I Could Never Be Your Woman (2007)
Written by Amy Heckerling
Directed by Amy Heckerling
Produced by Bauer Martinez Entertainment/ Templar Productions
Running time: 97 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
Rosie (Michelle Pfeiffer) — a single working mom in L.A. — is introduced rubbing wrinkle free moisturizer on her hands. Her nipped and tucked ex-husband (Jon Lovitz) drops off their precocious daughter (Saoirse Ronan), who has outgrown her Barbie dolls and now keeps her mom hip to the latest in teen slang. Rosie is writer/producer of a high school sitcom called You Go Girl!, whose 30-ish star (Stacey Dash) is passed off as a teenager. Rosie tussles with censors, a devious young secretary (Sarah Alexander) and a smarmy network executive (Fred Willard) more interested in makeover reality programs than Rosie’s show.

Casting for a fresh face to play a nerd on You Go Girl!, Rosie meets Adam (Paul Rudd), an exuberant, ultra-talented 29 year old actor. She accepts a casual date, first claiming to be 37, and after a kiss, coming clean that she’s 40. Adam scores points with Rosie’s daughter by helping her ace Sonic the Hedgehog on Nintendo. Complications arise when Adam’s expanded role on the show is attributed to his relationship with Rosie, whose secretary schemes to break the couple up. Rosie receives wisdom in the form of Mother Nature (Tracey Ullman), who maintains that Rosie’s generation is just fundamentally out of whack with natural order.

Who Made It?
Bronx native Amy Heckerling received her master’s degree from the AFI Institute, where her second year thesis Getting It Over With would help land her the job of directing Fast Times at Ridgemont High for Universal in 1981. A box office hit on its way to becoming a youth classic, the success of Fast Times put Heckerling in a select class: women directing feature films in Hollywood. Look Who’s Talking (1989) and a sequel in 1990 would follow before Heckerling wrote and directed a critical and commercial smash — Clueless — which won her Best Screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics in 1995. Heckerling executive produced the Clueless spin-off for the UPN Network from 1996-99.

It was during this time that Heckerling began sketching what became I Could Never Be Your Woman. The project spent six years in development at Paramount, whose CEO Sherry Lansing didn’t think audiences would much care for a woman who becomes involved with a younger man. Once Michelle Pfeiffer attached herself to the project and helped fight to get it made, financing and distribution was secured from French producer Philippe Martinez. Shooting wrapped in the fall of 2005, but the film became so mired in contract disputes that it surfaced February 2008 directly to DVD in the United States, an unusual fate for such a high profile movie.

How’d They Do It?
In 1996, Amy Heckerling was executive producing the Clueless spin-off for UPN. The writer/director was also a single mother raising a teenage daughter in L.A. These experiences formed a script that would become I Could Never Be Your Woman. Heckerling recalled, “I started out just writing about a whole bunch of things that were going on and making a kind of Mrs. Robinson relationship movie. Later on, I decided, ‘Let’s lighten this up.’ So then I banged out the relationship between Mother Nature. Is Mother Nature a person who always wins? Do we all have to give in to her or is it okay to keep fighting?”

Heckerling added “I sort of doodled around with the idea and then put it down when I did Loser. Then I was writing something for Fox for a while and then I did another draft of it years later, and that was the one that was shown to Michelle. Then a year or so before we made the movie, she had come on and helped get it done.” To secure financing, Heckerling and Pfeiffer’s reps at Creative Artists Agency called Philippe Martinez, who’d made his bones helping bankroll B-pictures like The Ultimate Weapon (starring Hulk Hogan), Musketeers Forever (Michael Dudikoff and Lee Majors) and producing/directing Wake of Death starring Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Before he became a movie producer, Martinez operated an international sales company that was forced into receivership in L.A. A warrant for Martinez’s arrest was issued in France, stemming from complaints by his business partners. Martinez hid in Agoura Hills where he continued to work in the film industry. He ultimately spent 14 months in a detention center before his extradition to France, where Martinez served six months in prison. But by 2005, he triumphantly returned to Los Angeles with backing from Templar Film Investment Fund and $200 million per year for three years to finance and distribute films under his Bauer Martinez Entertainment banner.

Martinez fondly recalled, “An agent at Creative Artists Agency called me one day and he said, ‘Philippe I know you’re looking for a big movie to produce and here is a wonderful movie that Michelle Pfeiffer wants to do’, so I read the script in two hours which is very rare for me and I loved it and called him and said, ‘Let’s meet the director’. It was one of the funniest things we’d read and incredibly powerful and pertinent. Ironically of course one of the reasons Michelle was such a champion of the project is that there really are so few great roles for older women.” With a budget of $24 million, I Could Never Be Your Woman would commence filming August 2005 … in England.

Producer Cerise Hallam Larkin stated, “Our financing was British, so to qualify as a British film we had to spend all this money in England shooting a movie that was set in L.A., which was no mean feat.” The financing scheme explained why so many actors from the United Kingdom (Saoirse Ronan, Tracey Ullman, Sarah Alexander, Mackenzie Crook, Noah Margetts, O.T. Fagbenle) appeared in the cast. Director of photography Brian Tufano was also a Brit – he’d shot Quadrophenia — and Amy Heckerling was thrilled with the opportunity to work with him. Six weeks of shooting at Pinewood Studios outside London would be followed by three weeks of location work in L.A.

Bauer Martinez landed a distribution deal with MGM in January 2006 and I Could Never Be Your Woman was slated to be the first of five pictures (including Harsh Times, Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj and The Flock) from the producer that would hit theaters. But when the studio discovered that Martinez had put them on the line to pay Michelle Pfeiffer 10% of its first-dollar gross and Amy Heckerling another 5% — and that lucrative DVD rights had been awarded to The Weinstein Company — MGM put the film on the shelf. Despite the fact that I Could Never Be Your Woman boasted two mainstream stars and had reportedly drawn positive response from test audiences, no distributor in the United States wanted to touch the movie.

Amy Heckerling lamented, “If this is independence, I’d rather go back to what they call ‘the devil you know.’ When I did Clueless, there was a big studio system that had marketing and distribution people who knew what they were doing, and had an idea of what TV shows movies should be advertised on, and did research into who liked which movie, and what they watch and what they read, and how much it costs to reach them. These people who knew how to make posters and advertisements. You know, I liked that machine. It worked.” I Could Never Be Your Woman managed $9.5 million in theaters overseas before being abandoned March 2008 direct-to-DVD in the United States.

Many Internet critics who picked up a copy of the much maligned film were favorable to what they found. Jesse Hassenger, filmcritic.com: “Sometimes you come across an interesting movie with too many flaws to recommend, but Woman is a flawed movie with too much good stuff to completely ignore. It’s smart and warm, and if Heckerling loses her grip a few times, it’s only because she’s squeezing so hard.” Christopher Kulik, DVD Verdict: “Controversy aside, I Could Never Be Your Woman scores highly, both as comedy and satire. Despite its tragic road to being dumped on DVD, it’s one of the best romantic comedies to come out in years.”

Jim Magovern, The Moviezzz Blog: “Rather than some disaster, it is actually a very good film. It may not be Heckerling’s best film, and I can understand why a studio wouldn’t have picked it up without the DVD rights (as it wouldn’t have been a huge blockbuster) but it deserved more.” Amy Heckerling summed up the experience by admitting, “It’s just bad. It’s just bad, bad, bad. There’s really no nice, interesting spin you can put on it from my point of view.” She added, “It just represents a lot of unhappiness to me. I loved working with Paul Rudd and Michelle Pfeiffer and Saoirse Ronan and all the other people, and I got to make some friends in England, where it was shot. But I’m not happy about what happened. I feel bad. But I feel bad about sadder things than this, too.”

Should I Care?
Dating rituals had evolved in the 17 years since White Palace to fully warrant a contemporary look at the love affair between a woman and younger man, and you couldn’t have asked for two more appealing lovers than Michelle Pfeiffer and Paul Rudd. I Could Never Be Your Woman has little to do with a love affair, or men and women in general; instead, it free falls into a slapdash, superficial and bitter as hell UPN sitcom. This peek into the woes of a professional single mom re-entering the dating scene is so loaded with rage that it might have qualified as a guerilla manifesto against youth culture, if it wasn’t so witless and incompetently made.

Amy Heckerling has directed a masterpiece (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and written and directed a well-deserved blockbuster (Clueless). I Could Never Be Your Woman is mad as hell about plastic surgery, ex-husbands dating younger women, youth driven pop culture, soulless network executives, teenage body angst and aging. The movie stops short of beating an effigy of Britney Spears like a piñata. Any adult can identify with Heckerling’s rancor, but the film — which is all surfaces and lacks any real edge — is another story. The settings are generic, humor flat and characters shallow. Not only a mess, it’s a mean-spirited mess.

Paul Rudd acquits himself with some charming physicality, but Michelle Pfeiffer doesn’t fare as well. When allowed to look her age, she’s a dangerous beauty. Trying to vamp it up as a woman 20 years younger, the versatile actress just embarrasses herself. The lighting seems weighed down with cake makeup, while the London-for-L.A. locations add a demented visual layer. There’s a nice cameo by Henry Winkler, but I Could Never Be Your Woman was so misconceived, misguided, mismanaged and misfortunate that there’s not much an appearance by Arthur Fonzarelli can do.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“His Plan: Conquest of Indie Hollywood” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 5 October 2005

“When Glitches Trump Glitz” By John Horn. The Los Angeles Times, 4 March 2007

“Would You Dump This Woman?” By Missy Schwartz. Entertainment Weekly, 1 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling’s DVD Premiere – Part II” By Laurence Lerman. Video Business, 22 February 2008

“Amy Heckerling” By Noel Murray. A.V. Club, 20 March 2008

I Could Never Be Your Woman – Production Notes

I Could Never Be Your Woman. DVD audio commentary by Amy Hecklering and Cerise Hallam Larkin. The Weinstein Company, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
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?
In Los Angeles of the early 1950s, Officer Bud White (Russell Crowe) stops on his way to deliver his fellow cops booze for a Christmas party. He visits a recently paroled wife beater and settles the thug’s latest domestic assault out of court. Sgt. Jack Vincennes (Kevin Spacey) is introduced at a cast party for the TV program Badge of Honor, for which he serves as a technical advisor. He’s approached by Sid Hudgens (Danny DeVito), publisher of gossip rag L.A. Confidential, who offers the detective $100 to bust a starlet for marijuana possession so Hudgens will have fresh scandal to print. Sgt. Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) serves as watch commander at Hollywood station. Exley’s ambition is to make detective, but Lt. Dudley Smith (James Cromwell) counsels his protégé, “You’re a political animal. You have the eye for human weakness, but not the stomach.”

When four Mexicans assault two officers, several drunken cops – including White’s partner Dick Stensland (Graham Beckel) – drag the suspects out of their cells and beat them. The incident makes the front page under the headline “Bloody Christmas.” Exley volunteers to testify to a grand jury against White and Stensland, winning the promotion he eagerly covets. Lt. Smith gets White off the hook so the capable officer can serve on a special detail to strong-arm organized crime from moving in on L.A. The bodies of gangsters start piling up all over the city. Vincennes is demoted to vice for his role in the brawl and told the only way to get his job at narcotics back is to make a major case. He investigates a mysterious escort service known as “Fleur-De-Lis.”

Exley – despised as a rat by the cops he now works with – rushes to the scene of a massacre, six victims shotgunned at the Nite Owl Coffeeshop. One of the victims is Dick Stensland. Lt. Smith takes authority of the case, but allows Exley to serve as his second in command. Meanwhile, White has become infatuated with the mysterious Lynn Bracken (Kim Basinger), a call girl who’s been made up to look like Veronica Lake. Her manager (David Strathairn) is a millionaire investor with ties throughout the city. The Night Owl Massacre is pinned on three Black youths, but Exley begins to doubt they were responsible. The investigations of White, Vincennes and Exley soon intersect. In each case, the trail leads them back to the LAPD.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1989, L.A. Confidential was the third volume of what novelist James Ellroy was referring to as “an epic pop history of my smog bound fatherland.” At 500 pages, over 100 characters, a timeline that spanned eight years and a labyrinth of a plot that unfolded in the minds of its three protagonists, when Ellroy’s publisher Otto Penzler notified him that Warner Bros. had purchased the film rights, the men broke into hysterical laughter. Ellroy wrote, “I figured some movie biz fuckhead would option the book. I figured he’d blow smoke up my ass about what a great film it would make. Movieland self-delusion was a major theme of the novel. It was only fitting that I should profit from its exercise. I knew my book was movie-adaptation-proof. The motherfucker was uncompressible, uncontainable and unequivocally bereft of sympathetic characters. It was unsavory, unapologetically dark, untamable and altogether untranslatable to the screen.”

One of Ellroy’s fans was a screenwriter named Brian Helgeland. “The weird thing was, I had gotten a hold of these pulpy novels he’d done in like ‘88 or something like that. I just tore through these things and I thought they were just great. Then when The Big Nowhere came out, I bought that right away and I read somewhere he was going to be signing it at some L.A. bookstore. I’d never gone to any book signings, but I was like, it’s Ellroy. I gotta go see him. It was really depressing because there were like, eight people there, this was probably in like ‘89 or so. So I talked to him for like half an hour, until he probably started to think I was a deranged fan or something like that, and he told me how he was going to write books that could never be made into movies. And I was like, ‘Cool, cool.’” When Helgeland heard that Warner Bros. had purchased the screen rights to L.A. Confidential, the screenwriter began a yearlong lobbying effort for the job of adapting the book. Helgeland was ultimately notified that the job had gone to someone else.

Curtis Hanson had toiled in Hollywood for close to twenty years as a screenwriter and director for hire. His latest film – The River Wild – starred Meryl Streep and was considered a step up in prestige. Hanson was thinking about his next project. “I’d always been interested in L.A. fiction from growing up here, authors like James M. Cain, Nathaniel West, Raymond Chandler. When I read L.A. Confidential, I just got hooked on the characters, got caught up emotionally in their individual struggles with their personal demons. I wanted to capture that in a movie. Also, I found that the way I felt about the characters was near to the way I felt about the city of Los Angeles. I’d always wanted to make a movie about L.A., to deal with this city at that magic moment in the ‘50s when the dream of L.A. was being bulldozed to make way for all the people that were coming here in pursuit of the very dream that was being destroyed. So I got really excited about it as a movie project and made a deal to write and direct it.”

Undeterred, Helgeland’s manager Missy Malkin got her client a lunch meeting with Curtis Hanson. Helgeland wrote, “We met in an old bungalow on the Universal lot that had been pink slipped – scheduled to be torn down to make way for the Jurassic Park portion of the studio tour. I thought this was a good sign, as much of the L.A. we would need to bring to life had suffered a similar fate.” Helgeland and Hanson discovered that they both shared a passion for Ellroy’s fiction, and thought they had the key to adapting L.A. Confidential. Hanson added, “If Bud, Ed or Jack wasn’t involved in a scene, it went by the board. Some were too good to let go of: the shootout at the abandoned auto court in San Berdoo that begins the novel, for example. We took it, moved it and let two of our trio take part.” It would take Helgeland & Hanson ten drafts and three years to complete their adaptation.

Meanwhile, the signals being sent from Warner Bros. were less than supportive. Hanson recalled, “The immediate strikes against it: Period, number one. Which of course every financier is afraid of, you know, on a commercial level, is that a contemporary audience won’t connect with the past. Multi-character, number two. Why are there three guys? Could you get rid of Ed Exley and Jack Vincennes, so that the movie is built around Bud White and then we could have a big star play Bud White? And I responded by saying how important Ed Exley was and why, and I was then cut off and they said, ‘Well what about getting rid of Bud White then and Jack Vincennes and build it all around Ed Exley, and then we could have a big star play Ed Exley.’ And number three, that it was in this period of film noir, which they’re extremely negative about because noir movies almost never do well, commercially. As you go through the history of the noirs made over the last few decades, very few of them did well enough to even earn their money back.”

Seeking a financier, Hanson turned to Regency Enterprises, whose head of production Michael Nathanson had long been an advocate of the filmmaker. Nathanson later recalled, “As years progressed, and I went on and became the president and chief operating officer of MGM, the irony was that if I had come into my office to say, ‘Will you make L.A. Confidential?’ I would have said, ‘No.’ This movie got willed to get made against incredible odds and against a business environment that said, ‘This is the kind of movie that should not be made.’” Nathanson set a meeting between Hanson and the principal of New Regency, Arnon Milchan. Instead of showing the producer a script, Hanson presented his elaborate vision of L.A. Confidential. Hanson recalled, “Arnon said, ‘Let’s go.’ Depending on the casting, depending on the budget, I’m in. So I had a sort of tentative blinking green light, let us say. And now we had to get the cast.”

New Regency suggested Hanson work with a casting director they knew well named Mali Finn. Hanson stated, “I wanted unknowns for Bud White and Ed Exley because with unknowns, the audience wouldn’t know who they liked, who they didn’t like, who would live, who would die. Anything could happen. I wanted these characters to be discovered, the way you discover characters in a novel. Your feelings evolve as you go along.” An Australian actor Hanson had seen in a movie called Romper Stomper flew to L.A. to read through some scenes, one of which Hanson decided to tape and show to Arnon Milchan and Michael Nathanson. After getting approval to cast Russell Crowe as Bud White, Hanson chose another virtual unknown – Guy Pearce – to play Ed Exley. The fact that Pearce also happened to be Australian was not immediately relayed by Hanson to his financiers.

For the role of Jack Vincennes, Hanson understood he needed someone audiences would be familiar with. Kevin Spacey met with the director to talk about the role and recalled, “I said to him, ‘All right, if it was really the 1950s and you were really directing this movie, who would you cast as Jack Vincennes?’ I kind of expected he would have said, like, William Holden. But he didn’t. He said, ‘Dean Martin.’ I thought, Dean Martin. And he said, ‘Well, watch Some Came Running. Watch Rio Bravo again, and you’ll see the quality that I’m talking about. It is a man who on the surface has all this ring-a-ding, you know, he’s slick and he’s cool and he’s on top of it but just underneath the surface is a man who’s going through changes and going through a moral eruption and that will ultimately lead him to the place where he realizes he can no longer behave the way he’s behaved.”

Hanson & Helgeland had held off paying a courtesy call to James Ellroy. The author recalled, “I had heard that Hanson was involved throughout the process and was impressed with the fact that he didn’t contact me. When he and Brian Helgeland had gone through seven drafts of the script they let me read what they had. I found it interesting and compelling and a good job of retaining the essential narrative integrity of my book, i.e. the dramatic lives of the three main characters. From that point on Hanson and I became friendly and I became an informal consultant. Chiefly, Curtis would call me up and ask me questions pertaining to L.A. in the ‘50s and the police corps then. ‘Do you turn left off the rotunda at City Hall to get to the detective bureau in 1953?’ Things like that.”

On a budget of roughly $35 million, L.A. Confidential commenced shooting May 1996 in Los Angeles. Producer Michael Nathanson remembered, “I think we had eighty something locations, in sixty-five days? Something like that. And we were all over greater Los Angeles. And we were shooting lots of nights. There was inclement weather, both written – where we created a few times – and there was inclement weather we ran into and tried to make it work for the movie. And we would go from Baldwin Hills to Pasadena to Santa Monica to downtown Los Angeles.” Pockets of 1950s architecture were found still standing in Elysian Park. Pierce Patchett’s home was located in Los Feliz, where architect Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House permitted filming on their grounds for the first time ever. In Hollywood, the Formosa Café and the Frolic Room were both utilized as locations.

Editor Peter Honess may have been one of the first to realize just how great L.A. Confidential was going to be. “It’s such a well crafted piece of filmmaking, from A to Z, actually. And I thought it was terribly brave of Curtis Hanson to cast Guy Pearce and Russell Crowe – two virtually unknown actors in the States – to play very American roles. I thought actually that their accents are really good. It also gave the audience an opportunity to see a film that you cannot make about modern times. You had to set it in another period because of the racism, because of the language, because of the bigotry of some of the characters in the piece, and that’s fascinating too, because it actually seems like it is of the modern era, but it isn’t, and I don’t think you could make a film about the social situation now of the way of L.A. Confidential. And it was just a very well crafted piece.”

Following enthusiastic reception at the Cannes and Toronto Film Festivals, L.A. Confidential opened September 1997 in the U.S. With the possible exception of The Sweet Hereafter, it received the best reviews of any film released that year. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Curtis Hanson’s resplendently wicked L.A. Confidential is a tough, gorgeous, vastly entertaining throwback to the Hollywood that did things right. As such, it enthusiastically breaks most rules of studio filmmaking today.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “You have to pay close attention to follow the double-crossing intricacies of the plot, but the reward for your work is dark and dirty fun.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “L.A. Confidential serves as an almost overwhelming reminder of the pleasures of deeply involving narratives in the old Hollywood sense … This picture restores the primacy of the dramatic line, which tends to make the violence even more startling when it comes.”

The Academy Awards returned nine nominations, but in a year that featured the highest grossing motion picture of all time, Hollywood saw fit to honor Titanic instead. Kim Basinger (Best Supporting Actress) and Helgeland & Hanson (Best Adapted Screenplay) were the only L.A. Confidential nominees to receive Oscars. The awards consideration did nudge the film to box office of $64.6 million in the U.S. and $61 million overseas. Naming the 25 best Los Angeles based movies of the last quarter century, the staff of the L.A. Times ranked L.A. Confidential #1 on their list in August 2008. Curtis Hanson mused, “The movie truly started with L.A. I wanted to capture the city of my childhood memories. And I wanted to take a hard look at the dark side – the booming economy, the exploding population, the corruption and racism – as well as certain problems that are still with us. I wanted to capture the spirit of this place. The optimism and energy was real. It still is.”

Why Should I Care?
The fact that a brooding, politically incorrect, character driven murder mystery set in 1953 was made without any real movie stars and proved a terrific success would be worthy of praise in itself, but the best news for movie lovers is that more than a decade after it reaped all those rave reviews, L.A. Confidential has actually appreciated in value as a screen classic. You don’t realize what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone, and after a couple of so-called Best Pictures have proven to be little more than hocus pocus Hollywood bullshit – Titanic had a better grip on reality than Crash did – James Ellroy’s complex, gratuitously violent and ceaselessly entertaining detective yarn stands out as prime rib among the fast food, what Hollywood filmmaking can aspire to be.

Top to bottom, the craftsmen behind L.A. Confidential are operating at the top of their game. In collaboration with cinematographer Dante Spinotti, production designer Jeannine Oppewall and costume designer Ruth Myers, Curtis Hanson went to great lengths to avoid the stereotypical look and feel of mysteries set in the ‘30s or ‘40s, opting instead to recreate a postwar Los Angeles that was looking ahead to its future. Scenes burst with vitality, as well as complexity. Helgeland & Hanson’s colorful adaptation sidesteps nearly every known cliché of the detective genre, moving at breakneck pace from a sleazy journalist to freeway construction to an uptight detective questioning Johnny Stompanato & Lana Turner to an LAPD hit squad. Somewhere in there, the portrait of a metropolis takes shape in all its glamour and deceit. Jerry Goldsmith composed the robust, brooding musical score.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!
L.A. Confidential: The Screenplay. By Brian Helgeland & Curtis Hanson. Warner Books (1997)

“Curtis Hanson” By Alex Simon. Venice Magazine, 1997 September

“Helgeland the Happy Heretic” By Rob Blackwelder. Splicedwire, 2001 April 17

Endangered Species: Writers Talk About Their Craft. By Lawrence Grobel. Da Capo Press (2001)

“Hollywood’s James Ellroy Enigma” By Scott Timberg. Los Angeles Times, 6 April 2008

“The Top 25 of the Last 25: L.A. Is A Complicated City, But They Got It” Los Angeles Times, 31 August 2008

L.A. Confidential (Two Disc Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Synopsis
In the city of Hermosa Beach, gun smuggler Ordell Robbie (Samuel L. Jackson) entertains dim-witted prison buddy Louis Gara (Robert DeNiro) with his knowledge of the firearms trade. Ordell’s girlfriend – an insolent, bong loving beach bunny named Melanie (Bridget Fonda) – is hardly impressed. “He’s just repeating shit he overheard. He ain’t any more of a gun expert than I am.” Ordell receives an urgent phone call from Beaumont – an associate who’s been arrested for drunk driving with a pistol. Ordell hires competent bail bondsman Max Cherry (Robert Forster) to post bail. A freed man, Beaumont (Chris Tucker) receives a visit from Ordell, who lures the compromised employee to his death using Roscoe’s Chicken ‘n Waffles as bait.

Meanwhile, stewardess Jackie Brown (Pam Grier) is intercepted returning from Mexico by an LAPD detective (Michael Bowen) and a high charged ATF Special Agent named Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton). Caught with $50,000 and a bag of cocaine, Jackie remains mum on who the contraband belongs to. Hired by Ordell to bail the stewardess out of County, Max falls for Jackie at first sight. Ordell drops by Jackie’s apartment with the intent of silencing her as well, but Jackie is ready for him. Faced with a year in prison if she stands mute, or a walk if she rats on Ordell, she demands $100,000 for each year in prison she’s given. In return, she convinces Ordell that she’s worked out a plan to retrieve half a million dollars he’s amassed from an airport locker in Cabo.

Confiding to Max that she actually intends to cooperate with the authorities and set Ordell up, Jackie reveals her biggest fear: “And if I lose this job I gotta start all over again and I ain’t got nothin to start over with. I’ll be stuck with whatever I can get.” With Max making up his mind that he’s tired of the bail bond business, he agrees to help Jackie scam not only Ordell, but get away with his money under the nose of the ATF. When the carefully orchestrated sting at Del Amo Mall culminates with Ordell’s half million disappearing, Ordell first blames Louis and Melanie, who the smuggler entrusted with making the pickup. To stay out of jail, Jackie has to convince Nicolette that she’s on his side. To stay alive, Max has to convince Ordell that Jackie was protecting him, and that she’s waiting to give him his money face to face.

Production history
Elmore Leonard was the first novelist Quentin Tarantino ever read. According to legend, Tarantino was caught shoplifting a copy of The Switch from K-Mart when he was 15 years old and was almost taken to jail. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in 1994, Tarantino revealed, “I love Elmore Leonard. In fact, to me True Romance is basically like an Elmore Leonard movie that he didn’t write, you know. And like, actually, I actually owe a big debt to like, kind of figuring out my style from Elmore Leonard because, you know, he was the first writer I’d ever read – and, but also like Charles Willeford did it as well – but he was one of the first writers I had ever read that just let mundane conversations actually inform the characters, you know, and then all of a sudden, ‘Boof!,’ you know, you’re into whatever story you’re telling.”

Published in 1992, Rum Punch was Leonard’s 29th novel. Recalling its genesis, the celebrated author stated, “I decided I wanted to do a book about a bail bondsman because of the kind of people he’s involved with every day. A story has to come out of that situation. My researcher found a bail bondsman for me who understood what we wanted to do. He was very willing to cooperate. So I learned about his business and started to write the book about a bondsman doing his job. I realized not too far into the book that he wasn’t my main character. The woman, Jackie, was the main character. The plot was happening to her. And then the other characters fall right into place on opposite sides of her. She’s caught in the middle and how does she get out?”

Tarantino and his producing partner Lawrence Bender read Rum Punch in galleys as they were getting ready to make Pulp Fiction. Bender attempted to option the book, but was rebuked by Leonard’s publisher. The situation changed once Pulp Fiction became a critical and commercial sensation. Miramax Films optioned four Elmore Leonard novels for the filmmaker: Bandits, Freaky Deaky, Killshot and Rum Punch. At one time, Tarantino envisioned adapting, producing and co-starring in Killshot opposite Robert DeNiro for director Tony Scott, but the film was ultimately directed by John Madden with Joseph Gordon Levitt and Mickey Rourke (it first wrapped in 2005 but as of November 2008, still hasn’t been released by the Weinstein Company).

Lawrence Bender referred to Tarantino’s affinity for Rum Punch as “The thing that sort of rose to the top I think in terms of his consciousness, and I was really happy because I’ve always loved the book and I’ve always wanted to make it.” In his adaptation, Tarantino made key alterations. The action shifted from South Florida to the South Bay of Los Angeles – Hermosa Beach, Carson, Torrance – where Tarantino grew up. “I don’t know Miami at all, but I know South Bay like the back of my hand. This was a way for me to make this movie personal to myself and to be confident that I could keep it real. In a South Bay context I knew exactly where each of these people would live, how they would dress, what their apartments would look like. Shooting in Miami I would not have come to those things as naturally.”

Tarantino also changed the lead character from a white airline stewardess named Jackie Burke to a black stewardess named Jackie Brown, with Pam Grier in mind to play her. Grier had auditioned for the role in Pulp Fiction that ultimately went to Rosanna Arquette, but Tarantino had promised her they’d work together on something else. After Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda joined the cast, Tarantino was trying to settle on who would play Max Cherry, the bail bondsman. “I had Paul Newman in mind; I had Gene Hackman in mind; I had John Saxon in mind; and I had Robert Forster in mind. I was always leaning more towards Robert Forster than the other guys. I didn’t have to cast him right away. I had my options open.”

Robert Forster had gained notice starring in the 1969 cult classic Medium Cool before descending into short-lived TV series like Banyon and – with the exception of Alligator – one forgettable B-movie after another. The actor recalled, “The past five years, I hadn’t gotten a job for more than scale; and terrible, junky stuff that you take when you’ve got a kid in college and an ex-wife. Then Quentin comes along and says, ‘You’ve waited long enough. Now you’re going to work again.’ I can’t describe the feeling.” Receiving membership privileges in what Variety critic Michael Fleming referred to as “Tarantino’s Rediscovery Network,” Forster would receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor and like John Travolta and David Carradine, never have to look for work again.

With a $12 million budget from Miramax and Guillermo Navarro serving as director of photography, Tarantino’s third film commenced shooting May 1997 in Los Angeles. “My cinematographer and I watched two movies: Hickey and Boggs, which was directed by Robert Culp and was shot in the 70’s – it’s a really good movie. And then we watched They All Laughed, by Peter Bogdanovich. Both were perfect for Jackie Brown. They All Laughed is a masterpiece, I think. It captures a fairy-tale New York. It makes New York look like Paris in the 20’s. It makes you want to live there. And we kind of used it. And then we watched Straight Time, one of the best L.A. crime movies ever. But I wanted Jackie Brown to look more like a movie than that. Straight Time is too gritty.”

With Tarantino and editor Sally Menke working on the film up to December 4, Jackie Brown snuck into theaters Christmas Day 1997. Critics responded coolly. Elvis Mitchell, the New York Times: “But for all its enthusiasm, this film isn’t sharp enough to afford all the time it wastes on small talk, long drives, trips to the mall and favorite songs played on car radios.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Each scene is staged methodically, overdeliberately, as if it concealed some payoff zinger. But the zingers don’t arrive. All we see is a reasonably clever Elmore Leonard caper that needed to be treated as fast, trashy fun.” Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “A raunchy doodle, a leisurely and easygoing diversion that goes down easy enough but is far from compelling.”

Jackie Brown grossed $39.6 million in the U.S., but compared to the $213 million Pulp Fiction made all over the globe and the celebration that followed in the press, Tarantino felt disconnected from his follow-up. In an interview with Sight & Sound in February 2008, he commented, “One of the things that is fun about reading books is it puts you in a complete different environment. If you read one of Ian Rankin’s books and you think you got a good excuse to go to Edinburgh and shoot this big Scottish thing that could be really fun. But I lost my stamina in the last quarter of the last lap of Jackie Brown and part of the reason was I wasn’t taking something I created from scratch from a blank piece of paper and turning it into a full project. When I finished the edit and got my cut the way I wanted, I was emotionally done. I believe people could say it’s my best movie, but there’s a slight once-removed quality, located somewhere in my balls where that doesn’t live.”

Opinion
For every member of the “Quentin Tarantino Is a Hack” Society, there’s probably something to dislike about Jackie Brown. Samuel L. Jackson is once again allowed to do too much and draws a spotlight on how pleased some of Tarantino’s dialogue is with itself. And at a notch above 2 ½ hours, it is too long. While Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill warranted epic running times, here, the story barely seems to warrant the excess. What ends up being so remarkable about Jackie Brown is that, while using the Blaxploitation genre of the ‘70s as a touchstone, Tarantino refuses to populate the film with pimps, prostitutes or private dicks and in a stunner, composes as subtle, mature and self-assured a modern love story as any director at any stage of his career.

Like all great cult classics, Jackie Brown offers little in the way of instant gratification. Four shootings each happen just out of frame. Instead of bullets, words are the primary weapon of choice. Plot device and style are almost invisible; it’s character and performance that take center stage and on that count, the film is brilliant. Pam Grier’s moments with Robert Forster soar. Bridget Fonda gives the performance of a lifetime as one of the goofiest vixens ever seen in a caper. Samuel L. Jackson’s scenes with DeNiro are monumental. While a remake of The Big Bird Cage might have passed for daring by a less gifted filmmaker, Tarantino demonstrates remarkable taste by recognizing what makes an Elmore Leonard novel special: human beings expressing their fears and desires, while stealing lots of money.

Richard Booth at DVD Times writes, “Jackie Brown is not over-indulgent or flawed, in fact it’s almost as good as his first two efforts. The more times you watch it, the more engrossing it gets, until there comes a point where it can proudly stand alongside Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. It may not be quite as good, lacking the hip edge that defined his first two films, but the few flaws in the film actually shape it, and the more mature approach taken show that Tarantino possesses layers as a filmmaker.”

Dawn Taylor at The DVD Journal writes, “A more leisurely paced, less-violent film than his first two, Jackie Brown is a movie that improves with age. The performances are top-notch, the setting, clothes, music and other details are timeless, and the writing dazzles. However, at two hours, 31 minutes it’s far too long and starts to wear out its welcome before QT finally ties all of the pieces together. But despite that, there’s some moments of sheer genius in the picture, most notably when the climactic money exchange is shown from three different perspectives — each new version offers delicious, important details that were missed from the other characters’ point of view, and the sheer fun of it all reminds us of why we go to the movies in the first place: to be surprised, thrilled, and entertained.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Upon his release from Joliet Correctional Center, “Joliet” Jake Blues (John Belushi) is met by his brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) in an old Mt. Prospect police car. Elwood takes Jake directly to St. Helen Blessed Shroud Orphanage to visit The Penguin (Kathleen Freeman), the nun who raised them. She reveals that the Cook County assessor has asked for $5,000 and is threatening to close the orphanage. Jake offers to have the cash for her in the morning, but The Penguin refuses to accept stolen money, and when the brothers curse up a storm, she kicks them out in disgrace. An old bluesman named Curtis (Cab Calloway) who raised the boys and also lives in the orphanage advises them to get churched up.

Standing at the back of the Triple Rock Cathedral to hear a sermon from the Reverend Cleophus James (James Brown), Jake is struck by the holy spirit. It occurs to him they can save the orphanage by reuniting their old band. Elwood reveals that might not be so easy; they all took straight jobs. Pulled over by a pair of Illinois State troopers for running a red light and driving on a suspended license, Elwood notifies Jake “We’re on a mission from God,” and leads the law on a wild car chase through a shopping mall. Laying low from the authorities, the Blues Brothers also dodge assassination attempts by a mousy brunette (Carrie Fisher) who has it in for Jake.

Steve Cropper (rhythm guitar), Donald Dunn (bass), Willie Hall (drums), Tom Malone (trombone) and Murphy Dunne (piano) are found playing a Holiday Inn. Trumpeter Mr. Fabulous (Alan Rubin) is lured away from his job as a maître’d when the Blues Brothers make a scene in his restaurant. Lead guitarist Matt Murphy and saxophonist Blue Lou (Lou Marini) are recovered in Calumet City working for Matt’s wife (Aretha Franklin) at a soul food diner. She doesn’t let her husband go without breaking into “Think”. In addition to state police and the Mystery Woman, the Blues Brothers are pursed through Chicago by a redneck band, Illinois Nazis and the state National Guard as they try to make it from their big gig to the county assessor’s office.

Production history
According to interviews given at the time, John Belushi pinned the birth of The Blues Brothers to the autumn of 1977 while he was stuck in Eugene, Oregon shooting Animal House. Belushi recalled, “There were a lot of rainy nights with nothing to do and this guy I met there, Curtis Salgado, began playing me all this music. It was fucking unbelievable. I was starving for it and Curtis kept asking me if I was really interested. Interested. I couldn’t stop playing the stuff! Magic Sam, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Junior Wells – I walked around playing that shit all the time. I bought hundreds of records and singles. And then I knew Danny had played the harp in Canada, and I always could sing, so we created The Blues Brothers.”

Dan Aykroyd traced the origin of The Blues Brothers to New York, where Belushi would warm up audiences for Saturday Night Live. Aykroyd recalled, “He used to sing rock stuff, and he introduced me to The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. I introduced him to James Cotton and some of the white blues bands that were working up North, like The Lamont Cranston Band.” Aykroyd quickly got in on the act. “We just decided we’d go out and sing a couple of old blues numbers – and why don’t we wear the suits that you wore when you were doing Roy Orbison? That was the discussion. John did Roy Orbison once. He wore the thin tie and white shirt and black suit. And then the shades, you know? And we just added the hat to it and the digital watches and the locked briefcase.”

If TV audiences couldn’t decide whether The Blues Brothers were mocking someone or paying tribute, they weren’t alone. Aykroyd added, “Well, we thought it was a parody at first, but then we started to get in with these heavyweight musicians and we realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got to be pros here.’” Belushi – who played drums growing up in the suburbs of Chicago – was living out a dream. Aykroyd remained dubious about taking their act on the road. Then Steve Martin asked The Blues Brothers to open nine shows for him September 1978 at the Universal Amphitheatre in L.A. Under the guidance of Paul Shaffer, Aykroyd & Belushi assembled a band. The response was so overwhelming that when Atlantic Records put out a concert album – A Briefcase Full of Blues – it sold three million copies.

Pitching an idea for a movie over the phone, Aykroyd & Belushi found a buyer in Universal Pictures, which rushed The Blues Brothers into development. Belushi convinced Aykroyd to get to work on a script and summoned director John Landis to New York. Aykroyd recalls, “Then Landis came in and talked to me at Saturday Night one night, and said, ‘I want this, this and this in the movie.’ I took some notes, and said, ‘Fine, you’ll have it.’ And I sort of cut the script to what he wanted – including of course, the thought and myth that we knew. So from the beginning, it was like Landis and I putting it together. Landis saying, ‘I want the biggest car chase ever at the end of the movie,’ and I went, ‘Okay!’ And I said, ‘Well, I want to jump a swing bridge.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’ And you know, I turned in a three-hundred-plus-page script.”

When he sent the script for The Blues Brothers to producer Robert Weiss, Aykroyd wrapped it in the pages of the San Fernando Yellow Pages to blunt the effect. As written, each member of the band had been given their own story. Aykroyd recalls, “I didn’t even know how to write movies. I don’t think I’d even seen a screenplay. I was told most screenplays were 120 to 150 pages long, but when I sat down to write The Blues Brothers, there were so many descriptive passages in there, just paragraphs and paragraphs of shots, of concepts, of ideas, of descriptions and eventually it just kind of ballooned up.” The script ran 324 pages. Landis recalls, “When I read it and I got these calls from Bob Weiss and Sean Daniel and Ned Tanen, you know, hysterical, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Landis adds, “So I basically distilled it, rewrote it, and then gave it back to Danny and then we worked together. But basically it was – don’t want to say streamlining because this movie’s anything but streamlined – but it was trying to make it as economic in the story as possible. I really wanted to simplify it to the point, I mean, it really is like Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, ‘Let’s put on a show and save the orphanage,’ just really make it a straight forward story on which we can hang all this craziness.” Shooting commenced July 1979 in Los Angeles. The musical numbers were largely shot on the Universal lot, while the climactic concert was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium. By the time the production moved to Harvey, Illinois to shoot a car chase in the shuttered Dixie Square Mall, the $27 million budget was climbing. It would end up at $36 million.

Released June 1980, The Blues Brothers was praised in its hometown; Gene Siskel ranked it #8 on his list of the year’s 10 best films, while Roger Ebert recommended the movie as well. Many critics outside of Chicago did not. Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker: “The film’s big joke is how overscaled everything in it is; this has an unfortunate result – Landis is working with such a lavish hand that his miscalculations in timing are experienced by the audience as a form of waste.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.” Variety: “If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.”

Speaking 25 years later, Landis commented that The Blues Brothers, “got the most hateful reviews. People wrote that it was Hollywood out of control. We had a bunch of films that were way over budget about that same time: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Movie, 1941, Heaven’s Gate and The Blues Brothers. All of those films – with the exception of Heaven’s Gate – eventually showed a profit. But the press kept saying Hollywood had gone crazy, and The Blues Brothers took a lot of that rap.” The film grossed $57.2 million in the U.S. and another $58 million overseas, but due to its costs – and the fact that Animal House earned twice as much – was considered a wash commercially.

Asked in 2005 about the film’s impact, Landis stated, “When we made The Blues Brothers, it was all Bee Gees and ABBA. Now, I get questions like, ‘How did you get Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and James Brown to be in the movie?’ And I have to tell them, ‘It’s because they were thrilled to get the job.’ To give you an idea of how different it is now, when we did The Blues Brothers, MCA/Universal refused the soundtrack album, because they said no one but old black people would buy it. Then we went to what was called a ‘black label’ – Atlantic – and they refused to put John Lee Hooker on the album! Fifteen years later, John had a platinum album. So The Blues Brothers was successful in its attempt to call attention to these guys.”

Opinion
If you hate musical numbers, car crashes, R&B, soul, gospel music or profanity, you’ll probably find a lot to dislike about The Blues Brothers, which brazenly – though a bit raggedly – serves up epic quantities of each. For its fans, time appears to have been very good to this film, which isn’t seamless, but stands as one of most enduring musicals or comedies ever made. Of the six or seven movies he appeared in, it’s probably the best testament to the immense talent and likability of John Belushi. Also documented are show stopping performances by James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway that if nothing else, make the film a marvel in musical anthropology.

What’s truly awesome about The Blues Brothers is the vision of Aykroyd & Landis’ script, which is filled with enough music, characters and ingenuity for two movies (Landis intended the picture to have a retro, road show release, with an intermission and a running time of two and a half hours.) The difference between this flick and 1941 – which was bloated with zany ideas and cast members – is that unlike Steven Spielberg, John Landis knew his musical and comedy genres. Elwood’s closet sized apartment, the chicken wire in front of the stage at Bob’s Country Bunker, and Carrie Fisher popping up like Wile E. Coyote throughout the film are all terrific concepts, and Landis demonstrates the panache to get honest to goodness laughs from that stuff. Along with Aykroyd & Belushi, he should also be acknowledged for employing so many great R&B musicians who were on the verge of being forgotten.

D.J. Nock at DVD Times writes, “25 years later, it’s easy to see that The Blues Brothers is little more than the sum of its parts. Like a lot of popular films, its reputation seems to precede it; never possessing the quality that its status reflects. But don’t get me wrong – I find the film to be a very entertaining brew, but its ‘perfect’ reputation is probably unjustified. Director John Landis has certainly made better films (especially his masterpiece, Trading Places), and his skills as a filmmaker have been put to more efficient use elsewhere.”

Scott Weinberg at DVD Talk writes, “Easily of the most ebullient and smoothly enjoyable musical comedies ever made, The Blues Brothers boasts a roster of musical talent that must be heard to be believed: Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker, all legends of the music industry, had their careers earn a well-deserved shot in the arm from their appearances in The Blues Brothers. And the musicians hired to play Jake & Elwood’s band? Top-notch artists across the board. The flick’s basically one-third blues music, one-third character-based comedy, and one-third car chase — and all of it’s grade-A prime American Comedy, brewed in the vintage year of 1980.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
“My name is Tom Van Allen. Or Danny Parker. I honesty don’t know anymore. You can decide. Yeah, maybe you can help me, friend. As you can see I don’t have a hell of a lot of time left.” So says the voice of Tom/Danny (Val Kilmer), wailing on a trumpet as flames engulf the room he’s trapped in. Taking us into the subterranean world of methedrine (speed) and speed freaks (tweakers), Danny braves daylight with his loyal fellow tweaker Jimmy the Finn (Peter Sarsgaard) to score more dope. A run-in with a dealer (Glenn Plummer) who keeps a live woman under his mattress and a speargun by his bed bleeds into “the land of the perpetual night party,” until Danny meets with the narcs (Anthony LaPaglia, Doug Hutchison) he works for as an informant.

Notified that one of the dealers he’s ratted on is coming after him, Danny’s benefactors advise him to get out of Los Angeles. He returns to his apartment instead, removing his jewelry and washing the dye out of hair. Changing into a suit, he plays his horn. Danny’s memory takes him back to when he was still musician Tom Van Allen and visited the Salton Sea of California with his wife (Chandra West). Before leaving L.A., Danny attempts to string together a quarter of a million dollar meth deal between a Chinese cowboy (B.D. Wong) and a sadistic, wheezing meth cook in Palmdale named Pooh Bear (Vincent D’Onofrio), so named because he stuck his nose in so much speed that it had to be amputated.

After taking pity on a neighbor (Deborah Kara Unger) with an abusive boyfriend (Luis Guzman), Danny hits rock bottom when the narcs are tipped off to his deal. They threaten him with prison time unless he agrees to set up Pooh Bear for them. Danny gains the cook’s trust after being forced to strip and endure a close encounter with a caged badger Pooh Bear keeps for amusement. Moving back in time again, we learn that Tom’s wife was killed when the couple crossed paths with two meth cowboys in the Salton Sea. Rather than tell the police what he knew, the musician uses a strand of hair and a ring to launch his own investigation, masquerading as a tweaker who’s pretending to be a snitch.

Production history
Tony Gayton was a USC Film School grad who in the mid-1980s was an assistant for John Milius, producer of a movie Gayton’s older brother Joe had written titled Uncommon Valor. In between writing jobs, Tony Gayton shot a “kamikaze style” documentary titled Athens, Georgia: Inside/Out – which featured R.E.M. and The B-52s – but took him out of the Hollywood loop for a year and drained his bank account. Gayton spent a few months teaching high school phys ed in Compton and considered dropping out of the film industry for good. He decided to write something for himself, something that might make a good writing sample and maybe lead to an assignment. The result was The Salton Sea.

Producer Ken Aguado – a principal of Humble Journey Films with actor Eriq LaSalle – became a champion of Gayton’s script. “Character revelations and plot twists are introduced throughout the entire piece, which is one of the reasons it’s such a fascinating movie. A lot of scripts are boring after the thirteenth page because everything has been revealed. This film is not about the immediate moment. It’s about the future, the past, and it requires two hours to figure out.” Aguado passed the script to D.J. Caruso, who had also started his career as an assistant – to director John Badham – before directing second unit on Point Of No Return and Another Stakeout. Caruso had recently directed a highly rated B-movie airing on HBO in 1998 titled Black Cat Run.

Urged by Aguardo to read The Salton Sea immediately, Caruso recalls, “I loved it. I flipped out because I had been waiting for the right opportunity to direct my first feature film. I’ve had a couple of opportunities before, but I really wanted my first film to be something that meant something to me. I’m obsessed with character journeys, whether that growth is a positive or negative growth. I was really compelled by the dilemma the lead character Danny Parker experiences.” Ken Aguado knew that Frank Darabont – who had written and produced Black Cat Run – was eager to work with Caruso again. He sent Darabont a copy of The Salton Sea as well.

Darabont said, “What I loved about the script was that it took me into a world that I was quite unfamiliar with, but did so in a way that made it tremendously accessible to me as a reader and to me as a viewer. The story delves into a real underbelly kind of existence. It has an absurdist kind of reality where anything can happen and at the same time the script has its other foot in this very intense, real crime drama that you can take seriously.” Directing The Green Mile for Castle Rock Entertainment, Darabont suggested setting up The Salton Sea there. Caruso recalls, “Frank said to me that Castle Rock would never make this movie because it was way too dark for the studio that made Miss Congeniality. Not to dismiss those types of films but The Salton Sea was not typical Castle Rock stuff. But, Rob Reiner was looking for something that was a little dirtier to make the company a little more diverse.”

In July 1999, Castle Rock not only paid $750,000 for the “spec comedy thriller,” but asked Tony Gayton for only minor changes – “I rewrote maybe 10 pages,” he recalled – while also hiring the scribe to write an idea of Reiner’s that became Murder By Numbers. Echoing several of the actor’s key performances, Caruso wanted Val Kilmer for the lead role. Kilmer recalled, “I had played a couple of alcoholics before – Doc Holliday and Jim Morrison – and other similar characters in theater, so I had a pretty good idea about addiction and those arenas of characters who become suicidal.” On a budget of $18 million, shooting commenced April 2000. Interiors were filmed at Center Stage Studios in Los Angeles, with additional photography taking place around L.A. and in the Antelope Valley.

Arriving in theaters April 2002, The Salton Sea received two thumbs up from At The Movies – Richard Roeper commented, “A lot of people have tried to do Pulp Fiction type movies and Tarantinoesque things and they usually fall far short. This is equal to the task” – but most critics were dismissive. Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times: “Taking issue with efforts like The Salton Sea, cold and unemotional films that couldn’t be more pleased at the opportunity to enthusiastically drag audiences through unhappy material, is as futile as getting mad at the wind.” Never expanding beyond 30 screens, the film grossed just $760,000 in the U.S. Tony Gayton mused, “It’s not an easy film for a studio, not the kind of product you can bottle and sell. I mean, how many movies do you have to actually see to figure out what’s going to happen? The TV spots usually tell you everything.”

Opinion
Of all the recent down and dirty movies to explore drug culture – from Trainspotting (heroin) to Blow (cocaine) to Homegrown (marijuana) – The Salton Sea (meth) is the boss for several reasons. The manic compulsions of the tweaker make them by far the most entertaining drug addict to watch stoned in a movie. Tony Gayton’s script is a beautifully structured piece of screenwriting – full of sharp dialogue and rich characters – that actually possesses a story, as opposed to sketches on a lost weekend. The material attracted one of the finest casts of actors and in his feature film debut, D.J. Caruso keeps a cool breeze of mystery flowing through the proceedings, so instead of being ahead of the score at all times, you’re in a constant state of trying to figure it out.

Far from taking itself seriously as an art movie, The Salton Sea is a throwback to the two-fisted fare that used to play on the bottom of the bill, pulp fiction featuring stars reminding you how good they could be, and new faces trying to prove it. Tom Van Allen is the last major role anyone offered Val Kilmer, and his jazz lounge narration in particular is savory. Peter Sarsgaard provides an immensely likable moral center, Adam Goldberg and Deborah Kara Unger give memorable performances as characters off on a bender, while Vincent D’Onofrio is the chief reason to see the movie. As a deformed dirt farmer with a trick up each sleeve, D’Onofrio’s Pooh Bear ranks as one of the best big screen bad guys of recent memory. Thomas Newman composed the coolly efficient score.

Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies writes, “The Salton Sea is a highly original and entertaining look at the lives of crystal meth addicts that can’t quite free itself from the run-of-the-mill revenge tale it’s trapped in. For every completely new character or scene, there’s one taken from Cop Film 101. It’s a sort of rollercoaster ride through the salvaged wreckage of a hundred similar movies. At the center are two very good but completely different performances: Val Kilmer as the main character, Danny/Tony, who is an addict with a plan; and Vincent D’Onofrio as Pooh-Bear, one of the most original characters I’ve seen in a long time.”

Derek Smith at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “It is the mystery of the film that makes it enjoyable and it’s important to note that this is not truly a “drug film” such as Trainspotting or Requiem for a Dream, but rather an exploration of a man’s identity and how tragedy forces him to extreme measures. The sharp script always keeps us on edge and makes it nearly impossible to predict what will happen next. While it’s not always original, this film holds its mystery until the very end – a feat not often accomplished by a Hollywood movie.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
After taking part in a sting netting fugitives by luring them into what they think is an event for the New York Yankees, Detective Frank Keller (Al Pacino) celebrates twenty years on the NYPD by getting drunk and calling his ex-wife. He responds to a murder scene on the west side of Manhattan – a male shot in the back of the head in bed – with the detective (Richard Jenkins) who’s moved in with his ex. Keller notifies his lieutenant (John Spencer) that the victim must have known his killer because a sentimental tune he was playing for her on a record player: “Sea of Love.” A detective from Queens named Sherman Touhey (John Goodman) approaches Keller with a case eerily similar.

When the detectives learn that their victims placed a rhyming ad in a singles magazine, Keller proposes writing their own ad, arranging dates at a restaurant and taking prints off a wine glass until they get a match. One of the suspects, a headstrong blonde named Helen Cruger (Ellen Barkin) walks out on Frank before he can get her prints. “I believe in animal attraction, I believe in love at first sight. I believe in this [snaps fingers] and I don’t feel it with you.” While a lead puts the detectives on the trail of a male shooter, Frank bumps into Helen at a grocery store, where she has second thoughts about him. Touhey urges Frank to walk away, but the couple begins a torrid affair, even as evidence mounts to her as their killer.

Production history
In the mid-1980s, novelist Richard Price was working on his first original screenplay – Sea of Love – which Dustin Hoffman had attached himself to star in. Hoffman was so enamored with Price’s writing that he asked the Bronx native to doctor the script for Rain Man, a troubled project that three different directors would ultimately tackle and withdraw from. Six weeks of work with the exacting star led to Price quitting as well. Hoffman responded by dropping out of Sea of Love. The project was dead for a year, until Price hand delivered the script to Al Pacino, whose interest suddenly made it a hot property again.

Pacino showed Sea of Love to Martin Bregman, his former manager and the producer of Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface. Bregman set the project up at Universal, but the studio had concerns. Price recalls, “I spent nine months shoehorning that script into a thriller, which I never meant it to be. I wanted it to be this moody, mopey thing, a character study. The worst thing you can say in a meeting with the studios is, ‘This movie about I’m about to pitch to you fellas, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before.’ They immediately say, ‘Well, in that case, get the fuck out of here.’ You sell a movie by its bloodlines, like you sell a racehorse. You tell them, ‘This is sired by Die Hard out of Do The Right Thing.’ Or, ‘It’s The Crying Game meets Jurassic Park, dinosaurs and transsexuals.’”

To direct, Bregman hired Gregory Hoblit, whose experience at that time was limited to episodes of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law. Disagreements with the producer over the script and over the crew he wanted to hire led to Hoblit being fired days before filming was to begin. Bregman turned to Harold Becker, whose credits included The Onion Field, Taps and The Boost. Becker recalled, “This Richard Price script, interestingly enough, had been around for many, many years. I had seen it in an earlier incarnation, it must have been about three, four years earlier and I think had probably been seen by a lot of people. It had made the rounds, so to speak. It’s hard to believe, such an interesting piece of material wouldn’t have been grabbed up right away, but that happens sometimes.”

With a budget of $16 million, Sea of Love commenced shooting May 1988. The production filmed in Toronto for eight weeks before moving to New York for another eleven weeks. Becker recalls, “This was a very difficult film to do. It was difficult because first of all, it was so intense. It also had so many different shades to it. Everything from the comedic to the darkest moments to murder. Also an intense erotic relation, it really covered the bases. So it was a big film and it also a very long shoot because we had a lot of night shooting – also always tough – shooting on the streets of New York during the summertime.” Ironically, Richard Price, Martin Bregman and Harold Becker all had grown up in the Bronx, as had the stars. Ellen Barkin even lived on the same block as Al Pacino when she was six.

Released September 1989, the picture was praised by critics, mostly. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wrote, “It has the manner of a heavily fiddled-with work, something that, after all the suggestions have been incorporated, finds itself in a corner from which it can’t plausibly be extricated.” David Denby retorted in New York Magazine, “Sea of Love is both an exciting murder mystery and a wonderful Manhattan love story – all lust and paranoia. It has a powerful erotic pull to it.” Siskel & Ebert gave it two thumbs up, with Siskel noting, “It’s Al Pacino’s best performance since The Godfather Part II.” Pacino had been absent from movie screens for four years, but Sea of Love brought him back in a big way, grossing $58.5 in the U.S. and another $52.3 million overseas.

To introduce Ellen Barkin’s character sooner, several scenes had been dropped, including a performance by Lorraine Bracco as Keller’s ex-wife. Despite the wholesale changes made to his script, Richard Price recalled, “What do they say? Comedy is Tragedy plus Time? Everybody’s telling me I’ve got to turn my movie into Fatal Attraction. Next thing I know, about a year later, I’m at a party and I run into James Dearden, the guy that wrote Fatal Attraction. And I said, ‘Oh. So you’re the prick that wrote that thing. I can’t tell you how miserable that made my life. I had to make my story like yours.’ And he said, ‘Look, I’ve just got a job directing a movie and everybody’s telling me I’ve got to make it like Sea of Love.’”

Opinion
After a decade in which Hollywood seemed to crank out a sleazy thriller from the pen of Joe Eszterhas every year – each a bigger dose of stupid than the last – the class act of that cycle and the one that’s endured is Sea of Love. With very little violence and a near aversion to dwell on any business beneath the sheets, the film is a classic due to its well-drawn characters, as well as its vibe, which conjures a classic sense of nocturnal desperation and edginess. Instead of taking its whodunit all that seriously, the film is more interested in exploring the desires, connections and dangers that lurk beneath urban affairs.

Richard Price – who would script the remake of Shaft and episodes of The Wire – knows his way around cops, and cuts into prime rib like few writers with the NYPD operation that opens the movie, as well as the intricacies of the Miss Lonelyhearts sting. Pacino remains scruffy and immensely watchable, but where the film lights up is with the entrance of Ellen Barkin, who capped a decade of gutsy screen performances with working class verve. Harold Becker imbues the film with a robust kinkiness that never overwhelms the characters, but stays strongly rooted in their reality. Trevor Jones assists this with a stark, jazzy musical score.

Johnny Web at Movie House Commentary writes, “Sea of Love is not a major movie, but is a solid little thriller with deep character development. Pacino’s cop is more than just a cardboard cut-out. He’s flawed; he’s an ass; he’s lonely; he’s a drunk. The key point is that he’s somebody who is known to us. We can probably answer questions about elements of his life than have not been specifically covered on screen. That kind of character development allows the audience to think of him as a member of the family, maybe a cousin who’s a pretty decent guy but needs to slack off the booze. We get deeper into the thrills because we’re into him.”

Andrew Wickliffe at The Stop Button writes, “Sea of Love is a great film. Richard Price’s writing is beautiful. For the first three quarters of the film, until the mystery takes over for a half hour, the nuance is unbelievable. Characters saying things, the meanings involved, just beautiful. Sea of Love is, I think, the last film written by the novelist Richard Price, everything after was by screenwriter Richard Price, who was still good, but reserved the good stuff for his novels (Clockers, incidentally, came from the research he did for Sea of Love).”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Disc jockey Dave Garver (Clint Eastwood) opens his show at jazz station KRML in Carmel by promising “a little verse, a little talk, and five hours of music to be very, very nice to each other by.” A regular female caller phones in and purrs, “Play ‘Misty’ for me.” Winding down at his favorite watering hole, Dave attracts the attention of a brunette at the end of the bar. Introducing herself as Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter), she tells Dave that she’s been stood up on a date. He gives Evelyn a ride home, but feels he knows the woman from somewhere. She reveals she’s his “Misty” caller.

Dave tells Evelyn he doesn’t want to complicate his life. She doesn’t see why this is any reason they shouldn’t sleep together. He sneaks off in the morning, but Evelyn shows up unannounced at Dave’s house to make him dinner. The disc jockey establishes a few boundaries before sleeping with her again. Dave is more interested in patching things up with his artsy ex-girlfriend (Donna Mills) when he discovers she’s moved back from Sausalito. But Evelyn tracks Dave down, asking why he hasn’t taken her calls. He’s not amused. “Where does it say I’ve got to drop what I’m doing and answer the phone every time it rings?”

Evelyn continues to smother Dave – banging on his door in the middle of the night and professing her love for him – until he makes it clear he doesn’t feel the same way. She responds by slashing her wrists in his bathroom and drawing out her recovery so he won’t send her home. When he finally leaves his house for a business meeting, Evelyn follows him to the restaurant and has a fit. Dave breaks it off with his schizophrenic woman for the last time, unaware she’s copied his house key and considers the affair far from over.

Production history
Jo Heims met Clint Eastwood while working at Universal as a legal secretary in the early 1960s. She wanted to be a screenwriter. He was a TV star taking acting classes with aspirations to be a serious actor. Some years later, Heims wrote a sixty-page treatment called Play Misty For Me. Eastwood read it and recalled, “I liked the Alfred Hitchcock kind of thriller aspect, but the main thing I liked about it was beyond that, the story was very real. The story was believable because these kind of commitments or misinterpretations thereof go on all the time.”

Eastwood optioned the treatment and took the project to CBS, to Universal and to United Artists, but with his feature film career limited to the spaghetti westerns he’d done in Europe, none of the studios were interested. While in England shooting Where Eagles Dare, Eastwood received a call from Heims. She had an offer from Universal to purchase Play Misty For Me. Unsure when he’d ever get around to the project, Eastwood told Heims to sell it. When Universal later signed him to a three-picture deal, Eastwood asked what had happened to that “odd little story about a disc jockey.”

He was shown a script the studio had commissioned, but didn’t care for it. Eastwood worked with Heims on a new draft – changing the setting from L.A. to Monterey County – then approached Dean Riesner to do a polish. Studio VP Jennings Lang was dubious. He tried to talk the star out of the project by mentioning that the woman had the best part, but Eastwood had already made up his mind that Play Misty For Me was going to be his directorial debut. Studio chief Lew Wasserman approved of the idea immediately, but notified Eastwood’s agent that he’d only be paid the DGA minimum for his services behind the camera.

With a budget of $700,000, Misty commenced shooting September 1970 in the area of Carmel, where Eastwood lived. He cast his mentor Don Siegel in the role of Murph the bartender, but ended up not needing the directorial guidance, bringing his first film in on budget. Despite an enthusiastic preview in San Jose a year later, Universal showed little inclination to support the picture. It performed well at the box office anyway, so well, that Eastwood received a call from the manager of the Cineramadome in Hollywood, asking if he could stop Universal from pulling the film after only four weeks. “The audience just keeps coming.”

Opinion
In the 1980s, Brian DePalma and John Carpenter were both approached to direct a potential blockbuster about an obsessive affair, but turned it down – in part – because they felt it was too similar to Eastwood’s directorial debut. Play Misty For Me is not only superior to Fatal Attraction as a thriller – slowly building dread and paying off with a couple of sharp, unexpected shocks – but remains a classic because it actually has something relevant to say about men and women; specifically, how flirtations can easily ignite into obsessions.

While not a model of perfection – the bar scenes are too bright and some of the casting is on the level of a nighttime soap – shooting on real location lends the film a terrific energy. Jessica Walter and Clint Eastwood are the chief reason the movie works as well as it does. Equally impressive is the fact that Dave Garver never picks up a weapon, but is left completely at the mercy of his conquest. Bruce Surtees provided the stark cinematography and Dee Barton – who Eastwood met at an L.A. nightclub where his band was performing – composed the moody score, his first.

Scott Weinberg at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “I doubt many people would argue against Eastwood’s skill on both sides of the camera. It’s a film that’s achieved cult status worldwide and was also the inspiration for the blockbuster hit Fatal Attraction. Regardless of the box office receipts, this one is easily the better film. As a cautionary tale on the benefits of monogamy or as a straight ‘psycho-girlfriend-from-Hell’ thriller, it’s worth your investment of time and money.”

“I could’ve easily gone without the Jazz concert bit. Felt trivial, self indulgent or/and there to ‘kill time’. Overall though Play Misty for Me was a tight, suspense laced little ditty that sported a couple of nasty surprises along the way and ended it off in a refreshingly grounded fashion. No overlong and flashy finale for this film! It capped off the way it should; “to the freaking point”. You going to Play Misty For Her or run for your life? This bitch is nuts!” writes John Fallon at Arrow In the Head.

Earl Cressey at DVD Talk writes, “Even though Play Misty for Me is highly regarded as one of the top films in the suspense thriller genre, I had overlooked it until now. However, when it came up for review, I was glad to correct this oversight. And it’s a good thing, as Misty is a terrific film. Though it was Eastwood’s first time directing, viewers will be hard pressed to notice, as everything looks and comes together great. The acting is all top-notch as well, especially on the parts of Eastwood and Walter. Though the movie slows down in the second half, it really is a great film that no fan of the genre should miss.”

© Joe Valdez