JFK (1991)
Directed by Oliver Stone
Screenplay by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar, based on the books On The Trail of the Assassins by Jim Garrison and Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy by Jim Marrs
Produced by Oliver Stone, A. Kitman Ho
Running time: 189 minutes (theatrical version)/ 206 minutes (director’s cut)

Should I Care?
Before Michael Moore came along, columnists representing all the colors of the political spectrum looking forward to the day they could be outraged again had to wait eighteen months for Oliver Stone to make another movie. Irked by the dramatic license Stone took to make entertainment amid the social turmoil of Central America (Salvador) or Wall Street (Wall Street), pundits got their bowties in a bundle when Stone started muddying the waters of history in movies dealing with the antiwar protest (Born on the Fourth of July), the life and times of Jim Morrison (The Doors) and most notoriously, the JFK assassination in JFK. Whatever your favorite conspiracy theory, this epic re-examination of the crime of the century from every conceivable angle — plus seven or eight you probably never conceived of — is nothing short of cinematic Cirque du Soleil, unfolding flashbacks within flashbacks through film editing and sound in a controlled demolition of sorts.

It’s easy to armchair quarterback JFK and question some of the audibles. Kevin Costner seems a bit wholesome to play a district attorney in the Big Easy and some of the oratory typed up for him gets almost as stiff as Costner does. In terms of both the murder mystery at the heart of the material and the technique employed to bring it to the screen, the film has few peers. Drafting top craftsmen — from director of photography Robert Richardson to composer John Williams on down — Stone juggles archive footage with fabrication, black & white with color, Tommy Lee Jones with Joe Pesci. The assassination is initially presented as it was understood at the time, slowly unraveling until an alternate, much more insidious version is proposed. This becomes the stuff great thrillers are made. Critics who argue that it’s all propaganda haven’t really watched the movie. Stone never declares who he believes killed the president and why. That’s ultimately left up to the audience to discuss and decide on our own.

So, What’s This About?
On November 22, 1963, New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is notified that the president has been shot. A family man, World War II veteran and popular anti-corruption crusader, Garrison and his staff (Jay O. Sanders, Michael Rooker, Laurie Metcalf, Wayne Knight, Gary Grubbs) watch live on TV as Dallas police apprehend a suspect in Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman) who in a press conference coolly maintains his innocence. Oswald is shot in a parking lot the next day by nightclub owner Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle Murray). Alerted that Oswald spent the summer before the assassination in New Orleans, Garrison summons a known associate named David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) for an interview on a tip he might have been a getaway pilot for Oswald. The FBI questions and releases Ferrie mysteriously. Four years later, a candid chat with Senator Russell Long (Walter Matthau) and glaring inconsistencies in the Warren Commission Report prompt Garrison to reopen the murder of President Kennedy.

The case begins on the night of the assassination when private eye Guy Bannister (Ed Asner) pistol whipped his friend Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon). Martin links David Ferrie and Oswald to Bannister, who was involved in a CIA scheme to train Cuban exiles for another invasion of the island. Garrison follows the trail to Dealey Plaza in Dallas, where witnesses report hearing shots fired from a grassy knoll in front of the president’s motorcade, as well as intimidation from federal agents. Garrison’s suspicion falls onto New Orleans industrialist Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones) who has CIA ties and discussed an assassination plot with Ferrie and Oswald months before the murder. Scrutinized, attacked and discredited, Garrison’s own wife Liz (Sissy Spacek) begins to question her husband’s case. Garrison is summoned to Washington by a retired Air Force colonel who gives the name X (Donald Sutherland). X confirms that Garrison is closer to the truth than he thinks; Kennedy was killed by a military coup d’état opposed to the president’s intent to end the Cold War.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
In May 1988, Oliver Stone attended the Latin American Film Festival in Havana to accept an award for Salvador. In an elevator, a publisher named Ellen Ray introduced herself and told the filmmaker about a book by Jim Garrison that she was publishing titled On The Trail of the Assassins. Headed to the Philippines to shoot the Vietnam sequences for Born on the Fourth of July, Stone read the galleys within days and quickly optioned the film rights out of his own pocket. In search of a writer who could get to work on a first draft, Zachary Sklar, editor of Jim Garrison’s book, was recommended. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy and hire a researcher named Jane Rusconi to lead a team that poured over a hundred more books and documents examining the Kennedy assassination in detail. Arriving on the structure for a murder mystery spanning three cities — New Orleans, Dallas and Washington — Stone successfully pitched his concept to the heads of Warner Bros. in December 1989 and found a home for JFK.

With a screenplay ambitious enough for two movies and a budget that doubled what Stone initially proposed at $40 million, producer Arnon Milchan came on board with financial support from investors based in France (Le Studio Canal+) and Germany (Alcor Films). Stone and casting director Risa Bramon Garcia considered virtually every name actor for a role in the film and doggedly pursued Kevin Costner to take the role of Jim Garrison. The script was kept under wraps until filming was set to get underway in Dallas, but by May 1991 the first scathing attack on the film’s historical inaccuracies appeared in The Washington Post. Many more newspapers and magazines picked up on the furor and despite Stone’s repeated attempts to conduct articulate damage control, JFK and its director were assailed in the media leading up to a hurried release in December. A critical and commercial success and nominated for eight Academy Awards, pundits would continue to attack JFK as propaganda for months.

How’d They Do It?
Ellen Ray was the publisher of a newsletter called CovertAction Information Bulletin and meeting Oliver Stone in a hotel in Havana, began telling him about a book by former New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison she was set to publish. In Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker by James Riordan, Stone recalled, “It was at this socialist hotel where it takes like thirty minutes for the elevator to get to the twelfth floor. We were on this creaky elevator and at first I thought she was another of the three thousand crusaders that go to these things around the world, who would talk my ear off about her pet peeve. But Ellen Ray is an extraordinary person in her own right. Back in 1967 she went down to New Orleans to volunteer her services to work with Garrison. She’s one of the most courageous women I’ve met in my life. She has a small printing press with her husband, Bill, and they publish that bulletin. She’s amazingly accurate about some things. And she said, ‘Read this book.’”

Stone ended the conversation by telling Ray to forward the galleys of On The Trail of the Assassins to his office at Fox. Two days later, Ray received a phone call from Stone. Interviewed for a Texas Monthly cover story in December 1991, Ray recalled, “He said, ‘It’s a great book, but I can’t do it. I’m on my way to the Philippines to film Born on the Fourth of July. But you won’t have any trouble selling it.’ Two days later, he called from Hawaii, saying, ‘I just read the book again on the plane. I can’t do it. I’m overloaded.’ Three days later, he called from the Philippines, saying, ‘I’m hooked. I’m going to option it.’” Stone was initially drawn into the material for the film noir aspects that seemed to leap off the page of Garrison’s book. “This pistol whipping occurs on the night of November 22, 1963 on a rainy night in which this guy Jack Martin gets his skull laid open by his boss, Guy Bannister, and out of that little Raymond Chandler kind of incident, Garrison spins this tale of international intrigue — a hell of a trail. As a dramatist, that excited me.”

Oliver Stone was 17 on the day the president was assassinated. “The Kennedy murder was one of the signal events of the postwar generation, my generation. Vietnam followed, then the bombing of Cambodia and Laos, the Pentagon Papers, the Chile affair, Watergate, going up to Iran-Contra in the eighties. We’ve had a series of major shocks. I think the American public smells a rat that’s been chewing on the innards of the government for years.” He added, “As an adolescent, I was self-absorbed with other problems, but I still felt like there was something wrong with the official version of the assassination.” Rather than engage a studio to option On The Trail of the Assassins, Stone kept his interest as quiet as possible by putting up his own money. Stone would also option a book by Jim Marrs titled Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. He contracted a recent Yale grad named Jane Rusconi to head a research team and assemble as much information on the assassination as they could compile.

Stone’s technical advisers included Larry N. Howard, founder and coordinator of the JFK Assassination Information Center in Dallas. Howard left no bones about why he believed the president was murdered. “John F. Kennedy committed suicide, political suicide. He was getting out of Vietnam, getting rid of the Mafia, dumping Lyndon Johnson in 1964. He fired Allen Dulles from the CIA, said he was going to break up the CIA into a million pieces, make peace efforts with Castro and Krushchev, sign the nuclear test ban treaty. Civil rights was going strong. He had Bobby to succeed him; he had Teddy after Bobby. So the real people who had the power in this country, the military industrial complex, decided that Kennedy was soft on communism and was a threat to national security and worldwide peace. So they got rid of him through rogue elements of the CIA, with the Mafia as a junior partner. And from that point on, they covered it up from the top — the Warren Commission, which Johnson set up with Dulles on the panel.”

Also advising Stone was Fletcher Prouty, a retired Air Force colonel who served as chief of special operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Kennedy administration. Prouty had provided logistical support for clandestine CIA operations from 1955-63. He gave Stone a declassified document that he had helped draft: National Security Action Memorandum 263, in which President Kennedy called for the recall of 1,000 advisers from Vietnam by 1963 and a complete withdrawal of U.S. personnel by 1965. As Prouty saw it, this is what got Kennedy killed. “Who did it? I would go to Lyndon Johnson for reference, when he said shortly before he died, ‘We had been operating a damned Murder, Inc.’ That’s an enormous statement coming from President Johnson. He was convinced that Oswald did not do it as an individual, that there was a conspiracy, and that the government had the capabilities to do it.” Prouty didn’t believe LBJ was involved in the assassination, but that the president kept his suspicions to himself after the fact.

In December 1989 — with Born on the Fourth of July in theaters and Stone prepping to shoot The Doors in March 1990 — the filmmaker and his agent Paula Wagner met with Warner Bros. chairman and CEO Robert Daly, president Terry Semel and production executive Bill Gerber. Stone revealed that he was writing a script about the JFK assassination. Semel recalled, “My reaction was we should do it. It was entertaining and intriguing, a great murder mystery, something we cared about and grew up thinking about. It took me two minutes to be totally engrossed with the whole idea.” Warner Bros. agreed to put up $20 million in financing for worldwide distribution rights. Stone recalled, “The film had a home. I know I could have made a better overall deal by selling off the international market separately, but I wanted to sell the whole thing to Warners because I didn’t want the script going all over the world to be bid on and read. I knew the material was dangerous and I wanted one entity to finance the whole thing. Given Terry Semel’s record of political films, Warners was my first choice.”

Stone hired Zachary Sklar to adapt Jim Garrison’s book into a screenplay. Sklar clarified, “I had not been what you call an assassination researcher –I was fifteen when the assassination occurred, and of course it deeply affected me, as did the other assassinations that followed. I didn’t take any particular research interest in it, I did become a journalist, and I edited a number of books about the CIA for Sheridan Square Press, which publishes books by former CIA agents who have become disillusioned with the agency. Sheridan Square Press approached me in 1987 with a manuscript from Jim Garrison that had been rejected by another publishing house. I worked on that book for about a year and a half with Jim Garrison, we re-structured and re-wrote it, and that book became On the Trail of the Assassins, that’s how I got into the assassination.” While Sklar focused on the Jim Garrison story, Stone worked on the Lee Harvey Oswald angle, the events at Dealey Plaza and the Mr. X story in Washington.

By July 1990, Kevin Costner, Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe were on Stone’s short list to play Jim Garrison, but also being considered were Harrison Ford, Nick Nolte, Michael Douglas, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Mel Gibson, Gene Hackman, John Malkovich, Alec Baldwin, Robert DeNiro, Dennis Quaid, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Marlon Brando. In the end, scripts went out simultaneously to Harrison Ford and Kevin Costner. Ford reportedly backed away from the material because he didn’t believe there was any conspiracy. Costner — a conservative tilting supporter of George H.W. Bush — may have had similar reservations, but Stone wouldn’t take no for an answer. “Costner was a big break for us. I chased him and got him. Mike Ovitz was instrumental in that. It helped that he was a strong fan of the movie and was strongly urging Costner, his client, to be in it. He kept saying, ‘He’s gonna do it, don’t worry. It’ll happen.’”

Whether Dallas was ready to move beyond 11-22-63 or were just happy to see Stone — who had shot most of Born on the Fourth of July in Dallas and was now bringing $5 million to the local economy — for the most part, the city welcomed JFK. In an open audition that drew 11,000 to the Dallas Convention Center, locals were cast as the Kennedys and Connellys, as well as in sixty other bit parts. Shooting was scheduled to begin April 1991. The trouble began two months earlier. Assassination researcher Harold Weisberg had dispatched an angry letter to Stone disparaging the Jim Garrison investigation. Weisberg failed to draw a response, but did get a hold of a script, a first draft that he passed along to George Lardner Jr. of The Washington Post. Stone recalled, “When Lardner showed up at our offices and walked down the fucking hall uninvited, I knew we had a problem. He’s an old CIA investigative reporter and has many contacts in the agency. He was snooping around, and we escorted him off the set. And he wrote the worst possible story he could write.”

Many columnists would blast Stone for playing fast and loose with history at best, misleading the public at worst. Stone later commented, “I believe the Warren Commission Report is a great myth. And in order to fight a myth, maybe you have to create another one, a countermyth. No one really knows what happened on November 22, 1963, or who did it, but there sure are an abundance of flaws in the official investigation. I wanted to use Garrison as a vehicle for a larger perspective, a metaphoric protagonist who would stand in for about a dozen researchers. Filmmakers make myths. D.W. Griffith did it in Birth of a Nation. In Reds, Warren Beatty probably made John Reed look better than he was, but remained true to the spiritual truth of Reed’s life. I knew this would make Garrison somewhat better than he was and, in that sense, we’d be making him more of a hero. I knew I would catch a lot of flak for that, but I figured it was worth it to communicate, really get across, some truth in an area that had been steeped in lies for nearly thirty years.”

Filming wrapped in July 1991 and post-production supervisor Bill Brown highlighted the technical challenges of assembling the film Oliver Stone had in mind. “A show like Return of the Jedi would maybe have four to five hundred opticals. For JFK, we had two thousand opticals. Of course, the shots in something like Return of the Jedi would generally be much more complicated than the opticals we used in JFK, but the sheer volume of the JFK material made it very difficult. We smashed all the records at the optical house.” He added, “A line in the script would say, ‘A C-130 transport plane flies over the South Pole’ and we would have to find that shot. Now there’s a warehouse sitting out in Van Nuys with Air Force footage in it and there’s probably hundreds of thousands of feet of C-130s, but the Air Force has to read the script for you to get it. Obviously, we’re not going to turn the script of JFK over to the U.S. government armed forces, so we have to scrounge it from other places. Or he would ask for a shot of Robert Bissell, who was a CIA agent. Well, these guys are spooks; they’re not supposed to have their picture taken.”

In an interview with Cineaste in 1992, Stone explained “I wanted to do the film on two or three levels — sound and picture would take us back, and we’d go from one flashback to another, and then that flashback would go inside another flashback, like the Lee Bowers thing. We’d go to Lee Bowers at the Warren Commission, and then Lee Bowers at the railroad yard, all seen from Jim’s point of view in his study. I wanted multiple layers because reading the Warren Commission Report is like drowning. The levels and the consciousness of reality created through sound — the work done by Wylie Stateman and Michael Minkler is incredible — was also in the script. But Warner Bros. was confused by the script — you can imagine 158 pages filled with flashbacks like that and I think there are some 2,800 shots in the movie — so I took all the flashbacks and I gave them a simpler script which they liked. Then I and the editors — Joe Hutshing, Pietro Scalia and Hank Corwin — ended up putting all the flashbacks back in the editing room, and adding quite a few new ones in a sort of prismatic structure.”

Arriving in U.S. theaters in December 1991, JFK dazzled critics. Desson Howe, The Washington Post: “Despite its three hours, JFK is almost always absorbing to watch. It’s not journalism. It’s not history. It is not legal evidence. Much of it is ludicrous. It’s a piece of art or entertainment. Stone, who has acknowledged his fusing of the known and the invented, has exercised his full prerogative to use poetic license. He should feel more than mere craftsman’s satisfaction at the result.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Part history book, part comic book, the movie rushes toward judgment for three breathless hours, lassoing facts and factoids by the thousands, then bundling them together into an incendiary device that would frag any viewer’s complacency. Stone’s picture is, in both meanings of the word, sensational: it’s tip-top tabloid journalism. In its bravura and breadth, JFK is seditiously enthralling; in its craft, wondrously complex.“ Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Stone makes it virtually impossible to leave the theatre convinced, beyond all shadow of doubt, of the lone gunman theory. Or, at least, he sets the stage for a good argument. And that’s where JFK’s real power lies — in stirring the national debate.”

On Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both delivered a ringing endorsement for JFK and debated the media furor it had stirred up. Roger Ebert: “I think intelligent moviegoers are capable of looking at this movie and knowing exactly what Stone did. He took real footage, he took fictional footage and a lot of it is speculative; in other words, Garrison’s imagining different ways the same thing could have happened and it’s exhilarating for us to follow that thought process through to the end, even if in the end, we still don’t know who killed Kennedy.” Gene Siskel: “I think what he is saying really, I think that included in the conspiracy is the American public, in the sense of not demanding more. Here’s a guy who feels, ‘Hey look it, I went to Vietnam, I have reason to believe that the whole Vietnam experience was caused, or could have been averted if Kennedy had lived. Not sure, but could have been — maybe a better chance than LBJ running the ship — and therefore, I laid my life on it, I have the right to make a film about it too.’”

Stone took the airwaves to discuss and defend JFK, appearing on Nightline, City Desk and The Oprah Winfrey Show for starters. He accepted an invitation to mix it up with Dan Rather on the CBS news magazine 48 Hours. “On Nightline they aired something like a six-minute clip and raised all kinds of charges, but then didn’t allow me to answer any of them. Because of that kind of prejudice, I was wary about the CBS News interview. When we did it, I was very painstaking about my answers. I left the Q&A session after every question to consult with my research assistants and then I’d come back and lay out the answer. That seemed to upset Dan Rather a bit. In the end, the interview took two hours and must have included twenty questions, but when they aired it they cut all by one question, the most innocuous one. They simply would not allow me to get my point across.” Four months after its release, MPAA president Jack Valenti, a former top aide to Lyndon Johnson, joined the chorus denouncing the film, comparing JFK to Triumph of the Will as a “propaganda masterpiece” and “hoax”.

Nevertheless, JFK drew box office receipts of $70.5 million in the United States and $135 million overseas. It would be nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Looking back on the media firestorm years later, Stone was still snakebit. “When Anthony Lewis would come out with a strong criticism about the film — and he was so one-sided in some of the statements he made — I would try to correct it and I couldn’t get the letter published. I had to go to the mat several times with Warners backing me to say we’re gonna take a full-page ad in The New York Times denouncing this unfair practice unless you publish this letter. It was that way with several publications. The moment I entered that arena I regretted it in a sense because it’s an endless battle — you’re attacked, and if you reply, they attack you again. They leave stuff out of your letter to make you look bad. The attacks became a major newspaper event. It was like Tommy Lee Jones said, everybody and their dog got to write an article about it and got paid for it.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Can Hollywood Solve JFK’s Murder” By Mark Seal. Texas Monthly, December 1991

“Interview with Zachary Sklar, Co-Writer of the Movie JFK” By Frank Morales and Paul DeRienzo.14 January 1992

“Clarifying the Conspiracy: An Interview With Oliver Stone” By Gary Crowdus. Cineaste, 1992

Stone: The Controversies, Excesses and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker. By James Riordan. Hyperion (1995)

Eyes Wide Shut (1999)
Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by the novel Traumnovelle by Arthur Schnitzler
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Produced by Stanley Kubrick
Running time: 159 minutes

Should I Care?
Even with its question marks, the thirteenth and final film from Stanley Kubrick — director of 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange and Full Metal Jacket — is a declaration of what movies for grownups can and should aspire to, in a perfect universe. It’s the return of the intelligent dirty movie, a genre that Showgirls forced into hiding in 1995. It’s a visual marvel. It’s has the power of both restraint and of shock. These qualities are abundant throughout Eyes Wide Shut, which may be one of the purest cinematic taste tests available to the general public, separating moviegoers of all strides into a Coke camp or Pepsi camp with brutal efficiency. You may not be able to express why you like or dislike this unique brand of erotic thriller, but you’ll know which group you belong to. One of the most dry, least entertaining films Kubrick made, it’s also one to savor and resample, with the effects of time illuminating the film’s strange currencies much better.

It’s debatable whether Kubrick — a committed perfectionist who yanked The Shining out of limited release to tinker with it in 1980 — would have made alterations to this 159-minute cut had he not passed away four months before its release. After wrestling with the source material for 25 years before taking a year and a half to get it all on film, expectations got the better of Eyes Wide Shut and continue to. Instead of generating sexual titillation, the film emits an ominous, low voltage discontent that begs to be regarded less as a sexual escapade and more like a dream. Nothing about the artificial staging or pacing suggests the waking world, giving each kinky nuance a deeper interpretation. Lighting cameraman Larry Smith collaborated with Kubrick on the film’s jewelry box look, while Austrian composer György Ligeti’s piano cycle “Musica ricercata” is used to maximum effect, a nod to how brilliantly Kubrick utilized classical music to score his pioneering films.

So, What’s This About?
Dr. Bill Harford (Tom Cruise) and his unemployed art curator wife Alice (Nicole Kidman) get dressed in their West Central Park apartment. They leave their young daughter with a sitter and head out for the annual Christmas party of one of Bill’s patients: Victor Zeigler (Sydney Pollack). Working the lavish soiree is a piano player Bill attended medical school with named Nick Nightingale (Todd Field). While Bill is summoned by Zeigler to attend to a hooker (Julienne Davis) overdosed in his bathroom, Alice has too much champagne and dances with a suave Hungarian. His efforts to get Alice upstairs go unrewarded when she maintains that she’s married. The lack of jealously Bill displays over the solicitation spurs a fight between the couple the following evening. Feeling that her fidelity has been taken for granted, Alice reveals she entertained the fantasy of running off with a naval officer they met while on vacation in Cape Cod.

Troubled by his wife’s confession, Bill puts in a visit to the jazz club in Greenwich Village where Nick is wrapping up a gig. The piano man reveals that he’s on his way to another gig, one whose location changes every time, requires a password to gain entry and a blindfold while he performs. Nick has taken enough of a peek to report that the women at these parties are not to be believed. Equipped with the address, Bill procures the necessary attire — tux, cape with hood, mask — from a rental shop whose nutty owner (Rade Serbedzija) pimps his underaged daughter (Leelee Sobieski) out of the back. Arriving at a mansion in the countryside, the password “Fidelio” opens doors Bill has only dreamed of: a ritualistic orgy with gorgeous masked women serving as party favors for the masked guests. One of these ladies of the night warns Bill that he’s in great danger. Ignoring her, Bill is confronted with the mystery of how much of what he saw that night was actually real.

Who Made It?
After the completion of Full Metal Jacket in 1987, Stanley Kubrick spent years deliberating where his next project would come from. He’d acquired the film rights to Patrick Susskind’s novel Perfume, about a serial murdering perfumer in 18^th century France, before deciding he didn’t want to direct it next. Several screenwriters labored with the director over an adaptation of a Brian Aldiss short story titled Super Toys Last All Summer Long, about an artificial boy who yearns to be real. In April 1993, Warner Bros. announced that Kubrick’s next film would be an adaptation of the Louis Begley novel Wartime Lies. The story concerned a Jewish boy orphaned during the German invasion of Poland who escapes an Auschwitz bound train with his young aunt; they evade recapture by assuming Catholic identities. Shooting was scheduled to begin in February 1994. Kubrick got as far as location scouting before his interest waned in the groundswell to Steven Spielberg’s definitive Holocaust tale Schindler’s List (1993).

Kubrick turned to a property he’d acquired over twenty years previous: Traumnovelle (Dream Novella), published in 1926 from Austrian physician turned author Arthur Schnitzler. In the summer of 1994, Kubrick contacted screenwriter Frederic Raphael, who’d won an Oscar for his original screenplay Darling (1965) and written Two For the Road (1967). Updating the tale of jealousy and sexual obsession from turn of the century Vienna to modern day New York, Raphael was instructed to keep Schnitzler’s century old narrative. Kubrick arrived on the title Eyes Wide Shut and in December 1995, Warner Bros. announced that the husband and wife tandem of Tom Cruise & Nicole Kidman would star. Filmed under a veil of secrecy in the London area where Kubrick lived, the $65 million production would stretch on for 17 months, so long that two cast members were replaced for reshoots. In March 1999, a mere week after screening his cut to his studio and his stars, Kubrick passed away suddenly. Released that summer, his final film would polarize critics, befuddle American audiences and go ignored during awards season.

How’d They Do It?
Stanley Kubrick may have been mulling over a screen adaptation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Traumnovelle – also published under the title Rhapsody — since reading it in 1968, the year the South Bronx native made the decision to permanently relocate to England with his family. Interviewed by Gene Siskel in 1987, Kubrick attempted to shed some light on his dramatic change of address. “There have been all sorts of stories about why I live in London, but it’s really very simple: In order to be at home some of the time, I have to live in a production center, and there are only three places in the world that fulfill this requirement in a practical sense. If you want to make English-language movies, it has to be done in Los Angeles, New York, or London. I love New York City, though my wife doesn’t. But it would rank third in the list of cities with the best production facilities, London being second. Hollywood of course has the best facilities, but I have never enjoyed living there. I found the sense of insecurity and the whiff of malevolence that surrounds you there unsettling.”

Kubrick obtained the film rights to Traumnovelle through his brother-in-law and associate producer Jan Harlan in 1972. That same year, he met Frederic Raphael at the home of director Stanley Donen. In 1994, Kubrick would telephone the author and screenwriter — who lives in France — to inquire whether Raphael would be available to collaborate on a project. Clearing his schedule, Raphael received a package from FedEx containing a photocopied novella. The title and the author’s name had been removed, though Raphael claims to have guessed that either Arthur Schnitzler or Stefan Zweig had written it. He found much of the work silly and pretentious, with overwrought dream sequences. Nonetheless, there was something compelling about it. “As I waited for Kubrick to call, I went back over the text and marked the key elements. I could imagine a movie somewhat like Buñuel’s Belle de Jour, which calmly juxtaposed the plausible and the extravagant, the dated and the modern.”

From November 1994 to March 1995, Raphael worked on a first draft adaptation of Traumnovelle for Kubrick. The director was explicit about not wanting to make a feature length dream, which prompted Raphael to lobby for greater cohesion to the story. “I began to fear that Kubrick might make another movie like Full Metal Jacket, in which the brilliant elements failed to bond into unity. Was he going to be so determined to confound routine expectations that that was all he did? The denial of conclusive satisfaction to the audience would be a twist without savor. Obedient dissidence was my only available response. In the days that followed, I wrote, and rewrote, and reverted tactfully to my point that the movie could not end as mysteriously as it began without leaving a sense of frustration. Kubrick listened, but he did not yet change his point of view.” In May 1995, Raphael faxed Kubrick a title for their project, which had been referred to merely as “Schnitzler”. Raphael proposed The Female Subject. Kubrick never acknowledged it and a few days later, suggested his own title.

On December 31, 1995, it was announced that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman would star in Eyes Wide Shut. Production was scheduled to touch off November 1996 in England, where Kubrick had shot all of his films dating back to Lolita (1962). Once cameras began rolling, they didn’t seem to stop. Nicole Kidman recalled, “The whole process of the film was a discovery. It was never about the result. It was never about, ‘Um, well, we have a week to shoot this scene, so quick quick quick, we have to do it. Let’s see, uh, we may not fully explore it, but we’ll get something good.’ Stanley wanted to explore every avenue and then make his decisions based on that. And Stanley was not restricted by time. He refused to be. And that is a great luxury that only somebody like he could afford, because of what he’d achieved through his career to be able to, say, ‘You wanna know what’s gold, with filmmaking? Time is gold.’ Not having to walk away from a scene before you feel like you really perfected it.”

Cast as the daughter of Dr. Harford’s recently deceased patient, Jennifer Jason Leigh filmed her scene opposite Cruise, but months later, not entirely satisfied with the results, Kubrick called for a reshoot. With Leigh busy filming eXistenZ for director David Cronenberg in Canada, Swedish actress Marie Richardson replaced her. Harvey Keitel was cast as Zeigler and got to participate in some filming, until it became apparent that Kubrick’s pace would overlap the actor’s commitment to Finding Graceland. Director/actor Sydney Pollack — a friend of Kubrick’s — agreed to take over the role. Pollack recalled, “He always would say when we would talk about it, ‘Isn’t it silly, you know, the cheapest part of all of this is do another take.’ Do another take. You’ve spent millions of dollars preparing and building sets, hiring people, doing costumes and months and months writing a script, years sometimes. And then you get there and you quit on take five. Or take six. Or take seven. Isn’t that silly. You don’t know what’s going to happen if you try three or four or five more.”

Frederic Raphael elaborated on Kubrick’s laborious work methods. “Some people claim that Stanley is very indecisive, but I think his attitude was much more professional than that. He had a tendency to put off making a decision until he had a clear understanding of the options available, very similar in this sense to a chess player, which he was. Very good chess players have far fewer options than bad players because the bad ones have to take into account a large number of moves, while good players know that 99.99 out of 100 moves are useless. With Stanley, it was ‘wait and see’ and I think when you’re working with someone as interesting and dedicated as Nicole, you don’t simply say, ‘Here’s the text, learn it.’ From this point of view I feel the screenplay, quite correctly, offered opportunities for improvisation. That’s the way Stanley liked to work, for there were two sides to him. One side was very careful about framing the shots, placing each element on the set with care, and the other was astonishingly ready to be surprised.”

Eyes Wide Shut wrapped production March 1998, 17 months after filming was underway. Nicole Kidman maintained that with breaks for holidays, filming only took place for roughly 12 of those months. After a year of editing, Kubrick’s cut was screened in New York for Cruise, Kidman and Warner Bros. co-chairmen Terry Semel and Robert Daly. By all accounts, reception was positive. Jan Harlan would later recount, “When Eyes Wide Shut was finally shown for the very first time in New York on March 1, 1999 to Tom and Nicole and the heads of the studio, the response was very enthusiastic. Stanley was very, very happy and a great, heavy weight was lifted from his shoulders. I think this change of his being caused almost a physical change in his body, because he had lifted this enormous responsibility for a very expensive film which was long in the shooting for a long time, for two years. And suddenly it was all gone. And he died a week later.” Christiane Kubrick found her husband in their estate north of London. At the age of 70, Kubrick had died in his sleep.

Opening July 1999 in the United States, Canada and Japan, no two critics had the same reaction to Eyes Wide Shut. Marv Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Rarely, if ever, have I seen a film (and certainly not in this decade) that has been so visually compelling, from Kubrick’s choice of granular stock to the brilliant, burnished ambers and frosty blues that make up the film’s palette. If this film were a meal, I shudder to think of the damage it might do to one’s vitals.” Manohla Dargis, L.A. Weekly: “Kubrick doesn’t put out in Eyes Wide Shut, and it’s hard to know why. Although he was contracted to deliver a movie to Warner Bros. that could secure an R rating, there’s a restraint, almost a demureness to the sex that has nothing to do with the MPAA.” Desson Howe, The Washington Post: “Whether or not this is a masterpiece or a semi-masterpiece is hard to say. I wasn’t particularly impressed by the resolution, for instance. But after the titillation has died down — and whether or not America embraces this one-of-a-kind experience — time will eventually smile on this movie, I believe.”

On The Charlie Rose Show, critics raked over the pros and cons of Kubrick’s last movie. Janet Maslin, The New York Times: “It’s very subtle and hypnotic and it just drags you into this dream. And you don’t realize how powerful it is until after it’s over. I mean, it’s a Rorschach — I think — of a lot of things about relationships between men and women, and honesty and dishonesty and it’s very full in a way. I find it fascinating, I really do.” David Ansen, The New Yorker: “At this point I can only say that the guy stages the most pompous orgy in the history of movies. I think — I’m sorry, more in sorrow than anger — I think it’s a dud. I don’t think it works, on any level, really. I think it falls into some uneasy limbo between reality and fantasy and the style just doesn’t have the authority that he’s had on earlier occasions.” Premiere Magazine’s James Meigs credited Kubrick for rehabilitating B-movie genres, from sci-fi in 2001: A Space Odyssey to horror with The Shining. “And maybe this is his reimagining of the softcore cable porn movie, in a sense. I’m really not entirely kidding here. In many ways, if you look at those clips, there’s some really silly stuff in there.”

Eyes Wide Shut paced to box office of $55.6 million in the United States and $106.4 million overseas. Its only notable awards citation was a Golden Globe nomination for Jocelyn Pook’s musical score. But filmmaker Martin Scorsese was one of many who rose to the defense of Eyes Wide Shut. “Many people were put off by the film’s unreality — the New York streets were too big, the orgy scene was a total fantasy, the action was slow and deliberate. All of this is true, and if the movie were designed to be realistic, it would be absolutely reasonable to judge these as failings. But Eyes Wide Shut is based on a Schnitzler novella called Dream Story, the story of a rift in a marriage told with the logic of a dream. And as with all dreams, you never know precisely when you’ve entered it. Everything seems real and lifelike, but different, a little exaggerated, a little off.” Scorsese compared Eyes Wide Shut to Roberto Rossellini’s maligned 1954 romance Viaggio in Italia. “Both are films of terrifying self-exposure. They both ask the question: How much trust and faith can you really place in another human being? And they both end tentatively, yet hopefully. Honestly.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Mystery Movie” By Josh Young. Entertainment Weekly, 2 October 1998

The Last Movie: Stanley Kubrick & Eyes Wide Shut (1999)

Eyes Wide Open: A Memoir of Stanley Kubrick. By Frederic Raphael. Ballantine Books (1999)

Stanley Kubrick: Interviews. Edited by Gene D. Phillips. University Press of Mississippi (2001)

Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures. Directed by Jan Harlan. Warner Bros. Home Video (2001)

Kubrick: The Definitive Edition. By Michel Ciment.  Macmillan (2003)

The Dead Girl (2006)
Written by Karen Moncrieff
Directed by Karen Moncrieff
Produced by Pitbull Pictures/ Lakeshore Entertainment
MPAA rating: “R for language, grisly images and sexuality/nudity”
Running time: 85 minutes

Should I Care?
A somber mediation on all things death — physical, spiritual, emotional — The Dead Girl captures the vibe of a particularly joyless funeral. Whether or not that’s something to stand up and applaud isn’t something I’ve been able to figure out. Each of the inter-connected characters involved in some way to the corpse of the title dies a bit; a fine theme, but no matter how literate the ideas or how skillfully they’re executed, I don’t know if I can recommend anyone take this trip. The overriding plus is a dream cast, which doesn’t deliver one false performance. Kerry Washington and James Franco seem to make the most of their appearances, as a junkie whore peeking out of her own personal abyss and a boyishly goofy medical examiner, respectively.

Being an anthology film of sorts, certain moments tower above others. The movie is derailed quickly and completely by its Toni Collette segment, which can’t help but come off as over-the-top and degrading. I was finally won over when Washington made her entrance and was impressed with Brittany Murphy (who decided she needed to disappear from theaters?) Hailed by one critic as “the next John Sayles”, writer-director Karen Moncrieff demonstrates terrific finesse casting and working with actors. Unlike Sayles, Moncrieff doesn’t quite pull off the moments that require people relate to each other in a natural, unforced way, but not many screenwriters do. A sense of humor and some light would definitely be welcome in the future, but Moncrieff is a major league talent worth watching.

So, What’s This About?
On a stroll in the abandoned orchard near her home, Arden (Toni Collette) discovers the body of a dead girl. She notifies the police, but her bitter mother (Piper Laurie) harangues her daughter for it. A grocery store clerk (Giovanni Ribisi) obsessed with serial killers asks Arden out; desperate to escape her dismal home life, she accepts. Leah (Rose Byrne) is a medical examiner in grad school still haunted by the disappearance of her sister 20 years ago. While her mother (Mary Steenburgen) holds out hope that the missing girl will turn up alive, Leah becomes convinced that the dead girl is her sister. Coming out of her shell, she responds to the advances of a classmate (James Franco).

A neglected wife (Mary Beth Hurt) discovers an item in the self-storage facility she manages with her husband (Nick Searcy) that she believes may be connected to the dead girl. Meanwhile, Melora (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives in Los Angeles to identify the dead girl’s body as that of her runaway daughter. Collecting her daughter’s belongings, Melora meets the junkie prostitute (Kerry Washington) that her daughter was sharing a motel room with and learns that she has a granddaughter. Finally, we meet the dead girl, prostitute Krista Anne Kutcher (Brittany Murphy). She spends the last 24 hours of her life with a john/boyfriend (Josh Brolin) trying to get a ride to see her daughter on her birthday.

Who Made It?
Karen Moncrieff grew up in Rochester, Michigan. She attended Northwestern University in Chicago and studying theater there, met her future husband and producing partner Eric Karten. After earning a BS in Performance Studies in 1987, Moncrieff came to Los Angeles. Ten years acting in bad television demystified the directing process for Moncrieff. She signed up for screenwritng extension courses at UCLA and the AFI and got a big break winning the 1998 Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for a coming-of-age script titled Blue Car. Seeking to protect her work by directing, Moncrieff completed a certificate program in film studies at Los Angeles City College, shooting a few short films on Super 8mm. She directed Blue Car on a $400,000 budget. Starring David Strathairn and Agnes Bruckner, Moncrieff’s debut feature film became a hit at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival.

Jury duty on a murder trial provided the inspiration for a spec script Moncrieff wrote titled The Dead Girl. The screenwriter and her husband got the attention of Henry Winterstern, a Canadian financier who’d come to L.A. to invest in film companies. One of those companies was Lakeshore Entertainment, where producers Tom Rosenberg and Gary Lucceshi quickly agreed to finance Moncrieff’s ambitious sophomore film at $4 million. Pre-production was underway when Moncrieff notified her producers that she was expecting. Though assured that her financing would be there after her pregnancy, Moncrieff was back at work three months after her delivery and shooting three months after that. But despite a stellar cast, The Dead Girl would barely see a theatrical release.

How’d They Do It?
In 2006, Karen Moncrieff recalled the genesis of The Dead Girl, stating, “I was a juror on a murder trial a few years ago. On the first day, it was revealed that the victim was a prostitute. I realized that I had certain preconceptions about her that were not positive. At the same time, I recognized my tendency to feel that — as the victim of a crime — she must be some kind of innocent. The testimony of the various witnesses–people who were there to corroborate the killer’s story, the victim’s mother; the woman who took care of her children, her johns, other prostitutes, and one woman who had been her lover — forced me to confront the complexities and the wholeness of her life. She was a series of contradictions: a passionate mother of her young daughters, and also an unmedicated bipolar, a drug addict, and a liar.”

Moncrieff continued, “She was neither sinner, nor saint. She was a troubled human being who didn’t deserve to die. After the month long trial, I found the tremendous waste of her life stayed with me.” Sketching out a 30-page outline, Moncrieff knocked out a first draft of The Dead Girl in two weeks. Three drafts later — in March 2005 — a script was finished. Her husband and partner in Pitbull Pictures brushed aside concerns that Moncrieff had written a downbeat female ensemble that would scare away buyers. Eric Karten recalled, “When I finished reading the first draft, I had two simultaneous responses. As a partner and collaborator, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a major step forward for Karen in scope and ambition.’ And it emerged fully formed with daring construction, cohesive narratives, vivid characterization, clear voices and smart dialogue.”

A multi-character format was always the design. Moncrieff elaborated, “From the beginning the structure was that these five sections do not intersect or overlap. The reason I chose this structure is because when I was on a jury, I was struck by the idea that there was this community that was created by the murder of this young woman. Many of us in this community — and I include myself as a juror sitting on her murder trial — didn’t know one another and would never meet again. Yet each of us in our own way was profoundly affected by this woman’s life and death.” Sending the script out to buyers, Moncrieff and Karten piqued the interest of Henry Winterstern. The former mortgage lender arrived in Los Angeles in 1999 on behalf of Canada’s largest pension fund to invest in the film industry.

What Winterstern really wanted to do was build a company, one that would produce and distribute its own films. At the time, he enthused, “Today, the studios are owned by media conglomerates. Because of that, and the amount of capital that needs to be returned to the shareholders, they need this big product. It’s [computer-generated imagery]-driven, and it takes a long time to produce and potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. We can focus on the films that independent filmmakers are making, the films they want to make — those are big enough to return capital for us.” Winterstern financed Wassup Rockers (2005) for director Larry Clark and saw in Karen Moncrieff another indie filmmaker he wanted to be in business with.

Winterstern passed The Dead Girl to chairman Tom Rosenberg and president Gary Lucceshi of Lakeshore Entertainment and the producers agreed to $4 million in financing. But a month before she’d finished the script, Moncrieff learned that her and her husband’s attempt at in vitro fertilization had been a success. Breaking the news to Lakeshore that she was pregnant, it was suggested postponing the film until after she gave birth. Moncrieff wasn’t having it. “It had been such a struggle getting a movie off the ground since Blue Car, and The Dead Girl had sort of tumbled into place so quickly, I just thought, ‘Oh, they’ll lose interest.’” Assured that her financing would still be in place, Moncrieff took maternity leave. She gave birth in November 2005, was back in pre-production by February and shooting the film in April 2006.

Moncrieff picked cinematographer Michael Grady to collaborate with. “In general, I don’t like flashy camerawork and Michael Grady is capable of doing the flashiest, but he’s really tasteful and one of the things when I was looking at reels, one of the things that really struck me — I was looking at his work on Wonderland, for instance — is that he’s always in the right place emotionally and to have somebody who knows a lot of tricks but uses them in service of telling an emotional story, that’s what I’m always looking for. But in general, I want the camera to disappear. I don’t want the audience to be looking at my work, I want to get out of the way so that the audience can forge a bond with the characters and feel like there’s no separation, like they are in their skin.”

Once Toni Collette came aboard, an ensemble quickly fell into place. Moncrieff argued for Mary Beth Hurt in particular, whom the producers had worked with previously but felt would be too strong for the role of a put upon wife. Josh Brolin, Rose Byrne, Marcia Gay Harden, James Franco, Brittany Murphy, Giovanni Ribisi, Mary Steenburgen and Kerry Washington also joined the cast. Moncrieff mused, “Each one of them said it was because of the script. I think the pattern is that they read the script and then, if they responded to it, they watched Blue Car. Some listened to the commentary. I always wondered who actually listens to the commentary, and I guess it’s the actors who listen to find out if you’re an absolute nincompoop or an egomaniac who will be impossible to work with on the set.”

Filmed around Los Angeles in only 25 days, the film’s original distributor intended to release The Dead Girl in 2007. Producer Tom Rosenberg strongly opposed that. “It’s a terrific film, and you want it to come out in the fall. What are we doing, we’re going to be waiting around for a full year? What is the point in not going? There was none. We had entered into this, and shot and edited, so we could come out this year. And we were determined to do it. Also, I didn’t want Karen waiting around for another year for people to see what she can do.” Instead, Henry Winterstern acquired First Look Pictures — the distributor of art house fare such as Antonia’s Line and Titus — with the ambition of making it over into a mini-studio, like Lionsgate.

Opening in a very limited release in December 2006, when screened for critics, the response was one of muted admiration. Jim Ridley, The Village Voice: “Moncrieff’s glum, somber film is something of a needed corrective at the moment, when horror movies are turning into weightless exercises in morally sanctioned sadism.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “The Dead Girl is bleak, sad, and depressing — which is exactly what Moncrieff intends it to be, although it would probably help the viewer to be apprised of that quality going in, since most of us do not head to the movies in search of a bad time.” Kevin Crust, The Los Angeles Times: “If the segments are uneven, Moncrieff — with the help of her excellent cast — nevertheless crafts a gripping overall narrative that exposes a shared dissonance among the protagonists.”

Never expanding beyond two theaters in the United States, The Dead Girl would gross only $19,875 domestically and add $885,416 internationally. Despite the limited commercial appeal of her film, Karen Moncrieff defended her take. “Somebody asked me if it would be better if the movie was uplifting. And I said, ‘Well, to me this is uplifting.’ To me what’s depressing is to see lies on-screen, to see lives sugar-coated, a fake version of life as I know it or I feel it. Anything less than that and I’d feel like I hadn’t done my job. There are other people who are much better at shining a light on what’s funny or what’s sweet. Maybe my calling is to feel deeply some aspects of human pain and grief. Maybe I’m working something out in my work, but it’s what I’m attracted to. People making choices, struggling to do better and change, to me is uplifting.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“First Look Studios at 25” By Scott Kirsner. The Hollywood Reporter, 18 January 2006

The Dead Girl – Press Notes

“Dead Girl Filmmaker’s Calling Is To Break Hearts” By Mark Olsen. The Los Angeles Times, 26 December 2006

“Aftershocks” By Howard Feinstein. FilmMaker Magazine, Winter 2007

“The Facts of Life” By Shelley Gabert. Written By, January 2007

“An Aspiring Mogul’s Quick Rise and Fall” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 8 March 2007

The Dead Girl. DVD audio commentary with Karen Moncrieff. First Look Entertainment (2007)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis
After whipping a trio of Russian mobsters in a pub brawl, Irish Catholic twins Connor McManus (Sean Patrick Flanery) and Murphy McManus (Norman Reedus) are paid a visit by their pissed off foes. Mopping up the bodies of the Russians afterward, Boston police are aided by outrageous FBI agent Paul Smecker (Willem Dafoe), who theorizes the deaths were personal; one of them had a toilet bowl dropped on him. The McManus boys – fluent in seven languages and plying their intelligence as meat packers – turn themselves in and plead self-defense. But after receiving a vision from God to destroy all that is evil so that good may flourish, they embark on a vigilante murder spree against the Boston underworld. The boondock saints have so much fun that they let their dense buddy Rocco (David Della Rocco) in on the team. To retaliate, the mob turns to Irish super assassin Il Duce (Billy Connolly).

Production history
After spending childhood in Exeter, New Hampshire amid a large, lower middle class Irish American family, Troy Duffy was accepted into the premed program at Colorado State University. Realizing his dream was rock ‘n roll, he dropped out of school and headed for Los Angeles in 1993. By day, Duffy served coffee in Westwood and by night, flipped burgers at a titty bar. After taking on odd jobs in home repair, Duffy found himself tending bar at a watering hole on Melrose called J. Sloan’s. With his brother Taylor and two buddies he’d put together a band they called The Brood, but Duffy’s primary occupation soon became movies. He recalled, “The straw that broke the camel’s back was Jean-Claude Van Damme’s Sudden Death. All I could think was, ‘I can do better than that.’ ”

Titled The Boondock Saints, the script Duffy wrote concerned two Irish brothers who embark on a spiritual crusade to cleanse Boston of “evil men”, putting a flamboyant FBI agent on their trail. Duffy recalls, “The idea for the script was just borne out of poverty and frustration. Me and my brother living in Hollywood in this freaking crackhouse, apartment vandalized and his truck broken into, and just living in shit. Getting frustrated and wondering why no one ever does anything about this, and the police just have no real control over it. We had that fantasy. You know who broke into your apartment, and you see that guy in the halls, and you just want to take a baseball bat to his head, but something stops you. I think we had that question in our heads of, ‘What if something didn’t?’”

A friend named Chris Binder who’d gotten a job as an assistant at New Line Cinema made sure The Boondock Saints was passed up the food chain. The heat around Duffy and his writing sample began to build; producer Robert Fried dropped by Sloan’s to meet him. In February 1997, the William Morris Agency took Duffy on as a client. Within a month, they’d inked a $500,000 deal for Duffy to write two original screenplays for Paramount Pictures. That got the attention of Harvey Weinstein, chairman of Miramax Films. Two weeks after the Paramount deal – while in town for the Academy Awards – Weinstein put in an appearance at Duffy’s workplace. Weinstein stated, “I loved the script that he wrote. Then he told me all the ideas for other films that he had, and I said, ‘A guy who thinks like this won’t be around on a one-shot deal.’ The proof is in the words. I read a lot of scripts that get near Boondock Saints but that don’t close the deal. They’re imitations. They’re mechanical. These characters come from Troy Duffy’s soul.”

In a deal celebrated in newspapers around the globe, Weinstein purchased The Boondock Saints for the following terms: $300,000 for Duffy’s script, $150,000 for Duffy to make his directorial debut. The film would carry a budget of $15 million. Duffy’s band The Brood would produce the music. Duffy would retain casting approval and final cut over the film. Last but not least, Weinstein agreed to buy J. Sloan’s outright and split ownership of the bar with his new discovery. No sooner than Duffy was throwing a backyard barbecue to celebrate, Mark Wahlberg dropped by to discuss starring in the movie. Jake Busey, Jerry O’Connell, Billy Zane, Matthew Modine, Vincent D’Onofrio, Jeff Goldblum and Emilio Estevez were among the actors who showed up at Sloan’s to hold court with Duffy.

Over at Miramax, it was hoped The Boondock Saints would follow the blueprint established by Pulp Fiction and followed by Cop Land: edgy, character driven crime dramas with roles so rich that name actors would waive their salaries for the chance to participate. Duffy had written the nutty FBI agent with Jim Carrey in mind. When the superstar comic passed, Miramax suggested Bill Murray, Mike Myers or Sylvester Stallone. Duffy countered with Patrick Swayze. When the studio proposed making an offer to Brad Pitt to play one of the title characters, Duffy shot that idea down too, reportedly telling friends he didn’t think much of Pitt’s Irish accent in The Devil’s Own. Duffy rejected Matt Damon for not being gritty enough. In private, he called Keanu Reeves a “punk” and Ethan Hawke “a talentless fool.”

Ewan McGregor was interested enough in The Boondock Saints to take a meeting with Duffy. Tony Montana – a co-manager of The Brood, who was shooting a documentary about the Troy Duffy phenomenon – remembered, “Troy thought he could go out, meet with Ewan and get drunk, have a Scottish-Irish love affair, as he called it, and sign him lickety-split. That’s what he said. So he went to New York, and when he came back, things got very quiet. It turned out that they had a bad meeting, got into an argument over the death penalty, and Ewan wasn’t interested. And at that time, Ewan was really one of Miramax’s rising stars.” Unable to lock a cast, Duffy found it harder to get Weinstein on the phone. In November 1997, the studio notified Duffy’s agents that they would not be producing The Boondock Saints.

Duffy recalls, “I told them I’ll jibe with them on every other domain. If you want to cut my budget, if you want to film half of it in Toronto and half in Boston, I’ll jibe with you everywhere except when it comes to casting. So they said, ‘Well, Troy, we just can’t deal with that.’ ” Duffy was permitted to keep his writing fee, but potential buyers were on the hook to reimburse Miramax $700,000 for development costs, plus the $150,000 they’d promised for Duffy to direct. Producer Robert Fried mused, “Troy was very raw and outspoken, and it hurt him. When actors met with him, he didn’t always sound like a polished filmmaker, and it put some people off. But that’s part of what makes such an original. He’s not fake – he’s the real thing.”

Riding to the rescue was Elie Samaha, a former nightclub owner whose Franchise Pictures had carved out a niche bankrolling the pet projects of major stars – Bruce Willis (The Whole Nine Yards), John Travolta (Battlefield Earth), Kevin Costner (3000 Miles To Graceland) – that no one was else wanted to finance. After attaching Sean Patrick Flanery and Jon Bon Jovi to the title roles, Duffy met with Willem Dafoe in April 1998 at the actor’s experimental theater company in New York. As soon as Dafoe signed on to play the FBI agent and Franchise had a name actor they could use to sell the picture, The Boondock Saints commenced shooting August 1998 in Toronto on a budget of $6 million (Norman Reedus became available and was cast in Bon Jovi’s place.)

The München Fantasy Filmfest in Germany was where The Boondock Saints held its world premiere August 1999. It also played theaters in Denmark before a limited release January 2000 at five theaters in the United States. During its three-week run, The Boondock Saints grossed $30,471. But in what may have been the first viral marketing outbreak in Hollywood history, many who discovered the movie on DVD told a friend, who told another friend, who told more friends. Ultimately, more than 430,000 units were sold. The official website boasts a fan section (whose devout members refer to themselves as The Flock) and a store, which sells merchandise from Boondock Saints shot glasses to rosary beads. The DVD grew popular enough for Duffy to secure financing for Boondock Saints II: All Saint’s Day, which commenced shooting October 2008 in Toronto. Peter Fonda, Judd Nelson and Julie Benz join Sean Patrick Flanery, Norman Reedus and Billy Connolly in the sequel.

At “The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time: Boondock Saints” on videogum, viewers submitted their opinions. H.F.G.: ”My ex-boyfriend loved this movie and tried to get me to watch it. I got half-way through this movie before I just looked at him and said ‘If you wanted to break-up with me, you should have said so.’” jess: “It is poorly made, poorly acted, poorly written, non-sensical, and stupid. I love violent movies AND stupid movies, for that matter. But Boondock Saints definitely represents one of those weird cultural phenomenon moments for me when everyone is saying, ‘You’re going to DIE this movie is so awesome.’ And then, it’s clearly not awesome. Not at all.” Manvnature: “I hate this movie. I hate the people who made it. I hate the cameras that were used to shoot it. I used to love Willem Dafoe. Then I saw this movie. I try not to judge people too much for their personal artistic taste, but I definitely use this film as a litmus test. If you like it, our paths shant cross again.”

Talking Boondock Saints in an interview with attrition.org, Duffy declared, “Yes, it has become a ‘cult’ film. Do you know what that is? It’s simple. A cult flick is a film that Hollywood missed. They made a mistake, plain and simple. After people’s love of the film is expressed the number one comment I hear is, ‘Why wasn’t this in theaters?’ I had my industry screenings a few weeks after Columbine occurred, when the president was forming judiciary committees against violent film. Studios were pulling back and Boondocks was black listed. If anybody had the nuts, we could have seen exactly what this movie could have done in theaters. But, fuck it. I have received mail from fans all over the world. The raw fact is, Boondocks hit the public and they loved it … I am sure in my heart that what happened here happened the way it was supposed to. I love this film. I am proud of this film.”

Opinion
If you let it slip that you’ve never actually seen The Boondock Saints and somebody gets in our face to demand that you watch it, these are the steps to follow: 1) Change the subject by asking them how they’re doing in school, 2) Remind them not to drink and drive, 3) Thank them for their recommendation, 4) Do not see the movie. The Boondock Saints is a gangsta rap demo recorded on film, a bro revenge fantasy that attempts to mix the symbolism of The Deer Hunter with the bullet worship of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. The result is feature length masturbation with an admittedly intriguing hook, but wretched execution all the way down the line, from writing to casting to editing. It’s so unwatchable you’ll want to snap the DVD in half and send Guy Ritchie a note on Facebook, apologizing for anything bad you ever said about his movies.

Troy Duffy should be congratulated for getting The Boondock Saints made and mesmerizing the crowd the movie seems designed for: 15 to 22 year old bros who always wanted to hang a neon beer sign in their room. For the sober moviegoer, there’s nothing to recommend about the film at all. Unable or unwilling to involve us in anything dramatically, Duffy tries to compensate by going wildly over the top and making a cheeseball action farce: Ron Jeremy has a cameo, a cat is shot, Willem Dafoe performs in drag. If Duffy had followed the example of Jon Favreau, channeling his Hollywood frustrations into a script about his barstool buddies wondering whether they should get a life, it might not have been as funny as Swingers, but at least it would have been honest. The Boondock Saints is so high on its own supply that the sequel may be the only picture with any chance of topping it as the worst ever made.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Hollywood’s Suddenly Drunk on a Bartender’s Idea”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 14, 1997

“The Two Faces of Hollywood”. Sharon Waxman, the Washington Post. April 10, 1998

“Back Behind the Bar”. Patrick Goldstein, the Los Angeles Times. April 13, 1998

“Boondock Saints”. Amy Finch, the Boston Phoenix. November 2, 1998

Overnight (2003), directed by Brian Mark Smith & Tony Montana

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