Strange Days (1995)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks, story by James Cameron
Produced by James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe
Running time: 145 minutes

Should I Care?
For all those movie geeks wondering how cool it would be if James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow ever made a movie together — a sci-fi epic conceived, co-written and produced by the creator of The Terminator, Titanic and Avatar, say, put under the pressure cooker direction of the filmmaker who brought us The Hurt Locker — then fan boy, have I got a movie for you. Strange Days latches onto three potent ideas weighing heavy on the minds of its filmmakers in the early 1990s: better-than-virtual reality playback technology, police brutality and what the party of the millennium was going to look like. On a gut level, the movie is Space Mountain meets cyberpunk, grabbing us and rocketing us into a near future we end up being thankful to just be visiting. It’s a stiff shot of espresso, thick with brutal violence and sleazy characters that held little to zero appeal for audiences at the time, but at the very least, this is an exhilarating vision, more remarkable that it went into production before anyone (except maybe Cameron) had ever used email before.

Whether the writing or the editing is at fault (Howard E. Smith cut the movie with an uncredited Cameron), there is too much tech noir and not enough cohesiveness to make the film great. Juliette Lewis plays a super skank for all time and though fun to watch slink around, her character is never a girl we believe Ralph Fiennes would be smitten with. Fiennes — posed to become a star following Quiz Show — plays a sort of magician, tantalizing but difficult to care about behind all the smoke and mirrors. He’s paired with a chiseled Angela Bassett who seems capable of busting his nose open at any moment. The obligatory music biz subplot and shots of a militarized Los Angeles don’t feel very genuine, but as evidenced by cyber junk like Johnny Mnemonic, The Net or Virtuosity, Strange Days is not only more powerful than it needed to be, but deeper. Substitute YouTube for “clips” and the filmmakers might have been onto something here. Graeme Revell and French techno group Deep Forest take us into the near future with a musical score that’s nothing short of sublime.

So, What’s This About?
At 1:06:27 am on 30 December 1999, Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) samples the wares of a hustler (Richard Edson) who procures the illegal drug of the near future: “clips”, mini-discs formatted by the Superconducting Quantum Interference Device (SQUID), an apparatus that when fitted atop a user’s head, records directly off their cerebral cortex, using the optical nerve as a camera lens. Developed as an upgrade on surveillance wires, SQUID also permits users to “jack in” to clips of people’s personal lives and experience them raw. A former vice cop, Lenny is now a black market operator who traffics in these clips. He spends his personal time reliving happier days through clips of his ex-girlfriend Faith (Juliette Lewis), a rock singer who left him for music mogul Philo Gant (Michael Wincott). Lenny’s remaining friends are a wily ex-cop turned private eye (Tom Sizemore) and stoic bodyguard Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett) whose protection service caters to VIPs visiting anarchic Los Angeles.

As millennium celebrations near and tensions between Angelenos and the LAPD boil under the surface, a prostitute friend of Faith’s named Iris (Brigitte Bako) begs Lenny for help. While he uses the encounter as an excuse to contact Faith, Iris is raped and strangled by a killer who records the act with a SQUID and taunts Lenny by sending him a clip of the murder. Lenny and Mace discover that Iris was in possession of a clip of her own: the execution of a militant rapper named Jeriko One (Glenn Plummer) at the hands of two rogue police officers (Vincent D’Onofrio, William Fichtner) during a traffic stop. After the same cops come after Lenny and Mace, Faith admits that her record producer boyfriend’s paranoia drove him to use Iris to spy on Jeriko One with a SQUID. Mace considers going public with the clip of Jeriko One’s shooting, even if it ignites a revolution and burns L.A. to the ground. With Philo holding his ex-girlfriend, Lenny intends to trade the clip for Faith. But as the year 2000 approaches, nothing is what it seems.

Who Made It?
In 1985, James Cameron became intrigued with the idea of giving the film noir genre a high tech polish. Taking a central element of the genre, a big city loser seeking redemption, Cameron set his tale against a doomsday scenario rising out of the New Year’s Eve celebrations of the year 1999. He scribbled less than five pages of notes and put the script idea — which he was calling The Magic Man — aside. Cameron rapidly transitioned from the unexpected success of The Terminator, his first real film as a writer-director, to one groundbreaking science fiction thriller after another: Aliens, The Abyss and Terminator 2: Judgment Day, placing him among a filmmaking elite after five credits as a director. In late 1992, with millennium approaching and Cameron already committed to direct True Lies next, he pitched The Magic Man to his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow, who’d just directed an action film Cameron script doctored and executive produced titled Point Break.

Kathryn Bigelow grew up in Northern California. Planning to emulate her father — an aspiring cartoonist who managed a paint store — Bigelow studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute and through a scholarship to the Whitney Independent Study Program, moved to New York. One day, she took in a double bill of Mean Streets and The Wild Bunch and decided to study filmmaking. A well received short film at Columbia in 1978 titled The Set-Up led to a feature film in 1982: the brooding motorcycle melodrama The Loveless, which Bigelow cast Willem Dafoe in his first film. Near Dark, Blue Steel and Point Break placed her in the rarified air of women directing action films in Hollywood. Budgeted at roughly $42 million, Strange Days was Bigelow’s most ambitious project to date. The intense mix of sci-fi, film noir and social commentary failed to draw a wide audience, but has grown in status as a cult classic among critics and moviegoers.

How’d They Do It?
Nine years before Strange Days would go into production, James Cameron started with what amounted to five pages of handwritten notes. In the introduction to the published version of his “scriptment”, Cameron wrote “In this preliminary sketch, the story consisted of a street hustler, a loser name Lenny Nero, who is squired around the urban decay of future L.A. by an unwilling limo driver, a woman named ‘Mace’ Mason. He is a black market buyer and seller of human experience, recorded and played back directly into the brain, and he enters a dance of death with a psychotic killer, who seems to be homing in relentlessly on Lenny’s ex-girlfriend, Faith, whom Lenny has difficulty protecting because she won’t have anything to do with him. I called it The Magic Man, because Lenny can get you anything, like magic. I never got around to writing it, at least not that decade. The remarkable thing , when I look at those pathetic handwritten scrawls now, is how the basic template of the story never changed, despite the long odyssey of getting from those notes to a shooting script in 1994.”

He continued, “Sometime in late 1992 I pitched this idea to Kathryn Bigelow. It had lain dormant all those years as one of those things that I knew I would get around to sooner or later but never did. I began to worry that if I waited too long, the millenium would no longer be far enough off to be science fiction. So with two directing projects looming in front of me (True Lies and Spiderman) which would take me into the mid-nineties, I decided to let another director take over a piece that was near and dear to me. Kathryn, with her edgy visual style, was the obvious choice.” In addition to being her ex-husband, Cameron had enjoyed collaborating with Bigelow on Point Break and trusted her ability to shoot a film on schedule and on budget, which was more than Cameron could say for himself. He added, “In addition, she is that aria raris in mainstream filmmaking — a director who cares deeply about the characters while approaching the material with an intensely visual style. Fortunately, Kathryn liked the pitch and turned down her other offers, agreeing to sit and wait while I wrote the script.”

Discussing her fifth film for the press kit in 1995, Bigelow recalled, “It was a tremendous piece that offered so many opportunities. When I first became involved with Strange Days four years ago, I saw a way to draw one possible future, think about it and maybe derail it; imagine it and feel it as you watch. Is this the end of the world or the beginning of another one? That’s the core of Strange Days and what moved me –compelled me — to make it. Those themes, and these characters: a hustler with an undiscovered conscience and a guide through the underworld who has the strength, and the love, to survive. The interlocking story of Lenny and Mace becomes a parable in noirish disguise, a story about the pervasive need to watch, to see. It calibrates the fragile balance between viewer and viewed, screen and audience, spectacle as medium and subject. It puts us all in the picture.” Bigelow waited while Cameron labored over a draft for what was turning into the most densely plotted and character driven script he’d attempted.

Cameron recalled, “I couldn’t crack the plot to save my life. Kathryn had added her own spin to the piece, opening up the story and giving it thematic weight by having the murder tapes lead inexorably to an explosive incident involving the LAPD and a potential race riot of Biblical proportions. This concept fit well with my idea for a megaparty that teeters on the edge of complete social collapse, but it was proving very snaky trying to integrate it with the film noir erotic-thriller love story.” Over five weeks beginning in January 1993, Cameron broke through eight years of creative dithering with what he came to refer to as a “scriptment”. Running 131 pages in this case, Cameron elaborated, “So what you have in your hands is at once a kind of pathetic document; it is as long as a script, but messy and undisiplined, full of cheats and glossed over sections. But it is also an interesting snapshot of formatting a moment in the creative process. It contains notes and references and textures that do not exist in the finished script. It takes the time to gaze around at a grim future world and paint it in neon colors, it gets the mood first, then tells the story.”

Due to his commitment to True Lies, Cameron wasn’t available to translate his scriptment into a first draft screenplay, He hired Jay Cocks to whip a script into shape. “Between Jay and Kathryn, ideas flew like crazy — visualize whirled peas. Their restructuring of my unweidly piece was efficient and focused, while retaining the style of the meandering, quirky dialogue. They wrote it down to a manageable length and shaped it into Kathryn’s vision. Though Jay and I did very little writing together, we are both proud of the collaboration.” Cocks had worked with Bigelow on an unproduced Joan of Arc epic titled Company of Angels that had Winona Ryder attached to play the martyred warrior. Of Strange Days, Cocks recalled, “We didn’t want to do tech and glitz. We wanted to do street. And we wanted to give a very vivid sense of a city in terminal social disorder. And a society really on the razor’s edge.” He added, “I came to this from more of a Raymond Chandler angle than a William Gibson angle.”

Finding camera equipment capable of simulating the near future world of Strange Days from the point of view of someone jacked into a SQUID became a formidable technical hurdle to bound before production could begin. In a lecture on the film’s opening sequence which is packaged as an audio commentary on the film’s laserdisc and DVD releases, Bigelow explained, “No existing camera was going to give me — I tested every camera out there, even the smallest, lightest one that was available to me, like an IMO, would give me that would replicate that kind of incredible mobility that the human eye has. When you just look around the room and you take for granted the kind of very fragile flexible mobility that the human eye has. So, we started out by realizing no camera would accomplish this that existed out there so we had no build a camera. This was about a year before we started to shoot. And we built a camera that literally could fit in the palm of your hand. It weighed 8 pounds, it was 35 millimeter, with interchangable lenses — prime lenses — and we outfitted it with a kind of modified Steadicam rig, which enabled you to give you the kind of fluidity of Steadicam.”

Bigelow added, “So I needed, if we simply did it handheld, you’d be throwing up in the audience watching that, I mean literally, you’d need airsick bags. I mean, this was just one challenge in making this. So what I did was I gave it a, there’s a piece of equipment that I used for Point Break — there’s a foot chase in that — called the pogo cam, which is a camera that weighs 18 pounds, which is gyro stablized, but it has no through-the-lens eyepiece, it has just a kind of wire on top of the camera so you kind of vaguely know what you’re framing. So I wanted to kind of give the Steadicam a pogo attiude and the pogo cam is just something you simply run with, it’s on a stick, camera’s on a stick, and it has a gyro stabilizer at the bottom. We kind of adapted some elements from the pogo cam to the Steadicam with this new 8 pound camera and there we finally had — this I’m talking a year, with a lot of experimentation — to finally have a camera that could execute this which I know looks really simple. But it wasn’t.”

Strange Days commenced shooting June 1994 in Los Angeles, with Cameron and Steven-Charles Jaffe producing under Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment banner for 20^th Century Fox. The 80-day schedule called for 77 days of night photography, including the massive New Year’s Eve bash. On Saturday, September 27, a four block area at 5^th and Figueroa in front of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel became New Year’s Eve 1999. Concert promoters Moss Jacobs and Philip Blaine were put on the payroll to organize an event, which featured performances by Dee-Lite and Aphex Twin and many more techno groups. With tickets running $10 a pop, the event was set to kick off at 9pm and run until dawn. Between 10,000 and 12,000 revelers showed up, two stadium sized video screens were brought in, several hundred fireworks exploded, 2,000 balloons released and a half-ton of confetti showered the scene. Jaffe recalled, “We had several hundred people organizing this, from our crew to security people to the police. It took a behemoth effort to pull this all together.”

Screened at the Venice Film Festival in September and New York Film Festival the following month, Strange Days opened October 1995 in the United States. Critics seemed won over by the director, if not her film. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “One thing for certain about the furiously talented Ms. Bigelow: No one will ever say she directs like a girl … Only when it comes time to justify its excesses and deliver on a promise of wider revelation does the otherwise audacious screenplay by James Cameron and Jay Cocks look too specific and small.” Steve Davis, The Austin Chronicle: “Although there are some exhilarating moments here, they’re offset by frequent distractions: Lewis’ standard (and now boring) weird performance, an occasional lack of logic in the story line, a tendency to go operatic, and the overall feeling that the movie is unsure of where it is going.” Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Strange Days does three things that will make it a cult film. It creates a convincing future landscape; it populates it with a hero who comes out of the noir tradition and is flawed and complex rather than simply heroic, and it provides a vocabulary … At the same time, depending more on mood and character than logic, the movie backs into an ending that is completely implausible.”

With $7.9 million at the U.S. box office, Strange Days was lumped in by The New York Times with several “big budget flops” released around the same time: Assassins, Jade, The Scarlet Letter. In an unspecified interview, Bigelow maintained, “If you hold a mirror up to society, and you don’t like what you see, you can’t fault the mirror. It’s a mirror. I think that on the eve of the millennium, a point in time only four years from now, the clock is ticking, the same social issues and racial tensions still exist, the environment still needs reexamination so you don’t forget it when the lights come up. Strange Days is provocative. Without revealing too much, I would say that it feels like we are driving toward a highly chaotic, explosive, volatile, Armageddon-like ending. Obviously, the riot footage came out of the L.A. riots. I mean, I was there. I experienced that.” She added, “The toughest decision was not wanting to shy away from anything, trying to keep the truth of the moment, of the social environment. It’s not that I condone violence. I don’t. It’s an indictment. I would say the film is cautionary, a wake-up call, and that I think is always valuable.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Strange Days Press Kit

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

Strange Days. DVD audio commentary by Kathryn Bigelow. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2002)

The Limey (1999)
Written by Lem Dobbs
Directed by Steven Soderbergh
Produced by John Hardy, Scott Kramer
Running time: 89 minutes

Should I Care?
Taking a look at a movie, stepping back and taking a look at it again benefits few films as thoroughly as The Limey, the fractured, hard boiled egg that director Steven Soderbergh whipped up on break between two studio assignments near the end of the first decade of his career. Pocketing some well earned critical cache for thrusting two stars of the 1960s — Terence Stamp and Peter Fonda — back into the limelight with screen roles they could sink their chops into, a non-linear timeline that reduces the story and characters to sketches could be described as an acquired taste at best. But like the director’s glacially paced remake of Solaris (2002) and the eccentric double feature Che (2008), The Limey is a movie whose suggested usage recommends time to chew it over. That’s the ideal approach for a film about time. Focusing on a British career criminal past his expiration date whose trip to L.A. conjures memories — and finally regrets — of what his life might have been, this is intricately well made, poignant and exciting filmmaking.

Screenwriter Lem Dobbs — who had Richard Stark paperback novels like The Hunter on his brain when he initially wrote the script in his early 20s — has reason to snipe about what Soderbergh came out of the editing room with. Supporting characters perfectly cast in Lesley Ann Warren, Nicky Katt and Barry Newman are shouldered out of the movie, while Ann-Margret’s entire performance hit the cutting room floor. At 89 minutes, it’s hard to see how restoring 10 minutes to the running time would have lost anybody. Entire layers of the story feel unexposed: contrasts between L.A. and London, upper and working class, the ‘60s and the ‘90s. Soderbergh seems after a little less conversation and instead juxtaposes moving images, moving adroitly through a man’s memory to examine all these subjects and more. Employing footage of a 27-year-old Stamp from the film Poor Cow (1967) for flashbacks was an inspired choice, while the low key piano score by Cliff Martinez haunts the action beautifully.

So, What’s This About?
A taciturn stranger (Terence Stamp) who speaks at times in rhyming Cockney slang and gives the name of “Wilson” exits Los Angeles International Airport. He seeks out Eduardo Roel (Luis Guzman), an acting class friend of his daughter Jenny (Melissa George) and sender of the letter notifying Wilson that his daughter has died. Refusing to believe that her neck was broken in a car accident on Mulholland Drive, Wilson pays a visit to the drug traffickers Jenny confronted when she discovered her boyfriend was doing business with them. Unaware that Wilson has spent half of his life in British prisons for armed robbery, the petty thieves pay dearly for their rudeness. Word reaches Jenny’s ex, Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda), a music producer who built a fortune capturing the allure of Southern California on vinyl records in the late 1960s. Valentine now lives in a house suspended over the Hollywood Hills with his current baby-faced flame Adhara (Amelia Heinle).

Spending time with Jenny’s best friend and acting instructor Elaine (Lesley Ann Warren), Wilson reveals that his daughter often threatened to dial the police on him during his wilder days in London. This was her way to showing her love for him. Wilson believes a similar occurrence with her ex-boyfriend led to Jenny’s death. Crashing a party at Valentine’s, Wilson throws one of the record producer’s muscle men into the canyon and narrowly evades a loaded for bear security consultant named Jim Avery (Barry Newman) who protects Valentine. Avery outsources the hit on Wilson to a pool hall punk (Nicky Katt) who blows his assignment when the narcs monitoring Valentine intervene. Unable to prove Valentine is involved in drug smuggling, a DEA agent (Bill Duke) instead provides Wilson with the location of their quarry. Wilson, Eduardo and Elaine head up the coast to Big Sur, where Valentine is hiding out and Wilson seeks the truth about his daughter’s death.

Who Made It?
The son of American painter R.B. Kitaj, Anton Lemuel Kitaj was born in Oxford and grew up in London in the 1960s. He settled in Los Angeles toward the end of the 1970s, adopted the pen name Lem Dobbs (a nod to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, one of his favorite films) and started cranking out screenplays. One in particular was influenced by the pulp fiction of Donald Westlake, whose novel The Hunter (written under the non de plume Richard Stark) and its vengeance wrecking anti-hero would coincidentally inspire at least two movies with fractured timelines: Point Blank (1967) and later Payback (1999). Titled The Limey, nothing much became of Dobbs’ script, but a decade later, the screenwriter found a fan in director Steven Soderbergh, who filmed a screenplay Dobbs had written as homage to German horror movies of the 1920s. Dobbs became a vocal critic of Kafka (1991), but was approached by Soderbergh with the prospect of making The Limey as soon as the director finished his third film, King of the Hill (1993).

Wrapping an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s crime novel Out of Sight (1998) for Universal Pictures, Soderbergh wanted to go back to work, as well as experiment with techniques he was tempted to workshop on his $48 million studio assignment. Dobbs was game to help remodel The Limey less in the style of a straightforward crime thriller and into something deeper. At a much earlier stage, Dobbs had Michael Caine in mind for the role of Wilson, but Terence Stamp was chosen as the ‘60s screen icon they wanted to build the film around. Basking in the warmest reviews of his career for Out of Sight, Soderbergh approached upstart, filmmaker friendly Artisan Entertainment in June 1998 with a script and a cast for The Limey. The mini-studio agreed to finance a roughly $9 million budget and nine months later, the dexterous filmmaker would turn in his cut of the film. Shunned by audiences, the fragmented film noir would come to be regarded by many critics and filmgoers as a career best for both Dobbs and Soderbergh.

How’d They Do It?
Emigrating from London to Los Angeles permanently at the age of 18, one of the earliest scripts Lem Dobbs finished was The Limey. “I remember when I first wrote this script, and I was living in my little apartment in Hollywood, a block from Paramount Studios. Around the corner there was an office building on Larchmont and I was walking by and I looked at the directory outside and it said, ‘Aldrich and Associates’. And the minute this script — the original, naïve, adolescent version — was hot off the Xerox machine I took a copy around to Robert Aldrich’s office and gave it to his secretary and said, ‘This is for Mr. Aldrich’ and I’d written a letter or something and I still think to this day if one thing had led to another and he’d read it and liked it and called me and somehow the movie had gotten made it would have added years to his life, it would have resurrected his critical reputation.” Dobbs added, “But it shows you how long it can be before a movie comes together and it’s strange to think that I’m saying now that you brought a script to Robert Aldrich. You might as well be invoking the name of D.W. Griffith.”

Leaning heavily on the novels of Richard Stark and action movies directed by Walter Hill, as well as British film noir  — Dobbs cites Michael Caine in Get Carter (1971) and the TV mini-series Out (1978) starring Tom Bell as influences — the script made its way to Steven Soderbergh, whose debut film sex, lies and videotape (1989) won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival when the director was 26 years old. Soderbergh recalled, “This is the script he had for a while, and that we talked about doing after King of the Hill. But we sort of let it drop. After Out Of Sight, I called him up again: I really wanted to go back to work immediately, but I wanted to do something small where I could continue to experiment a little with narrative. There were things I thought of during Out of Sight where I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you could go a lot further with some of these ideas if you had a piece of material that could withstand it.’ So I called Lem. I said, ‘Look, let’s think about this again, but I want to come at it a different way. I want to make it more of a mosaic and sort of deconstruct it a little bit, and let’s figure out now who the actor is that we’re going to design this around, because there aren’t a lot of choices.’”

Promoting The Limey in 1999, Soderbergh revealed, “I thought, I would love to see a movie in which Terence Stamp is the lead character, so that’s what I was thinking. But I also knew that we had a movie in which 95 percent of the dialogue was spoken by characters 50 and older, and that’s not exactly where the core demographic is lately. One of the things that I liked about the script was that Terence Stamp’s daughter, Jenny, had a really close friend who was not her age. Lem Dobbs, the writer and I were talking about that and he was saying, ‘You know, I have friends of all different ages, but I feel like when I go to see a movie, everybody’s friend is exactly the same age.’ We became very enamored of the idea of Jenny’s closest friend being a woman who was much older than her, because that seemed absolutely right for it.” Dobbs and Soderbergh considered Susan Clark, Lauren Hutton, Sally Field, Goldie Hawn, Blair Brown, Jill Clayburgh, Susan Blakely, Linda Pearl, Brooke Adams, Mackenzie Phillips, Katharine Ross, Adrienne Barbeau, Peggy Lipton, Glynnis O’Connor, Kathleen Quinlan, Annette O’Toole and Kay Lenz before Lesley Ann Warren was cast.

The Limey was pitched to Santa Monica based film financier Artisan Entertainment in June 1998. Cameras were rolling in locations around Los Angeles by October 1998. John Hardy — collaborator with Soderbergh on six of his seven previous films — was producing with Scott Kramer. To serve as director of photography, the director tapped Ed Lachman, who’d finished shooting The Virgin Suicides for Sofia Coppola only weeks previous. As for what Soderbergh had in mind in terms of influences and intent, he revealed, “For this film especially, I’d say Petulia and Point Blank, but I love the early Alain Resnais films. Those had a huge impact on me when I saw them. Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad are both still astonishing to me to this day. There are more ideas in the first fifteen minutes of Hiroshima, Mon Amour than in the last ten movies you’ve seen. And he was, like, the first guy to do this stuff. You look at what he was doing and it’s just jaw-dropping. I haven’t done anything nearly that adventurous yet.” He added, “I kept saying, ‘Look, if we do this right, it’s Alain Resnais makes Get Carter.”

One innovation by Soderbergh was to sneak in archive footage of his lead actor from a much older film. Lem Dobbs gave Soderbergh his bootleg copy of a 1967 crime drama starring Terrence Stamp and Carol White titled Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s debut feature film as director. Dobbs enthused, “The thing about Poor Cow is that it’s a Ken Loach film, so it had the famous Ken Loach grainy, documentary look to it, so it’s almost as if it’s not clips from another film. It’s almost as if it is memories or home movies of an actual past. It’s also the only film where Terence Stamp looks normal in. So many of the films from his heyday he has kind of strange dyed blonde hair or he’s got a period moustache or there’s something odd or it’s Modesty Blaise — it’s some wacky film. Poor Cow is the one film where Terence Stamp looks like he probably looked at that time. Like himself.” Soderbergh met Ken Loach and received the director’s blessing to poach Poor Cow, but negotiating legal clearances with two separate copyright holders stretched well into post-production.

With help from editor Sarah Flack, Soderbergh experimented with a disjointed editing style. A scene between Wilson and Elaine jumps between her apartment, a boardwalk and a diner, but unfolds as one conversation, making it unclear whose point of view we’re experiencing and how reliable it is. Soderbergh explained, “Editing is a very intensive and collaborative period. It’s where the film is finally being made, in a way. And in this case, there was a lot of experimentation. Some of our early versions went too far and resulted in something that was almost incoherent to people who had worked on the film. And we ended up backing off a little bit, and finding a better balance between the sort of abstract impressionistic side of the movie and the straightforward narrative side. That just required a bit of trial and error. That’s normal, but there was more in this film than a lot of other films I’ve made. But editing was really fun.”

One casualty in the editing of The Limey became Ann-Margret. Soderbergh explained, “She had a scene as Peter Fonda’s ex-wife when he shows up at the house in Big Sur. It was a scene that culminated in a lengthy monologue that I really liked, that I had asked Lem to write. I remember one day, I told him I had recently seen Network. And I said, ‘Gosh, you know, people used to have monologues in movies. I don’t feel like they have monologues any more.’ And Lem wrote this scene with Peter Fonda’s ex-wife doing a lengthy tirade about Peter and his lifestyle. And it all turned out very well. The problem is it had to be all or nothing. It was an eight-minute sequence. If it’s Ann-Margret, you can’t just have it be a minute. I decided, based on the rhythm of the movie and my sense that Peter’s character didn’t really need much more backstory than it had, that I just had to pull the whole thing out. That was a difficult call to make. But I felt that an eight-minute sequence right there really brought the film to a halt. And I decided to keep it going.”

Instead of screening The Limey to a test audience recruited at a mall, Soderbergh took an alternate approach. “In this case, the only screenings I had were for friends. I had called Artisan and said that in my opinion, we would be throwing our money away to do formal previews on this movie, because it’s never going to score very well. It’s the type of film that will not benefit from having these screenings. What I preferred to do was screen it for the most intelligent group of friends I could put together, and get ideas that way. They agreed. So I did just three or four screenings where I invited a different group of friends each time. It was writers, directors, actors, some other friends who are not in the film business, people who are reasonably intelligent and have a relationship with me that allows them to speak very frankly. Sometimes it would be brand new people, and sometimes it would be people who had seen it before, so I could get a balance of opinions from people who were watching the film change. I think in this case, that was a good thing to do.”

Screened at the Cannes Film Festival in May and the Toronto Film Festival in September, The Limey opened October 1999 in the United States to very favorable reviews.  Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “Steven Soderbergh’s The Limey is the story of two older guys who hire their killers, and another who is a do-it-yourselfer. In its quiet and murderous way, it is like the delayed final act of an old movie about drugs, guns and revenge.” Charles Taylor, Salon.com: “Like Point Blank, The Limey is an art noir that courts pretension but just manages to keep from succumbing to it.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Above all, Soderbergh is a master of narrative economy, stripping down images and information to their essential components, always searching for the most efficient and visually frugal means of telling his stories. The Limey continues in the vein he established with his previous film Out of Sight — straightforward genre pieces that he treats as anything but straightforward.”

The Limey was ignored in theaters, but $3.2 million at the U.S. box office did little to erase Soderbergh’s experimental streak. “I respect my audience, and I assume they come to the theater with a certain level of intelligence, but I don’t pander to them. I feel like, ‘Look, I’m going to take you somewhere, you can go or not go, but here is where we’re going’. I like that attitude when I see movies. We’re doing our thing. When we tested Out of Sight, it didn’t score very well. People wrote down, ‘I hate stories that are told this way’. There are people that just can’t stand a narrative that doesn’t go A-B-C-D. Do I think the average moviegoer today is a little less discerning than they were thirty years ago? Yeah, maybe. Back in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s in the U.S., people seemed more willing to go to a movie to have an unexpected experience. Today, people tend to want to know what they’re going to experience before they go, and they get upset if they don’t get what they wanted.” One year later, Soderbergh would win an Academy Award for Best Director with Traffic (2000), a fragmented exploration of the war on drugs that ran away with grosses of $207.5 million worldwide.

Where’d You Get All of This?
The Limey. DVD audio commentary with Steven Soderbergh & Lem Dobbs. Artisan Home Entertainment (1999)

“Independent Means: Getting Closer — With The Limey, Steven Soderbergh continues to break down the barriers between actor and director” By Jamie Painter. Back Stage West, 7 October 1999

“Soderbergh Finds Success Is No Sellout” By Rene Rodriguez. The Miami Herald, 10 October 1999

“Steven Soderbergh Interview” By Keith Phipps. The Onion

“Soderbergh Brings Past, Present Together in The Limey” By Elif Cercel. Directors World, 15 November 15, 1999

“Dan Schneider Interview 21: Lem Dobbs” By Dan Schneider. Cosmetica, 25 January 2009

Dark City (1998)
Screenplay by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer, story by Alex Proyas
Directed by Alex Proyas
Produced by Andrew Mason, Alex Proyas
Running time: 103 minutes (theatrical version)/ 111 minutes (Director’s Cut)

Should I Care?
In the sub-genre of alternate universe movies, Dark City demands to be seen with almost as much energy as it begs to be forgotten. As close to a passion project as you get in Hollywood, Alex Proyas cashed in the chips he earned directing a box office hit (The Crow) without the participation of a lead actor in Brandon Lee, who was killed during filming. Contrary to its intense ambitions, this unique hybrid of special effects phantasmagoria and existential detective mystery isn’t undone by doing too much, but by doing not nearly enough. Much like three films that would follow it into theaters — The Truman Show (1998), Pleasantville (1998) and The Matrix (1999) — Dark City deals with the inhabitants of a parallel world who begin to question the fabric of what they know as reality. Unlike those films, modern classics all, Dark City is not nearly as inventive in depicting its world or the beings controlling it as the filmmakers probably dreamed.

Proyas deserves style points for attempting something different here, as opposed to drawing a paycheck on Casper the Friendly Ghost. At its best, Dark City is drenched in the nocturnal shades of an Edward Hopper painting, with sensational lighting by Tim Burton’s cinematographer of late, Dariusz Wolski, evoking the wee small hours of the morning. Trevor Jones composed the rousing musical score, perfect for a monster movie of some sort, but not this one. The poorly sketched antagonists are more silly than sinister, while the entire cast seems to have been coaxed into sleepwalking through their performances. Maybe what’s missing most here is wit, either in a visual sense, like Terry Gilliam might have attempted, or in a spark from the characters themselves, who come across as figures in a mildewed comic book panel. If that’s what Proyas intended, the results are a big miscalculation.

So, What’s This About?
At the stroke of midnight, in a city fused with elements of the 1940s, ‘50s and ‘60s, John Murdoch (Rufus Sewell) wakes in a hotel room where a young woman has been murdered. He has no recollection of who he is or how he got there. Dr. Schreber (Kiefer Sutherland) telephones claiming to be Murdoch’s physician and warns that others are coming for him. The appearance of boogeymen known as The Strangers — who wield supernatural power over the inhabitants of the city — compels Murdoch to go on the run. Inspector Frank Bumstead (William Hurt) heads the manhunt and like Murdoch, the detective is haunted by an inability to remember much of his past, like the last time he actually saw daylight. His ex-partner (Colin Friels) has gone insane trying to unravel questions like this. Bumstead works with Murdoch’s estranged wife Emma (Jennifer Connelly) in an effort to bring him in safely, but his pursuit is complicated by Murdoch’s newfound ability to alter reality.

Dr. Schreber reveals to Murdoch that he is the focus of a massive experiment by The Strangers — led by Mr. Book (Ian Richardson) and his apprentice Mr. Hand (Richard O’Brien) — to distill what makes the soul unique. The Strangers have the power to put the city’s inhabitants to sleep and at midnight each day, “tune” their experiment by changing the identities and social status of their unsuspecting test subjects, as well as the physical reality of the city itself. Murdoch has been given the identity of a murderer to play, but The Strangers learn that with the ability to “tune”, he has the power to undermine their control.  Rejecting what Schreber has told him, Murdoch becomes obsessed with finding Shell Beach, the coastal village he vaguely remembers growing up in, but no one in the city seems to recall how to get to. With Bumstead’s help, Murdoch travels to the known boundaries of the city, where the secret of his existence is finally revealed to him.

Who Made It?
Alex Proyas was a freshman at the Australian Film and Television School when an 8-minute thriller he wrote and directed titled Groping (1982) made the film festival circuit. Proyas served as a director of photography on a short by classmate Jane Campion before dropping out of school in his third year to form a production company with two friends. Proyas began directing music videos for artists like INXS and Mike Oldfield, but his work on the Crowded House hit “Don’t Dream It’s Over” (1987) won him notice in the United States. Commercial work for Coca-Cola, Swatch and American Express followed, but Proyas was already scribbling ideas for a movie titled Dark City. When he finally accepted an offer to direct a feature film — The Crow (1994) — it was due largely to similarities the projects shared in mood and setting. The success of The Crow vaulted Proyas into the class of David Fincher and Michael Bay, music video directors who’d also made the leap to features.

Proyas wanted to direct Dark City next. Disney developed it, hiring Lem Dobbs to work with Proyas, but the studio’s befuddlement with their story would prompt them to drop the project. Fox was up next and brought in David S. Goyer to help Proyas & Dobbs iron out the script. Casting differences with Proyas would ultimately compel Fox to put Dark City into turnaround as well. New Line Cinema gave Proyas casting approval and roughly $27 million to produce his dream project, which shot in the Commemorative Pavilion at Sydney Showgrounds — now the site of Fox Studios Australia — far from the gaze of the studio. After drawing mixed reception at a test screening, New Line urged Proyas to make several commercial concessions, clarifying the story with a voice-over introduction, for one. Dark City was swept aside by Titanic at the box office, but a decade since its release, it has emerged as one of the most highly regarded cult movies of the 1990s.

How’d They Do It?
Intrigued with the potential for combining the hardboiled detective yarn with a science fiction story, Alex Proyas began writing a script around 1990. He recalled, “Basically I had the first draft — or I’d done many drafts but I had an early draft of Dark City — ready to go after The Crow opened and was quite successful. And basically I was asked to, people presented themselves, studios presented themselves and wanted to know whether I had a project I wanted to do next and Dark City was the one I started showing people. And at that stage it was even more unusual than the final film, even more challenging, to be made as a feature. So, you know, it was a slow process and you know, we went through several studios because there were always disagreements with where they wanted the script to go, where I didn’t want the script to go. I had a very specific idea about what I didn’t want to develop the screenplay into.”

Proyas was interested in working with Lem Dobbs, author of perhaps the most highly regarded screenplay never made into a movie: Edward Ford. Dobbs recalled, “A lot of people assume I got this job — or that Alex came to me — because I had written Kafka, which is not the case at all. Alex is not a particular admirer of the film Kafka, nor should he be. He in fact had read another script of mine, and then Disney, who’d actually hired me to work on Dark City, when my name came up they said, ‘Oh, but he’s too dark.’ I think one of their problems was Alex’s script Dark City was that they felt it should be lightened up a little. And the producer of Dark City, Andrew Mason, had read a rather romantic comedic love story that I had written. And it was that script that encouraged them to hire me. And it never for one minute occurred to me that this film was Kafkaesque. I recognized right away that Alex’s script had superficial similarities to the film Kafka, but in terms of Kafka the writer and the world that he evokes and the issues and themes that he was dealing with? No.”

Dobbs revealed, “I think he pretty much hired me based on the notes I’d written and our initial phone conversation. We seemed to hit it off and be thinking along the same lines and also I had a contract in hand by the time I got on a plane and went to Australia. So that’s pretty amazing, to be hired sight unseen. Particularly when you, I remember in my notes I said, I sort of indicated certain things in the script I thought were clichés. So that’s how you get hired in Hollywood, is by telling your director that his script is full of clichés and has certain pretentious elements that should be removed! I remember the first thing was that the character was called Walker in his original script and I said, ‘You can’t call him Walker.’ It’s just been done to death and it’s been taken so famously by Lee Marvin in Point Blank, but by this point you see the name Walker and it’s meant to symbolize an existential everyman trying to find his place in the world.”

Touchstone’s executive vice president Donald De Line didn’t see a movie he wanted to produce. Dobbs mused, “In Hollywood — in any screenplay — the suits wanna know what the rules are. They want to know, they want to do the math, and it’s terribly irritating to filmmakers because we often don’t care about the math. Like I’ve been saying, I don’t care about the story, the plot. I care about the man in search of himself, and other things. And when you have meetings in Hollywood, quite often, all people can really talk about is the actual plot: How does he get from A to B, who are these aliens, where do they come from. They want everything answered. And as we know, often the best movies don’t answer everything. They leave room for interpretations. They leave room for discovery on the part of the viewer. You don’t want total confusion, obviously. You don’t want the viewer to be lost or to get bored or to be mystified, completely, but you don’t want everything spelled out. You want it to be ambiguous here and ambivalent there and have mysteries.”

Fox picked up Dark City next. The only screenwriter both studio and director agreed on bringing in was David S. Goyer, who’d been sent an early draft by Proyas before The Crow was even in theaters. Goyer recalled, “And I remember the first day we were talking about kind of the genesis of the ideas and he said that he had had these dreams when he was a kid with these tall, dark figures pursuing him. And I had had a similar recurring nightmare when I was a kid about being pursued by this character called the Midnight Man, and it was just this silhouetted figure that would chase me and I remember the two of us talking about that in our first meeting and from that point on we just kind of clicked.” Goyer and Proyas spent a month in Australia working on a first draft, which Fox responded to favorably. After talking with Johnny Depp among others, Proyas narrowed his choice for leading man down to Ralph Fiennes, who the studio rejected due to how poorly Strange Days (1995) fared at the box office. Reaching an impasse with Proyas, Fox put Dark City into turnaround.

Proyas lamented, “The genesis of Dark City — even once we got involved with the studio — was a really slow and ponderous one, because I wanted this thing to be just completely off the wall. And I think this is where I finally discovered the principle that functions in Hollywood, which is the bigger the budget of a project the smaller the ideas. That’s a direct correlation.” New Line Cinema — the mini-studio that had rolled the dice on Seven (1995) and Boogie Nights (1997)  — was confident enough in Proyas to grant the freedom and financing for him to make the version of Dark City he wanted. By this time, Proyas had settled on Rufus Sewell to play the role of Murdoch. A 65-day shooting scheduled commenced August 1996 in Sydney, with Dariusz Wolski serving as cinematographer and Patrick Tatopoulos as production designer. George Liddle came on board during pre-production to help construct the fantastic cityscape.

Put before a test audience, Dark City drew a middling response. The rX offered by New Line was for the filmmakers to come up with a voice-over introduction that might explain what was going on. Goyer recalled, “All throughout production we had fought that battle, because we wanted the audience to be confused at the beginning of the movie.” Though Proyas had kept The Crow true to the gothic spirit of the comic book it was based on, Dark City met so much bewilderment that the director made concessions. Proyas elaborated, “In Dark City’s case, the pressure that was brought to bear on me is simply that the film wasn’t appealing to as many, as great a percentage of the audience as a studio would like for it to appeal to in order for them to make their money back. And the reality is, they were right to a certain extent. We perhaps made a film with a greater budget than it merited for that type of story. But unfortunately, by trying to distill it down to something it wasn’t, I feel in the end you risk losing your core audience.”

Critics returned from their visit to Dark City with a myriad of views. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “At its best, the movie feels like a magician’s trick, a gleefully improvised demonic fantasy of ominous evil genies conjured out of bottles and stirred into a steamy swirl that brings in everything from Franz Kafka to Vincent Price, from Fritz Lang to Star Trek.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “What they have done is taken a few second-hand ideas from noir and speculative fiction and mixed them in occasionally striking ways, even if, in the end, the result isn’t all that much fun.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Proyas’ ability to make a twilight cityscape look menacing is like no one else’s. But apart from the sensory input he throws at you, Dark City is a curiously unengaging experience. It’s like the CD-ROM games Myst or Riven blown up to huge cinematic proportions while the critical ideas driving the play are left behind. For all its dark splendor, nothing much happens to make you squirm or gasp or weep, as in The Crow. It flatlines before it ever begins.”

Leaving no doubt where he stood, Roger Ebert heralded Dark City as the best movie of 1998 — ahead of Pleasantville, Saving Private Ryan and A Simple Plan — and reserved some of the most effusive praise of his career in support of it. He wrote, “I responded so strongly to the film because it was intelligent, intriguing, darkly atmospheric, and most of all because it was visually breathtaking. Werner Herzog tells us we need new images or we will die. Alex Proyas’ Dark City was visionary in the tradition of Metropolis, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 2001 and Blade Runner. It was a daring act of the imagination.” Ebert loved the movie so much that a decade later, in declining health, he volunteered to record an exhaustive audio commentary track for a Director’s Cut DVD. In this expanded edition of Dark City — very similar to the version Proyas test screened — the studio mandated voice-over introduction by Kiefer Sutherland was nixed. Proyas also extended several scenes, adding depth to the characters and giving viewers more time in the world he created.

Sneaking into U.S. theaters in February 1998, Dark City was virtually ignored by audiences, tallying $14.3 million domestically and $12.8 million overseas. Looking back ten years, Alex Proyas summed up the reaction to his film. “The main criticism of Dark City still to this day with some critics is, it looks really nice but it’s all style and no substance, which I take as an enormous misunderstanding of what the film is. You cannot say it’s no substance. If anything, it’s all substance, you know. I mean, you can certainly criticize it on many other levels, but you would certainly never criticize it on that level. It’s almost that there’s too much substance for some people, and they’re not prepared to invest that level of thought into something, to sort of understand what it’s trying to do.” He added, “It’s far from a perfect film and I’d be the last person to call any of my films perfect because I’m my greatest critic, but I know the level of thought that was put into that film, and it certainly does not suffer from lack of ideas or thought. That’s the one thing it doesn’t suffer from.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
Dark City — Director’s Cut. Audio commentary by Alex Proyas and Lem Dobbs and David S. Goyer. New Line Home Video (2008)

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)

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?
In Los Angeles – overpopulated and choked in pollution – of the year 2019, the Tyrell Corporation leads the field of robot design with the “Replicant,” a being virtually identical to a human, but superior in strength and agility, and at least equal in intelligence. After a mutiny in an off-world colony, Replicants have been declared illegal on Earth, where they are tracked down and “retired” by special police known as blade runners. One of these blade runners administers an empathy test known as the Voight-Kampff to Tyrell employees in an attempt to screen out possible Replicants. One of his subjects – Leon (Brion James) – is pushed too far by the test and shoots the officer. Ex-blade runner Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is summoned by his old captain (M. Emmet Walsh) to hunt down four Replicants – two male and two female – who have arrived in L.A. for reasons unknown.

Paired with a cop (Edward James Olmos) who speaks an amalgam of French/German/Hungarian, Deckard goes to see Dr. Tyrell (Joe Turkel). He learns that a new model of Replicant – the Nexus 6 – has been implanted with memories so real that it may actually believe itself to be human. Designed to develop its own emotional responses, the Nexus 6 has been engineered with a 4-year life span. Tyrell has Deckard administer the Voight-Kampff Test to his secretary Rachael (Sean Young). Deckard realizes that she’s a Nexus 6. Rachael does not react well to news that she’s an artificial being and seeks Deckard out in an effort to cope with this. Meanwhile, the other escaped Replicants – combat model Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer), assassin Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) and pleasure model Pris (Daryl Hannah) – befriend a lonely robotics designer (William Sanderson) in attempt to infiltrate the Tyrell Corporation, seeking reprieves on their lives and the meaning of their existence.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Philip K. Dick capped a prolific decade that included 19 novels, 27 short stories and a Hugo Award in 1963 with the publishing of his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ in 1968. In a phone interview with Paul M. Sammon a little more than a year before his death in 1981, Dick discussed the novel’s genesis. “It stems from an interest on my part in the problem of differentiating the authentic human being from the reflux machine, which I call an android … Where for me, the word ‘android’ is a metaphor for people who are physiologically human but psychologically behaving in a non-human way. I got interested in this when I was doing research for Man In the High Castle and I was studying the Nazi mentality. And I discovered that although these people were highly intelligent, they were definitely deficient in some manner in appropriate affect, appropriate emotion that would accompany the intellectual process.”

After struggling as both a flamenco dancer and a screenwriter in the 1970s, Hampton Fancher thought he would take a shot at being a film producer. Fancher recalled, “I thought I would produce a movie. And this guy – Jim Maxwell – who’s a close friend, knows me well, said, ‘You might, I think science fiction’s gonna happen.’ And he said, ‘Do you know who Philip K. Dick is?’ I said, no. He said, ‘Well there’s a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?‘ And I said, okay, I’ll read that. I read it. I didn’t like it that much. But I thought, okay, that’s commercial. Here’s a thru-line: bureaucratic detective chasing androids. In ’78 or so, my friend Brian Kelly, he had $5,000. He said, ‘Maybe you could get an option and that might be a good commercial project that you could get behind, and, you know, make some money.’ That’s all we’re talking about, is making some money.”

Brian Kelly zeroed in on producer Michael Deeley with the project. Deeley recalled, “I’d been pursued for about two years by Brian Kelly – who’s a very close friend of mine – who had this idea in mind to make a movie, based on Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And I’d first read it and thought: this wasn’t very interesting.” Fancher’s take on the material was cerebral and dialogue driven, a cautionary tale of over population and ecological disaster that largely took place in rooms. Fancher pressed ahead anyway, first with a treatment, then several drafts of a screenplay. “The intellectual aspects of the screenplay were taken from my response to the death of animal life on this planet, and what that meant. That’s probably the thing that saw me through the first draft, was I had a passion about that, and so my affection for the project was consistent.”

On the strength of Hampton Fancher’s adaptation, Michael Deeley ultimately agreed to produce the film, opting for the title Dangerous Days. His first choice to direct was Ridley Scott, who was mixing Alien in England at the time. Scott recalled, “I said, ‘I don’t really want to do another science fiction, I’ve just finished one. So, but I’ll read it.’ I read the script, which was Hampton Fancher and it was called Dangerous Days. And I turned it down.” Scott’s friend and associate Ivor Powell had gotten a hold of the script and had a different reaction. Powell recalled, “And I said, ‘Listen, I think we should give this a second thought. I really think this is powerful and emotional and really interesting.” The idea stuck with Scott and when he was unable to crack an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune for producer Dino De Laurentiis agreed to direct Dangerous Days. Hampton Fancher had never cared for that title, and appropriated one from William S. Burroughs that he liked better: Blade Runner.

Filmways agreed to finance a budget, but Deeley recalled, “We’d spent about two and a half million by the time it became perfectly clear that the world we were building was much bigger than twelve and a half million dollars. Much, much bigger.” As sets were being constructed, Deeley brokered a three-way arrangement to secure alternate financing and keep the project alive. Producer Alan Ladd Jr. – who had a deal with Warner Bros. – put up $7.5 million for U.S. distribution rights. Singapore movie mogul Sir Run-Run Shaw also invested that sum, for the film’s foreign rights. Another $7 million came from producers Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, who received TV and home video rights and agreed to finance the completion budget, should Blade Runner go over schedule.

Meanwhille, Hampton Fancher was struggling to conceptualize what Ridley Scott wanted to see. Scott recalled, “The hunter falls in love with the hunted, except they never go outside the apartment. It’s very interior. I want to take them outside the door. Once we go outside the door, this world has to support the thesis that she’s android, humanoid, robot.” He added, “We got up to a point where Hampton was just getting exhausted. Go back to the anvil, back to the anvil, back to the anvil.” David Peoples was approached to deliver a shooting script. Scott added, “Peoples I think is more – and I mean this in the best possible way – is simpler? Hampton is more cerebral. And for the most part this was very cerebral. And I thought, actually, bringing in something like Peoples would maybe create some fresh air in the corridors to make it move. Because my danger as a director is I tend to get very cerebral and get engaged with darkness and detail.” One of Peoples’ contributions ended up being the idea that Roy Batty would save Deckard’s life.

After Dustin Hoffman spent several months attached to the role of Deckard – moving further away from the filmmakers’ vision as time progressed – actress Barbara Hershey mentioned to Hampton Fancher the name Harrison Ford. A visit that Michael Deeley and Ridley Scott made to England to watch dailies from Raiders of the Lost Ark – then shooting at Pinewood Studios – won them over. Ford recalled, “I remember that I read a script, which I thought was interesting. At the first version that I read of it, of the film, had some issues, I had some issues with. There was a voiceover narration attached to the original script, and I said to Ridley that I played a detective who does no detecting. How about we take some of this information that’s in the voice-overs and put it into scenes, and so that the audience could discover the information, discover the character through seeing him in the context of what he does, rather than being told about it. And some of that survived, and some of it didn’t.”

With conceptual designer Syd Mead creating the industrial look of the film – cars, streets, buildings and neon – Blade Runner commenced shooting March 1981 on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank. Working in the American film industry for the first time, Ridley Scott mused, “There’s nothing worse when you’ve done two and a half hours of commercials – and I know I’ve got a very good eye – in three seconds I can give you a set-up, having walked in the room without ever seeing it before. So I don’t like discussion. I know exactly what I want, and I want to walk in and say ‘Do it.’ That’s the director’s job. The director’s not meant to stand there and consult with half a dozen people in the room.” In addition to Scott’s brusque communication skills, filming nights under heavy rain and smoke effects wore down the crew – many of whom quit – as well as some of the cast, with Harrison Ford seething through most of the shoot.

A test screening of Blade Runner was held in Dallas in March 1982. Production illustrator Tom Southwell recalled, “Everybody was expecting a heroic follow-up to Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars and the way it was advertised on television – with only the visual effects shots of a flying car going over a futuristic city and sort of a fight sequence – doesn’t prepare you for the traumatic, emotional side that there is in the film that kind of leaves you sort of broken.” Specific objections raised at the test screening were that the film was too confusing, too dark, too slow and ended too abruptly. Scott addressed these concerns by filming a brighter ending, with Ford and Sean Young escaping to the pristine countryside, and inserting voiceover narration by Ford to help audiences along with the plot.

While its visual design won acclaim, many critics were left with a bad taste to the overall film. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Science-fiction devotees may find Blade Runner a wonderfully meticulous movie and marvel at the comprehensiveness of its vision. Even those without a taste for gadgetry cannot fail to appreciate the degree of effort that has gone into constructing a film so ambitious and idiosyncratic … But Blade Runner is a film that special effects could have easily run away with, and run away with it they have. And it’s also a mess, at least as far as its narrative is concerned.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “Blade Runner doesn’t engage you directly; it forces passivity on you. It sets you down in this lopsided maze of a city, with its post-human feeling, and keeps you persuaded that something bad is about to happen. Some the scenes seem to have six subtexts but no text, and no context either.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Blade Runner is a stunningly interesting visual achievement, but a failure as a story.”

In June 1982 during its first weekend of release in the U.S., Blade Runner opened big; only E.T. was drawing a bigger crowd. But as word of mouth spread – and audiences flocked to Rocky III or Star Trek II - the film’s commercial prospects sank. Grossing $32.6 million in the U.S., Blade Runner was not only deemed a commercial disappointment, but a creative disappointment by some of the people who’d worked on it. In 2007, associate producer Ivor Powell recalled, “For me, it’s still – emotionally – falls short of total satisfaction because I just think there is an emotional logic and a sort of a narrative logic that doesn’t run as true as I feel that it should do, and in a sense I felt that what we made was an incredibly beautiful looking – as one would expect with Rid – but it’s almost like an art movie.”

Accordingly, Blade Runner became a staple of midnight screenings on college campuses or at revival houses. Then in 1990, a work print seen only at test screenings in Denver and Dallas was briefly exhibited in Los Angeles. Popular demand for a definitive version of Blade Runner led to Ridley Scott being permitted to supervise a “Director’s Cut” in 1992. The much maligned voiceover narration and the upbeat ending were both removed and 12 cryptic seconds of Deckard dreaming of a unicorn was inserted. In addition to audiences who’d missed it, critics who’d seen Blade Runner and given it a lackluster appraisal started changing their assessment. By 2007, Roger Ebert had begrudgingly added Blade Runner to his list of Great Movies, amending his 1982 review by writing, “I have been assured that my problems in the past with Blade Runner represent a failure of my own taste and imagination, but if the film was perfect, why has Sir Ridley continued to tinker with it, and now released his fifth version? I guess he’s only human.”

Commenting in 2007 on the reception of Blade Runner, writer-director Frank Darabont mused, “’82 I think was owned by E.T. It’s a brilliant film, I’m taking absolutely nothing away from it, but it was definitely happy comfort food. It always will be. It’s one of the best examples of that kind of film ever. I’m not damning it with faint praise. It’s wonderful. But I think that everyone was so plugged into the happy comfort food at that time that they weren’t giving movies like Blade Runner a chance, or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing.” Also in 2007, special effects supervisor Douglas Trumbull summed up what he finds enduring about Blade Runner: “We’re in a movie business where most movies are disposable commodities. They’re the summer blockbuster. I’m not going to name what they are, but they come and go in weeks and, bye bye. Nobody wants to resurrect them. Nobody wants to see them again. So the ones that are really truly well made – the kind of Casablancas of science fiction – survive, and get seen over and over.”

Should I Care?
Instead of reassuring the audience with a hopeful vision of the future, Blade Runner is an emotional downpour. The atmosphere is choked with smoke and rain. Animal life is endangered. The background dialects are impenetrable. Citizens with the means have fled Earth. Those who’ve stayed behind struggle to relate to each other as humans because in the film’s vision of the future, we’ve replicated life beyond the point to retain what it means to be human. The strengths and weaknesses of Blade Runner come down to it being one of the grandest art films of all time, second only to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The story never adheres to a straightforward detective mystery. Where the Replicants are or how Deckard finds them is the least interesting business in the picture.

What Fancher and Peoples do so well in their script is pose questions about what it means to be human, and where we might be headed if we continue to lose sight of that. Rutger Hauer, Brion James, Daryl Hannah and Joanna Cassidy perform some of the finest work of their careers as the Replicants – the real heroes of the film – as does Harrison Ford, who brings the right amount of downbeaten sleaze to his role. Blade Runner is deliberate and comes close to paralyzing the viewer with stimulus overload, but Ridley Scott’s eye for detail and his design genius are never in question. The stunning cinematography by Jordan Cronenweth and haunting electronic score by Vangelis add immensely to the well-deserved re-evaluation of Blade Runner as a classic.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner. By Paul M. Sammon. HarperPrism (1996)

Dangerous Days: Making Blade Runner. Blade Runner (Five-Disc Ultimate Collector’s Edition). Warner Home Video (2007)

What the *&#! Is This About?
On the 16th of November 2027, London wakes to the following news: “The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet.” For 18 years, women have been infertile, and no one has been able to explain why. In the absence of all hope, anarchy has overwhelmed most of the world, but Britain “soldiers on” by banning all immigration, rounding up and deporting any asylum seekers. A group calling themselves the Fishes have organized an anti-government insurgency in support of immigrant rights, and are blamed for a bombing that almost kills Theo Faron (Clive Owen) as he’s ordering his morning coffee.

Theo was a political activist in his youth, but following the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage has become a low-level bureaucrat. He remains largely apathetic about the future of the planet. The only thing Theo looks forward to are visits to the Bexhill area – which in addition to housing a refugee camp – is home to his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a retired, ganga smoking cartoonist who cares for his wife (Philippa Urquhart), a photojournalist who experienced something so horrific, possibly in New York, or possibly at the hands of British intelligence, that she remains in a catatonic state. Returning to London, Theo is abducted by the Fishes, who he discovers are led by his fugitive ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore).

Julian implores her ex-husband to help them smuggle a girl past security checkpoints and to the coast. Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) has government financing for a project called Ark of the Arts – spiriting the masterpieces of the art world and relocating them to London – and it’s believed he can help. Theo is offered £5,000 for his services, but the only travel permit his cousin can obtain stipulates that the girl remain under Theo’s supervision. With the aid of an insurgent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a nursemaid, Theo realizes that the girl he’s transporting, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) is carrying a child. Julian hopes to deliver her to the Human Project, a think tank who as legend would have it, is working on mankind’s cure for infertility.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1993, The Children of Men was a change of pace for mystery writer P.D. James. She imagined a world of the year 2021, where global infertility has brought civilization to its knees. James had come across a newspaper article that mentioned human fertility in the west had declined in the last 20 years. Not long after, she encountered another article, which stated that most of the life forms that have existed on earth have since died out. The author recalled, “And I thought – suppose it happened to human beings, suddenly, all in one year? What kind of world would it be? What would it mean for the way people lived, their motivation? It is almost unimaginable, what it might do to human beings.” She added, “I suppose it is a sort of moral fable; I don’t like to describe it as science fiction.”

Talent agent Hilary Shor read The Children of Men two months after delivering her first child. With her partner in the newly formed Hit & Run Productions – Tony Smith – Shor brought the project to producer Marc Abraham of Beacon Communications (later Strike Entertainment). Due to the detailed requests of P.D. James – her book be developed only as a feature, the story had to be set in England – it took a year, but Beacon finally negotiated the film rights. After a pass by Paul Chart, Shor hired Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby to adapt a screenplay. Fergus recalled, “We had done A Scanner Darkly for our first writing assignment – not the Richard Linklater one that ultimately got made. We were hired by Jersey Films to try to crack that book, and I think we had a lot of success with that adaptation so they said, ‘Hey give these guys a shot at Children of Men because it seems to be one that’s not going anywhere.’ We just read it, and we said, ‘Oh my God! This is Casablanca!’ It’s the perfect love triangle. It fit that mold and that’s when they got excited and thought, ‘Wow this could actually be a film.’”

After two years of writing, Fergus & Otsby had a draft that was good enough to be sent to Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican director of two widely praised but little seen Hollywood films: A Little Princess and Great Expectations. A low budget Spanish language feature he’d shot in his native country – Y Tu Mamá También – had yet to be released. Cuarón recalled, “The truth of the matter is I didn’t respond to the material. I was not interested in doing a science fiction film and also the book takes place in a very posh universe. I respect, I love P.D. James. I enjoy the book, but I couldn’t see myself making that movie. And, nevertheless, the premise of infertility kept on haunting me for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Cuarón was committed to shooting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but promised the producers he’d tackle The Children of Men next.

Ignoring the Fergus & Ostby draft – as well as one by David Arata, which Cuarón referred to as “a generic action movie” – the director co-wrote a script with Timothy Sexton, who was tasked with adapting the novel, while Cuarón sketched his own ideas for what he wanted in the movie. “When I started working on the film I met with the art department and they undusted all the old rejections from science fiction movies they had done, they were so excited to do this movie that took place in the future. They started showing me all these amazing things. Supersonic cars, buildings, gadgets and stuff and I was like, ‘You guys this is brilliant, but this is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we are doing is this,’ and I brought in my files. It was about Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chernobyl and I said this is the movie we are doing. The rule I set is this movie is not about imagination, it is about reference.”

Referencing The Battle of Algiers and the lead actor in a movie they liked called Croupier, Cuarón & Sexton finished their adaptation and sent it to Clive Owen, who recalled, “He was very high on my ‘directors I would love to work with’ list and even some of his films that were not as commercially successful I think are very special. When he first sent me the script I wasn’t sure about the part, I didn’t quite know why he wanted me to do it. It’s a highly unusual lead part, you look at that character and there are very unusual traits that he’s got. It’s not the kind of part where you can do your thing as an actor, it’s about sacrificing yourself to Alfonso’s vision and not getting in the way of it, which seemed more important than doing any sort of acting.” Cuarón added, “I’m thankful that this movie didn’t happen before Harry Potter. For two years I was working on Harry Potter in London – which is very different from being a tourist. Suddenly, you’re inside and witnessing the social dynamic. I can’t claim to understand the Brits, but at least I witnessed the class system, for instance, and other subtle things.”

With Cuarón’s freshly minted prestige and Julianne Moore, Michael Caine and Chiwetel Ejiofor joining the cast, Universal rolled the dice on Children of Men and its $72 million budget. Shooting commenced November 2005 in London. Cuarón recalled, “All the time we were shooting, we kept saying, ‘Let’s make it more Mexican’. In other words, we’d look at a location and then say: yes, but in Mexico there would be this and this. It was about making the place look rundown. It was about poverty.” Children of Men premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2006 before opening in the U.K. and Spain that same month. Universal bumped its release in the U.S. back to Christmas Day, supposedly so the picture could vie in awards contention.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog wrote that the studio was in fact orphaning Children of Men. “While many critics were impressed by the film’s virtuosity and bravado, the industry types were seeing a downer film that was going to lose money. The movie is a brilliant exercise in style, but it’s another grim dystopian look at our future – like Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 – that simply cost too much money (between $72 and as much as $90 million, I’ve heard) to make a profit.” Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo said at the time. “These pictures tend to be box-office disappointments. A lot of them develop an audience later on television or DVD. They grow in esteem over time.”

Critics wasted no time lavishing the film with acclaim. Manohla Dargis, the New York Times: “Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “It’s a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.” Derek Elley, Variety: “Picture more than delivers on the action front – not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.” However, the overwhelmingly positive ink was not spun into box office gold.

Nominated for three Academy Awards – Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezi) and Best Film Editing (Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodriguez) – Children of Men was ignored on its release, grossing $35.5 million in the U.S. and $34 million overseas. Responding to an interviewer who mused that the film was too dark, Cuarón stated, “It pretty much depends on your own sense of hope. What we wanted to do at the end was to give a little glimpse of a possibility of hope. A very small glimpse. So you invest your own sense of hope in the story. After you go through this journey of what I consider to be the state of things, outside our green zones, then at the end is the question: Do we have a possibility of hope? I personally believe yes. Hopefully people believe that the movie is a very hopeful movie.”

Should I Care?
With bursts of documentary-like photorealism, Children of Men depicts one of the most subliminally disturbing visions of the future ever rendered to film. The only thing that doesn’t provoke a visceral reaction may be the pedestrian title, which P.D. James may have resorted to because Apocalypse Now was taken. “That movie really stayed with me” can be used to sum up any of the great films of a decade, but where Children of Men is most pronounced is in its verisimilitude. In this depiction of Things To Come, the future is not flying cars or robots. It’s Cuba. Fashion and technology have been frozen for 20 years. Infrastructure is in decay. Solders stand on every corner. Trash bags and stray dogs line the streets. Billboards advertise euthanasia kits under the brand name Quietus (“You decide where”) and remind citizens “Suspicious? Report all illegal immigrants”.

While the conceit that Theo would go on the run with Kee rather than hand her over to the authorities constitutes what is known as a plot hole, instead of being badgered by gaps in the narrative, I was absorbed by the reality of the environment being portrayed. The randomness of terrorist atrocities, suppression of human rights, impunity of death squads and dwindling flicker of hope bleed into a sort of nightmare you know you can wake up from, even though it seems a little too similar to the world we’re living in now. Alfonso Cuarón demonstrates not only technical virtuosity, but maintains a strong moral conscience in the story. Along with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and the art department, Children of Men may replace Blade Runner as the dystopia that other filmmakers rip off for the next 20 years.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Mistress of Morality Tales” By Jan Dalley. The Independent, 20 September 1992

“Children of Men Feature” Time Out London, 21 September 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron Discusses Children of Men” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 20 December 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron on Children of Men” By Brad Brevet. Rope of Silicon, 22 December 2006

“Tribeca Film Festival conversation with Mark Fergus” 11 February 2007

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

The Directors: Take One. By Robert J. Emery. TV Books (1999)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

Over the Edge. Warner Home Video (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).