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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strange Days. By James Cameron. Plume (1995)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Steven Soderbergh Interview” By Keith Phipps. The Onion

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

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

Miami Vice (2006)
Screenplay by Michael Mann, based on the TV series created by Anthony Yerkovich
Directed by Michael Mann
Produced by Michael Mann, Pieter Jan Brugge
Running time: 134 minutes (theatrical version)/ 140 minutes (Unrated Director’s Cut)

Should I Care?
Vice cops masquerading as drug smugglers and trafficking through that world in all its glamour and tragic inevitability as envisioned by Michael Mann — executive producer and style maestro of the groundbreaking 1984-89 TV series — is Miami Vice for you, nothing more, nothing less. Sorry for those expecting something else. Darker and less romantic than the version we last saw during the twilight of the Reagan years, but ten times more visually enthralling, the beauty of Miami Vice (2006) is how it expresses life in the fast lane of the South Florida underworld; not through an original story, compelling characters or an ability to make us really care about either, but by evoking mood. This is ultimately more a movie about fast boats, sports cars, designer sunglasses, sniper rifles and Santeria shrines than it is about people, but its detail is so serrated and spirit so intoxicating, it becomes a richer experience than most movies about people.

Shot almost completely in digital high definition, Miami Vice has such a deep focus feel — putting the viewer at a meet and greet in a Haitian slum or in a jaunt to Havana for mojitos — that you forgive it for not including a scene where Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx have a Heineken to talk about their characters’ feelings. The fact that Mann prefers moving images to talk — at least with dialogue worth retyping — only makes the movie stand apart from the plot heavy/brain dead cops ‘n robbers thriller du jour. It’s true that Naomie Harris, Justin Theroux, Dominick Lombardozzi, Elizabeth Rodriguez and Barry Shebaka Henley all warrant a lot more screen time than Mann gave them here, but John Ortiz, Luis Tosar and Gong Li are utilized particularly well as Crockett & Tubbs’ adversaries. A second or third viewing, where the story and characters can be pushed aside and the world Mann illuminates becomes the focus, is highly recommended.

So, What’s This About?
A prostitution sting staged by vice detectives — charming rogue James “Sonny” Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), the cooler headed of the pair, until violence against a woman is introduced — is interrupted at a Miami nightclub when Crockett receives a frantic phone call from an informant named Alonzo (John Hawkes). Driving like a speed demon, Alonzo alerts Crockett that a case he’s working has gone very bad and asks the detective to look after his wife. Patched through to the FBI, Crockett is notified by special agent in charge Fujima (Ciaran Hinds) that the deep cover feds Alonzo is cooperating with are about to conduct a “meet and greet” without backup. He’s unable to pull his people before the Aryan Brotherhood types they’re meeting obliterate the feds with Barrett M82 sniper rifles. Alonzo and his wife quickly join them as collateral damage.

Meeting with Fujima and their superior, Lt. Castillo (Barry Shabaka Henley), Crockett & Tubbs learn that Alonzo was part of an interagency task force attempting to infiltrate the white supremacists, whose operations in South Florida put them on the receiving end of cocaine produced and smuggled out of Colombia. Unable to trust his people, Fujima turns to Crockett & Tubbs to find out how FBI security was breached. Assisted by fellow vice cops Zito (Justin Theroux), Switek (Dominick Lombardozzi), Gina Calabrese (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and an intel officer Tubbs is living with named Trudy Joplin (Naomie Harris), Crockett & Tubbs sabotage the transporters being contracted by the Aryans to run product into Miami. They then fabricate deep criminal backgrounds for themselves as transporters and pressure another snitch (Eddie Marsan) to get them a meeting with Jose Yero, the Colombian the feds suspect is supplying the Aryan Brotherhood with cocaine.

Crockett & Tubbs fly to Haiti and learn that despite his vast resources, Yero (John Ortiz) is merely middle management, tasked with logistics and security for someone even higher up the food chain. Initially passing Yero’s scrutiny, the vice cops are taken to his boss Montoya (Luis Tosar), who after a brief introduction awards them a $3 million deal to transport 1,000 kilos of cocaine from Colombia to Miami. Montoya advises the pair “In this business with me, I do not buy a service. I buy a result. If you say you will do a thing, you must do exactly that thing. Then you will prosper beyond your dreams.” Montoya’s financial officer and lover Isabella (Gong Li) — a Chinese woman raised in Cuba — becomes their business contact. Though Isabella presents Crockett & Tubbs an opportunity to crack Montoya’s operation, Crockett jeopardizes it by getting romantically involved with her.

Who Made It?
Legend has it that Miami Vice was born on a notepad that NBC president of entertainment Brandon Tartikoff was scribbling program ideas on. One of his brainstorms supposedly read “MTV cops”. Tartikoff shared that concept with Anthony Yerkovich, a writer-producer on the network’s landmark police drama Hill Street Blues. Yerkovich maintains that he had already started compiling research on Miami and that vice cops operating in “a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk” was his idea. Conceived as a feature film, Yerkovich was contracted by NBC to expand his idea into a two-hour television pilot he titled Gold Coast, later Miami Vice. Yerkovich supervised the pilot and five subsequent episodes, while Michael Mann — co-writer and director of an acclaimed TV movie (The Jericho Mile, 1979) and moody feature film (Thief, 1981) — was named the show’s executive producer and served as primary style authority.

Debuting in September 1984, Miami Vice introduced a vibe for music, fashion and design that had never been seen on network TV before. The novelty began to wear off after Season 2 and Michael Mann moved on to a career as one of the more visionary directors in film, with The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Heat (1995). In 2004, Mann agreed to direct a $120 million feature film based on Miami Vice for Universal Pictures, with Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx taking over the roles played by Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas in the ‘80s. Utilizing digital camera equipment that Mann and director of photography Dion Beebe had experimented with on Collateral (2004), the production would be beset by tropical storms, security threats and cost overruns before the director’s gritty, R-rated take on the pastel colored TV series opened in the summer of 2006 to fair weather reviews and disappointing box office.

How’d They Do It?
In 2001, Michael Mann and Jamie Foxx attended a birthday party for Muhammad Ali, where Foxx cajoled the director to make Miami Vice: The Movie. Mann recalled, “My initial reaction was, you’ve got to be kidding me, why would I want to go back to Miami Vice? Then I looked again at the pilot and some of the early episodes and I got kind of captured afresh by the deep currents and the emotional power of those stories, and I’m talking here about the first two seasons. The way the issues were brought in from the outside world into the lives of Crockett and Tubbs and the way the stories impacted on them. To me, these stories summed up Miami Vice as it originally was. Secondly, Miami has always had a real allure for me, in the same way maybe as Las Vegas had in the 1970s, it was really sexy and beautiful and really dangerous and deadly and tragic at the same time. I love those kinds of places, those Twilight Zones, you know.”

Mann’s impulse had always been to try Miami Vice as a movie. “When Tony Yerkovich wrote the pilot for this show — I read it in 1984, 1985 — and when I first read it, my first instinct was to have us not go forward as a pilot for television series, but to make this as a feature film that I would direct. That was impossible and it was already at NBC and we went ahead and did it as a television series.” He added, “Someone said, ‘Well what exactly is it about Miami Vice that compels you to do it as a film?’ I think the answer to that is that it contained in what Tony wrote a combination of large, very dramatic events in which people’s lives are changed, violence occurs, deals are made, deals are broken. The environment in which it’s happening is almost like an opiate. It’s almost too beautiful. That combination of drama happening in this very lush, romantic place, those two things together made everything poignant and magnified. That was the allure. That was the real attraction to me in why I wanted to make it in a film in 1984 and ‘85 and eventually did in 2006.”

In May 2002, it was announced that Michael Mann would write and produce a Miami Vice feature film for Universal Pictures. While the studio was highly receptive to the idea of remaking Miami Vice as an event movie, Mann saw an opportunity to push the material past its prime time television roots. “I felt strongly that nobody wanted to see some nostalgic version of Miami Vice, like the other movie versions of TV shows that have been made, with the same elements and cameos from the original cast and all that stuff. Not putting those kinds of movies down, you know, but why would you bother? If you want to see the Miami Vice from 1984, we’ve got a whole rack of really beautiful DVDs you can buy, so you can get your nostalgia trip that way.” After Mann officially came on board as director, Universal agreed to a production budget of roughly $120 million. Filming was scheduled to begin in April 2005, with Jamie Foxx and Colin Farrell as leads.

Mann’s drive to simulate the experiences of real undercover cops pulled Miami Vice away from the confines of South Beach to locations in the Dominican Republic (standing in for Haiti), Uruguay (for Cuba) and Ciudad del Este in the notorious tri-border region of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina. Stephen Donehoo — managing director for international strategic advisory firm Kissinger-McLarty Associates — was added to the payroll as political advisor. Donehoo’s job was to negotiate the production safe passage into areas of the world where few tourists could tread without serious concern for their safety. Mann asserted, “There are things you can’t artificially create. As good as our crews are, you can’t duplicate the texture, the fabric of the neighborhoods. Audiences know when you’re making it up, and they know when you visually deliver an animated environment for the actors that makes it feel like they are truly here.”

Given the complexities of what Mann wanted, production setbacks might have been inevitable. Colin Farrell dislocated a rib while weight training and had to be hospitalized during a research trip to Cuba, of all places. The actor’s injury pushed filming back six weeks, to June 2005, into what became the worst hurricane season anyone in the Gulf of Mexico had ever seen. Tropical storm Dennis, Hurricane Rita and Hurricane Katrina each hit South Florida during the course of what stretched into a 105-day shooting schedule. In October, Hurricane Wilma slammed into a Miami highrise where a production office was located. At the same time, cast and crew were in Santo Domingo, the rowdy capital of the Dominican Republic, where security traded gunfire with an off-duty policeman who barged onto the set one day. The incident reportedly spurred Jamie Foxx to refuse to work overseas and forced Mann to scrap an elaborate climax to be filmed in Ciudad del Este.

Collaborating with director of photography Dion Beebe, Mann sought a texture he felt was best captured by shooting in digital high definition, as opposed to film. “We shot this film digitally and we shot Collateral digitally, actually for two different reasons. Collateral because I wanted to see into the night. For Miami Vice, yes we had a lot of the scenes that take place at night, but the primary reason for doing it had to do with what I wanted you to feel about daylight. About how light hits the water. How light hits these people. How intensely saturated and vivid everything you’re looking at becomes.” Bebee added, “Something we pursued was a very deep, dark definition in our clouds and in sky. And Miami has very dramatic sky, and weather. So some of the early testing were about how do we really bring that about into a 3-D quality on screen. There are times you look at these images of the sky and it does feel like you could reach out and touch the clouds.”

Co-producer Bryan Carroll calculated that about 4% of Miami Vice was shot on 35mm film, for slow motion or visual effects purposes. 75% of the digital footage was made on Thomson Viper cameras, like those used in Collateral. Additional footage was captured with more flexible Sony HDW-F950 or HDW-F900 cameras. Mann explained, “The requirements of shooting in Hi Def are very difficult and it’s difficult for a lot of cameramen because it’s an inversion of everything you do when you’re working with photochemical, meaning motion picture film. On film, you use light to illuminate areas that are dark and you try and protect the blacks by making blacks stay black. And Hi Def is a complete inversion in which you’re protective of the whites and you’re trying to make it so they don’t clip and there’s quite a different learning curve.” While Universal claimed that the final budget rested at $135 million, speculation in the film industry was that Miami Vice cost at least $180 million to produce.

Opening July 2006 in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, Miami Vice spread critics all over the map. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Mixing pop savvy with startling formal ambition, Mr. Mann transforms what is essentially a long, fairly predictable cop-show episode into a dazzling (and sometimes daft) Wagnerian spectacle. He fuses music, pulsating color and high drama into something that is occasionally nonsensical and frequently sublime. Miami Vice is an action picture for people who dig experimental art films, and vice versa.” David Ansen, Newsweek: “It’s filled with Mann’s signature macho verisimilitude, but essentially it’s the stuff of what, in saner fiscal times, would have been a B movie. Miami Vice delivers the thrills, atmosphere and romance it promises, but it doesn’t resonate like major Mann.” Marc Savlov, The Austin Chronicle: “Perhaps vice isn’t what it used to be, or maybe Crockett and Tubbs just aren’t all that interesting when removed from their appropriate time slot, but this may well be the dreariest and most monochromatic time you’ll have at the movies all summer.”

With domestic box office of $63.4 million, Miami Vice was pronounced a commercial dud, despite adding $100.3 million in theaters overseas. The Los Angeles Times took Mann to task as much for failing to appeal to young moviegoers as for brokering a deal paying him close to $6 million to write, direct and produce, plus a cut of the box office gross. Mann maintained that Universal knew full and well what they were getting into. “My idea was that you do Miami Vice for real, make it a hard R-rated movie with real violence, real sexuality and using the language of the streets. That took them aback more than a little and there was a series of meetings where I had to make my point. But they knew what I wanted from the outset, and in sitting around the table it’s my job, in part, to convince them that this is the right way to go. We all have to feel that we are making the same movie, and that we want to make that movie. And to their credit, I brought my perspective on Miami Vice to them and they endorsed it completely”.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Cool Cops, Hot Show” By Richard Zoglin. Time Magazine, 16 September 1985

“Miami Heat” By Daniel Fierman. Entertainment Weekly, 21 July 2006

Miami Vice — Production Notes

“Michael Mann Interview: Miami Vice” By John Maguire. Confessions of a Film Critic, 27 July 2006

“Digital Vision” By Michael Goldman. Millimeter, 1 August 2006

“Miami Vice Far Less Than a Universal Thriller at the Box Office” By Lorenza Munoz. The Los Angeles Times, 6 September 2006

Miami Vice (Unrated Director’s Cut). DVD audio commentary by Michael Mann. Universal Studios Home Entertainment (2006)

SherryBaby (2006)
Written by Laurie Collyer
Directed by Laurie Collyer
Produced by Elevation Filmworks/ Big Beach Films
MPAA rating: “R for strong sexuality, nudity, language and drug content”
Running time: 96 minutes

Should I Care?
Maggie Gyllenhaal picked up a Golden Globe nomination (her second) for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture — Drama” in SherryBaby and it’s a citation that doesn’t come close to giving the film the cred it deserves. SherryBaby is one of the better ‘70s movies to be released in the last decade. Tracing the ups and downs of a recently paroled young woman, the movie is an assured, refreshingly candid answer to Straight Time (1978). Instead of Dustin Hoffman reasserting himself on the streets of L.A. following parole, SherryBaby uses the suburbs as its arena and focuses on the reconciliation between an ex-con and her daughter. The narrative feature film debut of writer-director Laurie Collyer avoids cheap moral lessons, with an actress game to explore less than flattering aspects of her dysfunctional character.

As acutely as Straight Time portrayed the temptations available to an ex-con on the streets, SherryBaby traffics in the domestic minefield that awaits a woman trying to piece her life back together following time behind bars. Collyer manages to convey a high degree of tension with little or no violence and if it all feels small in scale, the movie surpasses expectations by rooting itself in reality. Russell Lee Fine — serving as director of photography between stints shooting MTV’s The Real World and HBO’s The Wire — lends the docudrama a rich look. As for Maggie Gyllenhaal, her salience has less to do with any ability to transform into character, but to come across as real and spontaneous and transform the audience into seeing the world from the point of view of that character. This is her best work yet.

So, What’s This About?
Sherry Swanson (Maggie Gyllenhaal) climbs off a bus somewhere in New Jersey and makes her way to a halfway house. After checking in with parole officer Hernandez (Giancarlo Esposito), Sherry uses her feminine wiles to urge a male employment coordinator to overlook a drug history and give her the job she covets: working with kids in an afterschool program. She’s visited by her gentle brother Bobby (Brad William Henke) who drives Sherry to the suburbs for a reunion with her 4-year-old daughter Alexis (Ryan Simpkins). Sherry’s honesty and hard luck story are lost on her sister-in-law Lynette (Bridget Barkan), who has raised Alexis as if she were her own daughter and does not approve of an ex-con coming into the child’s life.

Unable to cope with the halfway house and refused quarter by Lynette, Sherry moves into a motel. She attends rehab meetings and meets a steady Native American named Dean Walker (Danny Trejo) who remembers Sherry from her topless dancer days as a teenager. Enduring a sexually abusive relationship with her father (Sam Bottoms) and unable to reach her daughter, Sherry relapses into heroin use. A surprise visit from Hernandez compels Sherry to ask him for help; the p.o. offers her the choice of getting clean at an in-patient rehab facility or getting clean in prison. With her life falling apart, Sherry convinces Bobby to let her spend the day with her daughter. Sherry breaks parole, crossing the New Jersey-Delaware border with Alexis for destinations unknown.

Who Made It?
Laurie Collyer grew up in the suburban idyll of New Jersey. Graduating from Oberlin College with the ambition of translating German literature for a living, she moved to San Francisco instead and went to work at a residential treatment center for disturbed children. Social work burned Collyer out within six years, but her love of filmmaking brought her to a film production class, where an assignment to make a 3-minute short about a chair turned into a 25-minute film about a girl confined to a wheelchair. Titled Thanh, Collyer’s short was enthusiastically received when screened at the annual benefit concert for the Bay Area’s non-profit Bridge School. She enrolled in the graduate film program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where her thesis film Nuyorican Dream chronicled the life of a Puerto Rican family in New York. The documentary would compete at the 2000 Sundance Film Festival.

Nuyorican Dream won Collyer an invitation to the 2001 Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. Assisted by research she’d conducted with both ex-cons and the social workers in charge of them, Collyer wrote SherryBaby. Using her Sundance connections, Collyer got the script to Maggie Gyllenhaal, who’d just broken out in the cult hit Secretary (2002). With Gyllenhaal attached, producer Lemore Syvan of New York based Elevation Filmworks got involved. After a year and a half, Syvan finally snared financing in producer Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner of Big Beach Films, who agreed to bankroll SherryBaby at a budget of roughly $2 million. Shot in Collyer’s old stomping grounds of Mountainside, NJ in the summer of 2005, her narrative feature film debut would be acquired by Netflix and garner critical accolades when released a year later.

How’d They Do It?
Laurie Collyer recalled the origins of SherryBaby by stating, “I grew up in New Jersey in this very sort of sleepy, suburban town where there wasn’t much going on, and when I was in late elementary school, I met this girl who I thought was just the coolest thing ever, and she was really smart and used big words like ‘premonition’ and ‘tribulation.’ But she could also really throw down in the schoolyard with the boys. She was pretty tough so I really admired her and we got to be close and my life became much more interesting, but then as time went on, the partying got more intense and I switched to a private school and she just became more intensely into partying and drugs and stuff like that. So when I went to college, she was pretty much on the path to doing time in prison.”

After her NYU thesis documentary Nuyorican Dream (1999) was accepted into the Sundance Film Festival, Collyer was invited back to Park City the following year to participate in the prestigious Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab. She began workshopping a 30-page short script that she’d drafted as early as 1994 titled Shall Not Want. Like Nuyorican Dream, the material drew heavily on Collyer’s interest in people living on the margins of society. “I had a mentor early in the process of writing Sherrybaby, a gentleman named Richard Stratton, who is a producer and a writer but also spent 10 years in a penitentiary. He introduced me to a lot of ex-convicts and people working with ex-convicts in New York and helped me get the realness of the script by introducing me to this world. I just interviewed a ton of people — but it was through Richard opening that door for me.”

A friend of Collyer’s would inform the character of Sherry. “Some of the language, actually, from letters he wrote to me. When she talks to the women in the halfway house, she’s sort of talking street. I just sort of picked that up from the way he talked. But it was more of a temperament. The combination of the self-destruction with the — I don’t want to say narcissism but self-absorbed combined with the self-destruction. That whole thing. You know, when you’ve been on drugs since you were 14 or 16 years old and then in prison or on the streets on or off the rest of the time, you haven’t really lived as an adult, so there’s a certain amount of childhood you carry into your adulthood. It’s like you stopped living, you know? So Sherry in a lot of ways is like a 16 year old.”

Collyer began the odyssey of securing the financing to turn her script SherryBaby into a film. She revealed, “I knew and I was told, I was advised a lot at the Sundance Lab actually by my wonderful advisors and consultants there to get an actor attached first before trying to raise the money. They told me also at the lab that it was the sort of a part that actors love to play so that it wouldn’t be that hard but you know at the same time, I was very picky. There are all these TV shows that have young women actors on them but I didn’t really want a TV actress.” One of Collyer’s advisors at the Sundance Lab was screenwriter Naomi Foner, whose daughter Maggie Gyllenhaal was attracting notice opposite James Spader in the edgy Secretary (2002).

With Maggie Gyllenhaal interested, SherryBaby appeared on the radar of producer Lemore Syvan. Collyer recalled,“It was hard to find the money. Lemore Syvan came on as producer, but it took about a year-and-a half to find the financing. In the meantime she made a couple of movies and I wrote a couple of other scripts. Another challenge is trusting your collaborators. If you are new at the game, you are not used to giving your creative work over for others to translate and/or modify.” Syvan ultimately locked a financial backer in Marc Turtletaub, a founding partner — with Jeb Brody and Peter Saraf — of New York based Big Beach Films. Turtletaub agreed to finance SherryBaby at roughly $2 million.

With a 25-day shooting schedule kicking off in May 2005, SherryBaby was filmed entirely in suburban New Jersey. Collyer stated, “It all takes place in a very middle-class milieu. That was actually very important to me, to place the story in a suburban context. I wanted to explore more what happens to the family that leads people to make these sort of choices.” The filmmaker’s old neighborhood of Mountainside was the site of Sherry’s brother and sister-in-law’s home. Collyer mused, “I always had a love-hate relationship about having grown up in such a white-bread sort of environment. The thing about shooting where I grew up, I think it was my way to make peace with it once and for all.”

Coming less peacefully for Collyer would be getting along with Maggie Gyllenhaal. “We would have differences of opinion quite a bit. Sometimes she would pick on me so I would make her mad on purpose, too. It sounds so premeditated, but we did have differences of opinion about the work sometimes and sometimes she would win and sometimes I would. There was a lot of battling over the little girl that plays Sherry’s daughter. She didn’t want me to direct her; she knew best, everything about the girl. But that was her being Sherry in the most classic form, because that’s Sherry’s conflict. She’s the child’s mother and nobody else should tell the child what to do.” Collyer added, “I think all directors and actors, when there’s material that’s dramatic, maybe even with comedies, if you’re taking your job seriously, there’s going to be conflict. I think it’s natural. It’s sort of built into the relationship.”

Maggie Gyllenhaal later admitted, “When you’re the lead in a movie, when you’re in every moment of the movie, it’s hard not to live it. We shot Sherrybaby in 25 days. I was never in my own clothes. I would get into her clothes, be her all day, come home, fall asleep, wake up, go back to work. I do better in that kind of work.” She added, “So I shot all these fucked-up scenes that were really horrible, but I didn’t experience them that way. Obviously, I understood that all the things that happened in the movie were painful for her, but I didn’t really let that into the work. Then all the terrible things I’ve had to go through surfaced after we’d finished filming. And I got over it. I don’t think I could play that part now. I don’t know that I could be okay with the things I had to be okay with in order to play her.”

Critics posted rave reviews. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “What screenwriters call the arc of the story is visible from the outset, and some of the scenes in Sherrybaby have a familiar look and feel. But what distinguishes the film from its many peers is the quality of Ms. Collyer’s writing — which rarely reaches for obvious, melodramatic beats — and the precision of Ms. Gyllenhaal’s performance.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “There’s a schematic, workshopped quality to Collyer’s script, detailing the intertwined setbacks and small triumphs in one woman’s struggle to recover a life for herself. Yet the film works. It doesn’t go soft or inspirational in its later stages, when most films would. It doesn’t pump up the redemption or the melodrama.” Dennis Harvey, Variety: “Gyllenhaal, in her most substantial role since Secretary, does a fine, unshowy job of lining Sherry’s faults without alienating the viewer or pleading for sympathy.”

In January 2006, SherryBaby screened at the Sundance Film Festival. In May, it was announced that Netflix had acquired North American distribution rights under their Red Envelope Entertainment banner. The Silicon Valley based distributor has picked up a number of low budget films on the bet that one — like Capturing the Friedmans (2003) — will hit with audiences. SherryBaby would not be one of those sleepers. Opening September 2006 in the United States, it grossed only $199,176 domestically and $423,630 overseas. But Laurie Collyer summed up the experience by admitting, “I really didn’t have any expectations. I didn’t expect that it would get bought. It was just a lot of hope: I hoped that it would make the producer’s money back; I hoped that people would like it; and I hoped that Maggie would feel good about having done it. All those hopes have been realized, and then some.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Director Shows You Can Go Home Again” By Anita Gates. The New York Times, 27 August 2006

“indieWIRE Interview: Laurie Collyer, director of Sherrybaby” By Brian Brooks. indieWIRE, 7 September 2006

“Hollywood Loves You, Baby” By Daniel Robert Epstein. Film Stew, 19 January 2007

“Second Chances” By Jason Guerrasio. MovieMaker, 3 February 2007

“Interview: Laurie Collyer” By Ric Gentry. Post Script, Fall 2007

“Maggie Gyllenhaal” By Tim Blanks. Interview, May 2008

“Interview Laurie Collyer, Director SherryBaby” By Sheila Roberts, MoviesOnline

What the *&#! Is This About?
At a restaurant in Little Italy, mafioso Little Tony (Danny Aiello) dispatches a quiet, milk-sipping foreigner named Léon (Jean Reno) to settle a business dispute for one of his associates. Infiltrating a hotel where a rival gangster is barricaded with his security detail, Léon sneaks inside with near supernatural stealth, eliminating bodyguards one at a time and delivering his benefactor’s message succinctly. The assassin then returns to his Manhattan apartment building, where he discovers one of his neighbors – 12-year-old Mathilda (Natalie Portman) – smoking on the stairwell. Enduring an abusive father and a despised stepmother and stepsister, Mathilda’s only joy in life seems to be taking care of her 4-year-old brother. She asks Léon, “Is life always this hard, or just when you’re a kid?” He answers, “Always like this.”

Léon’s life is limited to Gene Kelly movies at the cinema, a potted plant he cares for and his job as a “cleaner” for Little Tony. Meanwhile, Mathilda’s father (Michael Badalucco) has gotten himself in deep water with a unit of rogue NYPD detectives, cutting a package of dope he was supposed to hold. Led by a pill popping psychopath named Stansfield (Gary Oldman), the cowboy cops return the next day and gun down Mathilda’s family. Returning to the massacre from the grocery store, the girl escapes death by pleading with Léon to let her into his apartment. With nowhere for her to go, Mathilda implores Léon to help her avenge her brother’s death by training her to be a cleaner. He shares his professional code – “No women, no kids, that’s the rules” – and lets Mathilda practice “cleaning” with a pellet rifle. The pair becomes attached, and the assassin has no choice but to get involved in her personal vendetta.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
When filming wrapped on the 1990 French language action thriller Nikita, actor Jean Reno and writer-director Luc Besson sought creative inspiration in different time periods. After appearing as a ruthless “cleaner” who erases the mistakes of field agents, Jean Reno achieved considerable fame in France by starring in the time travel comedy Les visiteurs. Writer-director Luc Besson turned his attention to an ambitious science fiction epic he’d dreamt up in high school. It had a baffling title – Zaltman Bléros – and a quarter of Besson’s script was deemed too ambitious to even film. It was felt that advances in computer technology and a falling dollar were at least 16 months away. Keeping himself occupied, Besson turned to another idea. Producer Patrice Ledoux recalled, “So he said, ‘You know, we stop Nikita with this character, with Jean. Why not take him and make a kind of spin-off of it?’ And that’s the way it started, so in a few months, Luc wrote the script, with this character, and shot this film just to wait for The Fifth Element.”

Luc Besson’s intention had been to turn directing duties for the Nikita spin-off over to another director. The quality of the script he wrote in 30 days changed the filmmaker’s mind. The good news for Jean Reno was that Besson’s next picture would be Léon. The bad news was that as director, Besson was no longer sure that Reno was the best actor for the part. Besson recalled, “Jean could be proud to be in the middle of these people: DeNiro, Pacino, Mel Gibson and some the others. To see all these people, naturally spread in the four corners of the planet, took me three months. The balance was rather strange. All were formidable. All were different. Certain, very frightened by the script, the other rebels. The others were interested, but not enough, in my taste. I needed an actor in hundred percent … The problem of my list, it is that these actors have already made so formidable things that it is difficult to motivate them profoundly. Jean will give to me everything.”

When it came time to finance Léon, Luc Besson recalled, “At first, I went to Warner, to see Billy Gerber, whom I had met on Subway and who follows me since. But that was not able to be made. Then I visited Mark Canton, the boss of the Columbia. They had already contacted me. I said, ‘I turn in four weeks, it is Jean the main actor. That interests you to buy the film for the United States or not?’ There were not other discussions of that one. And they said yes! They said simply, ‘We have reserves, we can discuss it.’ In fact, there were some too hard scenes for the United States, we risked to be classified X and not to be able to be presentable on the American territory. That arranged. It is necessary to say that the version that they read was much harder than the final version. My rough draft was very black.”

Asked whether Léon had been written in French or in English, Luc Besson described his screenplay as, “A sort of gibberish. Before the shooting, I worked with an American scriptwriter for the dialogues.” Warner Bros. VP of Theatrical Production Bill Gerber had introduced Besson to screenwriter Robert Mark Kamen – author of The Karate Kid movies – who would later collaborate with Besson writing The Transporter franchise and Taken among several others. According to Kamen, he rewrote Léon as well, which he stated “was really, really French, in the sense that in Luc’s version, the hitman slept with a 13-year-old girl, which Luc thought was totally normal.” $16 million in financing came from French studio Gaumont, with Columbia Pictures picking up distribution rights in the U.S. and JVC purchasing the rights in Japan.

The search then began for an actress to play Mathilda. Casting director Todd Thaler recalled, “I don’t think Luc fully understood that at first, how big a challenge it was going to be to find parents who would let their 11-year-old daughter play this part.” 2,000 girls in New York, Chicago, London and Paris were seen, among them, an 11-year-old named Natalie Portman, who was turned away because Thaler felt she was too young. Ultimately, Portman was one of six finalists who were called in to meet with Besson. Thaler added, “So I brought Natalie Portman in. He said to her, ‘I want you to imagine your whole family … is shot. Your father is dead in the living room, your mother is in the bathtub, your teenage sister she is dead on the floor, and your baby brother is killed under the bed.’ And after he said the thing about her baby brother, Natalie just started weeping. And we knew then there was no other choice, no other candidate could have done what Natalie did.”

11 years later, Natalie Portman recalled, “I was very emotional sort of little kid and my parents were like, ‘There is no way you’re doing this movie. This is absolutely inappropriate for a child your age to be doing this film.’ And I was like, ‘This is the greatest thing I’ve ever read, you’re gonna ruin my life’ and it was basically just fighting with them so much.” She added, “One of the things my parents were particularly concerned about was the smoking in the movie. They had a very detailed agreement with Luc about what could be used. I was only allowed to have five cigarettes in my hand in the entire shooting of the film. I wasn’t allowed to inhale. There weren’t allowed to be real cigarettes, which you can actually see in the movie. You see me, like, putting them to my lips, but you never see me, like, blowing out. Or you just see me like holding a cigarette. And then the other thing was that she has to quit during the movie, which is also in there.”

Léon commenced shooting June 1993 in New York, with most of the exteriors filming in Spanish Harlem and Chinatown. For the interiors, the production moved to Epinay Studios outside Paris. Luc Besson recalled, “The shooting is hard but takes place without grave problems. I have only two, two big daily and insoluble problems. The first one, it is the division. For trade union and economic reasons, it was more practical to make the outsides in New York and the inside in studio in Paris … Example of puzzle: Mathilde’s apartment is in the 103rd Street. Mathilde’s corridor is in Chelsea Hotel and Leon’s apartment is in studio in Paris. As for ‘the outside – street’, which coincides with the apartment, it was turned in the 120th Street. So, Mathilde cries behind the door in New York and Leon opens to her in Paris, six weeks later. The second big problem, it is Natalie. And in spite of her small size, it is an enormous problem.”

Besson added, “I realized, too much late, that I confided half of the film to an 11-year-old child. In spite of her excellent play, her intelligence, her kindness, she is eleven years old. That means that at the end of twenty minutes of intense play, she is tired, she grows tired of everything as soon as that is dawdles, she wants to enjoy herself as soon as possible. At one go, in the first fatigue, I realize in which bad adventure I put myself. She can drop me at any moment, decide that it does not amuse her any more, to say that she wants to return at home, to steep herself in her child’s shell. What to do, in a similar case? Brandish the contract in front of the child and threaten her with a lawsuit? As soon as I feel that she gets tired, that she sighs, I stop turning on her, send to play her half an hour Scrabble, balloon, in anything. The technique works well.”

Looking back a decade after the release of Léon, Natalie Portman recalled, “The sexual undertones – or overtones – of the film were also things that my parents tried to scale down. In the original script, there was a scene where Mathilda was in the shower and Léon sort of walked in by accident and he, you know, gave her a towel and she was like, ‘I don’t care’ or whatever. So that was where we axed. It’s a very pure sort of thing in the film. You know, it doesn’t cross that line, it’s just these two people who are so alone and happen to find each other within this sort of graveyard.” To ensure Léon would not pose a threat to Mathilda, Besson had directed Jean Reno to think of his character as a 14-year-old, a rather slow minded one at that. Reno explained, “If you’re fast and you take her, you will do bad things because you control situation. If you’re slow, she will control the situation, of course.”

When Léon went before a test audience in the U.S. – under the title The Professional – audiences rebelled against the relationship between the hitman and his young protégé. Editor Sylvie Landra recalled, “There is a scene that is in the long version of The Professional where she goes out dressed with a dress that he offer her and she has some makeup on and she ask him if he wants to be her first lover. We went to the first preview, but then when that scene arrive, they all started to laugh, but just giggling, because they were annoyed and uncomfortable about the situation.” Producer Patrice Ledoux added, “They were very, very uncomfortable. So we shot – we cut – 40 minutes, I think, something like that, and the next tests was great.” Luc Besson’s curt response to the film’s reception was, “No, I’m not responsible for what people think. The story is about two kids, a girl and a boy. They’re both 12 years old, in their minds, and they’re both lost and they love each other. And the rest is just your problem.”

Opening September 1994 in France and a month later in the U.S., critics were less than enamored of the film. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “… Mr. Besson has now made a film in New York, featuring characters who speak like Americans, think like Frenchmen and behave appallingly in any language. The Professional lacks the sexy elan of La Femme Nikita and suffers from infinitely worse culture shock.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, the Chicago Reader: “For sweaty, suspenseful thriller mechanics the first reel or so is fairly adroit, and action buffs who like explosions probably won’t feel cheated. But the sheer oddness of the New York world constructed for this film – where cops and crooks are literally interchangeable, and Oldman and Danny Aiello are stranded in roles that pick over the leavings of earlier parts – ultimately seems at once too deranged and too mechanical.” Lisa Nesselson, Variety: “Shooting entirely in English for the first time since his runaway local hit The Big Blue, Besson delivers a naive fairy tale splattered with blood. Mix of cynicism and sentiment will ring hollow to cine-literate sophisticates but may play well to the gallery.”

A modest hit in the U.S. with $19.2 million in receipts, “the gallery” went wild for Léon overseas, buying $26 million in tickets. This prompted Luc Besson to deliver a “Version Integrale” of the film for French theatrical release in the summer of 1996, restoring 26 minutes to the running time. Among the footage put back in was the hotly contested scene where Mathilda sexually propositions Léon (leading to a revelation by the assassin of how he was orphaned) and added scenes of Léon mentoring his young pupil on “cleaning”, using a coke dealer as target practice. Variety’s Lisa Nesselon wrote, “The restored story – with its greater, close-to-carnal emphasis on the love of Mathilda for Léon – now makes more emotional sense. Whether it makes more commercial sense beyond Gallic and select Euro-screens is open to debate.” Léon never earned a theatrical re-release in the U.S.

Should I Care?
Léon – alias The Professional - features three shootouts choreographed with such intense grandeur that it qualifies as one of the most exciting, no holds barred action films ever made. In addition to the dizzying cinematography (Thierry Arbogast) and crackerjack editing (Sylvie Landra) nothing about the violence is club soda: characters enter the crosshairs regardless of gender or age, some bad guys live, some good guys die and more police officers end up drawing combat pay than when Arnold paid a visit to the cop shop in The Terminator. The novelty of the picture – an ambitious attempt by Luc Besson to direct a movie set in the real world – doesn’t extend to obeying conventions like the laws of physics though, with Léon able to wield the same survival skills as Casper the Friendly Ghost.

To enjoy Léon is to accept a 14-year-old French boy’s vision of New York City – just as well titled Hitman vs. Police – with all the logic this tableau would encompass. Once you make that leap, the elegant cool of the film’s visual style and its warped sense of family values become damn hard to resist. Adding to the film’s immense pleasure is the unconventional casting of Jean Reno and an 11-year-old Natalie Portman, hardly the types for cookie cutter action-thrillers. Instead of being tools of the plot, both actors are tasked with injecting joy, desire, goofiness and feeling into their roles, almost as if they were playing real people. Despite being a fixture in these flicks, Gary Oldman gives what might be his most vicious big screen sociopath ever. Eric Serra turns in a musical score that is equally full throttle and whimsical, or, I’ll just say it, so irresistibly French.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Reno + Besson = Leon” By Agnes Cruz & Alain Kruger. Premiere, October 1994

L’histoire De Léon. By Luc Besson. Sony Magazines (1996)

“Luc Besson” By Richard Jobson. The Guardian, 23 March 2000

“10 Year Retrospective: Cast and Crew Look Back” Léon – The Professional (Deluxe Edition). Sony Pictures (2005)

“Sweet revenge: Hollywood screenwriter writes his own happy ending” By Patrick Goldstein. The Los Angeles Times, 9 March 2009

What the *&#! Is This About?
“A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski,” says the voice of the Stranger (Sam Elliott) as he follows tumbleweed blowing through the streets of Los Angeles. Jeff Lebowski, alias the Dude (Jeff Bridges) shuffles through Ralph’s in his bathrobe and sandals in search of creamer for his White Russian. The Stranger continues, “And even if he’s a lazy man – and the Dude was most certainly that, quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide …” The Dude returns home to be attacked by goons that have confused him with another Jeff Lebowski. Seeking to collect a debt, one of the goons pees on a prized rug belonging to the Dude.

Two pals on the Dude’s bowling team – bitter Vietnam veteran Walter (John Goodman) and the child-like Donny (Steve Buscemi) – compel him to seek out the other Jeff Lebowski for compensation. After being given a tour of Lebowski’s mansion by his loyal personal assistant (Philip Seymour Hoffman), wheelchair bound industrialist Jeffrey Lebowski (David Huddleston) refuses to replace the Dude’s rug as a matter of principle. The Dude takes one anyway, and on his way out, meets Lebowski’s trophy wife Bunny (Tara Reid). When Bunny is kidnapped, her husband employs the Dude to handle the ransom exchange in hopes he can identify the rug peers as her kidnappers.

The Dude sees fit to bring Walter along for the exchange, but his militaristic buddy only screws things up. The Dude leaves the ransom money in the backseat of his ‘73 Ford Torino, which is promptly stolen out of the bowling alley parking lot. Lebowski directs the kidnappers – German nihilists (Peter Stomare, Flea, Aimee Mann) – to take matters up with the Dude. Meanwhile, Lebowski’s daughter, an avant garde artist named Maude (Julianne Moore) with a strange continental speech inflection surfaces with an proposition of her own for the Dude. Juggling this intrigue with his Thai stick reefers and his bowling tournament proves exhausting, particularly with the Dude’s team being taunted by their rival, a Hispanic pederast named Jesus Quintana (John Turturro).

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Big Lebowski may have had its origins in a visit that filmmakers Ethan Coen & Joel Coen paid to the Los Angeles home of a producer’s assistant named Pete Exline in the mid-1980s, during the time they were scrounging financing for their first feature, Blood Simple. Tickled by Exline’s sense of humor, the Coen brothers would come to refer to him as “the Philosopher King of Hollywood” and “Uncle Pete”. As Ethan Coen recalled it, “We were at Pete’s house, which was, you know, kind of a dump. Uncle Pete was in a bad mood for some reason. He was feeling down. So, we complimented him on his place, and he told us how proud he was of this ratty-ass little rug he had in the living room and how it ‘tied the room together.’ So we told him that we too thought it ‘tied the room together.’ We just kept talking about how it ‘tied the room together.’ You know how you beat something to death.”

Ethan Coen continued, “Pete is a Vietnam vet. Very bitter. Whenever the subject of Vietnam comes up, he says, ‘Well, we were winning when I left.’ You know, after the Gulf War was over in a hundred hours, or whatever the fuck it was, Uncle Pete called up and said, ‘Look, it’s a lot different fighting in the desert and fighting in a canopy jungle.’ Defensive acrimony.” Exline had buddy named Lew Abernathy, who was also a vet, and had knocked around Hollywood as an actor and writer, as well as a private investigator. One of Uncle Pete’s favorite stories was Lew having his car stolen by joyriders. Retrieving the vehicle at the police impound, Lew discovered one of the perpetrators had left his homework in the back seat. Sealing the evidence in a baggie, the men tracked the juvenile down and confronted him.

Another character the Coen brothers ran across was Jeff Dowd, a movie marketing consultant – he helped finance Blood Simple – who’d been involved in the Seattle anti-war movement of the early 1970s. Dowd was referred to as “the Pope of Dope” as well as “the Dude”. On the opposite end of the political spectrum was producer/director John Milius, a military enthusiast whose gift of gab prompted the Coen brothers to offer him the role of the studio boss in Barton Fink. Ethan Coen recalled, “You sort of know these people and hear these stories and they all sort of figure together in nebulous ways. The character of Jeff Lebowski, the Dude, is personally more like Jeff Dowd and Jeff’s whole way of seeing things. And, not that the character is based on him in any literal way, but John Milius is sort of like Walter Sobchak. Pete Exline is a bit of both. One of the early ingredients came in setting these two characters beside each other – the Dude and Walter – and these two characters somehow seeming promising.”

Once the Coen brothers paired the Dude with Walter – using the crime of a soiled rug in contemporary Los Angeles as a catalyst – a story began to crystallize, which the brothers loosely based on the narrative structure of a Raymond Chandler novel. Unlike their experience writing Miller’s Crossing, the filmmakers didn’t exactly beat their heads against the wall completing a script. Joel Coen recalled, “This one we sort of figured, you know, if things become a little bit too complicated and they’re unclear it doesn’t really matter. I mean, the plot is not – and again, this is similar to Chandler – the plot is sort of secondary to the other things that are sort of going on in the piece. I think, if people get a little bit confused, I don’t think really, necessarily, going to get in the way of them enjoying the movie. Um, yeah. You look at something like The Big Sleep, and nobody seemed to know – including the people who sort of wrote it – what the hell is going on in that plot either.”

Referring to the Dude, Ethan Coen added, “It just seemed interesting to us to thrust that character into the most confusing situation possible. The person who would seem – on the face of it – least equipped to deal with it. That’s sort of the conceit of the movie.” The Coen brothers had a script for The Big Lebowski finished by the time they wrapped The Hudsucker Proxy in 1993. Walter Sobchak had been written for John Goodman, but the actor’s hiatus from the sitcom Roseanne didn’t line up with the production schedule. The role of the Dude hadn’t been written with any particular actor in mind, but the filmmakers wanted Jeff Bridges playing the part. Bridges had committed to star in Wild Bill and wasn’t available either. Rather than consider other actors, the Coen brothers turned their attention to Fargo instead. The 1996 crime film became the critical and commercial pinnacle of their careers, winning an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

When the time came to turn their attention back to The Big Lebowski, the Coen brothers had little difficulty assembling the cast they wanted. Jeff Bridges recalled, “I had heard, or they had told me, that they had written a script for me. And I was a big fan of theirs – I loved Blood Simple. And when they finally gave me the script, I was kind of surprised in a wonderful way. I loved the story and everything, but it was quite unlike anything I’d done before; and it seemed like they had spied on me at a couple of high school parties I was at.” Years later, John Goodman stated, “It’s just so well fucking written. It’s the writing. The writing, the detail. I’m not going to start making up words here, but it’s the noir quality of it, oh crap, it’s just funny. Jesus Christ, you know, my fondest wish is that we could do another one. But if we did, it would fuck everything up. It would just ruin everything.”

With Working Title picking up the roughly $15 million budget, The Big Lebowski commenced a thirteen week production schedule January 1997 in Los Angeles. To serve as director of photography, the Coen brothers reteamed with Roger Deakins, whom they’d met in 1990 – searching for a DP who was both non-union and established – to shoot Barton Fink. His preference for using a single camera and prime lenses suited the way in which the filmmakers liked to work: tightly. Deakins recalled, “It means you’re locked into shooting at 50mm or 32mm or whatever the lens’s focal length is, whereas with a zoom lens you can change the focal length during the shot. Which I think is a little bit of a sloppy way of shooting – pulling back on the lens as opposed to moving the camera. Using fixed lenses creates a sort of precision to your work. It forces you to think.” By 2009, Deakins had racked up eight Academy Award nominations, with four of those nods – Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, The Man Who Wasn’t There, No Country For Old Men – working with the Coen brothers.

When The Big Lebowski rolled into theaters March 1998 in the U.S., critical reaction was all over the map. Daphne Merkin, the New Yorker: “The clever dialogue, seductive camera work, and beautiful production design (the lavish dream sequences look like Busby Berkeley on Ecstasy) almost make you forget the vacancy at the movie’s core, but in the end there’s no escaping the feeling that the Coens are speaking a secret language.” Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle: “It’s paved with delightfully irregular and unanticipated bits of business that stimulate the viewer to stay fully alert, while renewing our faith in the sheer joy of watching movies.” Todd McCarthy, Variety: “Spiked with wonderfully funny sequences and some brilliantly original notions, The Big Lebowski, a pseudo-mystery thriller with a keen eye and ear for societal mores and modern figures of speech, nonetheless adds up to considerably less than the sum of its often scintillating parts.” With box office receipts of $17.4 million in the States, the popular opinion at the time was that The Big Lebowski definitely did not measure up to Fargo.

A disjointed but diehard group of fans began to discover The Big Lebowski on their own and struck an opposing view. In July 2002, journalist Steve Palopoli wrote an article about the film for the Metro Santa Cruz in which he referred to The Big Lebowski as “either the last great cult film of the 20th century or the first great cult film of the 21st, depending on how you look at it.” Not long after, the Nickelodeon Theater in Santa Cruz, California started running The Big Lebowski on Friday and Saturday at midnight. Palopoli recalled, “The first weekend they played it, they turned away several hundred people. They held it over, which they had never done, for six weeks. It was like an old-fashioned movie experience. People were yelling quotes before it ever started. It sold out every weekend for a month.”

In October 2002, two buddies in Kentucky named Scott Shuffitt and Will Russell threw “The First Annual Big Lebowski What-Have-You Fest” at a bowling alley in Louisville. 150 fans attended. A website was launched and since, Lebowski Fest has traveled to New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Austin, Seattle and Chicago, drawing thousands of fans in a weekend bowling tournament/ costume party/ fan convention. In an interview with Mr. Media in December 2007, Shuffitt and Russell were asked how one movie could inspire such an outpouring of devotion. Shuffitt: “Man, that’s a good question. I don’t even know that I know. To the best of my knowledge, it’s just a film that a lot of people enjoy, and I think that a lot of people can relate to the characters. And I think that a lot of people want to be Dude-esque and just take it easy. It was written very, very well. It’s a really good comedy. It’s shot really well. The imagery is beautiful. So I guess you add all those things together, and we end up with what we have now, which is…” Russell: “ … out of control.”

Peter Stomare commented, “It’s like a homage to California. But at the same time, in my home country of Sweden, they love The Big Lebowski too, and in Germany and Italy – everywhere I’ve been. I didn’t know it was such a global thing. It’s a combination of the craziness of being a regular human being and ending up in such a mess. Everything’s so bizarre. It’s like California. I thought it would never take off in other parts of the U.S., but it definitely did, especially the DVD.” While the Coen brothers refuse to dwell on the film’s status as a cult classic, Pete Exline offered his take on the popularity of The Big Lebowski. “I really think that it’s just the humor. If anything, if I had to analyze it beyond the humor, it’s the perfect adolescent movie because the Dude is a guy who just refuses to grow up, and the other Lebowski is like the nightmare father. Here’s this guy who is just, like, doing what he wants to do, getting stoned and bowling and outsmarting the Man. It’s a movie that each viewing, I notice something that’s funny that I never noticed before. So in that way, it’s kind of a gold mine.”

Why Should I Care?
The short, strange trip that The Big Lebowski made from box office misfire to one of the most celebrated cult classics of all time has a mythic quality to it that the Stranger himself might even appreciate. Without test screenings, focus groups, an Oscar campaign or the endorsement of mainstream critics – Roger Ebert voted a lukewarm thumbs up, while Gene Siskel panned it, proclaiming “The Big Lebowski, a big disappointment” – this may end up being the Coen brothers feature that the filmmakers of tomorrow discover first. Goofing on the movie in altered states is enjoyable, but the real joy of The Big Lebowski comes to you in sobriety, where closer examination allows the film’s goofball universe, crackerjack visual composition, irreverence and most importantly, the performances of the cast to wash over you like a live action Merrie Melodies. This ain’t really comic perfection, but it is the perfect comedy.

If the second hour loses the characters somewhat to drags down in a convoluted haze of Thai stick, what’s beautiful about The Big Lebowski is its offbeat perspective and how the performers embody that perspective magnificently. The bowling alley diatribes featuring Jeff Bridges, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi and generous uses of the “fuck” word are brilliant in how each character is clearly off in their own oddball orbit, yet on the same plane as well. In addition to the acting, the recurring manners of speech (“In the parlance of our times … ”) grow more infectious the longer they have to bounce around the head. Even without the quips, this would be a triumph in cinematography (Roger Deakins), costume design (Mary Zophres) and music (Sons of the Pioneers, The Gipsy Kings, Kenny Rogers). The Coen brothers offer a sly mockery of Raymond Chandler’s L.A. and a goofy homage to it at the same time. This is their finest film to date.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film. Text by William Preston Robertson, edited by Tricia Cookie.W.W. Norton & Company (1998)

I’m A Lebowski, You’re A Lebowski: Life, The Big Lebowski and What Have You. By Bill Green, Ben Peskoe, Will Russell & Scott Shuffitt. Bloomsbury USA (2007)

“The Making of The Big Lebowski” The Big Lebowski: 10th Anniversary Edition. Universal Home Video (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

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

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

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

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