Across the Universe (2007)
Screenplay by Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, story by Julie Taymor & Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais
Directed by Julie Taymor
Produced by Gross Entertainment/ Team Todd/ Revolution Studios
Running time: 133 minutes

So, What’s This About?
Expressing themselves through the songs of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, two lovers are introduced on opposite shores of the Atlantic. Jude (Jim Sturgess) works in a Liverpool shipyard, while in the Midwest, Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) lives an idyllic suburban life. Jude leaves his girlfriend in 1963 and travels to America, while Lucy says goodbye to her high school beau when he joins the army. Jude makes his way to Princeton University, where he locates his biological father working as a janitor. He then meets an irascible Ivy Leaguer named Max (Joe Anderson) who brings the British sketch artist home for Thanksgiving, introducing Jude to his sister Lucy.

Max drops out of school and heads to New York’s Lower East Side with Jude in tow. The young bohemians find room and board with a blues singer named Sadie (Dana Fuchs) and are soon joined by a guitar player from Detroit named Jo-Jo (Martin Luther McCoy) and an outcast from Ohio, Prudence (T.V. Carpio). Arriving in the Big Apple to deliver a draft notice to her brother, Lucy falls in love with Jude. When Max is shipped to Vietnam, she becomes active in the antiwar movement, which Jude — an illegal alien — remains largely ambivalent about. The gang encounters a West Coast beatnik named Dr. Robert (Bono) who expands their minds, but social forces begin to tear the group apart.

Who Made It?
Producer Matthew Gross and his associate Ben Haber were discussing the music of The Beatles and wondered why nobody had mined the riches of the greatest pop music library of all time for a movie. Working out a deal with Sony/ATV Music Publishing — rights holders of the Beatles catalog owned jointly by Sony and Michael Jackson — Gross planned to option the rights for 18 Beatles tunes to the tune of $5 million. To script an original musical utilizing those songs and a 1960s love story as a backdrop, the producer turned to the British writing duo of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais, who drafted a short treatment.

After several rejections of what was then titled All You Need Is Love, Gross found a partner in Joe Roth of Revolution Studios. To direct, Roth suggested Julie Taymor, the multi-talented director of stage (The Lion King) and screen (Frida). Eager to explore a cultural landscape she had actually grown up in, Taymor turned to partner and frequent collaborator Elliot Goldenthal to compose the music. She arrived on the title Across the Universe and won the backing for a visionary rock opera utilizing music and lyrics from 33 Beatles tunes. Delivering a cut deemed too long and unwieldy by Sony Pictures, Roth would recut the film himself, leading to Taymor threatening to remove her name from the ambitious project.

How’d They Do It?
Apple Corps — the multimedia company founded by The Beatles in 1968 — controls the band’s recordings, but the more lucrative publishing rights to most of that library was owned jointly by Michael Jackson, who bought the Beatles catalogue from ATV Music in 1985, and Sony Music, which the pop icon merged his publishing interests with ten years later. With a licensing fee of $250,000 per song, Beatles compositions had popped up in movies only sparingly over the years. Producer Matthew Gross learned that licensing 18 Beatles songs would cost $5 million, which he thought was a good investment to build a movie around. “The idea was reverse engineering. Instead of trying to string together a story from the songs, create a story and find the songs that suited the story.”

Formerly president of Kopelson Entertainment, Gross hooked the British screenwriting tandem of Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais — whose credits included The Commitments (1991), as well as the Michael Caine comedy Water (1985), which George Harrison’s HandMade Films had produced — to write a treatment. After five rejections, Gross found a buyer in Joe Roth, former chairman of Fox who founded Revolution Studios in 2000. Roth recalled, “The Beatles catalogue is owned by two parties equally, Sony and Michael Jackson. We distribute our films through Sony and I went to them with the idea, so they were okay and we worked long and hard at a time when Michael Jackson was somewhat vulnerable and we got the rights.”

To direct, Joe Roth wooed Julie Taymor, who he’d met while chairman of Walt Disney Pictures and Taymor was directing and designing costumes for the Broadway production of The Lion King. Taymor grew up in Boston in the 1960s. Her love of theater and travel led to creating a dance company while living in Indonesia in the mid 1970s on a Watson Fellowship. In 1991, Taymor received a MacArthur Fellowship and the following year, directed her first opera, in Japan. Following the massive stage success of The Lion King, Taymor made her feature film debut in 1999 with an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus starring Anthony Hopkins and Jessica Lange. Her sophomore film — Frida (2002) — notched Salma Hayek an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

In February 2005, it was announced that Julie Taymor had agreed to direct what was then being called All You Need Is Love for Revolution Studios and a planned release of September 2006. Six months prior, Taymor had approached the head of Sony Classical about the possibility of launching a Broadway musical utilizing tunes by the Fab Four. The idea dissolved, but with The Beatles on her brain and the opportunity to recreate an era she had actually lived through, Taymor worked with Clement & La Frenais to expand their less than novel love story set during the social upheaval of the 1960s. She would suggest the title Across the Universe and add three supporting characters: Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence.

Taymor revealed, “The picking of the names was a bit of a debate — the Jude, Lucy, Max, Sadie, Jo-Jo and Prudence — but I felt that, you know, you can like it or dislike it but it allowed us to use some of those songs with the names, obviously, like ‘Dear Prudence’ and ‘Hey Jude’, and later you have ‘Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds’ but it connected the people to the songs, otherwise, who were those people? If you used those names and those songs, who are they singing about? So no, we don’t have a song about Jo-Jo or Sadie, we are familiar with the words ‘sexy Sadie’ and what do we have, ‘Maxwell’s silver hammer comes down, crashing down’ in the later song, so people who know those songs understand where the references come from.”

Jennifer and Suzanne Todd — who rose from assistants of Joel Silver in the early ‘90s to producing the Austin Powers comedies, Boiler Room and Memento — were brought in to get the movie made. Jennifer Todd recalled, “We got the script from Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais and we just loved it. Once the permission came through to use the songs from The Beatles’ back catalog, it was incredibly exciting. We got to take these tracks that have become so much a part of everyone’s lives and reinterpret them — to have them lead a narrative and really breathe new life into them. To be able to work with a director of Julie Taymor’s talent, to really experiment and try to create a totally new experience, I mean, what could be more thrilling?”

To collaborate on Across the Universe, Taymor turned to her partner Elliot Goldenthal, who in addition to writing a film score, was tasked with rearranging the 33 Beatles compositions Taymor had selected. “Though Elliot is a composer and there are no songs to be composed, his arrangements and his understanding of drama and character are so great. I’ve worked with him for 20 years and have total trust and admiration for his work. I knew that he would find a new way to interpret the songs; by placing them with new arrangements, the music would be fresh again — not a better version, but different.” Music producers T-Bone Burnett and Teese Gohl would work with Goldenthal on the music.

Bruno Delbonnel was hired as director of photography. Taymor recalled, “Bruno, in our first interview said, ‘I hate musicals.’ I thought, ‘Now what do I think about that? That’s interesting.’ And I thought, he’s done Amélie and A Very Long Engagement, these incredibly theatrical movies. He has an incredible sense of light and photography. I knew that tough, European sense with him: he would want it to be a serious movie, not fluff; that the darkness would be there when I wanted it to be there, but it would also have that whimsy and theatricality that was very important.” Choreographer Daniel Ezralow came aboard to create routines that broke with the dance musical norm when possible and drew inspiration from more realistic movements.

Aside from Evan Rachel Wood — who was offered the role of Lucy — the cast was filled with relative unknowns. During an open casting call in England, Taymor and Goldenthal were sent a tape featuring Jim Sturgess. Taymor mused, “We did not want musical theater voices, and we didn’t want pop-y voices. Jim just fit in right away. Jim’s been in a rock band and he’s an actor. He just sings with such an incredible ease that you feel that the character is talking just to you. He has a beautiful voice – and there’s no disconnect between when his speaking voice and his singing voice. Jim can go right from talking to singing.”

English actor Joe Anderson had came to an open casting call for the role of Jude, but felt better suited for Max and employing an American accent, won the part. Taymor had created the part of Sadie specifically for Dana Fuchs, a singer/songwriter who’d recorded a demo for the director on a previous project. Martin Luther was a New York based vocalist and guitar player with little acting experience. The same went for T.V. Carpio, whose background included singing, dancing and ice skating, but not much acting. Revolution Studios announced a $45 million budget and Across the Universe commenced filming September 2005 in New York.

Once Across the Universe began the test screening process, its troubles began. In an article for L.A. Weekly in April 2007, gossip columnist Nikki Finke named various “insiders” who claimed that most everyone with an opinion agreed that the movie was too long, everyone except for Julie Taymor. The director unveiled a shorter cut of 135 minutes, but when it received similar complaints, Taymor blanched at any more trims, even after Sony co-chairman Amy Pascal was said to have taken Taymor to dinner and extolled the virtues of a shorter running time. One of Finke’s “sources” was quoted as saying, “That’s the refrain of everyone: There’s a great movie in there, somewhere. But as it stands now, it’s so complicated it’s just a bad movie.”

Joe Roth hired an editor and whittled Taymor’s cut to 105 minutes. Screening his abridged version to a test audience in Phoenix, the scores reportedly shot way up. Roth — who in addition to running studios, directed Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (1987) and Christmas with the Cranks (2004) — left it up to Taymor to decide whether she would endorse the new audience friendly version. When Taymor floated maybe taking her name off the film, Sony backed down. Recounting the experience on The Charlie Rose Show, Taymor offered, “Look, I went through what many directors go through, which is: You get to the end, you think it’s done and some people think that it should be, slightly different.” She added, “And I did some cuts for pacing and everything stayed — you’re seeing my cut — and there’s support behind it. So, end of story.”

Running 133 minutes, Across the Universe premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2007. Sony timidly released it on 24 U.S. screens in 12 cities, followed by a slow expansion to 400 screens in 24 cities. Critics scattered in every direction. Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “Somewhere around its midpoint, Across the Universe captured my heart, and I realized that falling in love with a movie is like falling in love with another person. Imperfections, however glaring, become endearing quirks once you’ve tumbled.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “Across the Universe will have ardent defenders, but in the long run, it will do nothing to infuse life into the current mini-revival of movie musicals and is as soft-headed as the wishful refrain ‘All You Need Is Love.’ Maybe that works in real life but not in the movies, sister.”

Despite striking a chord with many who discovered the film — and The Beatles — on their own, Across the Universe failed to take off at the box office, bringing in $24.3 million in the U.S. and only $5 million overseas. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 2007, Taymor was asked to comment on her film’s wildly diverse reception. “I think anything that’s really different, that really takes chances, that breaks the rules, also plays with sacred cows — like the Beatles music — is going to, it’s going to engender that debate. And I welcome that; better than bland, better than, ‘Wow, that’s nice.’”

Should I Care?
Across the Universe is that weird kid taking a seat at the back of the class. She’ll discover Brazil, The Hudsucker Proxy, Fight Club and other like-minded kids to smoke with behind the school during lunch, inspiring walkouts and love-ins among moviegoers over the years while giving film studios and their shareholders anxiety attacks. Shooting straight from the heart, this love letter to the songs of The Beatles — like the boldest love letters — is ill-advised, occasionally tedious and monumentally dazzling. Its closest point of comparison is Moulin Rouge!, but with much better taste and less cornball reverence for song and dance routine than Baz Luhrmann, Julie Taymor crafts a poetic and sumptuous rock opera destined to become a classic.

Whatever you think about Across the Universe, chances are, you’ll end up thinking about it. Rather than a recyclable consumer entertainment product, almost every frame of the movie is designed with TLC. The framing, lighting and camera movement are beautiful, the musical arrangements eclectic, vocal work by the cast excellent, animation mesmerizing and its staging innovative. The film flies off the rails during its psychedelic, “I Am the Walrus” and “Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite” numbers, while its star crossed lovers start resembling chess pieces being moved across history rather than people we really care about. But if Luhrmann was heralded for raising the bar on movie musicals, Taymor elevates it even higher with the singular drive to try something different.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Movie Mogul Joe Roth Speaks” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, February 2006

“Film Has Two Versions; Only One Is Julie Taymor’s” By Sharon Waxman. The New York Times, 20 March 2007

“Across an Alternate Universe” By Nikki Finke. L.A. Weekly, 12 April 2007

“Sony exploits its Beatles catalog” By Martin Lewis. Variety, 6 September 2007

“Julie Taymor Soars Across the Universe” By Edward Douglas. ComingSoon.net, 18 September 2007

“Beatles mania strikes again” By Chris Lee. The Los Angeles Times, 12 October 2007

“Jennifer and Suzanne Todd’s Sister Act” By Jessica Hundley. MovieMaker Magazine, 18 November 2007

“The Art of Musicals: Across the Universe” The Writing Studio

Across the Universe. DVD commentary by Julie Taymor and Elliot Goldenthal. Sony Home Entertainment (2008)

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

By Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

I Could Never Be Your Woman – Production Notes

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

Rocket Science (2007)
Written by Jeffrey Blitz
Directed by Jeffrey Blitz
Produced by B&W Films/ Duly Noted, Inc./ HBO Films
Running time: 101 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
While arguing against farm subsidies at the New Jersey State High School Policy Debate Championships, Ben Wekselbaum (Nicholas D’Agosto) — the greatest public speaker that Plainsboro High School has ever known — suddenly loses his voice. Back in Plainsboro, high school sophomore Hal Hefner (Reece Daniel Thompson) and his kleptomaniac older brother Earl (Vincent Piazza) watch as their exasperated father (Denis O’Hare) walks out on their mother. The stutter that makes it impossible for Hal to order pizza in the school cafeteria, much less talk to other students, leaves his special needs counselor (Maury Ginsberg) wildly grasping at solutions.

Hal is “ferreted” by the stunningly articulate Ginny Ryerson (Anna Kendrick) to join the debate team. After her ex-partner Ben washed out at state and mysteriously dropped out of school, Ginny covets a championship trophy and believes that beneath Hal’s “deformity” lies a deep resource of anger that can help her win. Studying their debate topic — abstinence — with Ginny, or spying on her from the bedroom of her goofy adolescent neighbor (Josh Kay), Hal falls in love. But after sharing a whirlwind kiss in the janitor’s room, the relationship between the academic partners sours. To get revenge on the debate stage, Hal goes in search of Ben Wekselbaum.

Who Made It?
Jeffrey Blitz and his producer/sound recordist Sean Welch financed their debut feature — the spelling bee documentary Spellbound — by piling up debt on 14 credit cards. After Spellbound received some of the best reviews of 2002 and was nominated for an Academy Award, Blitz and Welch didn’t have to apply for more plastic to get their next film going. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Blitz met Effie Brown, who was accepting a Producers Award for Real Women Have Curves. Brown had a deal at HBO Films and initially worked with Blitz on the script for a spelling bee movie.

How’d They Do It?
Brown stated, “He has such a wicked sense of humor; and that’s something that people don’t nail. His humor is smart and not malicious, but it’s definitely a bit self-effacing. That’s what drew me to him. His film, Spellbound, completely had me riveted. I was trying to spell words and I was so rooting for all those kids.” The idea of scripting a spelling bee movie didn’t work out, but in talking with Maud Nadler — the senior VP of theatrical films at HBO — Blitz shared his experiences attending high school in central New Jersey with a serious speech impediment and how he attempted to overcome it as a member of the debate team.

Everyone agreed that the high school debate script was the one Blitz should be writing. The filmmaker recalled, “Teen movies don’t interest me, is the thing. They don’t interest me at all, so the only way I was going to do a teen movie is if I felt like I could try to be more honest about what the actual experience of being a teenager is like. I guess teen movies want to be escapist fantasies for high school students, but to me they’re bullshit because they’re all formulaic. As soon as you can predict where the movie is going, which is the first 10 seconds of any teenage movie, you know exactly how it’s going to resolve. It’s completely uninteresting to me.”

Blitz continued, “I wanted to feel like I could create a story that felt like it follows the contours the world a little more, but at the same time it’s not strictly a piece of realism. There’s absurdist comedy that I wanted to bring into it also and try to find that balance. That’s why for me people like Billy Wilder and Hal Ashby are the guys that I look towards to figure out how to bring realism, naturalism into a movie that still has outlandish characters and people who do things that are really funny!” Brown added, “Jeff created fabulous, well-rounded characters that you don’t get to see everyday. But no one’s made fun of. You root for them all.”

After another actor dropped out over scheduling, Vancouver native Reece Daniel Thompson was spotted on an audition tape; he was flown to Baltimore to audition and won the role of Hal. Anna Kendrick had auditioned in L.A. Blitz recalled, “She’s just about the only person who came in to read who could actually handle the dialogue. Jinny talks so fast, I mean, she just sort of blazes through it, but the person saying those lines needs to understand what she’s saying, even though she’s going, you know, a million miles an hour. And Anna just nailed it.” Budgeted at $6 million, Rocket Science began a 30-day shooting schedule July 2005 in Baltimore.

To serve as director of photography, Blitz turned Jo Willems, who’d collaborated with Blitz on “spec” commercials the director had used to break into the industry. Blitz hoped the Belgian cinematographer’s European sensibility would balance the emotional side of the movie with its deadpan humor. The result was a drably lit and everyday high school look. Yana Gorskaya — who had cut Spellbound – was brought in as editor. While cutting, Blitz and Gorskaya used temp tracks from the band Clem Snide, whose singer/ songwriter Eef Barzelay ultimately wrote the film’s instrumental score.

Rocket Science was very well received at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2007, where Blitz won the Dramatic Directing Award for his work. Critics were also effusive with praise. Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun Times: “I suspect a lot of high school students will recognize elements of real life in the movie, and that the movie will build a following. It may gross as little as Welcome to the Dollhouse or as much as Clueless, but whichever it does, it’s in the same league.” Justin Chang, Variety: “This unusually voluble comedy is as eloquent about love, self-realization and adolescent angst as its protagonist is endearingly tongue-tied.”

Distributed by Picturehouse, Rocket Science opened August 2007. Audiences ignored it completely. Never expanding beyond 59 screens, the film grossed only $714,943 in the United States. Blitz would muse, “I think sometimes marketing campaigns hit and the whole thing works and sometimes they don’t at all. Some of this has to do with knowing the audience and really understanding to whom you’re marketing.” He added, “I think in the future I’ll try to be stronger in sharing my sense of the audience and the right tone of the marketing. But it’s hard to say. Each project seems like it comes with its own fresh set of challenges.”

Should I Care?
No stars. Low budget. Content that left me to shift nervously on my sofa. These were elements that Jeffrey Blitz’s debut Spellbound and his sophomore effort Rocket Science both share. The follow-up isn’t nearly as good because of several defects in its script. There’s an attempt at a storybook feel in the form of a narrator, which not only chills the film a bit emotionally, but calls attention to how much better Wes Anderson is at whimsical mood setting. As hilarious it is at turns — I busted out laughing three or four times — just as many bits stop the movie cold, especially a subplot involving a Korean judge (Stephen Park) dating Hal’s mom that falls totally flat.

While Blitz made a few rookie missteps as a screenwriter, he’s without a doubt a director to watch. The performances in Rocket Science are wonderful. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reece Thompson, Anna Kendrick and Vincent Piazza are all stars 10 years from now. Piazza sorta reminds me of Matt Dillon. Kendrick recalls Reese Witherspoon’s hilarious performance in Election, while Thompson superbly captures every awkward impulse — romantic or otherwise — we all had in high school. The joy of Rocket Science is that it gets those growing pains absolutely right.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Rocket Science: An Interview with producer Effie Brown” By Wilson Morales. BlackFilm.com, 6 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz on Rocket Science” By Max Evry. ComingSoon.net, 8 August 2007

“Jeffrey Blitz Practices Rocket Science” By Jennifer M. Wood. MovieMaker. 15 January 2008

“The Making of Rocket Science” Rocket Science. HBO Home Video (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

Over the Edge. Warner Home Video (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
Teenager Donnie Darko (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes to find himself sleeping in the middle of a road overlooking “Middlesex, Virginia.” He bicycles back to his suburban home, where Donnie’s older sister (Maggie Gyllenhaal) stuns their father (Holmes Osborne) with news that she’s voting for Michael Dukakis. Brother and sister start bickering and she urges Donnie to explain to their mom (Mary McDonnell) why he’s stopped taking his medication. Mom later questions her sullen boy about where it is he goes at night. “What happened to my son? I don’t recognize this person today.” That night, a supernatural voice wakes Donnie and lures him outside. There he encounters a six-foot tall figure wearing a demonic-looking rabbit costume.

Answering to the name “Frank,” the rabbit shares some additional information with Donnie: “28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, 12 seconds. That is when the world will end.” While Donnie is out wandering Middlesex in his sleep, a jet engine plummets out of the sky and crashes through his bedroom. Federal officials are at a loss to explain this; they can’t seem to locate the plane that the engine belongs to. At school, Donnie’s English teacher Miss Pomeroy (Drew Barrymore) matches him with a bright transfer student (Jena Malone) whom Donnie becomes smitten with. There is no love lost between Donnie and a gym instructor (Beth Grant) who forces her class to watch the cheesy self-help videos of a local guru named Jim Cunningham (Patrick Swayze).

Cunningham preaches that all human decisions fall on a lifeline between love and fear. Donnie refuses to believe that life can be lumped into two categories at the expense of everything else. Meanwhile, his nocturnal encounters with Frank continue. When Donnie asks the rabbit where he comes from, Frank replies, “Do you believe in time travel?” Donnie’s science teacher (Noah Wyle) gives him a book called The Philosophy of Time Travel, written by a neighborhood spinster the kids call Grandma Death. The book appears to corroborate the mind bending visions Donnie has been having. His psychiatrist (Katharine Ross) believes that the boy may be a paranoid schizophrenic. Donnie keeps marking the days until the end of the world.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
A native of Midlothian, Virginia, Richard Kelly became interested in movies due to a music video that made an impression on him as a teenager in 1989: Aerosmith’s “Janie’s Got A Gun,” directed by David Fincher. Accepted to USC four years later on an art scholarship, Kelly ultimately applied to and was accepted into the university’s popular film school. Graduating in 1997, he found work at a post-production house, but had bigger ambitions than 3-D animation. Kelly states, “I came out of film school and I was broke, so started writing. I set out to write something ambitious, personal, and nostalgic about the late ‘80s. I thought about a jet engine falling onto a house, and no one knowing where it came from – it seemed to represent a death knell for the Reagan era – and I built the story around that.”

The resulting script – Donnie Darko – was written in a six week period in late 1997. With the help of Kelly’s producing partner – an office temp at New Line Cinema named Sean McKittrick – the script was passed around and generated enough buzz to get Kelly representation by the powerful Creative Artists Agency. Meetings with potential buyers did not go so swell. Kelly recalls, “A lot of people were responding to the script, but when they heard I wanted to direct it, they were like, ‘No.’ It was, ‘This is a great writing sample. This is un-producible. Come rewrite Valentine.’ They wanted to me write 13 slasher films. ‘Great writing sample, come write I Know What You Did Last Summer 3.’ That kind of thing.”

Donnie Darko was dead for about a year, until Kelly and McKittrick heard that Jason Schwartzman was interested. McKittrick recalls, “And we finally just heard through the grapevine that Schwartzman wanted to do it. So we immediately called his agent and said well listen, if he wants to do this and we attach him, it’s going to get made. He just came off of Rushmore. Obviously, he is very talented. When Jason came aboard then out of nowhere Nancy Juvonen and Drew Barrymore – they were obsessed with Jason – they wanted to know what Jason was doing or what Jason was planning on doing, because they just thought he was great. So Sharon Sheinwold, Jason’s agent at UTA, sent the script over to Nancy, and Nancy read it and just flipped out for it.”

As producer Nancy Juvonen recalls, “I read the script that night, was riveted, and Drew read it the next day. The part of Karen Pomeroy was originally written for a 46-year-old woman, but she felt like a teacher with such passion and conviction to change the system that she must be younger, at an age where she still thought those changes could occur. So Richard quickly rewrote her as a 28-year-old character and we had our first piece of talent attached. By the end of the week we met with Richard Kelly and Sean McKittrick, his producing partner. They also brought along a guy named Adam Fields who was later asked to step aside from the project, although he took money and arguably a part of our souls with him upon his exit. During that meeting we were convinced Rich should direct his own story, and from there we set about getting financing.”

Adam Fields had netted $4.5 million from Paris-based Pandora Films – a specialty division of Gaylord Entertainment – but Barrymore’s schedule necessitated Kelly be shooting in three months, by July 2000. The accelerated time frame came into conflict with Schwartzman’s availability, and a frantic two week search for a new lead commenced. 19-year-old Jake Gyllenhaal won the role of Donnie Darko. In no particular order, Jena Malone, Noah Wyle, Mary McDonnell, Patrick Swayze and Katharine Ross joined the cast. Kelly stated, “All of the other actors, because of Drew mostly, felt comfortable working with a first-time director. She kind of stepped up to the plate. It takes one actor to break the ice or to RSVP to the party, then everyone feels comfortable RSVPing.”

In the hunt for a director of photography, A-list cinematographers were rejected due to budgetary restraints, while promising novices from music video were passed over by Pandora due to the inexperience that Kelly was already bringing to the table. Going through resumes, Sean McKittrick found journeyman Steven Poster, who stood out because he’d shot Someone to Watch Over Me for director Ridley Scott. The producer commented, “Steven’s a brilliant guy and he’s one of the main reasons why the movie looks like it does. Right now he’s actually the President of the ASC … He’s just kind of like this living working legend within the cinematography community and he just did a brilliant job. He’s the nicest, sweetest guy you’ll ever meet in your life. He was just a Godsend. Sometimes things just completely work out and that was the biggest of them all.”

As Richard Kelly put it, Donnie Darko was equally blessed when it came to hiring a composer. “I was very lucky that I didn’t have a crew forced upon me by the financiers. A lot of times they force you to hire people because they want the music to sound like music from ‘that’ movie. But with $4.5 million, you can’t afford Thomas Newman or Danny Elfman or any of these guys. You’ve got to just go find somebody who is young and hungry, and really talented. Nancy Juvonen’s brother recommended Mike Andrews. He’s from San Diego, actually. Gary Jules, who did the ‘Mad World’ cover with him, is also from San Diego. Jim Juvonen, he’s really good at knowing who’s the shit before anyone else knows who’s the shit. He said, ‘This is the guy. This guy is a genius; you’ve got to work with this guy. No one knows about him.”

Filmed in the Los Angeles area – where Loyola High School stood in for Donnie’s alma mater – in 28 days, a hastily edited cut was playing at the Sundance Film Festival just a few months later, in January 2001. The traditional lack of special effects films at the festival and the picture’s buzz made the screening much anticipated. But it was greeted with a mixed reaction; gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells reported the mood “subdued (if mostly respectable)”. Donnie Darko left Park City without a distributor. Kelly mused, “Sundance is a dangerous kind of marketplace because if you don’t strike at the right time and you don’t get an initial interest in your film, all of a sudden, it’s over. People like to dismiss it as something that doesn’t work. So after Sundance we sort of deemed it as a failure, an impressive, interesting failure, but as an experimental film that just doesn’t work.”

Production executive Aaron Ryder of financing company Newmarket recalled, “We saw the movie and we really liked it. Everybody thought, ‘It’s a good film but it’s going to be hard to market. It’s too long and it’s got problems.’ So we didn’t buy it at Sundance, nobody did. At this time we hadn’t yet released Memento. However our aspirations were to build a distribution company so we put an offer on it saying that we needed to talk about re-cutting the film with the director as it was well over two hours. We spent six months editing, allowing Richard to have the cut he was proud of.” Through a service deal with IFC Films, Newmarket agreed to distribute and promote Donnie Darko. In turn, Kelly was obligated to cut 10 minutes and make do with ‘80s pop tunes that were less expensive.

Released October 2001 in the U.S., Donnie Darko notched plenty of positive reviews. J. Hoberman, the Village Voice: “The events of September 11 have rendered most movies inconsequential; the heartbreaking Donnie Darko, by contrast, feels weirdly consoling. Period piece though it is, Kelly’s high-school gothic seems perfectly attuned to the present moment. This would be a splendid debut under any circumstances; released for Halloween 2001, it has uncanny gravitas.” Jan Stuart, the Los Angeles Times: “If you let it be what it is, Donnie Darko will knock you flat.” Andrew O’Hehir, Salon: “Donnie Darko is a stunning technical accomplishment that virtually bursts with noise, ideas and references, but it’s fundamentally a gracefully crafted movie that’s about human beings and not images.”

The critical raves fell on deaf ears. Donnie Darko failed to expand beyond 58 screens in the U.S., where it grossed $515,375. Aaron Ryder commented on the film’s handling, “We put it out at the wrong time as it was just after 9/11. We thought we could make an alternative Halloween movie, which is a bad idea. I think that we learned a lesson. If you have a film starring a young protagonist or young people in it, it doesn’t necessarily mean that film will attract a younger audience. The core audience for Donnie Darko is the same as Memento, which is an older audience. We probably should have released the film in February. There were just too many films out at the time and people weren’t going to the movies at that time … Everybody loved that movie and they think, ‘Wow, he’s such a good filmmaker, but boy did they fuck up the distribution of that movie.’”

In January 2002, Phil Hartman – co-owner of the Two Boots Pioneer Theater in Manhattan’s East Village – was looking for a movie to program at midnight screenings. He stated his criteria: “You need something that is a visual trip, that works on repeated viewings and is open to reinterpretations, something that you can watch in altered states.” His son recommended Donnie Darko. Far from a blockbuster – filling on average half the theater’s 100 seats – the late night engagement ran for 28 straight months. Revival houses in Washington and Boston caught on and when the film opened in England that fall, it was a modest box office hit, grossing $2.5 million USD. The Mike Andrews/ Gary Jules cover of “Mad World” even cracked the U.K. top ten pop charts. When released on DVD, Donnie Darko would sell $15 million in units.

Popular demand prompted Newmarket to approach Richard Kelly for a “new and improved” version of Donnie Darko. An investment of $290,000 enabled the filmmaker to restore 20 minutes of footage, substitute new musical cues, touch up the sound mix and add chapter headings from The Philosophy of Time Travel, which were inserted to enhance the science fiction aspects. Donnie Darko: The Director’s Cut opened in limited theatrical release July 2004. Kelly mused, “The first release just wasn’t meant to be. I feel like the film was meant to fail before it could succeed. It was meant to be this cult item before it could be more mainstream. There are always people who want Donnie Darko to be the cult film, the one they discovered. If there’s any way this film could ever cross over a bit more to the mainstream it would just allow me to continue to make these kinds of films. I think any time a counterculture piece of art infiltrates the mainstream, that’s a good thing.”

Why Should I Care?
Of all the ways you can approach Donnie Darko – as a portrait of teenage angst, a psychological horror movie, a nostalgic trip through the ’80s, a science fiction tale concerning time travel, or a satire of all of the above – what’s most exciting about Richard Kelly’s debut is how the audience ends up being empowered to give the movie its form and definition. It doesn’t barrel its way down any one genre or crib from other filmmakers for its inspiration. This is a movie truly in a class of its own. The screenplay is teeming with wonderful details – a Bush/Dukakis debate, a dance troupe called Sparkle Motion, a debate over The Smurfs – that may be part of a larger puzzle, or might not mean anything at all.

The writing features much sharp wit – laced with barbs toward the public school system – while engaging all sorts of cool ideas about time travel and alternate universes in the process. An alternate title might have been It’s A Miserable Life, as the novel approach could be summed up as It’s A Wonderful Life in reverse. The cast is stronger than any first time director could possibly hope to ask for, particularly the Gyllenhaals, Patrick Swayze, and Holmes Osborne and Mary McDonnell as Donnie’s sympathetic parents. Steven Poster lends the cinematography a vivid, dreamlike feel, while the original music by Michael Andrews compliments that mood as well. I doubt that Kelly has any better fucking idea what’s going on in this movie than anyone watching for the first time will, but your guess will be at least as good as the person sitting next to you.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Interview with Sean McKittrick” By Chadwick Clough. Script P.I.M.P., 19 July 2002

“Richard Kelly” By Jason Korsner. BBC, 21 October 2002

“Interview with Nancy Juvonen” Richard-Kelly.net, 25 May 2004

“Getting Inside Donnie Darko with Writer/Director Richard Kelly” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 27 May 2004

“The Resurrection of Donnie Darko” By Robert Levine, 18 July 2004

“How Donnie Darko Refused To Die” By Nathan Lee. The New York Sun, 20 July 2004

“Richard Kelly’s Second Chance” By Jennifer Soong. Moviemaker, 21 June 2004

“Donnie Darko The Director’s Cut: The Strange Afterlife of an Indie Cult Film” By Adam Burnett. indieWIRE, 22 July 2004

The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook. By Genevieve Jolliffe, Chris Jones. Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004

Synopsis
As a new school year begins at Ridgemont High, six students are introduced. Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works at Perry’s Pizza in the mall. When a foxy looking stereo salesman gives her his card, Stacy’s friend Linda (Phoebe Cates) implores her to be aggressive. “You’re fifteen years old. I did it when I was thirteen. It’s no big thing, it’s only sex.” Mark Ratner (Brian Backer) is assistant to the assistant manager of the movie theater and laments his pathetic social situation to his friend, smooth talking ticket scalper Mike Damone (Robert Romanus). Stacy’s brother Brad (Judge Reinhold) is a jock and Employee of the Month at “All America Burger.” He blows his cool with a customer, gets fired, and suffers the indignity of accepting work at “Captain Hook Fish ‘n Chips.” Stoner Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) rejects the concerns of his peers, declaring “All I need are some tasty waves, a cool buzz, and I’m fine.”

On the first day of school, Spicoli runs afoul with his strict history teacher Mr. Hand (Ray Walston) by wandering in late for class. Their battle of wills continues all the way to the night of the prom, when Mr. Hand unveils a unique system for paying back students who waste his time. After Stacy loses her virginity to the stereo salesman in a baseball dugout, her phone calls to him go unreturned. Harboring a crush throughout the semester in biology class, Ratner works up the nerve to ask Stacy out; to his amazement, she says yes. Seeking dating advice, Ratner is given a five-step plan from Damone that culminates with, “When it comes down to making out, whenever possible, put on Side One of Led Zeppelin IV.” Too awkward to take their relationship to that level, Ratner stands by while Damone plies his charms on the lovesick Stacy.

Production history
Cameron Crowe launched his auspicious journalism career at the age of 15, writing articles on rock ‘n roll that ended up in Creem and Rolling Stone magazines. In the introduction to what would become his first and only novel in 1981, Crowe recounted, “For seven years I wrote articles for a youth culture magazine, and perhaps not a day went by when this term wasn’t used: ‘the kids.’ Editors assigned certain articles for ‘the kids.’ Music and film executives were constantly discussing whether a product appealed ‘to the kids.’ Rock stars spoke of commercial concessions made ‘for the kids.’ Kids were discussed as if they were some huge whale, to be harpooned and brought to shore. It began to fascinate me, the idea of The Kids. They were everywhere, standing on street corners in their Lynyrd Skynyrd t-shirts, in cars, in the 7-Eleven. Somehow this grand constituency controlled almost every adult’s fate, yet no adult really knew what it was nowadays – to be a kid.”

When Rolling Stone moved offices from L.A. to New York, a colleague named David Obst went to work for Simon & Schuster. Obst agreed to become Crowe’s publisher, suggesting that if his client really wanted to find out about “the kids,” he should go back to high school and put those experiences in a book. So in the fall of 1979, a 22-year-old Crowe moved in with his parents in San Diego and got permission from the principal of Clairemont High School to enroll as a student named Dave Cameron.”The object, I told him, was to write a book about real, contemporary life in high school.” Crowe’s friendships – or “research” – culminated in six characters: a middle class brother and sister, her sexually experienced best friend, a nerd, a music loving ticket scalper and a stoned surfer. At the end of the school year, Crowe approached his subjects and revealed he was writing a book. At the time, they were largely indifferent.

The president of Universal Pictures – Thom Mount - was familiar with Crowe’s articles and had a feeling his novel might be a modern day Catcher In The Rye. Before the book was even finished, he optioned the film rights. Fast Times At Ridgemont High: A True Story was published in October 1981 to mostly positive reviews and decent sales. Mount got Crowe together with producer Art Linson, who the writer had met during a visit to the set of American Hot Wax in 1975. “Art and Thom Mount decided that I would be the cheapest guy to adapt my own book. They gave me the job of writing the screenplay, figuring it probably would never get made or some other writer would come in. But, as time went on, they protected me, and I went through several drafts of that script, and I began to fall in love with screenwriting.”

Linson recalled the collaboration with Crowe. “He came to New York, and I tried to sort of supervise him writing the screenplay, because he had never written one before. But he did a fantastic job. Cameron was painstakingly into the detail of what he was trying to do. He took the slightest moments very seriously: how the kids look at each other, how they feel about each other.” Mount felt that he knew the perfect director for Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Crowe recalls, “So we sent the script to David Lynch who read it in about a day or two and said, ‘Well, this is funny, not really my material.’” Linson remembered a thesis film by a 27-year-old AFI grad student named Amy Heckerling called Getting It Over With. Heckerling had been lined up to make her feature film debut with a youth comedy she’d written for MGM, but three weeks before shooting was set to begin, the studio changed its mind. Efforts by the rookie director to set it up someplace else had gone nowhere.

Heckerling recalled, “Art showed me Cameron’s script, and I really liked it and I told him various thoughts I had. Then he showed me the book, and I loved the book, and I really thought they had been doing a disservice to it. Cameron knew all these people, and in the book he’d recorded very accurately everything that was going on with them, and it was very funny because of that, whereas I felt like Universal were possibly trying to make more of a regular teen movie.” With Heckerling and Linson working alongside casting director Don Phillips, every up and coming actor read for roles: Ralph Macchio, Ally Sheedy, Matthew Broderick, Michelle Pfeiffer, even Scott Baio. Sean Penn was also there and did not impress anyone with his initial reading. But Linson stated, “There was something special about Sean, you can always tell that in the room. ‘Maybe he’s not right for Spicoli, but he’s obviously great, let’s put him in something.’ But he made it known Spicoli was what he wanted to do. And so we went, ‘Fuck it.’”

On a budget of $4.5 million, Fast Times At Ridgemont High commenced an eight-week shooting schedule November 1981 around Los Angeles. The Sherman Oaks Galleria stood in for the mall, while the classroom scenes were shot over eight days at Van Nuys High School. Then there were the two sex scenes. Heckerling recalls, “I was angry about seeing so many movies with naked women and never seeing a naked guy. So when I shot the sex scene between Stacy and Damone in the poolhouse, I wanted it to be uncomfortable. She was naked, so I wanted to show the guy naked too. And the ratings board said, ‘You do that and you’ll get an X rating.’ I said, ‘How come you can see all these naked ladies in movies?’ And they said, ‘Because the female organ is not aggressive, but the male organ is.’ So what? Should we shoot it? Whatever. But I was a very cranky young lady, and the idea of compromising makes you crazy.”

As a release of August 1982 neared, Universal was far from high on Fast Times. Art Linson recalls, “Before this picture came out, the studio hated the picture. Let’s just, for the record: the studio thought the picture was going to bomb. We got an R rating – we almost got an X rating – they didn’t like the picture and in fact, right before it came out, they decided not to release it on the East Coast, and it took 400 theaters away because they didn’t want to have to spend the kind of advertising money to support the picture on the East Coast, ’cause they thought it was going to be a huge bomb. That’s the facts. Now, part of the reason for that is that they had an R-rated high school movie with, you know, masturbation, abortion, dope smoking, tough language – albeit funny – and they figured, first of all, kids under 17 might not be able to get in – although I never met one under 17 that didn’t see the picture – and I think they thought, ‘This is just going to be another one of those nasty little high school movies that wasn’t nice,’ like American Graffiti was nice.”

The reaction to Fast Times from critics was definitely not nice. Joe Baltake, Philadelphia City News: “The problem with Fast Times is that it has no central nervous system because the idea about an ‘undercover’ student has been eliminated. Without this device, the movie is merely a pointless expose. It is also singularly unfunny and curiously listless. Heckerling’s pacing is way off and uninspired, to say the least.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “It clunks to a halt now and then for some heartfelt, badly handled material about pregnancy and abortion. I suppose that’s Heckerling paying dues to some misconception of the women’s movement. But for the most part this movie just exploits its performers by trying to walk a tightrope between comedy and sexploitation.” Daily Variety: “The nice thing is that Crowe and director Amy Heckerling have provided something pleasant to observe in all of these characters though they really are sadly lacking in anything gripping.”

Cameron Crowe needed to get out of L.A. for a while. With a buddy in tow, he took a road trip to Arizona for the wedding of a fellow journalist and recalls, “I was really depressed because they sort of dumped the movie out. There were a few bad reviews that came out from the establishment press, and I just wanted to get out of town. I just wanted to drive across the country. We stopped in Arizona, and it was a Saturday night after the Friday the movie had come out and it was like, yeah, let’s just go by this theater that’s running it and see what it’s like. Let’s see what that empty theater will be like. Well, we drove by the theater, and it was packed. We went inside, and there were kids that had already seen the movie two or three times. They had checkerboard Vans like Sean Penn’s. They were talking like Sean Penn. People were laughing their ass off at stuff that I didn’t even know was funny.” Popular demand prompted Universal to expand the film to over 700 theaters its fourth week of release. The box office for Fast Times would total $27 million in the United States.

Looking back at Fast Times at Ridgemont High almost twenty years later, Heckerling mused, “I love the theme about these kids having to deal with sex and jobs and things that people twenty years older than them are still dealing with. They were pushed into such a grown-up world and they were still children basically. Everything was going too fast for them. It was about growing up too quickly and having to deal with these things at a very early age and how these kids pulled through it or didn’t pull through it.” Linson offered, “And again, everybody misjudging Cameron’s script, because it read so funny and light that when you get underneath it you got into the truth of it … it had some great edgy truth to it. So, I think that’s why the picture survived for so many years, because even today, people can see it fifteen years later or twenty years later and it’s still got that like, kind of edgy, like ‘whoa’.”

Opinion
Even the most crotchety critics of Fast Times would probably amend their 1982 reviews to admit how innocuous the movie plays today, while also allowing how exceptional the cast became (Sean Penn, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and in bit parts, Forest Whitaker, Anthony Edwards, Eric Stoltz and Nicolas Cage). But to stop there – as the film continues to win fans that weren’t even born when the movie was in theaters – would be sprinkling it with faint praise. Fast Times at Ridgemont High is a masterpiece for one clear reason: because Cameron Crowe and Amy Heckerling infuse just about every scene with an honesty – laugh out loud, quirky, tender, brutal – that few movies trying to appeal to teenagers ever aspire to. Factor in those career defining moments from the cast, dialogue that’s come to define a generation and one classic moment after another and it’s difficult to overstate the impact the film continues to have for me.

Now, the soundtrack is a pretty ragged mix of the ‘70s rock (Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne) the producers felt “the kids” were still listening to and the New Wave (The Cars, The Go-Go’s, Oingo Boingo) that Heckerling saw coming; I still don’t think it’s a very intelligible playlist. But like all the great films, Fast Times offers something new with each viewing. The duels between Sean Penn and Ray Walston are like highlights from a great stoner comedy, but Heckerling and Jennifer Jason Leigh refuse to soft peddle the sex, opting for stark realism. Small details – like students sniffing fresh mimeographs – stand out as much as showstopper moments, like a topless Phoebe Cates rising out of a pool in one of the great fantasy sequences of all time. Hilarious. Smart. Cutting edge. Most impressive is how the filmmakers use Spicoli’s class clown to ultimately suggest there might be more to growing up than sex and consumerism.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Reliving Our Fast Times at Ridgemont High”. Fast Times at Ridgemont High. MCA/Universal Home Video. 1999

“Fast Times Strives Hard for the Right Teen Touches” By Dale Pollock. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 16, 1982

The Directors: Take Four. By Robert J. Emery. 2003

Sean Penn: His Life and Times. By Richard T. Kelly. 2006

Synopsis
On the Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, Jenny (Mya) drags her skeptical pal Becky (Shannon Elizabeth) to have her palm read. The young fortune teller (Portia de Rossi) takes one look at the girls and notifies them of blood in their future. In Hollywood, Ellie (Christina Ricci) gets off work and visits her boyfriend Jake (Joshua Jackson), a promoter finishing a monster themed club to be called Tinsel. This makes Ellie late to pick up her brother Jimmy (Jesse Eisenberg), a nerdy high schooler whose moment with a classmate (Kristina Anapau) is ruined when her jock boyfriend (Milo Ventimiglia) shows up to torment him. Heading home on Mulholland Drive, Ellie and Becky smash into each other when an animal darts across the road. Becky is yanked out of the wreckage by the beast and ripped in two, while the siblings walk away from the attack with nasty scratches.

Jimmy wakes in the morning to find himself outdoors and naked. Ellie – a producer for The Late Late Show with Craig Kilborn – now finds herself able to sniff out blood at a distance. At a PETA event, a fellow producer (Judy Greer) schedules Ellie time to pre-interview Scott Baio (as himself) for the show; not even Charles In Charge is immune to Ellie’s weird energy. Jenny is also at the event and after coming on to Ellie’s boyfriend, is stalked through a parking garage by what turns out to be a bipedal and hungry werewolf. Jimmy’s research on Google leads him to believe that the pentagrams forming on his and his sister’s palms are the sign of a curse. As the siblings try to control their new powers and keep from wolfing out at work or school, Ellie comes to believe that the werewolf that bit them may be in her midst.

Production history
In August 2000, Kevin Williamson had an idea for a movie. The idea found a home at Dimension Films, which had produced nearly all of the screenwriter’s thrillers, some hits (Scream and its two sequels), some misses (Teaching Mrs. Tingle). Williamson’s treatment – titled Cursed – was described “as being in the vein of Silence of the Lambs“, with a serial killer on the loose in New York City, but with a twist. Originally fast tracked to shoot before an anticipated writer’s strike in the spring of 2001, the coals were really put to studio’s feet two years later, when Warner Bros. optioned Kelley Armstrong’s werewolf novel Bitten as a vehicle for Angelina Jolie. To beat their competition into theaters, Dimension co-founder Bob Weinstein announced in October 2002 that Cursed would “reinvent the werewolf genre,” that Wes Craven would direct and that the movie was coming to multiplexes August 2003.

Christina Ricci, Skeet Ulrich and Jesse Eisenberg were cast as three strangers attacked by a werewolf after a car crash in the Hollywood Hills. With a budget of $38 million, Cursed commenced shooting March 2003 in Los Angeles. Academy Award winning makeup effects maestro Rick Baker was hired to design the werewolf. But reviewing dailies as shooting progressed, Dimension became increasingly worried over the state of the special effects, and was sweating the film’s third act, which hinged on Scott Baio (playing Scott Baio) being unveiled as the werewolf. Having recently sent Scary Movie 3 back to Vancouver – where director David Zucker shot 25 minutes of new material after his comedy fell flat at test screenings – the studio prescribed even more radical triage to rescue Cursed.

Dimension took the unusual step of putting Cursed on “an extended hiatus”, shutting down production with 11 weeks of footage in the can and another 4 weeks to go. In a comment to the Hollywood Reporter, Weinstein stated, “In the car business, General Motors comes out after five years in the planning and research and development with a new model. And it gets reviewed and everybody says ‘Tremendous.’ Our attitude’s the same with filmmaking. If it comes out right, it’s a miracle. If it doesn’t, we have enough faith in these filmmakers to keep going and fix what we need to fix. The middle process is just the process. And if we weren’t in the movie business and we were in the car business, this wouldn’t even be a story.” The studio brought in screenwriter Sean Hood – whose credits included Halloween: Resurrection (the one with Busta Rhymes) – to unravel the problematic script.

Interviewed by the New York Times in May 2007 – as his new TV series Hidden Palms struggled to get on the schedule of the CW Network – Kevin Williamson lamented, “That werewolf movie. That was 20 years out of my life. You can’t just be asked to do a werewolf movie and then expect it to be good. I wasn’t the guy who should ever have been writing a werewolf movie.” Craven estimated that 70% of what he’d already shot had to be ditched, while new director of photography Robert McLachlan – replacing John Bailey – recalled, “They planned to save about 10 minutes from the first go around which was little enough that we had carte blanche in terms of the look. The only request from Wes and the studio was to shoot a much darker, scarier movie with the goal of ‘less is more’ for the werewolf sequences.”

Skeet Ulrich was not happy with the new approach and declined to participate, while Mandy Moore (who’d shot a cameo as the first victim), Omar Epps, Illeana Douglas, Robert Forster, Scott Foley and James Brolin were either unable to resume work or not asked to. Version 2.0 of Cursed began shooting in December 2003 with Joshua Jackson, Portia de Rossi, Michael Rosenbaum and pop singer Mya joining the cast. Shannon Elizabeth, Judy Greer and Milo Ventimiglia came back, while Scott Baio was reduced to a walk-on cameo. Rick Baker had walked all the way off the show; Greg Nicotero and his K.N.B. EFX Group came on to execute the werewolf effects. In terms of story, the serial killer angle had been dropped to focus on a pair of siblings (Christina Ricci, Jesse Eisenberg) bitten by a werewolf on Mulholland Drive. Even after the ending had to be rewritten and reshot, Wes Craven was confident Cursed would be in theaters October 2004.

As Dimension put Cursed before test audiences in the fall of 2004, the studio followed what was then a popular trend and – in a bid to sell more tickets in the U.S. – cut the film for a PG-13 rating. The blood and guts were trimmed, neutering the film’s two most visceral moments: the gloriously over the top death of Shannon Elizabeth, and the discovery of Mya’s body after she shares an elevator with the werewolf. Speaking to the New York Post, Wes Craven would comment, “The contract called for us to make an R-rated film. We did. It was a very difficult process. Then it was basically taken away from us and cut to PG-13 and ruined. It was two years of very difficult work and almost 100 days of shooting of various versions. Then at the very end, it was chopped up and the studio thought they could make more with a PG-13 movie, and trashed it … I thought it was completely disrespectful, and it hurt them too, and it was like they shot themselves in the foot with a shotgun.”

Sneaking into theaters February 2005 without press screenings, Cursed was batted around like a piñata once critics got a hold of it. Kim Morgan, L.A. Weekly: “Poor special effects, a silly looking werewolf and clunky comic writing help to spoil what should have been a fun B-movie.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Screenwriter Kevin Williamson (the Scream trilogy), having bottomed out in the horror genre, now dips below bottom (there isn’t a line that has his knowing sweet-and-sour zing), and Craven directs as if he could barely rouse himself to stage one of those bulging-bladder-and-elongated-fang transformation scenes that revived the lycanthrope genre in its early-’80s acidhead baroque phase.” Dana Stevens, the New York Times: “It’s not bad enough to make you curse, but you are likely to laugh when you should scream, and to roll your eyes when you are meant to laugh.”

Grossing $19.2 million in the U.S. and $10.3 million overseas – on a relatively modest budget – Cursed never threatened Dimension with bankruptcy. But speaking with Ain’t It Cool News in August 2008, Wes Craven mused, ” … the Cursed experience was so screwed up. I mean, that went on for two-and-a-half years of my life for a film that wasn’t anything close to what it should have been. And another film that I was about to shoot having the plug pulled – Pulse - so it was like, I did learn from the Cursed experience not to do something for money. They said, ‘We know you want to do another film, we’ll pay you double.’ And we were 10 days from shooting, and I said fine. But I ended up working two-and-a-half years for double my fee, but I could have done two-and-a-half movies, and done movies that were out there making money. In general, I think it’s not worth it and part of the reason my phone hasn’t rung is that that story is pretty well known.”

Opinion
The R-rated version of Cursed available on DVD is watchable for two reasons: some interesting actors were cast and Wes Craven – director of Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes and A Nightmare on Elm Street, which you can rent now before they’re remade – knows how to construct a suspense sequence, of which this flick has two that work pretty well. And now that the demolition derby resembling film production is public record, Cursed is actually in the position of having nowhere left to go but up. Ultimately though, the movie is every bit as fucked as you’ve heard, starting off on the wrong foot and staying there: Hyperactive opening titles transition into what amounts to a music video for pop band Bowling For Soup. Then, characters start talking and the whole enchilada lapses into one of the weakest excuses for a movie in recent history, one deserving the title Cursed.

The cast members who have done terrific work in better films – Jesse Eisenberg, Judy Greer, Portia di Rossi, even Shannon Elizabeth – acquit themselves of embarrassment, while Christina Ricci, who has hit a career wall playing believable adults, at least has a kookiness and physical prowess that bubbles to the surface every now and again. But like many of Miramax’s movies that went into the editing room and came out scarred for life, this damned thing is neither fish nor fowl. Lacking an atmosphere of tension or dread, Cursed is too mild to really appeal to horror fans, while werewolves and the odd mauling make it too gnarly for kids. The only thing scary about the film is how desperate it feels, as if Kevin Williamson was sending out an encrypted S.O.S. that he was so over writing about high school and murder sprees.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Winding down a shopping spree at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, Julie (Deborah Foreman) reports on her social situation to friends Suzi (Michelle Meyrink), Loryn (Elizabeth Daily) and Allyson (Camille Calvet). When her ex Tommy (Michael Bowen) corners her on the escalator, Julie reads him the riot act: “It’s like I’m totally not in love with you anymore, Tommy. I mean, it’s so boring!” At the beach, Julie catches the eye of a punk rocker from Hollywood, Randy (Nicolas Cage). His buddy Fred (Cameron Dye) overhears the girls talking about a party that night in the Valley. “I’m not in the mood to go to the Valley,” Randy responds.

Before heading to the party, Julie checks in with her parents (Frederic Forrest and Colleen Camp), ‘60s radicals who have gone from peace marches in Washington to running a health food diner in the suburbs. At the party, Suzi finds herself competing for the attention of a boy she likes with her stepmother (Lee Purcell). Tommy tries to take revenge on his ex by getting it on with Loryn. Randy and Fred show up and try their best to mingle with the girls from the suburbs. Randy locks eyes with Julie and strikes up a conversation. Love at first sight is interrupted when Julie’s ex returns to the party and throws the punks out.

Randy returns to the party, sneaking into the bathroom to get some time alone with Julie. With her friend Stacey (Heidi Holicker) in tow, he takes her to his world in Hollywood to hang out in a dive club. The couple becomes inseparable, but Julie’s friends are not supportive. “You know, Tommy’s going to look real good after six groddie bus rides in Hollywood.” With prom approaching, peer pressure takes effect and Julie breaks it off with her punk rocker. Randy drowns his grief with his grungy ex (Tina Theberge) but hearing his and Julie’s song in a club – “A Million Miles Away” by The Pimsouls – he decides to put in appearance at the prom.

Production history
Frank Zappa’s satirical tune “Valley Girl” – featuring vocals by his 14-year-old daughter Moon Unit – was the only single from the avant-garde musician to ever crack Billboard’s Top 40. It became a phenomenon in the summer of 1982, spawning merchandise and landing on the cover of Time Magazine. Universal, United Artists and even Norman Lear approached Zappa with offers to make a movie, which the musician thought Moon Unit would naturally star in. Nothing came of the idea. Zappa’s reaction to the fad was, “It was a joke. It just goes to show that the American public loves to celebrate the infantile. I mean, I don’t want people to act like that. I think Valley Girls are disgusting.”

Writers-producers Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane saw gold anyway and without Zappa’s song or his approval, cranked out a screenplay in ten days. Securing investors for a movie, the writers realized they didn’t know much about teenage girls. Lane asked a friend named Martha Coolidge to read the script. Coolidge had attended grad school at NYU Institute of Film and Television and came to Los Angeles in 1976 to intern with director Robert Wise. She’d directed a feature in Toronto called City Girl, the producers of which had run out of money. Coolidge was editing it on her own, living in a room over a friend’s garage when Lane asked her to direct Valley Girl.

Coolidge recalls, “Wayne Crawford and Andy Lane had this great script which reminded me of Romeo and Juliet. And I came in and said I’ve really got to differentiate the Valley from Hollywood because there really is a kind of spiritual difference, one being more urban and more hardcore, and the other being more suburban. And put in the scene where they fell in love and put in the scene where they break up. Those two scenes weren’t in the picture.” The financiers Crawford & Lane had found were worried about a woman directing their teen exploitation flick. They made Coolidge vow to show naked breasts four times during the movie. She replied that wasn’t a problem as long as she could do it her way.

Coolidge convinced NYU classmate Frederick Elmes to serve as cinematographer and her friend Mary Delia Javier – set decorator for Apocalypse Now – to be production designer. To obtain wardrobe, crew members raided their own closets. To star, Coolidge liked Judd Nelson and Eric Stoltz. With Nelson unavailable, 18-year-old Nicolas Cage was cast in his first leading role, opposite Cameron Dye. With a production budget of $325,000, Valley Girl commenced filming October 1982 in Los Angeles. The entire movie was shot in 20 days. Coolidge recalls, “Almost everything was made with one take. The most was three. It was a movie I had no extra film, so we had to really be ready and really do it right when we did it.”

While Amy Heckerling lost her battle to fill the soundtrack of Fast Times At Ridgemont High with punk and New Wave, Coolidge cast Josie Cotton (singing “Johnny Are You Queer?”) and The Plimsouls (performing ”A Million Miles Away”) in the movie. X had been approached to appear, but was worried about alienating their fans in the Valley. Coolidge was listening to KROQ when she heard a song she felt would be perfect for her movie. All she remembered were the words “melt with you.” Singing it to music supervisor Michael Papali, he tracked down the tune, “I Melt With You” by Modern English. The song hadn’t gone anywhere on the pop charts, but exploded after being used in Valley Girl.

When executive producers Thomas Coleman and Mark Rosenblatt saw a work print, they were so ecstatic that Coolidge had made a real movie, they turned down bids from the major studios and released the film themselves, even renting a billboard on Sunset Boulevard. One person not happy with Valley Girl was Frank Zappa. He sought $100,000 for “false designation of origin, unfair competition and dilution of trademark.” One month before Valley Girl was released, a federal judge ruled against Zappa, finding that there would be no confusion between his song and the film. Andy Lane responded, “He did have something to do with creating the fad, but the song did not create the persona.”

Opening in April 1983, Valley Girl was dismissed by most critics at the time, but grew into one of the more profitable movies ever made, grossing $17 million in the U.S. Coolidge became one of a handful of women directing feature films. She recalls, “This movie was made with a lot of love, a lot of generosity. Enormous number of people worked free and those that were paid were basically working for free. It was a chance for everyone and all the crew members to make a movie that they were proud of and that really depicted a time, certain time in history which we had all loved and participated in. And I knew that movies do preserve the culture that we live in and I think that this movie has really shown that.”

Opinion
The premise behind this movie is so old – teen love from the wrong side of the tracks – that Peter Case of The Plimsouls suggested their tune “The Oldest Story In The World” as an alternate title. But Valley Girl is a classic because of how well it captures the period it was made, a time before punk rock in Los Angeles went up in a puff of pyrotechnic smoke detonated by heavy metal hair bands. You couldn’t find a better cast, cooler tunes or a more heartfelt approach to make this movie today, even with twenty times the money Martha Coolidge had. Her first time really out of the gate, she delivered the best film of her career.

Instead of making a visual parody based on Zappa’s silly pop hit, Wayne Crawford & Andrew Lane took the plights of their teenage characters to heart, while Coolidge colored the moods of the film with those of her own life. The punk and New Wave soundtrack is about as authentic as you could hope for – without this movie, “Melt With You” would never have been heard again, much less become the anthem of a generation – while Nicolas Cage turns in an inspired performance as a geek in love. Equally impressive are the adults, with Frederic Forrest & Colleen Camp a riot as Julie’s Age of Aquarius parents, and Lee Purcell sexy and sharp as a would-be Mrs. Robinson.

Noel Murray at The Onion A.V. Club writes, “Before John Hughes became the auteur of mature teen angst, Cage and Foreman’s romance had a reputation as the best the genre had to offer (a title that rightly should have gone to Fast Times At Ridgemont High). Valley Girl holds up pretty well, thanks to Cage, some anthropologically valuable shots of shopping malls and the Sunset Strip, and the sensitive illustration of adolescent self-consciousness provided by director Martha Coolidge. It almost doesn’t matter that Cage and Foreman’s differences seem ridiculously slight; what matters is that they feel like they’re being judged.”

“Valley Girl is one of those quintessential 80s flicks that actually stands up pretty well over time, and that’s because it isn’t really about Valley-speak or hot trends, although there’s plenty of that in the mix. It’s about two people that want to be together, even though everyone tells them they can’t, and the agony that all of this implies. It’s probably not the deepest or most profound telling of this oft-utilized theme, but it didn’t need to be. As purely an entertainment piece, the unique blend of music, wardrobe, and kooky characters sets it apart enough to have its own special flavor,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Rebecca Taylor at DVD Active writes, “Two decades after its release, Valley Girl certainly offers major nostalgia value, if nothing else, for some viewers. The fashion, the music and the vernacular are pure early ‘80s goodness. But because the film relies on a classic star crossed lovers story and Cage and Foreman exhibit abundant chemistry in their scenes together, Valley Girl retains a certain freshness and originality that makes it much more than just simply another 80s teen flick … I have seen it too many times to count and to me it is as much a masterpiece of cinema as The Breakfast Club, or any of the other 80s teen films that have gained mythical status in the public consciousness.”

© Joe Valdez