye and great taste not only delivering a solid debut, but executing a film with such a high degree of difficulty.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Carlos Brooks, Quid Pro Quo” The Reeler, 20 January 2008

“Local Film School Drop-out Gets into Sundance” By Sam Vicchrilli. The Seatle Times, 25 January 2008

“Nick Stahl” By Terry Keefe. Venice Magazine, March 2008

“Vera Farmiga Offers up Quid Pro Quo” By Jenni Miller. Premiere, June 2008

“Interview: Carlos Brooks on Quid Pro Quo” By Matt Singer. IFC. Com, 13 June 2008

What the *&#! Is This About?
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden,” narrates a young man we will come to know only as the Narrator (Edward Norton) as someone holds a gun barrel in his mouth. Minutes before he’s to witness dozens of office buildings explode in controlled demolition, The Narrator explains how he got here. Sleepwalking through life as an insurance claims adjuster for a major car company and gripped in what he refers to as “the Ikea nesting instinct,” he comments, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” Unable to sleep, the Narrator crashes support groups for testicular cancer, blood parasites or sickle cell anemia, finding that when people think you have a terminal disease, they listen to you.

The Narrator’s catharsis is threatened by the appearance of another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who attends group therapy because “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.” The Narrator’s day job sends him across the country investigating fatal car crashes to determine if a recall would be cost effective for his company. He dreams of a midair collision to break the monotony, while seated next to him, a dapper soap peddler named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) demonstrates how ridiculous the emergency landing procedures on an airliner are. When he returns home to find his apartment has mysteriously exploded, the Narrator meets Tyler for a drink. His new buddy points out the Narrator’s dependence on consumer culture. “The things you own end up owning you.”

In the parking lot, Tyler asks the Narrator for a favor. “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” If for no other reason than they’ve never been in a fight, the men wail on each other before calling it a night. The Narrator is invited to crash at the decrepit house Tyler occupies between jobs as a renegade caterer and film projectionist. The boys’ nocturnal fisticuffs start drawing the attention of other disaffected young men. Tyler gives it a name – Fight Club – and sets some ground rules. “The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.” Marla re-enters the Narrator’s life when she and Tyler meet and engage in round the clock, rambunctious sex in the house. Tyler then hatches a plan to expand the social anarchy of Fight Club from the basement to the streets.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
After graduating the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, Chuck Palahniuk returned to his hometown of Portland and wrote for a local newspaper (The Oregonian) for a time. He ended up having to take work writing service procedures for freight trucks. It was during a trip to the Pacific Coast Trail that Palahniuk got into a dispute with some campers. The author recalled, “The other people who were camping near us wanted to drink and party all night long, and I tried to get them to shut up one night, and they literally beat the crap out of me. I went back to work just so bashed, and horrible looking. People didn’t ask me what had happened. I think they were afraid of the answer. I realized that if you looked bad enough, people would not want to know what you did in your spare time. They don’t want to know the bad things about you. And the key was to look so bad that no one would ever, ever ask. And that was the idea behind Fight Club.”

Palahniuk used his newfound affinity for brawling to write Fight Club over a three-month period in 1995. He later mused, “I never expected the book to be published. I had been rejected so many times because my work was seen as too dark and depressing, that when I sent off Fight Club, I thought it was just a fuck off to New York publishing. It was my last gesture.” But within weeks of sending a first draft to his agent, the galleys came to the attention of Raymond Bongiovanni, a literary scout for Fox 2000 in New York. He phoned president of production Laura Ziskin, who recalled, “He was very excited about it, not sure it was a movie, but sure he had read the work of an exciting new voice. Thirty six hours later I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night reading passages of the book out loud to my husband.”

Big name producers had passed on the book before it got to Joshua Donen and Ross Bell, who were enthusiastic about the material. Donen ultimately zeroed in on David Fincher – the director of Seven – imploring him to read Fight Club. Amid protests that he was too busy, Fincher finally cracked open the book. He later recalled, “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny. I knew Marla. I knew the Narrator, I knew the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I knew his need for Tyler. I knew why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.” Much to the amazement of everyone involved with the project at that point, Fox expressed interest in actually producing Fight Club. Ross Bell reportedly told friends, “This is a seditious movie about blowing up people like Rupert Murdoch.” Fincher had sworn never to make a movie at the Murdoch owned studio again after the ordeal he’d gone through over his first feature film, Alien³.

David Fincher recalled, “I didn’t have a very good time with Fox the first time, so I was basically going thinking, ‘Oh, no that’s over with.’ But Josh called and told me to just go in and talk with Laura Ziskin, and tell her that I wanted to make it. So I do – I go in and talk with Laura Ziskin and I told her, ‘Here’s the movie I’m interested in making and I’m not interested in watering any of this shit down. I’m not interested in explaining, but I think I can make a movie that you don’t need to have read the book in order to understand what’s going on. I have no interest in making this anything other than what this book is, which is kind of a sharp stick in the eye.’ She was very cool with it. We could have made it a three million dollar or five million dollar Trainspotting version, or we could do the balls-out version where planes explode and it’s just a dream and buildings explode and it’s for real – which is the version I preferred to do – and she backed it.”

Fincher proposed developing a script on his own, without taking a fee, but also without studio executives needling him with notes. After eight months working with screenwriters Jim Uhls and Andrew Kevin Walker and producer Art Linson, Fincher came back with a script, a $60 million budget, a schedule – including stages on the studio lot that Fincher wanted to shoot in – and two leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Norton recalled, “Fincher sent me the novel, and I read it in one sitting. It’s obviously a surreal piece that operates at an almost allegorical level within someone’s madness, and I felt immediately that it was on the pulse of a zeitgeist I recognized. It speaks to my generation’s conflict with the American material values system at its worst. I guess I’ve felt for a long time that a lot of the films that were aimed at my generation were some baby boomer perception of what Gen-X was about. They seemed to be tailored to a kind of reductive image of us as slackers and to have a banal, glib, low-energy, angst-ridden realism, none of which I or anyone I know relates to.”

After presenting their package, Fincher and Linson gave Fox three days to decide whether they were in or out. The next day, the studio agreed to produce Fight Club. Studio chairman Bill Mechanic had become an advocate of the project. To afford Fincher’s vision, he reached out for $25 million from Arnon Milchan and his New Regency Enterprises. In order for Fincher to get his budget – which had climbed to $67 million – the director surrendered final cut to his financiers, but Milchan still wanted the director to bring his budget down to $62 million, arguing that Rupert Murdoch – the media tycoon who owned Fox – would not see this as a good investment. Fincher dug in, reportedly saying, “That $5 million is not going to come from Eastman Kodak, it’s not going to come from Teamsters, it’s going to come from visual effects, it’s going to come from sets, from costumes, it’s going to come right off the screen. It’s going to come from the moments they want in the fucking trailer.” Milchan passed on co-financing the picture.

In June 1998, Fight Club commenced a 100-day shooting schedule around Los Angeles. Once he got a look at three weeks of footage Fincher had shot, Arnon Milchan changed his mind about getting involved in the film; he agreed to split the risk with Fox. In early 1999, after 10 weeks of editing, Fincher screened a cut of Fight Club for the top brass at the studio. The screening was not met with enthusiasm. Mechanic delivered the news to Fincher: the movie was simply too long and too violent. Laura Ziskin elaborated on the concern at Fox. “I was afraid of it. I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it, and that’s hard. I was afraid. Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Many at the studio had a far stronger reaction. Mechanic recalled, “There were people who abhorred it. They’d walk up to me and say, ‘I hated it.’”

When Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999, the bad taste was amplified among critics. Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance.” Anita Busch, the Hollywood Reporter: “The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun Times that Tyler Durden came off “sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He’s a bully – Werner Erhard plus S&M, a leather club operator without the decor.”

Bill Mechanic later mused, “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today – and there isn’t one – to provide a context for understanding the film. Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.” Laura Ziskin was also one of the few supporters of Fight Club left in the film industry. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.” Fight Club came and went from theaters in the U.S. with $37 million in grosses. Even after adding $63.8 million overseas, it was deemed a commercial failure.

But on college campuses and in repertory theaters, screenings of Fight Club were selling out. A few journalists started rethinking their reaction to the film. In the independent student newspaper of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Samuel McKewon wrote, “Fight Club is an essential movie for the 21st Century – one of the few out there – that skewers materialism with such a bold, fierce bravado, and certainly, you wonder what all the fuss over American Beauty was for. The latter has ice water running through its veins; it’s detached, damning, judgmental. Fight Club has hot, black blood running through its two-hour-plus running time. It judges by showing.” By the time the DVD arrived – with four commentary tracks and subversive menus – even Entertainment Weekly ranked Fight Club #1 on its list of “The 50 Essential DVDs.”

While Fight Club was dying a quick death at the box office, Edward Norton offered his take on whether the film was socially irresponsible. “You can’t not pursue a creative statement because of the fear it will be misinterpreted. If you did, nothing of any substance would get done.” He added, “Many of the things that have been called subversive are regarded as classics now, including much of Oscar Wilde. Because some men pursue their sexual obsessions with young girls, does that mean Nabokov shouldn’t have written Lolita? Should Martin Scorsese not have made Taxi Driver because there was the potential that someone like John Hinckley would use it as the excuse for his particular pathology? I think the answer to that is definitely no. Art has an important role in holding up a mirror to the things that are unhealthy in a culture.”

Should I Care?
Mixing brooding atmosphere, wildly inappropriate information – “Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?”- perversely twisted black comedy and a wry mockery of the consumer culture that most of the audience participated in daily, Fight Club was the film version of a Molotov cocktail. 10 years later, it’s still riled up about the state of the planet; the only difference is that after 9/11, Enron, Martha Stewart’s fall from grace and Britney Spears’ ascension to near royalty, audiences seem to have caught on with what Chuck Palahniuk was getting at in the mid-1990s. Going back to watch Fight Club again is like downloading Nostradamus to a techno vibe.

From screenplay to David Fincher’s visionary direction, casting to music (The Dust Brothers composed the groovy synthesizer score), editing (James Haygood) to sound, the film delivers a 9.0 to a 9.5 in virtually every routine it puts on the floor. There’s not really a flaw exposed in the entire movie. Marla Singer may be the only female character of consequence, but this morbidly creative heroine is anything but eye candy, expressing herself in wonderfully kooky ways, like talking on the phone with the cord wrapped around her throat. Gleefully sardonic moments like that demand the film be seen more than once, if for no other reason than to savor the terrific plot twist 1 hour and 50 minutes in and how it rewires the viewing experience. If Fight Club isn’t a masterpiece, I’m not sure what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Fighting Talk” By Graham Fuller. Interview, November 1999

“Todd Doogan Interviews Director David Fincher” By Todd Doogan. The Digital Bits, May 2000

“Bruise Control” By Stuart Jeffries. The Guardian, 12 May 2000

Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. By Sharon Waxman. HarperCollins (2005)

What the *&#! Is This About?
At “Westerberg High School” in Ohio, Veronica Sawyer (Winona Ryder) has managed to ingratiate herself into the most powerful clique in school, which includes sociopath Heather Chandler (Kim Walker), self-absorbed Heather McNamara (Lisanne Falk) and anorexic Heather Duke (Shannen Doherty). While forging love letters and conducting other administrative duties for the Heathers, Veronica notices a new student named J.D. (Christian Slater), a hellion who unloads a .44 Magnum full of blanks at two jocks on his first day of school. Bumping into each other later at the Snappy Snack Shack, Veronica confides to J.D., “I don’t really like my friends.” “Yeah, uh, I don’t really like your friends either,” he snarls.

After one too many abuses by Heather Chandler, Veronica goes to her house with J.D. to confront her. Their plan to spike her coffee with something disgusting goes awry when Veronica hands her a cup J.D. filled with liquid drain cleaner. Heather keels over and dies, and the couple hastily dress the scene up to make it look like she committed suicide. But in death, Heather ascends to even greater popularity, while the gravity of teen suicide becomes the talk of the town. Further intimidated by the school’s jocks, J.D. uses Veronica to help lure them into the woods, where he shoots them and makes it look like a double suicide. With teen suicide now gathering momentum as a new fad, Veronica discovers that J.D. intends to help the student body along by planting a bomb in the school boiler room during a pep rally.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Heathers began at Riley High School in South Bend, Indiana, where Daniel Waters wrote a column for the school newspaper he called Troubled Waters. In his spare time, Waters sketched stories starring his classmates. He recalled, ”One weird hobby I had as a kid was that I used to read Seventeen magazine the way other kids would read comic books. I’ve always loved books about angsty young girls, girls who would write in their diaries and complain about life.” His senior year, Waters was exposed to The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophical study of women published in 1953. “I thought this was great stuff for a movie, the way girls maintain their own oppression. I was always fascinated that other girls are the ones who hate a fat girl, much more than guys do. It was something I’d always observed, and then to actually read it in this philosophy. I’m sure I’m the only person who ever read that book and said, ‘Hey, there’s money to be made.’”

Graduating McGill University in Montreal – where Waters was more interested in Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard than partying – he made his way to Los Angeles in 1985 and found work at a small, unhip video store in Silver Lake. Waters recalled, “Heathers was written purely out of my own consumer need to see a film about teenagers that had the comical sting of real high school. No offense to John Hughes, but your ‘heart dies’ way before you become an adult. As far as a female protagonist is concerned, adult white men may rule the world, but in high school, they’re a bunch of clueless goofballs. The high school power center is female; at that age, boys are checkers and girls are chess.” He added, “I was a worshipper of Stanley Kubrick. Here was someone who always worked in very specific genres and he had a very high and mighty attitude, very super-ego of ‘I will do the last word in each genre. This will be The High School Film.’ You know, I didn’t want to just do a regular high school film, it had to be the most pretentious, the final word in high school films.”

Around the same time, Michael Lehmann was already a legend at USC Film School, having run the nascent video department at Zoetrope Studios and directing an enthusiastically received student thesis titled Beaver Gets A Boner in 1985. Lehmann recalled, “It’s about a kid who’s a drug dealer in high school whose drug supply is flushed down the toilet by his mother and he has to get the money back to pay back his supplier. And the only option open to him is to apply for a college scholarship so he can take the money to pay back his drug supplier. This really mocked the form of the standard issue USC student film. A lot of the movies were about kids in high school trying to get that scholarship, trying to get out of town and grow up and go study medicine in Indiana or something like that.” Steve White – president of low budget exploitation company New World Pictures – was impressed enough to sign Lehmann to a development deal.

The good news for Daniel Waters was that at 200 pages – almost twice the length of an average screenplay – the script to his high school suicide epic was getting attention. Waters recalled, “Everyone who read the script really responded to it and loved it and then when it came time to, like, ‘Well, what time do I show up on the set?’ you know, they’d say, ‘Oh my god, no one can ever actually make this movie.’” Waters knew Michael Lehmann through mutual friends. The director recalled, “He was trying to figure out how to get people to read it and gave it to a friend’s agent. The agent said, ‘No one’s ever going to make this movie.’ I had made a short film in school and had a pretty interesting agent with great taste. Dan asked me to show it to her, and I did. She flipped for it. She thought it was the best thing she’d ever read. Dan wanted her to get him hooked to a big director like Stanley Kubrick, so she sent the script out and a lot of people liked it but no one wanted to make it.”

Heathers found a fan in Denise Di Novi, who had started the 1980s as a unit publicist before working as an assistant to producer Pierre David. Di Novi recalled, “People said there’s this amazing script and I got a hold of it and read it, and just became so passionate about it, and felt like this is the first movie I want to make as a producer on my own. There was kind of a group of us who were all starting in the business at the same time.” Michael Lehmann phoned Daniel Waters to give the screenwriter notes on his magnum opus. Ultimately, Lehmann offered to take Heathers to New World as his first feature film. “A guy at New World saw my student film and read the script and said, ‘I’ll make this for a price.’ It happened a lot more easily than movies are supposed to happen.” With a budget of roughly $3 million, within a couple of months – in July 1988 – Heathers would begin what became a 32-day shooting schedule in Los Angeles.

Michael Lehmann recalled, “We had really good casting directors, Julie Selzer and Sally Dennison. They had just cast RoboCop and they had a really good sense of who was around in Hollywood. We had no money to pay anyone and basically everybody in the movie came in and read for it – except Winona. She had been in a movie called Square Dance, which had played in one of the very first Sundance festivals and had gotten her a little attention. She had also been in a movie called Lucas. Michael McDowell, who was the co-writer on the movie Beetlejuice and was represented by my agent, read the script, and Winona was shooting Beetlejuice at the time, so Michael said, I have the perfect person to play the lead. Her agents didn’t want her to do it, but she loved the script and came in and we met.”

Lehmann added, “The funny thing is, New World told me I had to offer the movie to Justine Bateman first. Apparently her dad has a relationship with the studio, and they thought she meant good box office. So we had to wait for Justine Bateman to pass on the script first. The rest of the cast, all the girls who played Heathers – Shannen, Lisanne, and Kim – they just came in and read. We auditioned a lot of people. I wanted to cast Heather Graham in the part of Heather #1, the one who goes through the coffee table. She was perfect for it, but she was under 18. Her parents were extremely conservative and her mother wouldn’t let her.” Denise Di Novi recalled, “In the days that when we made Heathers, teen suicide was an issue. But it was handled so ludicrously by the media and that’s I think what inspired Dan to write the script.”

Before New World Pictures would sign off on Heathers, there was the issue of the ending. Michael Lehmann recalled, “In the original, the high school blew up. It ended with the prom in heaven. It was really good and it’s what the ending should have been. But this guy Steve White – the head of production at New World who was a big supporter of the movie – basically said to us he’d make the movie but he wouldn’t allow the high school to be blown up at the end. He wouldn’t make a movie that was satirizing teen suicide and have this main character who we grew to love actually kill herself at the end. He was worried it would lead to copycat suicides, and he didn’t want that on his head. I don’t necessarily disagree with that, but I felt like, ‘Come on, this movie is clearly a satire. It’s way out there. The farther you go the better. If somebody’s going to kill themselves because of the movie, then they have a much bigger problem than this movie.’ But he wouldn’t do it.”

Opening March 1989 in the U.S., Heathers began notching better than expected reviews. Dessson Thomson, the Washington Post: “Wickedly funny. In fact, Heathers may be the nastiest, cruelest fun you can have without actually having to study law or gird leather products. If movies were food, Heathers would be a cynic’s chocolate binge.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “The script, by Daniel Waters, has a lot of prankish, spiky dialogue and some good rowdy slapstick nastiness … the script promises that the picture will lift off into the junior division of Blue Velvetland. But layers of didacticism weigh it down, and the young, inexperienced director, Michael Lehmann (who uses hyper-bright colors for a facetious artificial effect), doesn’t find the right moods for the gags.” Julie Salamon, the Wall Street Journal: “Heathers gave me the creeps but it also made me laugh. This bizarre variation on that Hollywood staple, the teen movie, is one weird original.”

Over at New World Pictures – which had been sold in 1983 by founder Roger Corman – titles like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark and Return of the Killer Tomatoes had somehow failed to keep the company’s theatrical or video divisions in the black. Heathers would be the last movie the company released to theaters. Denise Di Novi recalled, “The film didn’t really have marketing because New World was going out of business when the film was released.” Michael Lehmann added, “I actually remember talking to the head of distribution at New World and I called him and I said, ‘The movie’s in its second week of release. It’s got great reviews, it’s filling houses in New York and L.A. and other cities. There’s no ad in the L.A. Times on a Saturday. And he says, ‘There isn’t?’” After three weeks in release, New World pulled its advertising. Unable to expand beyond 54 theaters, Heathers would tally $1.1 million at the U.S. box office.

As Winona Ryder and Christian Slater went on to considerable stardom in the early 1990s, Heathers built a robust cult following on VHS tape. In September 2006, the list makers at Entertainment Weekly ranked Heathers #5 on their list of the “50 Best High School Movies”. Tim Stack offered, “For those who dream about offing an obnoxious classmate, Heathers is the ultimate fantasy. Full of mordant wit, shocking violence, and savvy performances by Christian Slater and Winona Ryder, the flick was the antithesis of the earnest ’80s John Hughes films – you’d never see Molly Ringwald serving up a kitchen-cleaner cocktail for Ally Sheedy. Even today, Heathers’ spin on cliques, teen suicide, and homosexuality still has bite.” EW reserved the #1 slot for The Breakfast Club.

At the time Heathers was released, Michael Lehmann commented, “There are people who thought it a glib, cynical, socially irresponsible view of high school. I believe we treat the moral issues responsibly. Teenagers don’t have any problem with it; it’s always adults who are shocked.” Looking back at Heathers a decade after the air had cleared, Daniel Waters mused, “That was definitely a slight dig at John Hughes films, which, John Hughes films seemed, I have a lot of fun with John Hughes films. I adore them in many ways – Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club and Pretty In Pink – they all seem to have this underlying motif that all teenagers are controlled by their parents and their biggest attribute, the biggest thing running their lives is their hatred of their parents and what I found growing up is it’s more like I hadn’t given the matter much thought, that evil happens among you.”

Why Should I Care?
With drive-ins crumbling, fly-by-night outfits like New World Pictures restructuring and the books on the 1980s closing, exploitation pictures would slowly go the way of the spotted owl, kicked out of their native habitat by big budget studio fare, with movies like True Romance or Kalifornia borrowing the same sleazy plotlines, but having the nerve to throw in name actors and spiff themselves up with production values. The only thing missing from the mainstream B-movies would be that socially irresponsible, renegade spirit that Heathers dishes out in spades. But at the end of the day, a pirate flag is all this really is. It’s got the skull and crossbones, but no one involved in the production seems capable of taking a ship anywhere.

The most notable feature of Heathers is the teen slang cooked up by Daniel Waters. While not as extreme as the futurespeak Anthony Burgess created in A Clockwork Orange, lines like “Did you have a brain tumor for breakfast?” indicates plenty of energy went into the writing. But for all its wit, the jokes don’t really have punchlines, and the movie bowls forward with little organizing intelligence. If a good satire skillfully skirts the line between reality and exaggeration, Michael Lehmann weaves all over the material like a drunk driver. With everything in the movie blown out and exaggerated, nothing feels remotely compelling. The inexperience displayed behind the camera – with the film looking much cheaper than it actually was – shows up most in the casting, with Winona Ryder and Christian Slater registering in two dimensions at best. When Shannen Doherty gives the best performance – and she’s good in this – your high school movie has serious issues.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Heathers: Light Look at a Dark Topic” The New York Times, 26 March 1989

“Swatch Dogs and Diet Coke Heads” Heathers (THX Version). Anchor Bay Entertainment (2001)

“Heroes: Heathers” By Christopher Bollen. V Magazine, September 2006

“Michael Lehmann ’78: Satire and Subversion on the Silver Screen” By Jennifer Preissel. Columbia College Today, November/December 2007

“Dan Waters: Heathers 20th Anniversary Interview with Screenwriter” By Heidi Martinuzzi. Pretty Scary, 1 July 2008

What the *&#! Is This About?
Moving through a movie studio lot in a single take, several stories unfold. Executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) listens to a pitch from screenwriter Buck Henry for The Graduate Part 2. The banker who owns the studio has dispatched his playboy son (Randall Batinkoff) to appraise operations, sending nervous ripples across the lot. Security chief Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) chats with Henry on his way out about the greatest single takes of all time (“My old man worked for Hitchcock. Rope was a masterpiece. Story wasn’t that good; shot the whole thing without cuts. I hate all this cut, cut, cut.”) While listening to a pitch from director Alan Rudolph for a political thriller, Griffin receives a threatening postcard in the mail. Development executive Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson) dresses down her assistant (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Rudolph, while Griffin hovers outside the office of his boss (Brion James) upon hearing rumors that Griffin might be on his way out of a job.

Griffin and Bonnie are a couple, but rather than spend quality time with her, he takes his girlfriend to a power party at the house of his attorney (Sydney Pollack). As Jack Lemmon plays piano and Harry Belafonte is among the movers and shakers, Griffin confides to his attorney that he’s been receiving ominous postcards from “some writer I must have brushed off.” He arrives on a suspect and after snooping outside the home of the writer’s girlfriend, an artist named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), Griffin tracks down the tempestuous David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) at a theater in Pasadena showing The Bicycle Thief. Griffin offers Kahane a development deal, but the writer displays nothing but contempt for the corporate hatchet man. When a scuffle breaks out in the parking lot, Griffin is overcome with rage and kills Kahane. Before fleeing the scene, he makes it appear as if it was a mugging gone awry.

Walter discovers that Griffin may have been the last person to see Kahane alive and preps the executive for his interview with a wily police detective (Whoopi Goldberg). Her suspicion of Griffin intensifies when her kooky partner (Lyle Lovett) tails him and discovers that he’s romancing Kahane’s icy ex-girlfriend. But without motive, evidence or a reliable witness, the detectives are unable to tie him to the murder. Griffin is much more concerned that a young executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. Hatching a Machiavellian scheme, Griffin pursues a death row tearjerker titled Habeas Corpus from a hack director (Richard E. Grant) and pestering producer (Dean Stockwell). Their insistence on “no stars, just talent” and a realistic ending convinces Griffin that the movie will be a colossal disaster and backfire on Levy, enabling the player to rescue the studio.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Michael Tolkin had show business in his blood. His father was an Emmy Award winning writer for Your Show of Shows, while his mother was senior VP of legal affairs at Paramount. Tolkin struggled as a writer, starting with Delta House – the short-lived TV spin-off of Animal House - in 1979. It took a decade for him to get credit on a feature, the Christian Slater skateboarding flick Gleaming the Cube. Tolkin recalled, “I must have been in a couple of meetings when I was looking at producers or the executives of producers and I saw how bored they were with me. And I realized that they had hard jobs; that they had to listen to a lot of bad ideas. I wasn’t happy in there and I was uncomfortable and I think that they could see that and I wasn’t helping them. And they were desperate for good ideas, because they couldn’t advance if they didn’t have them. I was listening to all of us complain. And I thought we were complaining just because we were frustrated. And we weren’t necessarily right; maybe our ideas weren’t as good as we thought they were. And somehow in that, this idea began to take hold.”

A motion picture executive whose morals – or lack thereof – empower him to murder a screenwriter became the basis of a novel Tolkin started writing in 1984. “When I finished the book, I sold it to Atlantic Monthly Press, and then an editor at a magazine called Manhattan Inc took the book and went through the manuscript and took out the whole Larry Levy story, and put just a little bit of editing and a little pasting, put together the Larry Levy story as a short story and published it in Manhattan Inc. Ned Chase – who was a book editor and is Chevy Chase’s father – read that and was interested in who I was, he liked the writing. And somehow, talked about this to David Brown, the great producer, and one day, my agent told me David Brown had called and wanted to talk to me about buying the novel.”

David Brown – producer of Jaws, The Verdict and Cocoon – recalled, “I have been an avid magazine reader ever since I began as a magazine editor. There was a magazine I was reading called Manhattan Inc and inside there was a little story called The Player, which was an excerpt from a novella. I read it and felt that the author, Michael Tolkin, really knew what he was talking about in relation to Hollywood. I had read many stories, spent decades in Hollywood and felt that this was the real stuff. Unfortunately, I felt it was impossible to make because of all the internal monologue of the characters. I hadn’t given it any further thought until I had lunch with a publisher at Time Books who said, ‘We are publishing a little book that might interest you called The Player.’” Brown read the book and still didn’t think it would translate into a movie. No one else in Hollywood did either, which enabled Brown to option the film rights for a pittance of $2,500.

David Brown brought Michael Tolkin on board The Player as a producer and commissioned him to adapt his novel to a screenplay. Tolkin recalled, “To my surprise it only took about six or eight weeks to write the script, which was in the fall of – I guess – probably by now we’re probably talking about 1989. And then I finished the script, with David’s notes, back and forth, after about three months I think we were really done and then the script went out into the world. And David tried to set it up.” Brown recalled, “Tolkin and I had a series of humiliating meets at studios with people one-third my age. They said, ‘We don’t do stories about Hollywood. You’ve got a totally unsympathetic character here, a man who gets away with murder.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’” Sidney Lumet spent several weeks attached as director, but wanted more money – for the budget and his salary – than Brown could afford.

Around the time that producer Cary Brokaw and Avenue Pictures stepped up to finance The Player, director Robert Altman signed with the William Morris Agency, which also represented Michael Tolkin. The acclaimed director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville had gone sixteen years between hits and had hit a brick wall trying to get a personal project off the ground. Altman recalled, “I’d written Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver short stories, and I was trying to get that picture financed. That’s what I was really working on; I just couldn’t quite get the financing to make the film. The Player was offered to me as a picture they were gonna make. I was a director for hire. I needed the job. I saw it as an easy shoot and I kind of liked the idea of it, so I did it.”

Brokaw had mixed feelings about Altman. “I had known Bob when I was a marketing guy at Fox and he was tough to deal with. He was brash. When things didn’t go well, it was inevitably our fault. He always had the studio earmarked as the enemy and, from the corporate, conventional Hollywood point of view, Bob was a kind of loose cannon.” Altman stated, “All this thing about me being outside of Hollywood is simply, the truth of the matter is, I can’t make the kind of movies they wanna make, and the kind of movies I can make and like to make and make are not the kind of films that they know how to distribute. So we just basically aren’t in the same business. There’s no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes.” Brokaw added, “We talked very openly about how we would work together. We talked about how this was a structured thriller at heart. My concerns were overcome. This is, after all, a movie that Bob was born to direct. He’s a very charismatic guy who, once he began casting, got just about everyone he wanted.”

Within a month, Tim Robbins agreed to star and in June 1991, shooting commenced in Los Angeles on a budget of $8 million. Altman felt that instead of fabricating celebrities, it would be more realistic to populate The Player with the real deal. “I began calling movie stars. Calling and saying, ‘I’m doing a film about a movie executive who murders a writer and gets away with it.’ They laughed when I said it was a happy ending. They said, ‘You’re going after Hollywood?’ and I said, ‘No, but I’m certainly going to give Hollywood the opportunity to go after itself.’ They said, ‘I’m in.’” To play the couple in the climactic movie-within-a-movie, Altman contacted Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis. To his surprise, without asking to read a script, both said yes. At least 64 more celebrities joined the production. Some – like Cher – appeared only as faces in the party scenes, while others – Angelica Huston & John Cusack, Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin & Scott Glenn, Burt Reynolds – had speaking parts, which they were left free to improvise. Each received scale wage for a day’s work and donated their salary to the Motion Picture Home.

When The Player began screening for distributors in the winter of 1992, it became the talk of Hollywood. David Brown kidded to Newsweek that Barry Diller – then chairman of Fox – laughed so hard that Brown thought he might go into cardiac arrest. Universal’s chairman Tom Pollock was equally boisterous. Studio executives pleaded with Altman to run the film for them at their homes. The director flatly refused, but was tickled by the reaction in the executive suites. “The fact that we came out and said it, it’s like the fool in the court of the king; you can get away with real criticism. And of course it gives them a chance to talk about themselves, their favorite topic.” The only row Altman got into was with Mark Canton – chairman of Columbia Pictures – when the executive reportedly asked a projectionist to skip to the last reel. All but two of the major studios put in a bid to distribute The Player. Fine Line – the specialty division of New Line Cinema – won out.

Opening April 1992 in the U.S., The Player drew some of the best critical notices of Altman’s career. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “As a satire, The Player tickles. It doesn’t draw blood. It says nothing about Hollywood that Hollywood insiders don’t say with far more venom in their hearts. Mr. Altman’s most subversive message here is not that it’s possible to get away with murder in Hollywood, but that the most grievous sin, in Hollywood terms anyway, is to make a film that flops.” Steve Davis, Austin Chronicle: “From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that’s wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who’s been there.” Variety: “Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Five years later, Michael Tolkin mused, “When I wrote The Player, I had absolutely no intention of selling it as a movie. I thought the book was too internal and that since the whole novel really takes place in Griffin Mill’s head, and since it’s about a killer who gets away with murder, I didn’t expect it to sell to the movies and I didn’t intend to sell it to the movies. Everybody said that Hollywood was too tough a topic and that like baseball that was just one of these things that you’re not supposed to make a movie about because nobody wants to see it.” The industry praise culminated in three Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Robert Altman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Michael Tolkin) and Best Editing (Geraldine Peroni). Though The Player enabled Altman to direct nine more features – including Short Cuts – before his death in 2006, audiences steered clear of the movie, buying only $21.7 million in tickets at the U.S. box office.

While Robert Altman maintained that Hollywood had given him more than his fair share of breaks, no love was lost between the director and the Griffin Mills of the world. “The Player is my take on a lot of things, but Hollywood, what is Hollywood, anyway? A guy like Paul Newman starts a company, makes $54 million in profits last year, and it all goes into a charity; you don’t hear a lot about that. A guy like Steve Ross makes $63 million a year, a guy like Michael Eisner, Lee Iacocca, Barry Diller, these guys don’t feed that money back. They gather as much as they can, and the profits don’t have any real meaning. They can’t spend that money. All they’ve got, they can say on their record they have the most chips in front of them when they die.” Altman added, “Hollywood doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t exist anymore. My film, nobody’s even upset about it. One guy, Mark Canton, is the only one who got pissed off, because he’s a fool. Most of these guys, they’re sitting there doing a job, they’re making money – they don’t even have a sense of shame.”

Why Should I Care?
The TV pilot it inspired in 1997 – starring Patrick Dempsey as a moodier Griffin Mill and Jennifer Garner as his boss’s daughter – may have been too dry for ABC to pick up, but over on HBO, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm all gleefully ran with the conceit of celebrities spoofing themselves and Hollywood with terrific success. The Player is nowhere near as barbed or as funny as any of those sitcoms proved to be, and they also seem to have a lot more conviction than Robert Altman’s cool take on Michael Tolkin’s droll source material. What neither director or writer manage to do is get a handle on Greta Scacchi’s character, who comes off as vaguely superficial with little or nothing to add to the story. Equally flat is director of photography Jean Lepine’s smudgy lighting, an unfortunate reminder of how poorly funded this movie actually was.

Even if The Player doesn’t stand up all that well, it still has to be respected as a statement, as a reminder of what movies can achieve both in technical craftsmanship and moral resonance. The masterful opening tracking shot – which at 8 minutes 5 seconds is one of the longest in film history – is a small work of art, while the movie-within-a-movie that climaxes the film is as clever as Griffin Mill’s curtain call. Altman gets excellent mileage from his cast, with Tim Robbins, Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant virtually disappearing amid the silly power brokers they portray. The novelty of the celebrity cameos tilts disproportionately in favor of faces from the ‘70s, and also seem passé when viewed today, but in 1992, The Player was terrifically innovative. Its strike against an economic system that places corporate profit above personal decency still has bite.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Hollywood Is Talking” By Jack Kroll, David Ansen and John Leland. Newsweek, 2 March 1992

“When Hollywood Is a Killer” By Bernard Weintraub. The New York Times, 1992 April 5

The Player (Special Edition). New Line Home Video (1997)

Robert Altman: Interviews. Edited by Davd Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi (2000)

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the “sunny, woodsy” town of Lumberton, the suburban idyll is broken when a man watering his lawn appears to be bitten by an insect and suddenly collapses. His son Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) returns from college to find his hospitalized father stricken in terror over his ailment. Strolling home, Jeffrey stops to throw rocks in a field. Sifting through the weeds, he discovers what appears to be a human ear. A police detective (George Dickerson) agrees with Jeffrey, but the eager young man fails to get details of the investigation divulged to him in a visit to the officer’s home. The detective’s teenaged daughter Sandy (Laura Dern) is game to share some things she’s heard through the walls, specifically, the name of a woman singer named “Dorothy Vallens” that has come up. Sandy takes Jeffrey to see the apartment building where Dorothy lives, on the edge of the suburbs in the dark side of town.

Desperate for “knowledge and experience”, Jeffrey hatches a scheme to snoop around Dorothy’s apartment by posing as a pest control man. Sandy goes along to protect Jeffrey, who steals a set of keys while undercover. The couple later goes to hear the mysterious and fragile Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) sing at a bar. Jeffrey’s curiosity leads him back to Dorothy’s apartment, where he is forced to hide in a closet and have things revealed to him that are best left unknown: an amyl nitrate inhaling psychopath named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper) has kidnapped Dorothy’s son and husband, cutting off her spouse’s ear to keep the songstress dependent on him. Jeffrey seems both repulsed by and attracted to Dorothy and sleeps with her. Frank and his gang find out and take the kid on a “joyride”, but after he makes it through the night alive, Jeffrey finds he can’t get Dorothy out of his mind.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
David Lynch spent his formative years in Spokane, Washington. His family moved to Boise, Idaho, where Lynch attended 3rd through 8th grades before settling in Alexandria, Virginia, where Lynch went to high school. Of his childhood surroundings, Lynch recalled, “It was beautiful old houses, tree-lined streets, the milkman, building forts, lots and lots of friends. It was a dream world, those droning airplanes, blue skies, picket fences, green grass, cherry trees – Middle America the way it was supposed to be. But then on this cherry tree would be this pitch oozing out, some of it black, some of it yellow, and there were millions of red ants racing all over the sticky pitch, all over the tree. So you see, there’s this beautiful world and you just look a little bit closer, and it’s all red ants.” By the spring semester of 1966, Lynch was enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, participating in the school’s experimental painting and sculpting contests, and living with buddy Jack Fisk in a run-down, crime ridden, industrial section of Philadelphia.

As early as 1973, Lynch began getting ideas for what became Blue Velvet, beginning with Bobby Vinton’s version of the tune. “I don’t know what it was about that song, because it wasn’t the kind of music that I really liked. But there was something mysterious about it. It made me think lawns and the neighborhood. It’s twilight – with maybe a streetlight on, let’s say, so a lot of it is in shadow. And in the foreground is part of a car door, or just a suggestion of a car, because it’s too dark to see clearly. But in the car is a girl with red lips. And it was these red lips, blue velvet and these black-green lawns of a neighborhood that started it.” Following a critically acclaimed second feature – The Elephant Man, in 1980 – Lynch was approached by producer Richard Roth and asked if he had any other scripts. Lynch responded that he only had ideas, for instance, he’d always wanted to sneak into a girl’s room and watch her at night. Maybe, in the process, he’d see a clue to a murder mystery.

Returning home to write a treatment, Lynch then pictured someone finding an ear in a field. “It had to be an ear because it’s an opening. An ear is wide and, as it narrows, you can go down into it. And it goes somewhere vast. Then Richard said, ‘You gotta come with me and we gotta pitch this.’ So we went over to Warner Bros. and pitched it. I went out of the room or something and this guy said to Richard, ‘Is this a true story? Did he find an ear? Or did he make that up?’ And Richard said, ‘No, he made it up.’ And the guy said, ‘Jeez! I’ll do it!’ And so I wrote two scripts and they were horrible! And this guy at Warners who was excited at the beginning was screaming at me on the phone.” Lynch instead accepted an offer from producer Dino De Laurentiis to adapt and direct a $40 million screen version of Frank Herbert’s Dune. In addition to the filmmaker feeling artistically compromised throughout the massive production, the film was poorly received by audiences.

“Because Dune was not such a big success, and things went badly, Dino and I were ready to part company. But then he came back and said, ‘What is this, what is this Blue Velvet?’ You know? And I said, ‘Dino, you’re so crazy.’ I said, ‘You know about this thing, I told you about it before.’ But he said, ‘I must read again.’ And I said, ‘Well you can read the first half of it,’ because I liked the first half of it. And he read it and he’d really liked it. And I said let me fix the second half, and you know, we’ll do it. And that’s how it got started.” Lynch added, “My agent then was Rick Nicita at CAA and we were always going to visit Dino in the bungalow – or, as he says, ‘boongalow’ … Dino knew that I wanted final cut, but, like a great businessman, he used that to his advantage. He said, ‘No problem, just cut your salary in half, and cut the budget in half, and away you go.’”

Lynch wanted to work with Kyle MacLachlan again. The actor recalled, “And, you’ve gotta remember that, I mean, Dune was the first screenplay that I’d ever read, and Blue Velvet was basically the second screenplay that I’d ever read, so … I thought it was incredibly charged, very erotic. I thought, frightening. Kind of amazing, like in an overpowering way and frightened me and also sort of filled me with this desire to go into that world.” To play Dorothy Vallens, Lynch approached Helen Mirren. The actress helped Lynch fine tune the material before opting out of the part. Lynch had met Isabella Rossellini at a restaurant; realizing later that she was an actress – having appeared in White Nights – he offered her the role of Dorothy Vallens. Rossellini later mused, “I mean, I always imagined her as a broken doll – you know – one of these beautiful dolls that you put in the bed, you know, with the ruffles and the hair completely done, but something had happened and you know, the hair all down, the makeup is falling off, the dress are – the idea of a broken doll. So the glamour, some of it was still there. Some of it was erased. Some of it was being raped, broken, violently.”

When it came to finding someone to play Frank Booth, Lynch stated, “Dennis Hopper’s name had come up in meetings before, but as soon as it did, it was shot down because of his reputation. Not because he wasn’t right, but because his reputation was so strong that it was just out of the question. And that was sad, because he had been off everything for over a year and a half and no one really knew that. So his manager told me that Dennis was totally different and that we could phone the producers whom he had just worked with to check. And then Dennis called and said, “I have to play Frank because I am Frank.” Well that almost blew the deal right there. But he was truly great to work with.” Hopper emerged from the obscurity of drug and alcohol rehab for back-to-back-to-back roles in Hoosiers, River’s Edge and Blue Velvet, completing one of the greatest career makeovers in Hollywood history.

Under a budget of roughly $6 million, Blue Velvet commenced filming February 1986 in an unlikely place. Lynch recalls, “Well, Dino had just bought the studios in Wilmington, North Carolina. It had maybe one soundstage, but he was busy building others. They put a concrete slab down and these walls and ceilings go up in a twinkling of an eye. They’re not soundproof, and they’re two miles from an airport. They’re not soundstages at all. But we actually got one that was pretty good for Blue Velvet. Dino’s company was going public and we were the littlest film and therefore the one that they didn’t have to pay any attention to. And so there was a tremendous sense of freedom. After Dune I was down so far that anything was up! So it was just a euphoria. And when you work with that kind of feeling, you can take chances. You can experiment. You can really feel it. And I had final cut, which gives you another whole sense of freedom.”

Contrary to Lynch’s fears, when he screened Blue Velvet for De Laurentiis and the producer’s employees, it was greeted with enthusiasm. “And then Dino had this foreign sales guy showing it over in Europe. And the guy was saying to him, ‘Dino, people are diggin’ this film! We’re selling this film!’ So Dino called me into his office and he says he’s not sure but maybe a wider audience will like this film. He said, ‘We make tests!’ So there was a theater in the Valley showing Top Gun, and Dino sneaks Blue Velvet in there one night. My agent Rick Nicita and some other agents at CAA went to the screening and they left just as the film ended. They called me from the car and told me they thought it was great. So I’m, like, all pumped up, and I go to sleep that night so happy, because they were all screaming over the car phone and all this stuff.”

Lynch continued, “So Rick and I went over to Dino’s office and they had the cards from the screening. They were like: ‘David Lynch should be shot!’ Question: ‘What did you like best about the movie?’ Answers: ‘The dog, Sparky.’ ‘The ending!’ ‘When it was over!’ It was like the worst preview screening Larry [Gleason] – who’d been in the business for years – had ever seen. The cards were the worst he had ever, ever seen. And if it wasn’t for Dino, they might have put the movie on the shelf. I’m not kidding. But Dino said, ‘David. We took chance, and we see now it’s not a film for everybody. So we learn and we go on.’ So they geared up and got a lot of key critics who were seeing the film and really saying nice things. When it hit the theaters, it never really did any big business, but it was solid.” Without expanding beyond 188 theaters, Blue Velvet would gross $8.4 million in the U.S.

With a few minor exceptions, the mainstream media was universal in their praise of the picture. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “For those with the temerity to follow it anywhere, Blue Velvet is as fascinating as it is freakish. It confirms Mr. Lynch’s stature as an innovator, a superb technician, and someone best not encountered in a dark alley.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Lynch and his film will surely be reviled, but as an experiment in expanding cinema’s dramatic and technical vocabulary, Blue Velvet demands respect.” Variety: “Picture takes a disturbing and at times devastating look at the ugly underside of Middle American life. The modest proportions of the film are just right for the writer-director’s desire to investigate the inexplicable demons that drive people to deviate from expected norms of behavior and thought.”

Blue Velvet was debated by Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert on At the Movies, with Ebert voting thumbs down, finding the film “cruelly unfair to its actors.” Ebert: “It’s not how Isabella Rossellini reacts … It’s how I react. And that’s painful to me, to see a woman treated like that, and I want to know that if I’m feeling that pain, it’s for a reason that the movie has other than simply to cause pain to her.” Siskel: “Well, I think that the reason is that the film is a thriller and a shocker. I mean, there are people that get hurt – badly – in real life, and I think that this is a legitimate one. This is not a simple mad slasher movie.” Ebert: “Okay, then why is it a comedy?” Siskel: “Because, he wants to set you up – he’s a director – and he wants to play you like all the directors, the great directors want to do; he wants to play you like a piano, which is have you smile and then swing you right into some depression.” Ebert: “Yeah well if somebody wants to play me like a piano he better get some music that’s worth listening to.” Siskel: “I think this is a good song.”

Members of the National Society of Film Critics voted Blue Velvet Best Picture of 1986, but in a year that also saw Children of a Lesser God, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Mission, Platoon and A Room with A View vie for Best Picture, Blue Velvet was left in the dark at the Oscars. David Lynch received the film’s only Academy Award nomination, for Best Director. Following the film’s release, the filmmaker mused, “Talking about it was so important to that film. I think some people could despise it. If you don’t like the story or what it’s saying, then you just end up hating everything. It’s not a movie for everybody. Some people really dug it. Others thought it was disgusting and sick. And, of course, it is but it has two sides. You have to have the contrasts. Films should have power. The power of good and the power of darkness, so you can get some thrills and shake things up a bit. If you back off from that stuff, you’re shooting right down into lukewarm junk.”

Why Should I Care?
Even if you were to take this movie only at face value, Blue Velvet may be the most primal tribute to Alfred Hitchcock ever conjured by another director. Where Shadow of a Doubt uncovered evil in a small town and Rear Window warned voyeurs about peeking in on the deeds of their neighbors, so does Blue Velvet, which is even more unsettling in its portrait of evil than Psycho. If David Lynch had been satisfied making a movie about other movies, this still would have been a classic. What makes Blue Velvet a masterpiece is its boldness, how it lifts the curtain on conventional filmmaking and shines a light on the freaks, demons and bizarre of human nature with a command usually reserved for filmmakers that have been working at this for a whole lot longer.

In terms of visual composition, Blue Velvet is a watercolor come to life, with cinematographer Frederick Elmes immersing the film in electric blues, verdant greens and nightmare black. Equally amazing is that even with extras looking like they were plucked from the circus, there’s not one bad performance in the picture; in fact, Kyle MacLachlan, Isabella Rossellini and Dennis Hopper have never been stronger in a movie, with Hopper in particular cracking the screen with white trash intensity. Angelo Badalamenti composed a lush orchestral score and if further evidence was needed that Blue Velvet achieves perfection, Lynch lets his quirky, infectious sense of humor seep through the daylight scenes while at night, forcing viewers to question the nature of evil.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Blue Velvet press kit – DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group (1986)

Lynch on Lynch: Revised Edition. Edited by Chris Rodley. Faber and Faber (2005)

Blue Velvet (Special Edition) MGM Home Video (2002)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In 1980 – following the expulsion by Fidel Castro of 125,000 Cubans, many less than desirable – U.S. immigration officials question Tony Montana (Al Pacino). His bid for asylum falls short when the scar on his cheek and the prison tattoo on his hand brand him less than desirable. Tony explodes. “What do you want me to do, stay there and do nothing? I’m no fucking criminal, man. I’m no puta or thief. I’m Tony Montana, a political prisoner from Cuba. And I want my fucking human rights, now! Just like the president Jimmy Carter say. Okay?” Tony is interned at Freedomtown with the other Cuban refugees, including his best friend Manny (Steven Bauer), who secures them green cards by agreeing to kill a Castro lackey who arrives at the camp for their new benefactor. A job at a sandwich stand in Miami awaits, but Tony has his sights set on bigger fish.

Tony & Manny’s ragged but effective work as drug couriers gain the respect of their humble boss, Frank Lopez (Robert Loggia). With cash in his pocket, Tony attempts to reconcile with his mother (Miriam Colon) and his adoring kid sister Gina (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) who Tony harbors intense feelings for. He also sets Manny straight about America. “This country, you gotta make the money first. Then when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” Coveting Lopez’s glassy eyed girlfriend Elvira (Michelle Pfeiifer), Tony takes the initiative on a business trip to Bolivia and negotiates a $75 million cocaine deal with the powerful Sosa (Paul Shenar). Lopez warns his protégé that the guys who last in their business are the ones who keep a low profile, but Tony has one ambition: “The world, chico. And everything in it.”

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The genesis of Scarface was with Al Pacino. In 1974, the actor was performing in Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui, a satire on fascism that the playwright had modeled on the American gangster movie, particularly the 1932 classic Scarface, starring Paul Muni. Pacino recalled, “So I was one day walking along Sunset Boulevard of all places and there was – I believe it’s the Tiffany Theater now – and it was playing on a double bill with something else, I forget. And it was Scarface, and it was a few of us, so I said, well why don’t we just go and take a look at it. And we went in and it was, you know, an astounding movie, astounding. And the performance of Paul Muni’s was astounding and inspiring. And I thought after that, that I just wanted to, yeah, I wanted to imitate him, I wanted to do something and was inspired by that performance. And I called Marty Bregman, who then put together some people and they started working on developing this as a film.”

Producer Martin Bregman – Pacino’s former manager and producer of Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon – has also claimed credit for the idea. “The reason I did Scarface - or how it came to my attention – was I was watching the old Paul Muni film about three o’clock one morning when I couldn’t sleep … and it occurred to me that a film like that, a film like Scarface – the rise and fall of an American gangster – had not been done, certainly had not been done recently. Hadn’t been done since Scarface.” To direct, Bregman approached Brian DePalma, who in 1981 was in post-production on Blow Out. Collaborating with playwright David Rabe, DePalma attempted to retain the setting of the original Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks and adapted by Ben Hecht. When the results failed to meet with anyone’s satisfaction, DePalma dropped out and Bregman turned to director Sidney Lumet.

Academy Award winning screenwriter Oliver Stone – uninterested in remakes – had already turned down an offer from Bregman to adapt a script. He changed his tune once Sidney Lumet came aboard and Stone heard his take. “It was not until Sidney Lumet came into the picture – I think shortly thereafter – we had another conversation and he told me Sidney Lumet was very anxious to do the movie and wanted to do it Cuban, Miami, 1980, ’81, the Mariel Boat Lift. I started into the research of Miami. I went to Miami extensively and I got to know both sides. I got to know the law enforcement side, the attorney generals, the attorney’s office, the gangster elements through the lawyers, the ex-gangster elements. And then eventually I wanted more. I plunged into the Caribbean. I went down to Bimini. On another trip – a separate trip – I went to Ecuador and to Bolivia.”

Stone’s self-confessed “drug period” – beginning during his adaptation of Conan the Barbarian, which was written on cocaine and downers, and continuing through The Hand, which Stone also directed – was in full swing during his research on the drug cartels. Ultimately, the screenwriter absconded to Paris for six months in December 1981, went cold turkey and wrote Scarface. Sidney Lumet – who had hoped to explore the geopolitical ramifications of the cocaine trade, including what he suspected was the involvement of the CIA – didn’t care for what Stone turned in. He commented, “I didn’t want to do it on just a gangster or cop level. As it stood, it was a comic strip.” Stone maintained, “Sidney did not understand my script, whereas Bregman wanted to continue in that direction with Al.” When Lumet dropped out, the producer went back to his first choice for director.

Brian DePalma recalled, “When I had first started with David Rabe, we had more or less tried to start with the original Scarface. Italian. Chicago. The script that came to me ultimately that Bregman had developed with Stone was completely different. Nothing that I had ever envisioned, and that’s why I liked it so much, ‘cause it was a whole new way of approaching this material. And those elements were in the original script. I liked the material specifically because to me it was sort of like a modern metaphor for The Treasure of Sierra Madre, where cocaine becomes gold and it’s kind of the American dream gone crazy, where you have this product that can turn into millions of dollars but in the process you destroy your life. And it’s sort of like the capitalist dream gone bizarre and berserk and is crazy as you get and completely self-destructive.”

After an ingénue named Michelle Pfeiffer flew to New York on her own dime and gave an intense audition with Pacino, both Bregman and DePalma were unanimous that she would play Elvira. Pacino was holding out for a leading lady with a bit more experience: Glenn Close. Bregman recalled, “I had a long, old relationship with Al, and I told him he didn’t know what the hell he was thinking. I told him he didn’t know his ass from his elbow. I said this character is partly a courtesan, and she has to be half a hooker. Glenn Close is many things, but she is not half a hooker.” In addition to warming up to Pfeiffer, Pacino worked with dialect coach Robert Eastson and co-star Steven Bauer – who was born in Cuba – to nail his character’s accent. Pacino became so immersed, he asked director of photography John Alonzo to speak to him only in Spanish throughout the shoot.

Under a budget of $21.5 million, Scarface was scheduled to roll September 1982 in Miami. The bullet riddled city did not celebrate. Fearing that the movie was set to portray Cuban Americans in a negative light, Commissioner Demetrio Perez Jr. introduced a resolution to City Council to deny permits to the production. The effort failed, but two weeks into filming, threats of demonstrations forced Bregman to shut down and move to Southern California. Costume designer Patricia Norris recalled, “I did think they’d have killed us if we stayed in Miami. There were members of the community who hated us because they thought we were doing a pro-Castro movie, which was absurd, but their anger was very serious. And then there were real drug people around, Colombians who came on the set. The day a fellow sat down in the chair next to me, and crossed his legs, and I saw a gun strapped to his ankle, I knew I wanted to get back to Los Angeles.”

The internment camp sequence was shot underneath the Santa Monica and Harbor Freeways in downtown L.A. The sandwich stand where Tony & Manny work was also shot in Los Angeles, in Little Tokyo. Tony & Elvira’s wedding was filmed at a 35-acre mansion in Montecito, near Santa Barbara, while Sosa’s Bolivian hacienda was also shot in Montecito. Many of the elaborate interiors were staged on the Universal Studios lot. To snag the Miami Beach exteriors, DePalma snuck back into town with a small crew for two weeks in April 1983. The director later stated, “It’s difficult enough to make a movie without adding more complications. Afterward, the governor and the mayor were upset, realizing that the company would have provided a lot of jobs in Florida. When we went back, there were no problems.” The delays added two months and $5 million to the budget.

When Scarface went before the MPAA, it returned with an X rating four times. Efforts by DePalma to trim the violence had no effect on the rating, which would have dissuaded exhibitors in many parts of the U.S. from booking the film. In early November 1983, Bregman called for a hearing, in which the producer joined DePalma, Universal distribution chief Robert Rehme and Broward County law enforcement official Nick Navarro to plead their case to the ratings board. DePalma maintained to Playboy at the time, “I didn’t take anything out except for the arm that was chainsawed off. You don’t really see it, just about twelve frames. I took it out, anyway. I sent the censors four versions and kept taking things out, and finally I said, ‘I’m not doing this anymore,’ and all four versions got an X for ‘cumulative violence,’ whatever that is. So I figured, ‘Hey, if we’re getting an X, let’s go with our first version.’” By a vote of 17-3, Scarface received an R rating and was clear to open December 1983 across the U.S.

Critics didn’t condemn Scarface, not completely. The New York Times (Vincent Canby) and Time Magazine (Richard Corliss) posted rave reviews. But the boo birds came out in equal force. Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “The whole feeling of the movie is limp. This may be the only action picture that turns into an allegory of impotence.” Walter Goodman, in a New York Times op-ed: “Brian DePalma evidently believed that enough gore and mayhem could save a plate of cold fried bananas fifty years after it has been served up piping hot.” Dave Kehr, the Chicago Reader: “Brian De Palma dedicates this 1983 feature to Howard Hawks and Ben Hecht, authors of the 1932 original, though I doubt they would find much honor in his gory inflation of their crisp, 90-minute comic nightmare into a klumbering, self-important, arrhythmic downer of nearly three hours.”

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert flew into debate over Scarface, with Siskel turning thumbs down over what he perceived to be lack of character development. Ebert: “You think there’s some rule that says a guy has to be good at the beginning and bad at the end?” Siskel: “No, I say it’s more interesting.” Ebert: “He’s a criminal when he gets off the boat …” Siskel: “That’s exactly right, an uninteresting criminal.” Ebert: “He has a criminal’s version of the American dream, which is get a lot of money, build a big house and marry this blonde. And then he falls into drugs and because of his own fatal flaws it all comes crashing down, so it’s the story of a guy who’s bad at the beginning and bad in the middle and worse at the end. What’s wrong with that?” Siskel: “Who cares? I didn’t care about him in the slightest. His life meant nothing to me.” Ebert: “There are a lot of people like this guy, I think.” Siskel: “All of the famous gangster films are not about louses who got lousier. Some of them are about interesting characters who got lousier.”

Scarface grossed a subpar $45.4 million in the U.S. and $20.4 million overseas. But instead of going away, audiences remained fixated on Tony Montana. Al Pacino mused, “You make a lot of pictures, and you realize some don’t have it. I knew there was a pulse to this picture; I knew it was beating. And then I kept getting residuals from the movie, kept getting checks. And wherever I was filming, in Europe, people would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, Tony Montana.’ In Israel the Israelis came up to me and wanted to talk about Scarface. The Palestinians wanted to talk about Scarface.” Due to popular demand, Universal has granted more than forty licenses for merchandisers in the U.S. to crank out Tony Montana T-shirts, action figures, belt buckles or money clips. When Universal announced the Scarface Two-Disc Anniversary Edition DVD in 2003, advance orders swelled to 2 million, the highest of any title in the studio’s library.

Tony Montana has even been resurrected as a video game – Scarface: The World Is Yours – allowing xBox and Wii users to rampage through Miami. Oliver Stone summed up the enduring appeal of the film by stating, “A lot of young businessmen quote me the dialogue and when I ask them why they remember it, they say, ‘It’s exactly like my business.’ Apparently, the gangster ethic hit on some of the business ethics going on in this country. Scarface has probably got me more free champagne than any film I’ve ever worked on. I’ve bumped into Spanish and Jamaican gangsters throughout the Caribbean and South America and gay gangsters in Paris, who bought me champagne all night long. I’ve even read reports in newspapers where gangsters have modeled themselves on Tony Montana.”

For the film’s 20th anniversary, Def Jam met with Brian DePalma to propose Scarface be re-released, updating the Giorgio Moroder score with a hip-hop soundtrack. Bregman and Pacino had given a blessing to the idea of a rap music reboot. DePalma scotched it. The director stated, “If this is the ‘masterpiece’ you say, leave it alone. I fought them tooth and nail and was the odd man out, not an unusual place for me. I have final cut, so that stopped them dead.” Def Jam pressed a tribute CD instead, compiling tracks by Jay-Z, The Notorious B.I.G. and others, loosely connected to the gangster classic. DePalma noted, “The hip-hop community was seeing all around them what was happening in the film: that cocaine makes you feel all powerful, and you surround yourself with entourages and palaces and outrageous clothes and women, and you lose all touch with reality; you become numb. Ultimately you divorce yourself from the people you knew in the past. You ultimately explode, you perish because of your own excess.”

Why Should I Care?
With characters exiting the movie almost as tissue paper thin as they were when they came in, only someone with a Tony Montana hoodie would say this picture is perfect. But one of the reasons it’s become enormously popular all over the world is how well it plays regardless of its audience. Arthouse, grindhouse, bootleg VHS, mall crowd or country club set, no matter what your setting, there is something to marvel over in Scarface, undeniably one of the greatest shoot ‘em ups of all time, as well as one of the most hilarious satires of that same excess. The visual palette of the picture is unmatched, with the finest possible recreations of early ‘80s Miami high life, courtesy production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. When it comes to Technicolor violence, the film is gruesome in a way that few Hollywood action movies are, with the possible exception of The Untouchables, also directed by DePalma.

What makes Scarface so potent isn’t its carnage or how well it was photographed, but the penetrating script by Oliver Stone. Bursting with lively one-liners – “Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say goodnight to the bad guy!” – and street corner sagacity about the nature of power, the film is full of color and excitement at the beginning before slowly taking a turn toward darker territory. Written as a swan song to cocaine, Scarface is the personal best screenplay Stone has ever cranked out of his own typewriter. Second best might be Wall Street, another warning about the blind alleys of capitalism that instead of being taken as a cautionary tale has become a training video for would-be entrepreneurs who completely miss the point. If Al Pacino’s lunatic raving about banking, trust and pelicans while immersed in a giant bubble bath isn’t the centerpiece of a great black comedy, I don’t know what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Al Pacino: A Life on the Wire. By Andrew Yule. Dutton Adult (1991)

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

“The Healing of Scarface” By Elaine Dutka, Los Angeles Times, 17 September 2003

“A Foul Mouth With a Following; 20 Years Later, Pacino’s Scarface Resonates With a Young Audience” By Bernard Weinraub. New York Times, 23 September 2003

Scarface (Platinum Edition). Universal Home Video (2006)

Scarface Nation: The Ultimate Gangster Movie and How It Changed America. By Ken Tucker. St. Martin’s Griffin (2008)

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)