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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Resorting to a fantasy in which a stranger accosts her in the shower, Kate Miller (Angie Dickinson) gets through a thoroughly unsatisfying round of sex with her husband. Revealing this to her psychiatrist, Dr. Elliott (Michael Caine), she’s advised to think about where her anger is going and to confront her husband with her sexual frustrations. Kate visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art and after a prolonged game of gallery tag with an amorous stranger, climbs into a cab and indulges in a quickie in the backseat with him. Leaving his apartment, Kate is cornered in the elevator and slashed to death by a blonde with a straight razor.

Call girl Liz Blake (Nancy Allen) witnesses the slaying and is hauled before the crass cop (Dennis Franz) leading the investigation. Kate’s geeky teenaged son Peter (Keith Gordon) eavesdrops on the interrogation electronically, hoping to nab the killer himself. Meanwhile, “Bobbi” – a disturbed patient who feels he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body – leaves a message for Dr. Elliott in which he reveals he’s taken the shrink’s razor. Peter follows Liz on the subway and saves her from Bobbi’s razor. Liz and Peter then hatch a plan to snoop through Dr. Elliott’s appointment book to learn who “Bobbi” is and stop her before she kills one of them.

Production history
Brian DePalma spent a year working on an adaptation of Robert Daley’s book Prince of the City when Orion Pictures balked at where the script was headed and dismissed the director. DePalma returned to an unproduced screenplay he’d adapted from the novel Cruising. Taking the idea of a character engaging in random sex, DePalma married it to a woman who gets picked up in an art gallery, something he’d tried in his college days. Seeing a transsexual interviewed on The Phil Donahue Show gave him the idea of a psychiatrist whose female side murders the women arousing his male side. This formed the basis for Dressed To Kill.

DePalma sent the script to his former agent George Litto, whose response was, “If you and I can’t agree that I can produce the movie, I’ll kill ya.” Litto knew that Samuel Z. Arkoff was an admirer of DePalma’s and set the project up at Filmways, which provided $6.5 million in financing and gave DePalma full creative control. His first choice to play Kate Miller was Liv Ullmann. The esteemed Norwegian actress turned the part down. Sean Connery was asked to play the psychiatrist and also passed. DePalma talked Angie Dickinson and Michael Caine into filling the roles, joining DePalma’s wife Nancy Allen, who the role of Liz Blake had been written for.

The first crisis arrived when DePalma submitted Dressed To Kill to the MPAA. The film was stamped with an X rating. To ensure that the theater chains would exhibit the film and that newspapers would run ads, the director reluctantly toned down the nudity in the shower scene and the bloodshed of Kate’s death to win an R rating. DePalma recalls, “I had an impression that because it so effective I was being penalized by being effective, not because I showed so much, but because it was so scary and so violent.” Audiences in Europe were able to see DePalma’s uncut version, while in the United States, they had to wait for home video.

Arriving in theaters July 1980, Dressed To Kill received some of the most enthusiastic critical notices of the year. The New York Times (Vincent Canby), the New Yorker (Pauline Kael) and New York magazine (David Denby) went out of their way to praise the film. Andrew Sarris dissented, calling it “soft-core porn and hard-edged horror” and citing DePalma for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. An even more hostile reaction came from Women Against Pornography, which organized protests outside theaters in New York, Boston, L.A. and San Francisco. One of the group’s leaflets read, “If this film succeeds, killing women may become the greatest turn-on of the Eighties!”

The picket lines amounted to free publicity and vaulted Dressed To Kill past Airplane! and The Empire Strikes Back to the number one grossing movie in the country its second week of release. It went on to earn $31.8 million in the United States. Looking back on the furor in 2001, DePalma commented, “All those movies that they were trashing in the ‘60s and the ‘70s or ‘80s are the ones that people are writing about now and the ones that seem to have some kind of life. The revisionism will start basically and you basically as an artist, you just have to just do what you feel is what you’re doing and not get crushed by the particular establishment in place at the time.”

Opinion
Whether you’re an academic taking notes in the aisle with a pen light, a jackass up in the balcony with a box of Goobers, or a regular moviegoer somewhere in between, Dressed To Kill is a classic because it has something to marvel over regardless of which demographic you fall into. It’s my favorite Brian DePalma film, one that absolutely has to be considered on any list of top five achievements in the director’s infamous yet prodigious career. It is gruesome (the DVD features the film in both its theatrical and “unrated” versions,) but in a way that’s more electric than upsetting, soused on a pure intoxication for cinema and eliciting a visceral response from the audience. And does it ever.

From the opening chord of Pino Donaggio’s billowing musical score, the movie is too far over the top to be taken seriously as a drama. As an orchestration of camera movement, film and sound editing and art design, even the ghost of Alfred Hitchcock would have to admit that DePalma knows how to utilize the medium. Michael Caine sort of looks like he came in on his time off between Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and Blame It On Rio, but Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon have never been more engaging in a movie. Terrifying in parts, the film is also hilarious in others, courtesy Dennis Franz, who takes off running with the full range of New York cop talk, without ever looking back.

Gary Militzer at DVD Verdict writes, “Stylish psycho-shock films don’t come any better than this. Talented acting, superb direction, shocking twists, taut suspense – it’s all here. Sure, there is style to burn here – Brian De Palma is a filmmaker in love with his camera, after all – but De Palma sprinkles in just enough lingering substance to gel it all together into a memorable suspense classic that only gains in stature with repeat viewings. And it’s not just a one-trick, gimmick-twist of a film that insults your intelligence in the end… This is the real deal; Dressed to Kill is an essential De Palma masterwork that is not to be missed.”

“It has some genuinely creepy sequences and some really well-shot scenes, but De Palma strays too often into gratuitous violence and sensationalism. De Palma was one of the major voices in the 1970s-1980s school of filmmaking that wanted to see how far they could push the envelope. What they learned (or, at least, what the audiences learned) is that being able to show everything that classic Hollywood had to cover up is not necessarily a good thing, especially if the films exist only to see how far they could go,” writes Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies.

Daniel Stephens at DVD Times writes, “The brilliance of the movie begins at its core: the script. De Palma has managed to create a taut thriller filled to the gills with false avenues, red herrings and ambiguity. It is much more original than it may look at first glance, combining visual scenes driven by the camera rather than dialogue, and for all intents and purposes throws out any remnants of genre conventions. For all its worth as a thrilling psychological drama, it has true connotations of gothic horror, romance, comedy and porn.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
“So where are you? You’re in some motel room. You just, you just wake up and you’re in a motel room,” narrates Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) as he tries to figure out what he’s doing in the motel. Lenny meets Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) and is able to remember that this is a friend of his by referencing one of several Polaroids he carries, with notes scribbled on the back. The notes on Teddy’s photo read, “Don’t believe his lies. He is the one. Kill him.” Lenny asks Teddy to beg his wife’s forgiveness before he shoots him.

As the story moves backwards one scene at a time, Lenny reveals that he knows who he is, but after an accident, is unable to form new memories. In addition to the Polaroids and notes he uses to cue his recall, Lenny has covered his body in tattoos, such as, “Find him and kill him.” Using these clues and a DMV record that’s been given to him by someone named Natalie, Lenny concludes that Teddy is the man he’s been searching for, the man who raped and murdered his wife.

Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) – whose Polaroid reads, “She has also lost someone. She will help you out of pity” – meets Lenny at a diner to give him information he apparently asked her for. Natalie seems to have feelings for Lenny and wants to help him get his revenge, but as far as Lenny’s concerned, he just met her. Teddy tries to warn his friend against killing a man based on his little notes and pictures because they may be unreliable. Lenny disagrees. “Facts, not memories. That’s how you investigate.”

Lenny used to be an insurance investigator. He recalls the case of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky), a retired accountant who after an accident, appears to lose the ability to form new memories. When junkies kill Lenny’s wife (Jorja Fox), he succumbs to the same condition. Lenny is convinced that the police got it wrong and that the true killer is the mysterious “John G.” Natalie wants to help him find this man, but Lenny fears someone may be trying to take advantage of his condition to make him kill the wrong person.

Production history
Jonathan Nolan was attending Georgetown University in 1996 when a General Psych course introduced him to a condition known as “anterograde memory loss.” His professor explained that this prevented patients from forming new memories. An aspiring writer, “Jonah” dropped out of school and spent a year traveling and reading Melville. Returning to Chicago a year later, he wanted to write a story about memory. ”I was drawn to it as a metaphor. A demonstration of how fleeting identity really is.”

Jonah was helping his older brother Christopher Nolan move from Chicago to Los Angeles. During the road trip, Jonah told him about his idea. Christopher Nolan had just finished Following, a no-budget, 69-minute mystery he’d made in England that marked his feature film debut as a writer/director. He became excited about his brother’s story idea and asked if he could write a screenplay.

In the short story Memento Mori – ultimately published in Esquire Magazine in March 2001 – a man named Earl whose short term memory is wiped clean every fifteen minutes escapes from an institution, following clues to the man he believes murdered his wife. In the screenplay Memento, the protagonist is named Leonard Shelby. He suffers from the same condition, using scraps of paper, Polaroids and tattoos to find his wife’s killer. The major departure Christopher Nolan took from his brother’s short story was to tell it in reverse.

Aaron Ryder read an early draft of the script while working with Christopher Nolan’s wife, producer Emma Thomas. Ryder optioned the script through a film financing company he worked for called Newmarket and helped Nolan develop it. After a rewrite, Newmarket brought in producers Suzanne and Jennifer Todd to produce Memento and committed to a budget of $5 million. The script then went out to actors.

Guy Pearce claims he literally begged to play Lenny. “My agent sent me the script and wrote on the bottom, ‘You’re going to love it.’ And I called him after I read it and said, ‘Well, that was an understatement, wasn’t it?’” Carrie-Anne Moss joined the cast next, and recommended Joe Pantoliano for the third lead. Memento went before the cameras in August 1999 for 26 days of shooting around Los Angeles. But when Newmarket screened the finished film to studios and distributors, not one of them made a respectable offer. According to Ryder, “People thought it was too difficult, too obscure and had no commercial potential.”

Newmarket wanted to transition from a finance company to one that produced and marketed its own films, and chose Memento to be their first release, submitting it to the Venice, Toronto and Sundance Film Festivals. Riding a wave of favorable reviews – “If nothing else, Memento is a savvy comment on the queasy uncertainties of the postmodern condition, in which history goes no further back than yesterday’s news, and knowledge is supplanted by ‘information’ from a tumult of spin-controlled, unreliable narrators,” wrote Ella Taylor in L.A. Weekly – and enthusiastic word of mouth, the film took in $25 million at the box office in the U.S.

Opinion
Memento occupies select real estate in the seedy neighborhood of the film noir mystery because the story unravels with the precision of a narrative engineered by Mensa. That said, you don’t have to be a genius or even watch the film more than once to be enthralled by it. The Nolans employ all sorts of ruses, dodges and slights of hand here, but the biggest surprise may be how well the film holds up under scrutiny. It’s just as exciting now as it was when it was released, and remains one of the most compelling movie mysteries of all time.

While there’s a vague familiarity to this tale of an insurance man and a dangerous dame, the Nolans are less interested in repeating genre conventions than they are in shattering them. Assembling a movie in reverse might have been disastrous, but the con works beautifully. Part of the fun is how Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano play variations on their characters, changing who they are depending where we are in Lenny’s recollection. Editor Dody Dorn cut this together seamlessly, while Christopher Nolan deserves props for stretching a small budget to look twice what it was.

Curt Holman at Creating Loafing writes, “Though it’s not the easiest of films to follow, Nolan crafts his narrative with such care that the audience soon falls into its rhythm. At the end Nolan seems to bend his own well-established rules, and the finale may make your head spin — counterclockwise, of course. But it’s in the service of a deeper meaning, allowing Memento to conclude on an unnerving note about obsession, vengeance and grief that gives it thematic staying power beyond its gimmick.”

“Memento is a clever thriller, which is rare in these times. It consistently entertains with a sense of humor and an artful spirit. So what if the final conceit doesn’t fit within the logic of the initial conceit? Unfortunately, those praising the film for more than twists and thrills need to try harder to recall their college philosophy readings … Affixing great intellectual import to this film turns a great body of philosophical work into a giant souvenir sombrero,” writes Jon Kern at Jiminy Critic.

Christopher Null at Filmcritic.com writes, “It’s deeper than you can make a gimmick like this sound – and to be honest, it is just a gimmick – but it’s a gimmick that works. The movie, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (and based on his brother’s short story) is vibrant and harrowing, unpredictable despite an ending long since given away. Unfathomably, the film gets progressively better as it goes along, and I found myself inching closer and closer to the edge of my seat throughout the movie.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
After attending the groundbreaking of a real estate development he’s building in the impoverished South Bronx, industrialist Christopher Van Der Veer stops off with his wife in Battery Park, where Van Der Veer’s ancestors built the first windmill in New York. Stalked by an unseen predator with four legs and highly acute senses, the couple are quickly attacked and killed. Their driver has his hand severed before he’s able to get off a shot.

Haggard detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney) receives a page from his commanding officer (Dick O’Neill) and is dispatched to the crime scene: “It’s very weird and it’s very strange, just like you.” A coroner named Whittington (Gregory Hines) – full of grisly facts, like how long a severed head can remain conscious – finds no trace of metal on the victims’ wounds. The high-tech security firm protecting Van Der Veer pairs Dewey with their own expert, psychologist Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora).

Counterterrorism tactics fails to net a suspect, but when the predator attacks a vagrant in the South Bronx, hairs found at both crime scenes indicate the killer is the same. Dewey and Rebecca visit a zoologist named Ferguson (Tom Noonan) who reveals the hairs belong to “canis lupis.” A wolf. Dewey’s suspicions lead him to Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), former member of the Native American Movement. Holt spends his time on top of bridges and claims to be able to shape shift into different animals.

Ferguson maintains that wolves were wiped out in the east a century ago, along with the buffalo and Indians. “Wolves and Indians evolved and were destroyed simultaneously. They’re both tribal, they look out for their own, they don’t overpopulate and they’re both superb hunters.” It becomes obvious that something out there is preying on New Yorkers. Dewey and Whittington arm themselves with night vision and go hunting in the South Bronx, but discover they’re up against something more than a pack of wolves.

Production history
The Wolfen was the 1978 debut novel by Whitley Streiber. The book opened with the deaths of two police officers and focused on the efforts of cranky detective George Wilson and his young partner Becky Neff to track down the killers. They discover a pack of highly intelligent wolves preying on the castoffs of society. The wolves are also willing to kill to keep their existence secret. Streiber’s agent showed her husband – producer Rupert Hitzig – an advance copy of the book, which Hitzig bid on and won the screen rights to.

With the property set up at Orion Pictures, Hitzig offered the directing job to Michael Wadleigh, a talented documentary filmmaker best known for Woodstock. To adapt a screenplay, the studio was interested in Oliver Stone. When Hitzig and Wadleigh met with the Academy Award winning screenwriter in Rome, Stone didn’t care for the environmental approach they wanted to take with the story. David Eyre was brought in to write the script with Wadleigh instead.

Over the course of shooting, Wadleigh fell behind as many as six weeks. Notified by the studio that he had five days to finish, Wadleigh submitted a four hour and four minute assemblage with thirty six “scene missing” cards inserted. He was fired. Hitzig assumed directing duties for thirty days of reshoots, including the solarized “Wolfen vision” shots with Steadicam creator Garrett Brown operating the camera. John Hancock was brought in to finish the movie due to DGA regulations. Wadleigh never directed a feature film again.

Opinion
Wolfen was released in July 1981 between The Howling and An American Werewolf In London, but it’s a testament to the strength of the finished film that not only is it as great as those two genre classics, but it spins the werewolf movie off in completely innovative and exciting directions. Seen today, it plays like a big budget season finale of The X-Files, establishing strong performances from its cast, some ghoulish autopsy scenes, a weird mystery and incredibly vivid atmosphere.

Instead of reducing itself to a creature feature, serial killer thriller or cop procedural, the script is an artful combination of all three, layering a deeper message about man’s precarious relationship with the environment. Wolfen has a bold visual sheen and breathtaking production value as well, with key sequences shot atop the George Washington Bridge and in the ruins of South Bronx. The cast shines, particularly Gregory Hines in his screen debut. A 27-year-old composer named James Horner replaced Craig Safan on short notice and produced a rousing musical score.

I’d like to thank Rupert Hitzig at Bizazz Media for taking the time to discuss the making of Wolfen. So little behind the scenes information exists on this film that this article wouldn’t have been possible without his participation. Thanks, Rupert!

Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews writes, “Wolfen is a thriller that doesn’t quite fit easily into a defined genre. It plays primarily as horror, but as the mystery as to what is behind the killings unravels, thriller and fantasy elements begin to take over. It’s an uneven experience, but does have its rewards, and the quirky nature of it can probably be attributed to the previous directorial experience of counter-culture director Michael Wadley.”

“Wolfen goes through the paces of a typical detective thriller, but I’ll bet you’ve never seen anything like it … My mother calls Wolfen ‘a werewolf movie from the werewolf’s point of view,’ and that’s not a bad take on it, since the homicidal title creatures are in essence the good guys of the piece,” writes Bill Chambers at Film Freak Central.

Dr. Obrero at Digital Retribution writes, “A beautifully lensed picture, Wolfen captures the look and feel of New York circa late 70’s/early ’80’s in a way few other films have ever managed, and the effective camera-trickery that gives us ‘Wolfen-Vision’ is almost dream-like and effective in sustaining the atmospherics of the attack sequences … Wolfen is an essential choice for those who enjoy intelligent thrillers as opposed to blood-splattering slice and dice and braindead horror films.”

“They can sense the rhythm of your blood. Hear clouds pass overhead. See where you are blind. A force so deadly it will tear the scream from your throat.” View the 1981 theatrical trailer for Wolfen.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In “Frontera,” Texas, men collecting ordinance on an old army rifle range stumble upon a human skeleton and a sheriff’s badge. Sheriff Sam Deeds (Chris Cooper) suspects the remains are those of Charlie Wade, a notorious lawman who disappeared in 1957 shortly before Sam’s father Buddy assumed the office of sheriff. The reputation of the late Buddy Deeds is such that a memorial is being erected in his memory, but Sam feels that if his father’s legend is predicated on a murder, people have the right to know.

What happened between Buddy Deeds (Matthew McConaughey) and Charlie Wade (Kris Kristofferson) changes depending on who Sam talks to, including “Big” Otis Payne (Ron Canada), proprietor of the bar where Wade was last seen alive. Otis’ estranged son – a “full bird colonel” named Delmore (Joe Morton) – returns to town to assume command of an army base there. Delmore would prefer to leave his family past buried, but his teenage son is curious enough to seek his grandfather out.

Sam was elected sheriff on his father’s name, but tells his high school sweetheart Pilar (Elizabeth Pena), “Hell, I’m just a jailer. I run a sixty room hotel with bars on the windows.” Sam still resents his father for keeping him away from Pilar when they were kids, and as he investigates Wade’s murder, actually wants his old man to be the killer. Pilar’s mother (Miriam Colon) is a restaurant owner, and when she’s not calling the Border Patrol on illegals, doesn’t approve of Pilar’s relationship with Sam either.

To solve Wade’s murder, Sam drives to San Antonio to retrieve some of his father’s papers from his “highly strung,” football obsessed ex-wife Bunny (Frances McDormand). Along the way, he stops to talk to a Native American who sells curios on the road near where Sam grew up. He discovers that his father had a mistress, but instead of giving him a name, the Indian shares a story about coming across a rattlesnake in a crate. “Gotta be careful where you’re poking, who knows what you’ll find.”

Production history
Writer/director/editor John Sayles was thinking about Yugoslavia’s ethnic genocide in the early 1990s. Searching for a story that would allow him to explore the conflict between a people’s history and their culture, he came up with a murder mystery set in Texas, “A sheriff trying to discover who killed somebody 37 years ago and the prime suspect turns out to be his own father. He has mixed feelings about whether he wants it to be true or not.” The mystery would then unpeel the layers of society along the U.S./Mexico border.

With producers Maggie Renzi and R. Paul Miller, Sayles traveled to Del Rio, Texas, where he rented a houseboat on Lake Amistad and scouted the region. The original plan was to shoot near Austin in order to accommodate the cast and crew, but the border region Sayles discovered south of Del Rio had the feel he was looking for. The towns of Eagle Pass and Piedras Negras – connected by an international bridge that spans the Rio Grande River – became the primary shooting location for Lone Star.

Sayles wrote the script over a four-month period in the fall of 1994 and secured a $5 million budget from Castle Rock Entertainment. He’d written the role of Sam Deeds for an almost unknown actor he’d worked with on Matewan named Chris Cooper. In addition to becoming the biggest commercial success of Sayles’ directing career, Lone Star established Cooper as an A-list star, gave Kris Kristofferson’s acting career its second wind and earned Sayles an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay.

Opinion
Lone Star owes so much to the pulp fiction of Raymond Chandler that you might need a family tree to map out the relationships between the characters introduced in the course of this 134-minute yarn. But what sets the film apart is the ethnic tapestry of its sprawling cast – Anglo, Mex, Black, Indian – and its mystery, which instead of being a straight forward whodunit, explores how a murder 37 years ago ties people together in the present, whether they care to be related or not.

Criticized by some for lacking a signature visual style, Sayles – who also wrote and directed the independent films Lianna, The Brother From Another Planet and Eight Men Out – distinguishes himself here with the dexterity of his script and cast. Sayles has always been a surgically gifted writer with a moral consciousness and a terrific ear for dialogue, but for this particular film, sustains that narrative mastery for two plus hours. The soundtrack – featuring Tejano, ‘50s R&B and Lucinda Williams – is as freshly minted as the film itself.

Dan Jardine at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “Despite Sayles’ weakness as a director, Lone Star is a rich and rewarding exploration of the tensions and attractions between the people of this multi-racial community. The screenplay avoids platitudes and easy answers, and treats the characters as individuals, rather than symbols or idealized stereotypes. This is a story of the Great Possibility, what America COULD be, and what it has lost by not working past its prejudices and fears.”

“With all these characters and all of the flashbacks this could have been the most confusing film ever made, but John Sayles puts it together in an easy to understand, slow moving Texas style that makes everything flow with ease and logic. The Academy Award Nomination that he got for writing this screenplay was well deserved,” writes Margo Reasner at DVD Verdict.

James Slone at End of Media writes, “Lone Star is one of the great ensemble dramas, a rich textured story full of the complexity of life and the bright color of genuine people. It’s a mystery, though not one content to merely see a case to its end, but one of history, ideas, relationships and the secrets people carry to their graves. It’s also a political film, though one that sees beyond polemic, reaching into the daily lives of living, recognizable people, even those most of us would find repugnant.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
When a serial killer stalking gay leather bars on the west side of Manhattan claims another victim, the head of the NYPD’s major case squad – Captain Edelson (Paul Sorvino) – recruits a young cadet named Steve Burns (Al Pacino) to go undercover. Chosen due to his physical resemblance to the victims, Burns seems to know little if anything about gay lifestyles, but accepts the job because he feels it’s the fastest way to a gold shield.

Keeping his assignment secret from his girlfriend (Karen Allen), Burns is moved to the West Village under the name “John Forbes”. He befriends his neighbor, an aspiring playwright named Ted (Don Scardino) who’s having problems with his roommate. Ted isn’t part of the “cruising” culture – men looking for anonymous sex with other men – but Burns is committed to his assignment and becomes a fixture in the leather scene.

The murders continue, apparently at the hands of a different killer each time. The first suspect Burns settles on is employed at a steak restaurant, but after a bizarre and violent interrogation, Edelson realizes they’ve got the wrong man. Burns shifts his attention to a music student at Columbia (Richard Cox) with daddy issues. The cop tries to draw the killer out into the open, but finds his work interfering with his personal life.

Production history 
Cruising was a 1970 novel by Gerald Walker, an editor for New York Times Magazine. The gritty story dealt with a series of crimes against gay men in New York City, as told from the point of view of a killer, a police detective, and a young cop. Producer Phil D’Antoni optioned the film rights. His first choice to direct was William Friedkin, who D’Antoni had worked with on The French Connection and had just completed The Exorcist.

Friedkin read the book and turned it down. D’Antoni approached Steven Spielberg next. Spielberg was working on his first feature film – The Sugarland Express – and briefly considered the project before passing on it too. One director who wanted in was Brian DePalma, who made an unsuccessful bid to acquire the property, even adapting a screenplay. Some of the material in DePalma’s unproduced script ended up being recycled by the director in Dressed To Kill.

Unable to set the project up, D’Antoni let his option lapse and producer Jerry Weintraub picked up the rights. Weintraub went back to William Friedkin with the property. Friedkin still wasn’t interested, not in the book. What interested him were articles he’d read in the Village Voice about body parts being pulled out of the East River. Men were being killed in the vicinity of the underground leather bars on the west side of Manhattan. Friedkin felt that a murder mystery set against that backdrop would be interesting.

Friedkin wrote a script, based mostly on NYPD detective Randy Jurgensen, who had been sent into the leather bars undercover because he resembled the murder victims. Friedkin visited three clubs – the Mine Shaft, the Anvil, the Ramrod – for several months to explore the scene. He won the cooperation of the leather community by planning to shoot in the real clubs with their real patrons, not professional extras.

When filming commenced in the West Village in July 1979, activists who weren’t so enamored with Hollywood’s depiction of the gay community descended on the shoot by the hundreds. Whistles and air horns became such a problem that the film ended up spending a month in ADR to rerecord much of the dialogue. Some protestors reflected light from rooftops to disrupt the lighting setups.

After months of free publicity, the film opened in February 1980 to strong box office. That lasted one week. Critics overwhelmingly panned Cruising, and once audiences got a look at it, the film completely vanished from public view. It didn’t even appear on VHS until 1996. The film was finally released on DVD in September 2007 and screened publicly in several cities, with Friedkin on hand to spur a reevaluation of the lost film.

Opinion
Cruising may be the most reckless movie ever attempted by a major director, jumping further than Natural Born Killers or Showgirls and landing with an even louder crash. Not only does Friedkin conceive and execute almost every scene with such awful taste, but the film also manages to portray the gay community as a breeding ground for sin of nearly biblical proportions.

The script is so poorly developed that while it captures details of the leather scene and a police investigation, we’re never given a reason to care about either. The most serious problem with the film is that it generates no sympathy whatsoever for its victims. The club scenes are so repugnant, we’re actually put in a position of rooting for the killers. The human dimension that the story needed feels hacked off with a meat cleaver.

Friedkin’s decision to cast non-actors as club goers or cops makes the movie feel more amateurish than gritty. Al Pacino – adrift at this stage in his film career, no longer a young man, not yet a wise one – looks completely lost. His character is never really the focus; it’s the freak show around him that is. If Cruising has any value, it’s as a social document of a particular scene at a particular moment in history. As a movie, it’s one of the worst ever made.

Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide writes, “Was it insensitive of the filmmakers to make this film when it stood to represent the gay subculture to mainstream America? Yes, it was. Is it a great film? No, it’s not. But it’s an interesting one and a fascinating relic of sexual politics circa 1980.”

“It’s a visually stunning movie that gets bogged down in not enough character development coupled with purposefully ambiguous open ended questions with no resolve. It feels like a movie that was hacked up to get released, and the DVD does not supply any additional material to rectify any of these issues,” writes Brett Cullum at DVD Verdict.

Matt Cale at Ruthless Reviews writes, “Seriously, what the fuck is up with William Friedkin’s Cruising? That it’s homophobic is beyond dispute, but more than that, it’s greatest crime is against the very craft of filmmaking. It’s like the anti-movie; lurid and strange enough to warrant a complete viewing, but so disjointed and incomprehensible that it just about flies off the screen.”

“A New York City detective in search of a killer is about to disappear into the night.” View the 1980 theatrical trailer for Cruising.

© Joe Valdez