The following is my contribution to The Class of ‘84 Blogathon convening here at This Distracted Globe.

The Terminator (1984)
Screenplay by James Cameron & Gale Ann Hurd and William Wisher (uncredited), story by James Cameron
Directed by James Cameron
Produced by Pacific Western/ Hemdale Film Corporation
Running time: 108 minutes

Should I Care?
After three sequels and a Fox TV series each decreasing in quality and relevance, what’s most striking about The Terminator is its mood of unrelenting bleakness. Though exciting, its B-movie budget restraints keep this from escalating into the all-ages action spectacle its spin-offs would happily aspire to. Instead, this is one dark cup of coffee, a lurid, appropriately ultra-violent and nihilistic sci-fi horror flick. While I wouldn’t call this James Cameron’s masterpiece — his follow-up Aliens has my vote — it does feel like his most honest, sacrificing none of its ideas in a concession for broad commercial appeal.

The cast may seem unremarkable, but Arnold Schwarzenegger’s less than half an hour of screen time is a model of efficiency. In hindsight, there was no better performer on the planet to play the Terminator, the most iconic screen role of Schwarzenegger’s life. Linda Hamilton & Michael Biehn aren’t great actors, but fit within the economics the director was rather fortuitously stuck with here. Cameron — who doesn’t get enough credit for his strength as a writer — forges an unusually potent relationship between Sarah and Reese, while making a drive-in flick look and feel like something much bigger. Brad Fiedel’s electronic musical score remains one of my favorite of all time.

So, What’s This About?
In Los Angeles of the year 2029, machines have risen from the nuclear apocalypse they initiated against mankind to wage a losing war against the survivors. In desperation, a cybernetic organism known as a Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — part man, part machine — is sent back to Los Angeles of 1984. A soldier named Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) has followed the cyborg through time. Reese clothes and arms himself by breaking into a sporting goods store. The next day, the Terminator pays a visit to an unlucky gunsmith (Dick Miller) and begins assassinating the Sarah Connors in the L.A. phone book one at a time.

Waitress Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) realizes she may be in danger. She ducks into a nightclub and calls the cops, where Lt. Traxler (Paul Winfield) urges her to stay in public until they can get there. The Terminator reaches Sarah first. Reese manages to protect her and goes on to explain that the Terminator has targeted Sarah in order to eliminate her unborn son, who is destined to lead mankind to victory against the machines. Once captured by police, Traxler, his partner (Lance Henriksen) and a psychologist (Earl Boen) offer Sarah a far more rational explanation for her ordeal. This theory lasts as long as it takes for the Terminator to track Sarah to the police station and come after her.

Who Made It?
James Cameron grew up around Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border. He came to the United States when his family moved to Brea, California in 1971 and attended Fullerton College, scouring the USC library for information on film technology while putting himself through college as a machinist. Cameron would drop of school in 1978 and with $400,000 he raised from dentists in Tustin — looking to produce their own Star Wars — made a 12-minute special effects demo. This got the attention of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, whose head of visual effects hired Cameron to do front screen projection work on Battle Beyond the Stars (1980).

With battlefield speed, Cameron was promoted to production designer and to head of a visual effects camera unit at New World. He was named second unit director and got the chance to work with actors on Galaxy of Terror (1981). Dismissed by his executive producer after wrapping Piranha II, Cameron would write The Terminator, with a production manager named Gale Ann Hurd polishing his script and producing. William Wisher — a college buddy — pitched in additional dialogue and after years of rejection due to Cameron’s non-existent directing resume, Hurd finally secured $6.4 million in financing from Hemdale on what became one of the most profitable and iconic movies of all time.

How’d They Do It?
Arriving February 1981 in Rome to shoot his first film as a director — Piranha II — James Cameron realized that his Italian executive producer merely hired him as a contractual obligation to New World. As soon as filming wrapped, Cameron was sent home and the film was recut without him. He recalled, “When I got back from Piranha II, I knew that I was never going to get offered another movie unless I came up with something myself. I had to write a film. That made sense for me as a director. I thought it had to have effects, which justified my existence on the project, but I had to not price myself out of the kind of budget that they were likely to trust me with.”

“I thought, how can I introduce that otherness, that element of wonder, into a low budget environment that can be shot on the street, very conventionally, very guerilla filmmaking. So, I thought, fine. It’s present day. It’s present day Los Angeles. It’s the back streets of L.A. So, what happens next? Maybe it can come from outer space. It can come from the future. From a narrative standpoint, it starts to limit your options. It starts to lay out a certain way based on those givens. So I had a given: a contemporary environment that was determined by budget. No big movie stars, so maybe the main characters can be kind of young.”

Cameron backed into the idea of a robotic hitman sent through time, arrived on the title Terminator and wrote a treatment and most of a first draft screenplay. Gale Ann Hurd had been a production manager at New World and co-produced Smokey Bites the Dust. She helped polish Cameron’s script, which he sold to Hurd for the price of $1, striking a pact that he would keep her on as producer, if she agreed not to go with a more experienced director. Cameron recalled, “Our strength in doing the movie was pooling our resources and forming an impenetrable barrier to anyone who wanted to take it away from us or change to concept.”

Gale Ann Hurd spent the next two years trying to raise the financing for Terminator. “Some actors turned down the film because Jim was attached as the director. Buyers approached Jim as the director provided he got rid of me as producer. I trusted him and he trusted me. We held out and were able to do it essentially on our own terms. I thought if I just persevered I’d get the movie made. My idealism and my naiveté carried me through at least two years of trying to get it together and keep it together. If I’d known then what I know now — some 23 pictures later — I’m not sure I would have persevered.”

Hurd zeroed in on an executive at Hemdale Film Corporation named Barry Plumley. “Of course, he wouldn’t return my phone calls. Practically no one would.” Hurd found out that Plumley was selling a desk. She needed a desk and when they met to complete the transaction, Hurd handed him a 48-page treatment for Terminator. Plumley called the next day to tell her that he loved it. Hurd had also mentioned her project to a comrade from New World named Barbara Boyle, who was now senior vice president of Orion Pictures. “Barbara talked Mike Medavoy into reading the script, talked him into meeting with Jim and me.” Hemdale agreed to finance Terminator at $6.4 million, while Orion came on board as U.S. distributor.

To play the Terminator, Cameron wanted a survivor from Piranha II, Lance Henriksen. The actor pitched in on the drive for financing.”I went into Hemdale decked out like the Terminator. I put gold foil from a Vantage cigarette package in my teeth and waxed my hair back. Jim had put fake cuts on my head. I wore a ripped-up punk rock T-shirt, a leather jacket and boots up to my knees. It was a really exciting look. I was a scary person to be in a room with. I kicked the door open when I got there and the poor secretary just about swallowed her typewriter. I headed in to see the producer. I sat in the room with him and I wouldn’t talk to him. I just kept looking at him. After a few minutes of that he was ready to jump out the window!”

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name soon came up. Cameron recalled, “Arnold was never really slated to be in the picture. Mike Medavoy at Orion suggested Arnold play Michael Biehn’s character, Reese. I don’t think there’s anybody that would think that was a great idea. At that point in his career, doing 25 pages of expository dialogue and talking really fast and painting the picture of a future world we didn’t have the budget to actually visually create was not going to be Arnold’s strong suit, you know.” To play the Terminator, Medavoy suggested O.J. Simpson. Cameron immediately put The Juice out of his mind, but was intrigued with meeting Schwarzenegger.

Cameron revealed, “Over lunch I started thinking, This guy has got the most amazing face. I almost wanted to say, ‘Arnold, just stop talking for a second and be real still,’ but I was petrified. I thought, This guy would make a great Terminator. But he doesn’t want to play the Terminator. I went back to John Daly and said, ‘Forget it, it’s not going to work. But, boy, he’d make a hell of a Terminator.’ Anyway, the upshot is that the deal was closed that afternoon and we were making the movie after a two-year hold.” Schwarzenegger was already booked to spend the fall of 1983 in Mexico shooting a sequel to Conan the Barbarian, pushing a potential start date for Terminator back 10 months.

With the Austrian Oak on board, Cameron recalled, “What changed was the original concept as written — and the script didn’t change at all, not a single line of dialogue was changed — but the visual concept was that the Terminator was this anonymous character who could walk out of a crowd, just one face in a crowd, could walk up and kill you, for no apparent reason, except for what your life would mean in some future time. And that concept changed, because Arnold doesn’t vanish into a crowd. It took on a slightly more hyperbolic visual style, a little larger than life. It still played sort of realistically, but it became more nightmarish.”

Linda Hamilton was initially only in the running to play Sarah Connor. Cameron revealed, “She was among a number of actresses I saw. I think it narrowed down to her, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Rosanna Arquette. At the time, Jennifer Jason Leigh had only done a couple of TV movies. She is an awesome actress, but Linda was great in the part.” Despite auditioning with a Southern accent because he’d spent that morning reading for a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Michael Biehn would be cast as Reese. After months spent storyboarding and designing the film — as well writing Alien II and First Blood Part II on assignment — Cameron finally called action on Terminator March 1984 in Los Angeles.

Cameron recalled, “The executive producer begged us to write more of the scenes as daytime, because of the perceived cost difference, but, you know, I plunged madly on. It seemed so important stylistically to keep the film in night, a night film, as much as possible. And so we kept it that way. And I don’t think it really impacted the cost all that much.” Terminator was shot mostly with a single camera by journeyman Adam Greenberg, while Stan Winston labored up to the hour to build a mechanical Terminator for the climax. Fantasy II Effects executed the special effects shots, including a stop-motion puppet animated by Peter Kleinow.

Barbara Boyle mused, “Now, everybody in town knew of that Terminator script because it had been all around. Everybody knew that it had a woman as producer who co-wrote the script with some guy with no credits called Jim Cameron and that he came with the package as the director, that’s why it hadn’t been picked up. That’s always dicey.” She added, “Hemdale was scared and why wouldn’t they be? The director didn’t talk much, he drew pictures. The producer’s only credit was as an associate on Smokey Bites the Dust. No one at Orion had confidence in the movie.” Seven months after shooting commenced and The was inserted in its title, Terminator opened October 26, 1984 in the United States at 1,005 theaters.

In its opening weekend, The Terminator was one of six new releases: the action comedy American Dreamer was from Warner Bros., Brian DePalma’s thriller Body Double from Columbia, the drama Firstborn from Paramount, the Paul McCartney starring Give My Regards To Broad Street from Fox and a horror compilation film titled Terror In the Aisles from Universal. To the surprise of most in the film industry, The Terminator debuted #1 at the box office. After adding 100 theaters the following weekend, instead of its attendance dropping, it actually went up. The low budget sci-fi flick would go on to earn $38.3 million in the United States and add $40 million overseas.

On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert hadn’t even seen The Terminator before it opened. The critics bought a ticket just like everyone else and would split over whether the film was any good. Roger Ebert: “In fact, this is a surprising movie. It’s violent, it’s bloody, it’s sadistic, but it’s also well-acted and directed, it is R-rated — don’t go unless you like strong action pictures — but I must say, I did like it.” Gene Siskel: “Yeah, I was rooting for it, I mean, I thought, everyone’s talking about it and I saw it a little bit late and I was not impressed.” Siskel added, “As an action picture, I thought it was not particularly well made, but the love story, you’re right, is kind of nice.”

Emboldened by his success, James Cameron ran into trouble with outspoken science fiction writer Harlan Ellison. As Terminator was headed into production, friends had tipped Ellison off that its script bore a strong resemblance to two episodes Ellison had authored for the 1960s TV series The Outer Limits, “Soldier” and “Demon With A Glass Hand”. Ellison was later contacted by Starlog Magazine and notified that Cameron had boasted of “ripping off a few Outer Limits” to form the basis of Terminator. Hemdale would settle out of court, writing Ellison a check for $75,000 and amending the end credits of all future prints of The Terminator to acknowledge Ellison’s contributions.

Nonetheless, 15 years later Cameron was still proud of what he considered his first film as director. “So I think from the standpoint of the Hollywood mainstream, they got up one morning and opened the trades and went, ‘What the hell is this movie that’s number one this weekend?’ And, by the way, it was number one the next weekend and the weekend after that. It dominated the Thanksgiving weekend against a couple of big pictures, like Dune, for example, and 2010, which were big studio pictures. Actually, 2010 was a big studio picture and Dune was a high-end independent film. But these were megabuck movies and Terminator just steam rolled over them. And it had been done by these nonentities.”

Where’d You Get All of This?
“James Cameron – How To Direct a Terminator” By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver. Starlog Magazine, December 1984

“James Cameron Interview” By Kenneth Turan. US Magazine, August 1991

“The Making of The Terminator: A Retrospective”. 1992

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

Women Who Run the Show: How a Brilliant and Creative New Generation of Women Stormed Hollywood, 1973-2000. By Mollie Gregory. St. Martin’s Press (2002)

“The Terminator: Past Perfect” By Ben Braddock. SFX, September 2003

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
Emerging from his home on the southside of Dublin, Martin Cahill (Brendan Gleeson) is shot in his driveway. Moving back in time, a young Cahill (Eamonn Owens) is chased home by police after nicking groceries for his family. Cahill’s petty robberies land the boy in a Catholic reformatory. 18 years later, he’s released from prison for his latest offense. His wife Frances (Maria Doyle Kennedy) notifies him that the flat where they grew up and still live is being demolished to make way for a new development. Cahill files suit and refuses to budge, even as crews tear the building down around him. He holds out for a replacement flat in Rathmines, which prompts exasperated authorities to ask if he’d rather live closer to his own kind. “No, I’d sooner live closer to me work. All the big houses.”

Cahill supports his family of four as a burglar. When Frances urges him to buy a house, Cahill deposits $80,000 in a bank, which his men Noel (Adrian Dunbar) and Gary (Sean McGinley) promptly steal back for him. To establish an alibi while his gang is at work, Cahill hangs around the police station waiting for Inspector Kenny (Jon Voight). The cop fails to compel Cahill that there’s only one way that things can end for him if he keeps this lifestyle up. Arrested for robbing coins from an arcade, Cahill plots a heist big enough to support his family if he’s convicted, as well as humiliate the police in the process: O’Connor’s Jewelers. “Two million in gold and jewels, waitin’ for us.” So heavily fortified that even the Irish Republican Army walked away from the score, Cahill’s ingenuity results in the biggest heist in the history of Ireland.

While Cahill fathers a child with his sister in law (Angeline Ball) – with his wife’s blessing – he also studies enough Irish penal code to win an acquittal at his highly publicized trial. Even after nailing one of his men (Eanna MacLiam) to a pool table believing he stole, loyalty in his circle remains strong to the man the press calls “The General.” When the IRA demands half of the O’Connor’s loot, Cahill refuses, “There’s nothin’ as low as robbin’ a robber!” Though he manages to stay ahead on the law, twenty-four hour police surveillance takes its toll on Cahill’s health. Stealing priceless works of art proves to be his downfall when Cahill finds a buyer in the Loyalists, sworn enemies of the IRA.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Wanting to make a film about contemporary Ireland, filmmaker John Boorman arrived on the tale of Martin Cahill, the infamous Dublin robber who was shot and killed by the IRA in 1994. Boorman was familiar with the exploits of the General because in 1981, Boorman’s home was burglarized. Among the objects lifted was a faux gold record the director had been presented for the soundtrack to Deliverance. He was notified that Cahill was likely responsible. Boorman recalled, “At that time, he was really just a cat burglar – he wasn’t doing any of these big things, but he was very audacious then, and provocative. The police recognized his modus vivendi, but also he always wanted to be known when he pulled off these things. He wanted the credit for them. It was also a challenge, you know: ‘Well, OK now try and prove it. I did that, now prove it.’”

Crime reporter Paul Williams chronicled the details of Cahill’s life in his 1995 book The General. When Boorman and his producing partner Kiernan Corrigan inquired about the film rights, they discovered that producer P.J. Pettite had already scooped them up. Receptive to working together, contract negotiations dragged on for so many months that Boorman turned his attention to a film version of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. He spent nine months in pre-preproduction before Paramount balked at Boorman’s $85 million budget for Narnia. He was set to direct A Simple Plan for much, much less when a dispute between producer Scott Rudin and Paramount’s financing partner scuttled that film two weeks before shooting was to begin.

Returning to Ireland, Boorman learned that Pettite was ready to sell the rights to The General. Optioning them out of his own pocket, the filmmaker discovered that a rival Cahill project already had a script and was out to financiers. In March 1997, Boorman plunged into a script of his own. With Paul Williams on hand to provide information not covered in his book, Boorman wrote, “The gang members were shadowy enough and I simply invented a group of characters and gave them the names of people in my village. Cahill himself sprung to life on the page. I had heard his voice. I knew his wiles. Frances Cahill and her sister Tina were a more difficult problem. They were not involved in criminal activities … I considered contacting them. Paul Williams advised against it. He said they would refuse contact with anyone outside their world. This was to be a fiction based on fact. The frameworks would be built of incidents that occurred. Beyond that I would rely on the truth of the imagination.”

Finishing a first draft in three weeks, Boorman had a script – titled I Once Had A Life – and a budget ready to present to buyers May 1997 at the Cannes Film Festival. Gabriel Byrne and Gary Oldman were both suggested as potential leads, but Boorman had settled on Irish character actor Brendan Gleeson to play the General. Financiers were even more skittish about the tone of the project. Boorman recalls, “Because of the way Hollywood is, people are led to expect that the heroes are people you can root for, they’re sympathetic. When I was trying to finance the picture, Americans all said two things. One was, ‘Well, put a star in there.’ The other was, ‘Well, does he have to do these brutal things, and why does he have to die?’ They could see it as a kind of Robin Hood thing, but they didn’t want the complexity and they didn’t want the tragedy. I always said when I was making the film that this has to have a tragic dimension. If it’s not seen as a tragedy, it’s not going to work.”

Taking out bank loans in order to get production off the ground, Boorman opted to shoot The General in black & white. Apart from his stylistic preference for the dreamlike nature of black & white film stock, the director felt that an unsaturated look would give audiences safe distance from events that had transpired so recently. A casting director, a production manager and cinematographer Seamus Deasy were each hired. Soon – with a budget of $13 million USD – an eleven week shooting schedule commenced August 1997 in Dublin. In a concession to potential buyers, Boorman had agreed to shoot on color film stock so that a color version of The General could be sold to television. Theatrical prints, however, would be struck on a black and white negative. A distribution deal was at last reached with J&M Entertainment; The General would be released by Warner Bros. in the U.K. and Sony Pictures Classics in the States.

As the film’s May 1998 release grew near, many in Ireland already had an opinion on The General. Boorman recalls, “There was something in this picture to offend everybody. The police weren’t very happy about it being made. We were nervous as to how the criminal community would take to it, or not take to it, and whether they would take action against us. It attacks the church, and the government, and corruption, and hypocrisy. So there was a lot of controversy. Then the press started to dig up victims of crimes, people who felt offended just by the act of us making the film. This was all before it came out. When it came out, all the controversy disappeared. All the bits I was being accused of, like glamorizing crime. Clearly, the film doesn’t do that. It’s a balanced picture of the guy.”

Critics greeted The General warmly upon its release in December 1998. Derek Elley, Variety: “With The General, his first feature in three years, the 65-year-old Boorman has not only come up with a pic that puts many British New Wave filmers half his age to shame in its energy and ’60s esprit, but he has poured all his love of his adopted homeland, Ireland, into a movie that says more about the rebellious Irish psyche than any heap of overtly political pictures.” Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “And he presents this film (photographed by Seamus Deasy) in such seductively beautiful black and white that it has the visual precision of a photo essay. The black and white tones (shot on color stock) are so rich that the ski masks of the burglars wind up looking like velvet.” But despite hope for Academy Awards nominations, The General never expanded beyond 41 screens and was completely ignored by the industry. It grossed only $1.2 million in the States.

Why Should I Care?
John Boorman – who wrote, produced, directed and comes as close to being an “auteur” here as you get – has had a gloriously erratic career, celebrated for Point Blank and Deliverance, mocked by some for Zardoz and Excalibur and generally ignored for everything since the mid-1980s. He makes up for the absence with this film. The General works beautifully in so many different modes: as an independent film, cops versus robbers flick, foreign film, tragedy, social satire. It’s brilliantly acted, impeccably photographed, scored superbly well and acutely written, comically exposing the hypocrisy of various institutions in the state of Ireland and affectionately celebrating the character of the country Boorman has called home for 30 years, in the humor, intelligence and resiliency of its people. So I guess I liked it.

While Boorman does frame the cunning Cahill as something of a folk hero, The General doesn’t escape scrutiny for lining his pockets at the expense of his community. Brendan Gleeson – who became heavily in demand as a supporting player in Hollywood after this film – is so real that he made me forget Gabriel Bryne or Gary Oldman were ever suggested for the role. Boorman’s decision to shoot in black & white – the DVD features both the theatrical version and the colorized one – gives the film a noble, elegant sheen unmatched by most movies from directors far younger and supposedly more vigorous than Boorman. Irish jazz saxophonist Richie Buckley composed the sensual musical score, while Van Morrison’s “So Quiet In Here” and “It Was Once My Life” add considerable panache to an already class production.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“A Personal Account on the Making of The General” By John Boorman. The General – Production Notes. Sony Pictures (1998)

“Safe haven” By Charles Taylor. Salon, 1998 December 17

“John Boorman” By Joshua Klein. A.V. Club, 1999 January 20

Synopsis
Supercop Jack Slater (Arnold Schwarzenegger) responds to a hostage situation involving the axe wielding Ripper (Tom Noonan). Slater saves the city, but loses his son in the standoff, which is all revealed to be the set-up for Jack Slater III, an action spectacle that 11 year old Danny Madigan (Austin O’Brien) sits through for the sixth time rather than go to school. Danny’s friend is a retiring projectionist (Robert Prosky) who invites the kid back to the theater at midnight to check the print of the latest Jack Slater epic. Danny gets through English class by imaging Slater machine gunning his way through Denmark as Hamlet. He promises his widowed mother (Mercedes Ruehl) to get his head out of the clouds, but instead, sneaks out to the theater, where Nick presents him with a magic ticket Houdini gave to him when he was a kid.

During the projection of Jack Slater IV, the ticket transports Danny into the middle of a car chase in the move. Slater is on the trail of a Sicilian drug lord (Anthony Quinn) and his wily henchman Benedict (Charles Dance). Danny tries to convince Slater that they’re in a movie: all the women look like models, everyone’s phone number begins with 555, and at LAPD headquarters, cops are paired with their polar opposites, including a cartoon cat named Whiskers (voiced by Danny DeVito). Danny is introduced to Slater’s sexy daughter Meredith (Bridgette Wilson) but his encyclopedic knowledge of the movie world attracts the attention of Benedict, who confiscates the ticket and moves through the screen into Danny’s world, where bad guys can actually win. Slater follows Danny through the screen to stop him.

Production history
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1990, Zak Penn & Adam Leff were trying to break into the film industry as screenwriters. Their first script was about a giant rat run amok in Manhattan. Next they wrote a noirish thriller about blackmail in the Hamptons, but after that first effort failed to interest an agent or a buyer, Penn recalls, “The smart thing we did was having the foresight not to send out the second one.” For their third effort, Penn & Leff rented dozens of action movies and produced a list of plot conventions, like “What holiday is the film taking place on?” “Do the hero’s wife and child get kidnapped?” “Does he have a Vietnam buddy? (Because your war buddy always betrays you.)” Their script – titled Extremely Violent - was about a fatherless 15-year-old who steps through a crack in a movie screen to enter the cartoonish world of his idol, LAPD cop Arno Slater, who the boy assists with his inexhaustible knowledge of movie clichés.

In October 1991, Penn & Leff and several of their friends took to the phones to get the word out on Extremely Violent. The script landed in the read pile of Chris Moore, an ambitious agent at Intertalent who agreed to represent the screenwriters. The first buyer Moore approached was Carolco, the company behind Total Recall and Terminator 2. Carolco passed. Before word of mouth soured, Moore submitted the script to five other buyers. One was producer Steve Roth, who had a development deal at Columbia Pictures. Speaking to the New York Times about the project in May 1993, Roth recalled, “It had a wonderful first act when this disenfranchised kid is sucked into the movie.” Within 24 hours, Roth passed Extremely Violent to Barry Josephson, Columbia’s vice president of production. After six days of negotiating with Moore, Columbia optioned Penn & Leff’s script for $100,000 against $350,000 if it ever got made into a movie, which was now going by the title The Last Action Hero.

The only actor anyone could imagine playing Arno Slater was Arnold Schwarzenegger. After Twins, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop and Terminator 2, “Arnold” was now the biggest movie star on the planet. The front-runner for his next picture was the comedy Sweet Tooth, in which Schwarzenegger was to play the Tooth Fairy, with Ron Underwood standing by to direct. Other contenders included Crusade (a medieval epic to be directed by Paul Verhoeven), Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip (ultimately starring Nicolas Cage and released as It Could Happen To You), Sgt. Rock for producer Joel Silver and Curious George for Imagine Entertainment. The Last Action Hero found a place at the front of the pack. Schwarzenegger recalled, “Having a kid come into a movie awakened certain fantasies I had as a kid in Austria. What would it be like to sit on John Wayne’s saddle, or have him come with this huge horse right out of the screen? The script had a great concept, but it wasn’t executed professionally.”

Columbia shelled out $1 million for Shane Black – author of Lethal Weapon – to rewrite the script. Black brought in a USC buddy named David Arnott to work with him. Arnott stated, “Usually, someone wants you to rewrite something because it’s bad. This script was a gold mine of an idea. The writers played four variations on a theme. We thought, ‘Wow, there are 400 more possibilities.’” While Black & Arnott got to work in February 1992, Columbia slipped the Penn & Leff draft to director John McTiernan, who didn’t find it very good. Taking a look at the rewrite in July, McTiernan changed his mind. “What drew me is the wacko sense of humor Shane Black & David Arnott brought. Shane had done enough service in the salt mines of action movies to ridicule them in an acid way. The script had so much venom that I loved it. I called Arnold and said: ‘This thing is great. You have to read it.’ Arnold was about to commit to the Tooth Fairy, and he held up.”

McTiernan and Schwarzenegger both expressed reservations about the third act of the Black & Arnott draft. Schwarzenegger recalled, “They had created rhythm and pace and staggering action scenes. What I felt was missing was bonding between this kid and his hero.” The star agreed to commit to Last Action Hero if Columbia could add an emotional layer to the script by putting William Goldman on the payroll. Goldman – one of the most respected script doctors in Hollywood – declined, finding the script too violent for his taste. After a personal plea from Schwarzenegger that he was off the movie unless Goldman intervened, the scribe accepted a fee of $750,000 for four weeks work. Among his contributions was changing the boy’s age from 15 to 11, and making Jack Slater more vulnerable. Or as McTiernan quipped, “Goldman gave Arnold a character to play, and he excised 150 toilet jokes.”

In addition to Black & Arnott revising Goldman’s work. McTiernan turned to Larry Ferguson to provide some additional dialogue, while Carrie Fisher came in to flesh out the character of the boy’s single mother. With a budget of $60 million – which Columbia anticipated would ultimately settle in the $80 million range – Last Action Hero commenced shooting November 1992 in Los Angeles. Schwarzenegger had been lobbied by Joel Silver to produce the film, but Barry Josephson and Columbia chairman Mark Canton took a hands-on role producing Last Action Hero themselves. Canton’s faith in the project was so huge that he wrote NASA a $500,000 check to affix the studio’s logo and Schwarzenegger’s name to an unmanned rocket that was to be fired into space. Canton also settled on June 18, 1992 as a release date. Even after Universal announced it was opening a picture they had called Jurassic Park one week ahead of that date, Columbia boldly stood its ground.

Halfway through a frantic 10-week post-production schedule, Columbia scheduled a test screening of Last Action Hero for May 1. Buoyed by a rough cut he’d seen on the Sony lot, Mark Canton eagerly assembled the studio’s top brass at Pacific’s Lakewood Center Theatre in L.A. McTiernan was on hand and as the lights went down, Schwarzenegger slipped into the back of the theater with his wife Maria Shriver. What the audience experienced was little more than an assembly. Running 2 hours 18 minutes, it had a temporary sound dub, as well as a temp score and unfinished effects shots. McTiernan recalls, “I had great trepidation about showing the movie. It was literally in a state that you don’t even show the studio executives. What we were showing was what the editors show the director ten days after finishing the shoot.”

A source who was there told Premiere Magazine, “The movie laid there like a big fried egg.” Another audience member described Last Action Hero to Entertainment Weekly as ”Willy Wonka with guns.” Schwarzenegger and McTiernan had both suggested to Columbia as early as November 1992 that the release be postponed to give them more time to work on the film, or at the very least, get out of the way of Jurassic Park. Even in the wake of the poor test screening, that idea was nixed. McTiernan recalls, “The studio folks assured us that the movie was more likely to make money this way, that the amount of money that the studio would see would decrease by about $10 million per week of the summer than you cut off. I’m not about to argue with things like that.” Shane Black came in the next day to punch up an action scene in the third act and to clarify some story points, like what Benedict was doing in the real world. Additional shooting was under way just seven weeks before Last Action Hero was due in theaters.

Though Mark Canton had confiscated the test screening cards and refused to release the score, the Hollywood rumor mill quickly filled the vacuum. Word spread that Last Action Hero was a disaster. The rocket launch scheduled for May was postponed, then cancelled. On June 4, gossip columnist Jeffrey Wells wrote an article for the L.A. Times titled “Phantom Screening: You Haven’t Heard the Last of Action Hero.” Wells credited unnamed sources from a screening he alleged took place late May in Pasadena. Columbia denied the screening ever happened and retaliated against the Times by barring all employees from speaking to the newspaper. Entertainment Weekly, Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal – which ran a story titled “Pundits Predict Losing Battle For Last Action Hero” – all weighed in on the film’s misfortunes before its June 18 release.

Critics actually waited to see Last Action Hero before rendering a negative appraisal. Though both Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert pointed thumbs down on At The Movies, Siskel conceded, ” … this is a most ambitious project that works quite well in fits and starts and then drags on for what seemed to me like an extra thirty minutes, wearing out its welcome.” Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times: “Last Action Hero is something of a mess, but a frequently enjoyable one. It tries to be too many things to too many different kinds of audiences, the result being that it will probably confuse, and perhaps even alienate, the hard-core action fans.” Last Action Hero was not the box office calamity many had predicted, pinching out $50 million in the U.S. and hitting $87.2 million overseas. The final budget was $87 million, with marketing costs of $30 million.

According to John McTiernan, Schwarzenegger took the reception of Last Action Hero especially hard because the star had been developing his chops as a real actor by learning to sustain long takes. “He could never have done that before. It made him very vulnerable, and he was very proud of it. I only know about it because I had spent a year trying to figure out what every twitch of an eyebrow meant on his face. And to be rejected so soundly when he had allowed himself to be so naked, it sort of, like, broke his heart, but I suppose that’s too flowery a phrase. It broke him up terribly.” Late that summer, Schwarzenegger was candid about the film’s reception. “First, I learned that in my case, if you don’t give the people a very clear comedy or a very clear action movie, somehow the two don’t mix together. It was clear that Twins was a comedy; it was never promoted as action.”

Speaking to Hollywood Interview in March 2008, McTiernan offered his post-mortem on Last Action Hero. “It’s largely unedited and large portions of it still appear exactly as it was when it left the camera. It wasn’t ready yet. I don’t know that I’ll ever get the chance to go back to it. It’s like having a model with an extra 20 pounds on her. There’s a really neat movie in there. In order to get a sense of fun that was clear to the audience, it needed tightening, and it needed another month in editing to do that.” In January 2005, Zak Penn mused to UGO.com, “The irony about Last Action Hero is that two kids wrote a movie that was making fun of Hollywood movies that was about an audience member going into the movie and destroying it because it was so stupid, then was rewritten and directed by the same people that it was parodying. I hated it when I first saw it because it was so painful, but I think it actually plays better now.”

Opinion
It’s high time that Last Action Hero had its status upgraded from “turkey” to at the very least, “work in progress”. While the film is most definitely flawed, it’s so imaginative at turns that I’d go as far to say this is a must-see for movie fans, particularly lovers of ‘80s action cinema. Its exuberant wit is most evident in Slater’s lieutenant (Frank McRae) whose hysterical exclamations include, “I got the Chamber of Commerce doin’ cartwheels in my cocoa factory!” Danny pulls Slater into a video store at one point, where no one seems to know who “Arnold Schwarzenegger” is because Sylvester Stallone played the Terminator. In another funny bit, Danny scribbles the f-word on a piece of paper, and when Slater is unwilling to say it out loud, the boy notifies him the reason he can’t is because they’re in a PG-13 movie.

Even in its unfinished state, John McTiernan seems to have a much better sense for what’s amusing than most action directors trying their hands at comedy (Steven Spielberg comes to mind). But the longer the straight on action stuff plows ahead without making fun of itself, the more listless Last Action Hero becomes. The movie grinds to a halt once it crosses back into the real world, where it’s just too overcast to jibe with the tom foolery that came before (Ian McKellan stepping down off the screen as Death from The Seventh Seal is quite cool, at least). This is worth a look purely out of appreciation for what the potential of the film medium can be. Michael Kamen composed a terrific, self-aware musical score, while Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick reprise their roles from Basic Instinct and Terminator 2 in cameos that come and go almost too fast to fully register.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Five Writers + One Star = A Hit?” By Aljean Harmetz. The New York Times, May 26, 1993

“How They Built the Bomb” By Nancy Griffin. Premiere Magazine, September 1993

Buyer Beware!
The versions of Last Action Hero available for rental on both Netflix and Greencine subscription services are delivered in the dreaded “Pan and Scan” format, which distorts the frame of the movie to fit television screens. Movie lovers who want to see Last Action Hero in its 2.35 : 1 theatrical aspect ratio will have better luck at their local video store.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis
Upon completion of a ten year prison sentence, the “world’s greatest cat burglar” Eddie “Hudson Hawk” Hawkins (Bruce Willis) emerges from Sing Sing to reunite with his buddy Tommy Five-Tone (Danny Aiello). Hanging out at their old neighborhood bar – which has been turned into an upscale Yuppie dive – Eddie is coerced by two-bit mafia hoods the Mario Brothers (Frank Stallone, Carmine Zozzora) to break into an auction house and steal an antique horse. Easily completing the score with Tommy’s help, the Leonardo Da Vinci sculpture Eddie steals becomes property of a sinister English butler with sword blades up his sleeves. Snooping out the auction house, Eddie meets a mysterious Vatican art expert (Andie MacDowell) and narrowly escapes death from a bomb left by the Mario Brothers.

The next assortment of colorful characters to intercept Eddie are a fiendish CIA goon squad with candy bar code names – Snickers (Don Harvey), Kit Kat (David Caruso), Almond Joy (Lorraine Toussaint) and Butterfinger (Andrew Bryniarski) – led by old school spy George Kaplan (James Coburn). Abducted and taken to Rome, Eddie next meets the Mayflowers (Richard E. Grant, Sandra Bernhard), obnoxious billionaires hoping to obtain pieces of a mechanism Leonardo Da Vinci built 500 years ago with the power to turn lead into gold. The Mayflowers coerce Eddie into stealing the final piece from the Vatican. Double crosses, a crotch sniffing mutt, curare darts, a Da Vinci glider and many explosions ensue.

Production history
Hudson Hawk originated with Robert Kraft, a Harvard grad who in 1979 was knocking around Manhattan as a piano man. Kraft befriended a bartender named Bruce Willis when he heard the 23-year-old blowing a harmonica at one of his gigs and invited him onstage. Kraft was reading about jazz great Coleman Hawkins – The Hawk – as well as Chicago, whose lakeshore winds were sometimes referred to as “the hawk.” After encountering a similar gust while walking west on 86th Street from Central Park, Kraft came up with a tune. “I didn’t know if it was going to be a song or a bassline. Whatever. But somewhere in that period, Bruce had the idea that there was a character, there was maybe a story. And he said at one point – either that afternoon or many weeks later or something – ‘Someday I’m gonna make a movie called The Hudson Hawk.’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, sure. I mean, you’re working in a bar, I’m trying to get a record deal, and you’re already making this movie.’”

Circumstances changed six years later when Willis went from obscurity to celebrity starring in the screwball detective series Moonlighting. When he wasn’t selling wine coolers for Seagram’s, Willis still had Hudson Hawk on the brain. “It kind of started out as a more of a serious action movie. One of the first things we said was that it was like James Bond before he became James Bond. What was James Bond like when he was 20 years old? Sean Connery, like, what was that guy doing? Like if he was stealing, he was a good thief. We got about that far.” Willis approached Moonlighting writer-producers Ron Osborn & Jeff Reno to pen a script. Reno recalls, “He had a character in mind that he wanted to do, this ex-con who had just gotten out of jail and got caught up in some kind of international situation. Ron and I came up with an idea, ran it by him, and he loved it, and everything was good, so we spent a lot of time then with him just kind of developing this.”

With a first look deal at TriStar Pictures, Willis also took his pet project to Joel Silver, who ultimately brokered a commitment from the star to do Die Hard 2 first in exchange for Silver producing Hudson Hawk. Steven E. de Souza had written the latest draft of the script and to direct, Silver brought in Michael Lehmann, director of two dark cult comedies, Heathers and Meet the Applegates. Lehmann recalled, “Steve de Souza wrote a draft that was very funny, very lively and very much a kind of fun action-adventure comedy. But I felt it was a little too close to home and that it was a little too much like other movies, and people had seen enough of this stuff without being reflective on it, and it would be fun to take the genre and turn it on its head.” Daniel Waters – author of Heathers – was hired to rewrite the script. Among his many contributions was the movie’s best idea: Willis and Danny Aiello belting out tunes in an effort to subvert burglar alarms.

Hudson Hawk commenced shooting July 1990 in New York on a budget of $42 million. As production moved to Italy, then Hungary, then England, that amount climbed. Interviewed by the New York Times in May 1991, co-producer Michael Dryhurst explained, “Hudson Hawk was conceived on a very broad canvas. The moment you put people into airplanes and hotel rooms, you’re into money. We were supporting a cast and crew of 100 people in Italy for 12 weeks and Budapest for 4 weeks. You’re paying for hotel rooms, location, food and per diems. And support costs in Europe are much higher.” Daniel Waters bluntly assessed some of the overruns: “The Italians were great people, but everybody has wine at lunch, and lunch never seems to end. American crews will work 48 hours straight if you pay ‘em enough. You can pay an Italian crew all the lire in the world and they won’t work past 10. Their lives are too important. We’d be saying, ‘Wait a minute, where are you going?’”

In his memoir You’re Only As Good As Your Next One, TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy diagnosed the real problems with Hudson Hawk: “(1) the star is the co-writer, (2) the producer is more powerful than the director, and (3) the director had never done a big film. Within the first three weeks of shooting, the film was over budget, so I flew to Rome to see what could be done. As soon as I saw the first dailies, I was certain Hudson Hawk would be, to use the popular Hollywood euphemism, ‘a total fucking disaster.’ While there was no way to stop the train wreck, I was hoping there was a way to minimize the damage. The performances were uneven. While it is admittedly hard to tell in dailies what is funny and what isn’t, everyone in the film seemed to be ‘acting funny’ but no one was funny.”

In a bid to speed up filming after six weeks, Silver replaced Dutch director of photography Jost Vacano with Dante Spinotti, an Italian. Maruschka Detmers – who had been cast as the female lead – was also let go after back pain prohibited her availability; Andie MacDowell was flown to Rome to take her place. Due to a schedule that was constantly shifting, MacDowell waited three weeks to get in front of a camera. Dryhurst rationalized the impending wreck to the New York Times: “One of the problems we had was the script, which had a number of changes as we went along. That’s always a recipe for difficulty, because you can’t plan. The script was being adjusted right up until the middle of November, when we were within three weeks of completion. It’s basically extra cost, because the script wasn’t locked in.”

While Joel Silver attempted damage control by claiming that Hudson Hawk barely exceeded its scheduled 81-day shoot, the New York Times reported that the show went on for 106 days. Daniel Waters described watching dailies with Silver and hearing the larger than life producer change his assessment of what they had on a day-to-day basis: “It’s like a Hope-Crosby picture,” “It’s like The Pink Panther,” “It’s a 90’s James Bond movie.” Pitching the movie to the readers of Entertainment Weekly on the cusp of its release in May 1991, Bruce Willis crowed, “This film is anything goes, in the classic comedy vein of It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World. It’s Cary Grant meets James Bond meets Our Man Flint meets The Flintstones meets Dorothy Lamour meets Miles Davis. Did we leave anything out? The film also has a jazzy cool feel to it, as opposed to rock & roll or country & western or polka.”

Whatever the hell the end product was, critics drop kicked it out of the park. Daily Variety: “Ever wondered what a Three Stooges short would look like with a $40 million budget? Then meet Hudson Hawk, a relentlessly annoying clay duck that crash-lands in a sea of wretched excess and silliness. Those willing to check their brains at the door may find sparse amusement in pic’s frenzied pace.” Julie Salamon, the Wall Street Journal: “Despite all of its failures of wit, sense, and pace, the film does most effectively flaunt the millions spent on it. The inane action takes place in splendiferous settings.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “This may be the only would-be blockbuster that’s a sprawling, dissociated mess on purpose. It’s a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.”

While some in the film industry conjectured that Hudson Hawk cost as much as $70 million, sources close to the production told the New York Times that the bill was closer to $51 million. At any rate, the movie did a spectacular belly flop at the box office, grossing only $17.2 million in the U.S. Hudson Hawk seemed to play better on the small screen; when released on VHS, it even developed somewhat of a cult following. Recording a commentary track for the 1999 DVD release, Michael Lehmann stated, “Now the thing is, when this movie came out, a lot of people I think were expecting a solid, hard action movie along the lines of Die Hard or Die Hard 2. And we were attempting to provide a little bit of action and a lot of the kind of pyrotechnics you see in those movies, but this is, was and is meant to be a comedy.”

Talking Hudson Hawk with Robert Kraft in November 2005, Willis mused, “The thing that I think should be said about the film is that it was special to us for a lot of different reasons, but it was vilified I think more than any film of its time, of its decade. They had been trying to tear down, you know, come after me I guess since the first Die Hard. And, you know, the films were successful anyway, but they had started to review this film long before anybody saw any of it. So it was just my time to catch a beatin’ in the press. But the film is in profit now and it’s, you know, paid for itself and it’s makin’ money … I still laugh at it, I think it’s funny. There’s stuff in the movie that makes me laugh. I mean, it’s just so silly. And that was the whole point. We were just trying to make people laugh. It might have been a little too hip for the room at the time.”

Opinion
With so much going so wrong in so many departments – the story is MIA, staging clunky and visual palette downright shitty – finding amusement in Hudson Hawk comes down to how you feel about the jokes and about Bruce Willis. While the irreverence of Daniel Waters is reduced to a trickle in the big action flicks he normally rewrites (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Batman Returns, Demolition Man), in Hudson Hawk, Waters’ acidic pop culture wit gets sprayed around with a high-pressure hose. Some of it is quite special: a CIA master of disguise and mime whose sentiments magically appear on cards he hands out probably takes the cake. The banter and movie references fly back and forth at the speed only a video store clerk can process and demands the movie be seen two or three times to absorb it all.

Hudson Hawk becomes too painful to endure more than once in a lifetime due to its star, who struts his way through empty scenes so assured of his own cuteness that instead of enjoying the movie, you want to take it out back and smack the grin off its face. Hudson Hawk isn’t a character, he’s Bruce Willis celebrating Bruce Willis, and that cocktail plows the movie head on into Stoker Ace and Rhinestone. Willis at least appears comfortable letting better actors try to help him. Andie MacDowell is in on the joke and turns in a funny performance, while James Coburn is as sharp as ever. But painting on such a big canvas only shows how impaired Michael Lehmann – who went on to direct My Giant and Because I Said So – is when it comes to anything involving ingenuity or wit.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
The Story of Hudson Hawk. Bruce Willis-Robert Kraft interview. November 2005

Hudson Hawk. DVD audio commentary track featuring Michael Lehmann. Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, March 1999.

“Why The Hudson Hawk Budget Soared So High“. By James Greenberg. The New York Times, May 26, 1991

“Bruce Willis On the Level“. Entertainment Weekly, May 24, 1991

Synopsis
In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Harvard College graduating class of the year 1870 – which includes James Averill (Kris Kristofferson) – assembles in a massive auditorium to hear a speech by their class orator, Billy Irvine (John Hurt). Irvine rejects the high-minded ideals mapped out by the reverend doctor of the university (Joseph Cotten), and advises his classmates to merely rise no further than each of them is capable. Twenty years later, Averill arrives by train in Casper, Wyoming after transporting an immigrant woman to St. Louis to be hanged. Averill is now sheriff of Johnson County, mountainous and pristine territory in which more settlers – mostly Polish, German or Ukrainian immigrants – are pouring into every day.

Averill can’t help but notice Casper is teeming with mercenaries. By the time he drops by a saloon operated by his friend John Bridges (Jeff Bridges) in the town of Sweetwater, Averill has learned that the local cattle association, led by the unscrupulous Frank Canton (Sam Waterston) has drawn up the names of 125 settlers suspected of cattle rustling or troublemaking and put them on a death list. The most efficient of the assassins is Nathan Champion (Christopher Walken), who roams Johnson County hunting down and executing immigrants who’ve stolen livestock. Averill returns to his pastoral home and to his girlfriend Ella Watson (Isabelle Hupert), who manages a bordello and accepts stolen cattle as payment.

After adjourning to the town reception hall – Heaven’s Gate, which hosts music and roller skating – Averill asks Ella to leave the county, not wanting to tell her that her name is on the death list. Champion – who in addition to being one of Ella’s customers is in love with her – offers to take her away under the protection of his men (Geoffrey Lewis and Mickey Rourke). She rejects both offers and chooses to stay. Three of the killers make their way to Ella’s bordello and rape her. Averill arrives in time to dispatch the men with his pistols, while Champion rides to Canton’s camp and kills the mercenary who planned the raid. After debating the matter, the town chooses to stand their ground and repel the invasion.

Production history
In 1971, a filmmaker no one in Hollywood had heard of – putting his pictorial eye and camera skills to use in New York directing commercials for Kodak, Pepsi and United Airlines – wrote a screenplay titled The Johnson County War. The screenwriter was Michael Cimino and his script was loosely based on a range war that took place in 1892 between cattle ranchers and settlers, many of them immigrants, who flowed into Johnson County, Wyoming after passage of the Homestead Act. Producer David Foster set the project up at Fox, only to have production head Jere Henshaw put it into turnaround in 1972. Henshaw later told American Film, “It looked to us like a pretty downbeat story at a pretty heavy cost.”

An idiosyncratic caper Cimino wrote titled Thunderbolt and Lightfoot fared much better, with Clint Eastwood enjoying the script enough to gamble on the first time director. Co-starring Jeff Bridges, the picture was very favorably reviewed and a modest box office hit in the summer of 1974. Four years later, Cimino was riding a tidal wave of industry buzz for his second film, an ode to brotherhood and sacrifice set against the Vietnam War titled The Deer Hunter. Among those in Hollywood who were high on the movie was David Field, a production executive for United Artists. “We saw an advanced print of Deer Hunter – I don’t know how many weeks before it was released – and we were blown away.”

Cimino’s agent submitted a package for his client’s next film – The Johnson County War – to United Artists. UA’s head of production Danton Rissner read the script in August 1978 and was cool to it. His story department concluded: “If it were not for Cimino, I would pass.” What distinguished the script from the typical western was its assertion that the U.S. government had sanctioned the range war in what amounted to ethnic genocide. Rissner remained dubious that theater exhibitors would welcome such liberal revisionism of a fading genre. But by September, UA agreed to a pay-or-play package of $1.7 million for The Johnson County War: $250,000 for Cimino’s script, $500,000 for Cimino’s directing services, $100,000 for Cimino’s producing partner Joann Carelli and $850,000 for Kris Kristofferson to star, all to be paid whether the movie was made or not.

Cimino continued to tune his script. He inserted a prologue introducing the characters of Averill and Billy Irvine at Harvard twenty years before the events in Wyoming, and added a brief epilogue, taking place 10 years after the range war. Averill is moored in a yacht off the coast of Rhode Island, still haunted by the events of the film. The script concluded with the quote, “What one loves about life are the things that fade.” Cimino had also arrived on a new title, and in April 1979, one week after The Deer Hunter won five Academy Awards including Best Picture, principal photography began on Heaven’s Gate. Glacier National Park at Kalispell, Montana had been selected as a filming location and a release date of December 1979 set. The accelerated schedule dictated a budget of $11.5 million, $15 million at most.

Recalling Cimino’s exacting work methods, cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond stated, “It was very unusual the way he worked. He would actually paint by selecting extras and put them in the right place in a set. It was like a painter would paint them. He painted by picking up people and put them into the right place. Then, once we started to shoot, you know, sometimes we would go for three takes, sometimes you would go for ten takes. And many, many times you had to go for forty takes.” In the first six days of shooting, Cimino had fallen five days behind schedule, with roughly 90 seconds of usable footage in the can. After twelve days, Heaven’s Gate was ten days behind schedule.

In his book Final Cut, former United Artists head of worldwide production Steven Bach recounted the expenses that accumulated: “It was true, as later press reports informed, that Michael Cimino was building sets and rebuilding them, hiring 100 extras, then 200, then 500, adding horses and wagons and hats, shoes, gloves, dresses, top hats, bridles, boots, roller skates, babushkas, aprons, dusters, buckboards, gun belts, rifles, bullets, cows, calves, bulls, trees, thousands of tons of dirt, hundreds of miles of exposed film, and all this mattered economically. But what mattered most was that what he was adding was takes and retakes and retakes of the retakes. And retakes of those. Michael Cimino was taking – and retaking – time. Getting it right.”

To get it right, Cimino was shooting many, many, many takes of shots and printing nearly every one, burning through $200,000 a day and $1 million per week. Actor Brad Dourif recalled, “I’m not used to seeing 57 takes. I’m really not. I’m not used to doing a minimum of 32 takes. He wanted to try a bunch of different ways. It was like workshopping on film, you know, we did the happy version, we did the crying version, we did the furious version. I mean, each scene was taken to these degrees, beyond which you weren’t going for the ultimate take, you were going for a lot of choices.” At its current rate, Heaven’s Gate was on track to exceed its budget by 500% and end up costing United Artists a then stellar sum of $35 million.

United Artists got its first peek at Heaven’s Gate on June 6, 1979 when Bach and David Field made the trip to Kalispell to view about thirty minutes of the film. Bach recalled, “The footage was ravishing. There was nothing that anybody on Earth could say to criticize the footage, so we knew it wasn’t the case of a production that was falling apart. We never thought it was a case of Michael sitting in his trailer eating chocolates and watching television when he should have been out on the set. That was never the issue. The issue was we didn’t agree that you could take this much time to achieve perfection. And if you continue to take this much time to achieve perfection, you’re going to break our bank and there’s not going to be any company to release the picture.”

Jeff Bridges recalls, “From somebody on the outside it would look like it was almost too much, but it never appeared that way to me. It was like, this guy really cares.” But with John Hurt due to start work on The Elephant Man in October and the mountain roads in Montana closing for winter, Cimino heeded United Artists’ pleas to pick up the pace. UA pushed the release of the film back a year, settling on Christmas 1980. The studio planned exclusive reserved seating 70mm print engagements in New York, Los Angeles and Toronto for November 1980. Heaven’s Gate would then expand to additional cities in December before a general release in February 1981 to benefit from the many Academy Award nominations the film industry would bestow on the picture.

On June 26, 1980, after eight months of editing, Cimino was ready to show United Artists the film. Studio executives assembled in Los Angeles for a private screening. Bach recalls, “I thought Michael looked exhausted, truly, truly depleted. I remember asking, ‘How close are we to a final cut?’ And he said, ‘It’s a little long. I can lose maybe fifteen minutes.’ And we sat down and we watched the movie. And the movie that we saw was 5 hours and 25 minutes long. The battle sequence alone was as long as most feature motion pictures. I was angry, I was angry, I was angry. The company had been put through turmoil … And the internal hope that had kept us all going for those two or three years at this process now – which was that it was going to be a masterpiece, and that would justify everything that we had gone through – was suddenly gone.”

By mid-October, Cimino had Heaven’s Gate down to 3 hours and 39 minutes. No one at United Artists bothered to see his cut until its public unveiling in New York one month later. Jeff Bridges recalls “I can remember going to the first screening, the premiere in New York, and we were all very excited and Mike was quite anxious because I don’t know if he even saw the film before it was shown, you know, it was wet right out of the soup. He had just put it together and just barely made the deadline to get it all together. And the movie comes on. I remember my first impression of seeing it was, you know, kind of the splendor of it was wonderful, but the rhythm of it was so unusual and so kind of slow and not what you expected to see that the audience certainly was frustrated. And you hear that [smattering of applause] terrible applause at the end. Ugh, it was terrible.”

The next morning, Cimino, Joann Carelli and Bridges were on their way to Toronto for the next screening when they picked up a copy of the New York Times. The opening paragraph of Vincent Canby’s review read: “Heaven’s Gate … fails so completely you might suspect Mr. Cimino sold his soul to the Devil to obtain the success of The Deer Hunter, and the Devil has just come around to collect.” Brad Dourif recalls, “Well I read Vincent Canby’s – I don’t read reviews, that’s the first thing – I read Vincent Canby’s because it actually had the line in it, ‘like being given a four-hour tour of your own living room’ and I just wanted to see how bad a review could be and it was really scathing. Angry review. I mean, basically, everything that people hated about the direction of film was piled onto Michael.”

Interviewed by Jean-Luc Godard in 1982, film critic Pauline Kael defended the stoning Heaven’s Gate took in the mainstream media. “I did think Canby’s review was rather brutal. On the other hand, the fact is the picture does not have one good scene, or one good character, and it goes on for several hours. I think it’s very interesting visually, but there is nothing that can carry it with an audience. If the company had thought that the critics were wrong, they would have put in millions in advertising and they might have recouped on the picture. A lot of terrible movies get by if the companies believe in them … But they were dismayed because they could see the justice of what the reviewers were saying, that there was nothing there.”

Steven Bach disagreed. “I think the critics were reviewing the production history. They were rewriting their reviews for The Deer Hunter, which they thought they had over praised. They were getting back at what they perceived as hostile treatment from the director. I think they were slapping United Artists for having allowed this to happen. But I never felt that there was a real serious attempt to see what is this picture trying to do and does it succeed on its own terms. It didn’t succeed on the terms they wanted to lay on the picture and that was what they were writing about, was their terms for the picture, not the picture’s terms.” After playing for a week in New York, Cimino took out ads in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter asking UA to withdraw the film from release so he could rework his 219-minute cut.

A 149-minute version of Heaven’s Gate opened in 810 theaters nationwide in April 1981. But audiences ignored it completely, buying $3.4 million in tickets in the U.S. Tom Brokaw introduced a segment on Heaven’s Gate for the NBC Nightly News by proclaiming “a $40 million film from an Oscar winning director may be the biggest bomb in Hollywood history.” The loss to United Artists was tabulated at $44 million. Within a month, Transamerica decided it was done with the movie business and sold UA to rival studio MGM. Michael Cimino and Kris Kristofferson were at the Cannes Film Festival in May when the news broke. UA’s new president Norbert Auerbach maintained that while Heaven’s Gate had not been directly responsible for the collapse of the prestigious 62-year-old studio, it hadn’t saved it either.

Naturally, the first audiences to appreciate Heaven’s Gate were French. In December 1982, celebrated film magazine Cahiers du Cinema sponsored a screening of Cimino’s 219-minute cut in Paris. Word reached Los Angeles, where Jerry Harvey and Fred Grossbud of pay cable’s Z Channel persuaded MGM/UA to let them air the long version of Heaven’s Gate starting on Christmas Eve. It marked the first time a wide audience had been permitted to see the film at its original length. In the Los Angeles Times – whose film critic Kevin Thomas had been one of the few to submit a rave review of Heaven’s Gate while it was in theaters – Charles Champlin wrote, “Not a damn thing was gained economically by forcing Cimino to eviscerate his work, but audiences were denied the chance to see fully whatever it was that Cimino had in mind.”

In August 1983, England’s National Film Theatre booked the long version of Heaven’s Gate for six performances, with Cimino on hand to introduce the film. Derek Malcolm wrote in The Guardian: “The full version, I can assure you, is quite an experience – an extraordinary attempt to make a major American movie at a time when only the minors held sway.” The long version was released theatrically at the Plaza 2 theater in London, but its box office was so negligible that MGM/UA nixed plans to re-release the uncut Heaven’s Gate elsewhere. Michael Cimino – who has not directed since 1996 and refuses requests to discuss his infamous magnum opus – had this to say in 1990: “I would respond to Heaven’s Gate the same way Jack Kennedy responded to the Bay of Pigs. I’d take full responsibility and all other questions are answered by the film itself.”

Opinion
Some academics still accuse Heaven’s Gate of vaporizing the Golden Age of the director and putting the controls of Hollywood back in the hands of the studio, a process that was under way long before Michael Cimino ever got to Montana. What ultimately matters here is what’s on screen and what isn’t. On that basis, it’s time to call Heaven’s Gate what it is: the last great American film of the 1970s. It has nothing to live up anymore – making a fresh eyed and open minded reappraisal a win-win situation – but the movie is really that good. For all its excesses, what Cimino does is capture a lyrical beauty virtually missing in filmmaking since the days of David Lean. Heaven’s Gate is all at once one of pictorial brilliance, almost unparalleled scope, terrific performances and haunting grandeur.

Micahel Cimino’s screenplay not only visualizes the Old West in a way I imagine it really was – crowded and sparse, violent and peaceful, ugly and beautiful – but features dialogue of surprising depth and pathos. The cast featured no stars, but Kristofferson, Walken, Huppert, Jeff Bridges, John Hurt, Brad Dourif, Sam Waterston, Mickey Rourke, Richard Masur all do outstanding work. Few films recreate a bygone era with the detail of this one, assisted by majestic cinematography by Vilmos Zsigmond and a heartbreakingly beautiful musical score by David Mansfield. Unlike so many cinematic turkeys of the last 30 years that truly qualify for “worst ever” status, for all the money spent on Heaven’s Gate, there’s never any question of where those bucks ended up.

@ Joe Valdez

Sources
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate by Steven Bach (1985)
Final Cut: The Making and Unmaking of Heaven’s Gate (2004), directed by Michael Epstein

Synopsis
When his exhaustive knowledge of Elvis Presley fails to convince a woman he meets a bar to watch a triple feature of Sonny Chiba movies with him, Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) goes to the theater alone. There he meets Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) when she spills popcorn on him. Taking a seat next to Clarence, Alabama not only makes it through all three kung-fu movies, but actually seems impressed when Clarence takes her to his workplace, a comic book store. They go to bed, after which Alabama confides that Clarence’s boss hired her to keep him company for his birthday. Conflicted because she’s fallen in love with Clarence, Alabama quits her new job as a call girl and elopes with him.

Clarence goes to see Alabama’s vile pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman) to settle his wife’s accounts. During the melee that ensues, Clarence grabs a suitcase filled with cocaine instead of Alabama’s clothes. He visits his estranged father Cliff (Dennis Hopper) to find out if Detroit PD is on to him. Cliff notifies his son that Drexl was an associate of gangsters and the cops assume his death was gang related. Clarence and Alabama depart for their honeymoon, but Cliff receives a visit from Vincent Coccotti (Christopher Walken), the rightful owner of the narcotics. Rather than be forced to give up his son, Cliff uses his knowledge of Sicilian history to infuriate the gangster into shooting him.

Clarence and Alabama arrive in L.A., where Clarence’s friend Dick Ritchie (Michael Rapaport) – an aspiring actor up for a role on T.J. Hooker – lives with his stoner roommate Floyd (Brad Pitt). Clarence hopes his buddy can find a buyer for the cocaine. The only possibility Dick can think of Elliot (Bronson Pinchot), a guy he knows from his acting class who’s an assistant to a big movie producer named Lee Donowitz (Saul Rubinek). They set up a meet, but Coccotti’s enforcer Virgil (James Gandolfini) intercepts Alabama at her motel room. Only one of them makes it out alive.

Meanwhile, Elliott is pulled over for speeding and is caught wearing a bag of Clarence’s cocaine all over him. Two narcs (Tom Sizemore and Chris Penn) pressure Elliott into wearing a wire for the business meet. Arriving at the Beverly Ambassador Hotel, Clarence – who’s been receiving guidance from the spirit of Elvis Presley (Val Kilmer) – makes a good impression on the movie producer. But before he can complete the drug deal, the LAPD and the Sicilians and the producer’s own gunmen find themselves in a Mexican standoff.

Production history
In 1985, an employee at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach named Roger Avary started a screenplay called The Open Road. The script was about an uptight businessman who encounters a wild hitchhiker and travels with her to a bizarre town in the Midwest. Avary ran out of gas after eighty pages. Moving on to other projects, he gave his buddy and fellow video store clerk Quentin Tarantino the okay to rewrite The Open Road using his own sensibility. Tarantino came back with close to five hundred handwritten pages.

Avary helped Tarantino hone the epic manuscript to a presentable length. The result was True Romance, the first screenplay Tarantino ever finished. Over the next five years, his manager Cathryn James beat down doors trying to sell it. Meanwhile, Tarantino used his magnum opus as the genesis for his second script, Natural Born Killers. Buyers weren’t interested in that title either. Many were put off by its profanity, while others felt that Tarantino’s writing style – which featured fractured timelines and lengthy monologues – was the sign of an amateur.

Craig Hamann, a friend of Tarantino’s and co-writer of a home movie the pair were trying to finish called My Best Friend’s Birthday recalled, “Cathryn James took calls all around from people in the industry who were just livid at that script. They absolutely didn’t like it at all. One person who’s very prominent in the film industry sent the script back to Cathryn and said, ‘I will seriously consider reading anything else that you send me again if this is the quality.’ I mean that kind of hostile thing was going on and I’m not sure even Quentin understands that completely, but then after Reservoir Dogs everybody was, ‘Oh we really like this film.’”

Finally, a B-movie company called CineTel optioned True Romance. Their plan was to have William Lustig of Maniac Cop 2 fame direct. The company gave Tarantino his first professional writing job, doing dialogue polishes on scripts they had in development. CineTel executive Catalaine Knell took Tarantino under her wing. Knell had been an assistant to director Tony Scott, and introduced her protégé to her former boss. Tarantino gave Scott a copy of True Romance and a script he’d just finished titled Reservoir Dogs.

Scott wrapped The Last Boy Scout in June 1991 and was on a flight to Italy when he read the scripts. When he landed, Scott called Tarantino and said that he wanted both of them. Tarantino wanted to direct Reservoir Dogs, but told Scott he was welcome to True Romance. Scott recalled, “I’m not a good reader but I read it in one sitting and I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was very fresh and very different and totally character based. My love of the piece was based on how much I fell in love with the characters, so therefore it’s an actor-based movie and it’s the first time I’ve had one of those. After Top Gun, the movies that I was offered were, for better or worse, what you’d call hardware action movies.”

Scott commenced shooting in June 1992 in Los Angeles on a $12.5 million budget. Other than structuring the action in chronological order, the only change Scott made to the script was the ending. Tarantino had Clarence perishing in the climactic gun battle, but Scott had become so enamored by the couple that he brought in Roger Avary to write a happier ending. Tarantino recalled, “At first, I was really distraught about it. In fact, I was talking about taking my name off the film. I had a lot of faith in Tony Scott – I’m a big fan of his work, especially Revenge – but where I was coming from, you just couldn’t change my ending, you know?”

Released September 1993 in the U.S., even critics who liked the movie seemed embarrassed to admit it. On Siskel & Ebert, Roger Ebert stated, “True Romance is like a case study of the inflamed fantasies of violent, stupid, amoral, gun loving, sexually obsessed teenagers, and on that level – which is an admittedly low level – it is well made and very entertaining. It tells the kind of story that a lot of teenage boys think they would like to live through, before they grow up and begin to develop average intelligence, of course.” Gene Siskel simply retorted, “It’s kind of sloppy and dumb and not fun.”

True Romance was ignored at the box office, where it grossed only $12.2 million in the U.S. Interviewed in 2003, Scott commented, “Unfortunately, the film wasn’t successful. It bombed, really. I think maybe it’s too violent. But if you ask me to make a choice and state which of my films is my favorite, I think I would say True Romance, because it invaded my life so easily, because it was so well written. The characters were so well drawn. Every day, I went to the set and had an amazing smorgasbord of the best actors around.”

Opinion
When viewed as the sum of its parts, True Romance is a classic because it has scenes that rank among the most spectacular in film history when it comes to the written word. By far the most memorable is the showdown between Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper; the 11-minute scene features two of the greatest actors of their generation chewing up two of the most enthralling monologues a writer has ever crafted. The muscular confrontation between Patricia Arquette and James Gandolfini is a blue ribbon award winner as well. Gary Oldman in bananas as the dreadlocked white pimp who believes he’s black. The same goes for Brad Pitt, who is the epitome of the completely useless roommate.

The conceit of a pop culture geek taking down pimps and cold blooded killers may be the stuff of science fiction, and it’s hard to believe that if Tarantino had chosen to direct this, Christian Slater would have appeared on his list to play Clarence (Val Kilmer desperately wanted the role.) Some of the casting and almost all of the music is completely generic Hollywood, while Tony Scott – director of Beverly Hills Cop II and Days of Thunder – gets mixed results filming a down and dirty exploitation flick like it was a cologne commercial. But for the most part, the cast is one of the finest ever assembled, while Scott remains true to the spirit of Tarantino’s text, which is both uncompromising in its brutality and invigorating in its repartee.

Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide writes, “In the end, Romance feels like an odd piece. The script seems unusually thin and sketchy for something from Quentin Tarantino, but since it was his first finished work, that makes sense; he clearly hadn’t quite found his voice just yet. Had Tarantino taken on the project himself and made it as a low-budget indie production, it could have worked, but unfortunately, it went the other way and became a glossy piece of Hollywood fluff. Romance enjoys a few decent moments, but overall it falls short of its goals.”

David Medsker at Bullz-Eye.com writes, “True Romance was a pioneer action movie in many respects, in that it placed an equal influence on the dialogue and characters as it did on the action. It may not have reinvented the genre entirely, but the action movies that soon followed (The Professional, Con Air, Grosse Pointe Blank) were far more enjoyable than their predecessors (again, The Last Boy Scout). Sonny Chiba and Elvis would certainly approve.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Max (Jamie Foxx) starts his shift driving a cab in Los Angeles. He picks up a fare named Annie (Jada Pinkett Smith) headed to the Federal Courthouse. Ignoring her instruction to take side streets, Max bets he can get her there faster on the Harbor Freeway. He tells Annie that the cab is only a fill-in job and that he plans to start his own limo company. She’s on the eve of prosecuting a big federal case. To ease her nerves, he gives Annie a tropical postcard he uses to relax. Touched by the gesture, she gives Max her card.

His next fare is Vincent (Tom Cruise) a non-descript man with graying hair and a gray suit. Headed to Pico Union, Vincent declares that when he’s in L.A. he can’t wait to leave; it’s too sprawling and no one knows each other. He claims to be in town to close a real estate deal, and offers Max $700 to drive him around for the night. But on their first stop, a body plunges through a window and lands on the cab. A terrified Max asks Vincent if he killed the man. “No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him.”

Vincent gives Max no choice but to drive him to their next four stops as planned. “You drive a cab. I make my rounds. You might make it through the night, come out $700 ahead.” An attorney in West Hollywood, a jazz musician in Leimert Park and a gangster in a Koreatown disco are Vincent’s next targets, as contracted by a Mexican drug kingpin (Javier Bardem). To keep him focused on their job, the hit man tries to break the cabbie out of his passive shell, which is what Max does when he discovers their last stop is Annie.

Production history
Stuart Beattie was 17 years old and living in Sydney when he took a cab home from the airport. It occurred to Beattie that he could be “some homicidal maniac sitting back here,” yet the driver entered into a long conversation with him, trusting his passenger implicitly. Beattie drafted this idea into a two-page treatment, which – while enrolled at Oregon State University – became the first screenplay he ever wrote. Titled The Last Domino, Beattie put the script on the shelf, revising and rewriting it every few years.

Waiting tables, Beattie ran into a friend named Julie Richardson, who he’d met in a UCLA Screenwriting Extension course. Richardson was now a producer looking for ideas for thrillers. Beattie pitched her The Last Domino, and she liked it. Her boss Frank Darabont did as well and set it up at HBO. After the writer turned in a draft, HBO passed. Beattie begged his agent to set up a meeting at DreamWorks, where an executive named Marc Haimes read the script over the weekend. Within a week, the studio made a purchase on Beattie’s screenplay.

Over the next three years, DreamWorks tried to kick start Collateral. Mimi Leder was attached to direct, then Janusz Kaminski. It wasn’t until Russell Crowe became interested in playing the hit man that the project started generating heat. Crowe brought in Michael Mann to direct, but by June 2003, the star had grown weary and dropped out. Mann immediately went to Tom Cruise about taking over the lead, with Adam Sandler to play the cabbie. Negotiations with Sandler didn’t pan out, and Jamie Foxx took the part instead.

Frank Darabont and Beattie had taken turns polishing each other’s script revisions, which were set in New York City. But Mann had always wanted to shoot a movie that took place in a compressed period of time in nocturnal Los Angeles and relocated the action there. Realizing that 35mm film wouldn’t pick up details visible to the naked eye at night, Mann conceived Collateral as a digital project, shooting half the film on HD video, a format that also lent the character drama greater intimacy.

Opinion
The reaction from some critics and audiences was that the film’s third act degenerated into a somewhat generic thriller. While it’s true that the psychological and verbal sparring between Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx is more exciting than their physical face off, Collateral is one of the decade’s great film noirs, a poised and taut unraveling of ten hours almost entirely at night. Just as impressive is the guided tour of Los Angeles that Michael Mann takes us on, and how the city itself emerges as a major character.

Confined to a taxi, the film is filled with claustrophobic dread, a certain gallows humor and finely tuned dialogue between its characters, without ever becoming repetitive. Instead of cliché, there are reversals and surprises. Each actor in the cast shares moments of real chemistry, even in the case of the hit man and his jazz club mark (Barry Shabaka Henley.) Foxx earned a well deserved Academy Award nomination (his first) as the stressed cabbie, while Javier Bardem’s menacing appearance is worth a rental alone.

Sara Michelle Fetters at Moviefreak.com writes, “What’s special about Michael Mann’s new crime thriller Collateral isn’t that it treads new ground or goes in new directions … No, this is a movie about the here and now, about the actions required when extreme circumstances knock, and this compression of time and space gives Collateral an epic, almost nausea-inducing, urgency most contemporary thrillers lack.”

“This was a pretty good film that could have been great, if it had not been as interested in the thriller elements. The best scenes demonstrated Michael Mann’s tendency toward creating the cinematic equivalent of a lonely saxophone solo in the wee hours of an existential LA morning. The rest was sturdy, if uninspired, thriller plotting, which was not bad, but was unwelcome,” says Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Nick Schager at Lessons of Darkness writes, “Mann’s interest in the codes of honor shared by men is diluted by the increasingly silly plot twists orchestrated to prevent the film from running out of gas, but the director’s sleek visual eye – everything in Mann’s world looks tailor-made for a men’s cologne commercial – turns nocturnal Los Angeles into a thing of jet black, star-twinkling beauty.”

“It started like any other night …” View the theatrical trailer for Collateral.

© Joe Valdez