Adventureland (2009)
Written by Greg Mottola
Directed by Greg Mottola
Produced by This Is That Productions/ Sidney Kimmel Entertainment
Running time: 107 minutes

So, What’s This About?
In the summer of 1987, Oberlin College grad James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg) is notified by his parents (Wendie Malick, Jack Gilpin) that money he was depending on to help pay for a European backpacking trip will no longer be available. Unable to help their son pay rent when he enrolls at Columbia in the fall, James returns to Pittsburgh for the summer looking for work. A comparative literature and Renaissance studies major, the only job he finds he’s really qualified for is at the scruffy amusement park Adventureland, where his childish neighbor Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) works.

James is passed over for a position in Rides when the couple that runs the park (Bill Hader, Kristen Wiig) concludes that he’s more of a Games man. His co-workers include the mopey Joel (Martin Starr) and a streetwise girl named Em (Kristen Stewart) who saves James from getting knifed by a customer. Em reveals a similar taste in music (The Replacements, Big Star) and that she’s headed for NYU in the fall. But James’ affection for Em is tempered when he discovers she’s been sleeping with Adventureland’s 30-year-old married maintenance man (Ryan Reynolds).

Who Made It?
Greg Mottola grew up in Dix Hills, a town on Long Island, New York. After receiving a BFA in art from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Mottola earned an MFA in film at Columbia. His debut feature film The Daytrippers (starring Hope Davis, Parker Posey and Liev Schreiber) won the Audience Award at the 1996 Sundance Film Festival. Mottola envisioned an auteur’s career for himself like that of Stanley Kubrick or Woody Allen, writing and directing his own material. But when Columbia Pictures put Mottola’s planned sophomore film – The Life of the Party, a road trip ensemble to feature John Cusack — into turnaround in 1999, Mottola fell into a funk that resulted in little if any writing.

Desperate to get back behind the camera in 2001, Mottola accepted an offer from producer Judd Apatow to direct episodes of Fox’s coed dorm comedy Undeclared. Surrounded by a cast and crew much younger than himself, Mottola started thinking about writing a film about first love. Working with producers Ted Hope and Anne Carey of This Is That Productions, Mottola was ready to send his script Adventureland out to investors when Apatow offered Mottola the job of directing a feature: Superbad. The teen comedy’s runaway critical and commercial success in 2007 led to Sidney Kimmel Entertainment and Miramax Films agreeing to split financing for Adventureland.

How’d They Do It?
Greg Mottola had moved from New York to Los Angeles to work on Undeclared when the idea for what became Adventureland began to percolate. Mottola recalled, “I was working on the TV show Undeclared and there were so many young people in the cast and on the writing staff, it made me very nostalgic for being young, because I was one of the older people there. I thought, you know, I’d like to write a movie about first love. Thinking back to the first relationship where it wasn’t just infatuation or horniness, it was an actual relationship and you saw the person and loved them in spite or because of their flaws.”

He added, “I was a very naïve young man at one point, and had lots of romantic illusions. I remember back to like the first girlfriend. I saw that person for who they were and it was a real change in how relationships were for me. I think I was just getting a little sentimental and nostalgic, hanging around with young people. But I thought it would be kind of fun to do that in a way that was naturalistic and kind of bittersweet.” During a conversation with a member of the Undeclared writing staff — Jenny Connor — about the worst jobs anyone had ever had, Mottola mentioned his stint working at a Long Island amusement park called Adventureland in the summer of ’84.

“So I had a friend working at this amusement park I applied and soon found myself wearing a ‘Games’ shirt and being a carnival barker for the summer. And it was just demeaning, you know, I was pretentious, I was an art student at the time, I thought it was beneath me … You know, and I wanted to find people who could sit and talk about the abstract expressionists and Rothko you know, and it was these animals vomiting around me and eating cotton candy. But, you know, it quickly turned into one of those kind of super fun summers.” While directing episodes of Fox’s Arrested Development and HBO’s The Comeback, Mottola continued to work on his script.

Once Mottola had a draft of Adventureland he was happy with, he sent it to producer Ted Hope. A partner in the indie film production company Good Machine, Hope had produced Ride With the Devil for Ang Lee, Storytelling for Todd Solondz and Human Nature for Michel Gondry before agreeing to sell Good Machine to Universal and founding This Is That Productions with Anne Carey. Hope recalled, “Years back when I was struggling to get Nicole Holofcener’s Walking & Talking financed, Nicole said in a fit of despair that I should be working with someone who will actually make a lot of movies, like the guy who had just won best film at Columbia Film School, Greg Mottola.”

Hope added, “He already had a producer relationship so we just got to know each other, but life wasn’t as Nicole had predicted for him. By the time five or so years had passed since Daytrippers, his agents, who were also our agents, submitted the script to us as a ready-to-go project. We loved it but had some thoughts on how to enhance it and make it more resonant in the marketplace. Greg agreed but it took us over two years to get it right, and then he got what initially looked like a direct-to-DVD feature, but that turned out to be Superbad and the rest is history.” Confident of his take on Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg’s teen comedy, Mottola put his moody take on first love on the backburner.

With the massive success of Superbad, Mottola found plenty of investors willing to bankroll Adventureland, if he could only change it a bit. “You know, it was hard to get the film set up, even after Superbad. People who wanted to make it made a condition that I had to rewrite it as a contemporary film, and I refused. That may have been very stubborn of me. But I didn’t know what the equivalent to this film would be for a 21-year-old just coming into college. I could research it, but it wouldn’t be as fun to me as a film that came from personal experiences. There was just something about a movie that’s looking back — it has a slightly more melancholy strain. And a part of it was because life did seem simpler before the Internet and before cell phones.”

Sidney Kimmel — a garment magnate who built Jones Apparel Group into a publicly traded company worth $5 billion — had quietly assembled a film production and finance company in Beverly Hills in 2005. With indie film vets Jim Tauber and William Horberg on his team, Kimmel rolled the dice on a number of offbeat comedies (Death at a Funeral, Lars and the Real Girl) and socially conscious dramas (United 93, Talk To Me) that were anything but safe commercial bets. SKE financed Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York and decided to go into business with Greg Mottola, splitting $10 million or so in financing with Miramax Films. In August 2007 it was announced that Adventureland would be Mottola’s next picture.

Ted Hope recalled, “We were ready to go out with the script for financing and casting a few weeks before Superbad came out. Interest in Greg was high, but time to put together a summer movie was short. Luckily Greg had thought hard about whom he wanted in the film prior and they were all accessible. Jesse & Kristen were pretty much whom he always wanted. Kristen had yet to get Twilight so she was still considered a virtual unknown. Greg knew Bill Hader from Superbad and wanted him and Kristen Wiig from the get-go too. Ryan Reynolds may have been the first person Greg had met for the role; he just happened to be in NYC right when we started.”

Hope continued, “And Martin Starr just slayed it in an early audition and changed our conception of the character. Similarly Margarita Levieva came to the audition in full character and makeup. Both of them became the archetype so there was no one else we could cast. Perhaps most fortunate, was that our financing partners agreed with our vision for the roles and that allowed Greg to lock his cast quickly by his taste and not some Chinese Menu of what may work in different markets or with specific demographics.” To get the summer romance rolling before winter set in, Mottola ended up with two weeks of prep time. The director admitted some mistakes were made as a result.

“Well, like, a prop guy thought they didn’t have those pop tags on soda cans in 1987. And I’m like, ‘I’m pretty sure they did.’ And it’s hard to find ‘80s cars. People will preserve and treasure their ‘70s muscle cars, but not treasure their K-cars. It was weird; we couldn’t find cars that ran. But I grew up in a really modest suburban community in Long Island and a lot of my neighbors didn’t have a lot of money, and their houses were still filled with furniture from the ‘70s and the ‘60s, even. It’s not as though everyone switched to an ‘80s aesthetic because that’s what was on TV. This is a modest world where the film takes place, and it’s okay if there’s a mish-mash of ‘70s and ‘80s.”

The search for an amusement park that hadn’t changed much in 20 years came down to Playland in Rye, NY and Kennywood Park in Pittsburgh. Mottola recalled, “The tax rebates in Pennsylvania were better than New York state, plus it seemed like we could get a better deal with Kennywood, so the choice was arrived at pretty quickly. Plus, I have a fondness for poor maligned Pittsburgh. We didn‘t have the budget to build or create very much, although my production designer Stephen Beatrice did a very nice job of creating the specific booths that I needed and scuzzying up the park a bit so it wasn‘t quite as quaint as Kennywood is in reality.” Shooting in the 111-year old park during the week — before Kennywood went into Phantom Fright Nights mode on the weekends — Adventureland commenced filming September 2007.

An Adventureland employee in 1984, Mottola bumped the film’s timeline up to 1987 to take advantage of songs he wanted to use to tell his life story. Collaborating with music supervisor Tracy McKnight — who had worked at an amusement park in Seaside Heights, NJ in her youth — Mottola exchanged iPod playlists and mix tapes. Accustomed to licensing 15 to 20 songs for a movie, McKnight arrived on 40 tunes, including “Bastards of Young” by The Replacements, “Don’t Want To Know If You Are Lonely” by Husker Du and “I’m In Love With a Girl” by Big Star. Mottola joked that the fee paid to Van Halen to use “Panama” in Superbad “cost nearly as much as all of the songs in Adventureland.” To compose a score, Mottola turned to another favorite band, the Hoboken trio Yo La Tengo.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January and the South By Southwest Film Festival in March, Adventureland opened nationwide April 2009. Critics fell in love with the movie. Tony Scott, The New York Times: “Somehow the story of a young man’s coming of age never gets old, at least when it is told with the kind of sweetness and intelligence Adventureland displays.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “A confident return to the kind of teen comedy that’s funny without being raunchy, youthful without being juvenile, and reflective without hitting you over the head.” Michael Phillips, The Chicago Tribune: “A sweet, sharp coming-of-age romance, Adventureland is a little warmer, a little funnier and a lot more truthful than the last 20 or 30 of its ilk. Especially its Hollywood ilk.”

Never expanding beyond 1,876 U.S. screens, Adventureland sold $16 million in tickets domestically and added $1 million overseas. Acknowledging the challenges of marketing a period movie to kids who might feel it wasn’t about them and to adults who might feel it was just about kids, Greg Mottola sounded pleased with the results. “There was a moment when I thought, well, maybe I shouldn’t make this film. I’ll turn into this, like, young-adult filmmaker and everyone will be disappointed that it’s not Superbad 2 and I’m not as funny as Seth Rogen. But I didn’t write the movie to try to be as funny as Seth Rogen. It’s apples and oranges to me. I wanted, for better or worse, to make this little movie looking back 20 years ago. And I’m just grateful to have this shot.”

Should I Care?
Quickly hailed as one of the year’s best films by critics and too easily dismissed by casual viewers as lacking in laughs (Kristen Wiig fans expecting more than a token cameo will probably be disappointed), Adventureland is a little of both, a small but perfect gem that gets better the more I think about it. Without painting a rose colored portrait of the late ‘80s, Greg Mottola’s writing genuinely pines for the days when people somehow met without the Internet and expressed themselves without cell phones. It’s a gentler coming-of-age drama than something from Noah Baumbach and recalls Wes Anderson’s early work in its understated wit.

One sign we’re in the hands of a talented filmmaker is the casting. Jesse Eisenberg does what Michael Cera couldn’t have done, playing a boy growing into a man. Kristen Stewart has an alluring scruffiness that I can’t recall seeing another young actress emulate as convincingly. It takes time before we know how to feel about either character. The soundtrack — a sublime blend of kitsch played at the park and the ‘70s or ‘80s music its couple shares via mix tapes — refrains from explaining the scenes, supplying mood instead. What’s most rewarding about Adventureland is how Mottola smarts the movie up — instead of dumbing it down — by rejecting raunch and taking a slow turn toward brutal honesty.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“A Film Producer Guided More by His Heart Than by His Calculator” By David Halbfinger. The New York Times, 12 December 2007

“When Hollywood Comes Calling” By Daniel McGuire. IAAPA, February 2008

“Greg Mottola Interview, Adventureland, Sundance 2009” By Kevin Kelly. SpoutBlog, 22 January 2009

“Sundance 2009 — Adventureland — Greg Mottola” The Hollywood Podcast starring Tim Coyne. 19 February 2009

“Directing to an ’80s Playlist” By Larry Rother. The New York Times, 20 March 2009

“Five Questions for Ted Hope (Adventureland)” By Matt Dentler. indieWIRE, 31 March 2009

“After The Daytrippers …” By Peter Keough. The Boston Phoenix, 31 March 2009

“Director Greg Mottola on Keeping Adventureland Eighties Appropriate” By Lane Brown. New York Magazine, 3 April 2009

“Some Kind of Love” By Nick Dawson. Filmmaker Magazine, Winter 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

High Fidelity (2000)
Screenplay by John Cusack & D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink. Based on the novel by Nick Hornby
Directed by Stephen Frears
Produced by Dogstar Films/ New Crime Productions/ Working Title Films/ Touchstone Pictures
Running time: 113 minutes

What the *&#! Is This About?
“What came first, the music or the misery?” Rob Gordon (John Cusack) asks the audience as his girlfriend Laura (Iben Hjejle) moves out. When his record collection fails to soothe his heartache, Rob recounts his “Desert Island, All Time, Top Five Most Memorable Breakups, in chronological order.” He tells himself that Laura doesn’t crack the list. Rob owns the Chicago record store Championship Vinyl. “I get by because people make a special effort to shop here,” he continues, “Mostly young men who spend all their time looking for deleted Smiths singles and original – not re-released, underlined – Frank Zappa albums.”

Bookended at the store by the shy and awkward Dick (Todd Louiso) and the manic Barry (Jack Black), Rob broods over Laura and makes a half-hearted attempt to win her back. A shared friend (Joan Cusack) reveals that his ex has moved in with “this Ian guy.” Rob deduces that Ian (Tim Robbins) is their flaky former upstairs neighbor and torments himself imagining Laura having sex with him. He finally admits that Laura is indeed in his top five breakups of all time. His wounded, sensitive side appeals to singer Marie DeSalle (Lisa Bonet) who poured her breakup woes into her music and has a compassionate one-night stand with Rob.

With the encouragement of Bruce Springsteen, Rob tracks down the rest of his Top Five breakup list, including the introspective Sarah (Lili Taylor) and the obnoxious Charlie (Catherine Zeta-Jones). None of the women boost Rob’s ego to the extent he needs to get over Laura, but when her father dies, she invites him to the funeral. In her grief, Laura decides to give Rob another chance, helping him promote a record release party for two skateboarding punks whose album Rob produces. This brings him to the attention of Caroline Fortis (Natasha Gregson Wagner), a music columnist who has Rob second guessing his relationship status all over again.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1995, High Fidelity was the first novel by English essayist Nick Hornby. It told the story of Rob Fleming, a self-absorbed record shop owner in London who soothes a breakup with his girlfriend Laura by generating trivial “top five lists” with Dick and Barry, the audiophiles who work in his store. According to Hornby, “People would come up and say, ‘This book is about me – literally, this book is about me.’ I’ve been told, I don’t know how many times, ‘I know the record shop you wrote about,’ and the shop’s in some part of the country I’ve never been to. It’s a fairly depressing indictment of the state of things, I think.”

Mike Newell optioned the novel and set it up at Disney, where Scott Rosenberg wrote a draft. Looking for a better take, the studio ultimately sent the book to John Cusack, who’d rewritten Grosse Pointe Blank with two high school buddies from Chicago named D.V. DeVincentis & Steve Pink. The locations and characters Hornby described reminded Cusack of his hometown, and the actor also felt “that many young men can identify with Rob’s inner monologue, which is spoken through great, incisive writing. It’s a very funny book, but he also captured this particular type of character with brutal honesty. And it’s actually kind of strangely romantic in a way, so I felt the combination of all those things was really remarkable.”

After receiving Hornby’s blessing to relocate his narrative from London to Chicago, the scribes went to work. Cusack recalls, “We’d go through the book and structure it out and then Steve and D.V. would go off and write and then I’d read what they do, and then sometimes I’d go off and I’d write for a while and they’d read it. Finally when we were getting it all together, we’d sit with two or three different computers and say ‘All right, well here’s a checklist of things we need to get done … So, each person would then check something off the list and take a pass at it and then three of us would edit it together.”

Cusack had signed with William Morris Agency to represent him as a screenwriter. Stephen Frears – who directed Cusack in The Grifters – was also a William Morris client, and when he heard the news, asked what the actor was working on. Though skeptical of High Fidelity being taken out of England, when Frears read the script, he changed his mind. “I liked the idea of it being in America. It had a sort of, this sort of more optimistic way in which Americans live, seemed to me to add something to it, rather than taking it away. So it lost some of its stoicism and became slightly more romantic.”

Once Frears came on board, one of his first questions to Cusack and his co-writers was who they thought should play Barry. Without hesitating, they answered “Jack Black.” Black had worked steadily in TV and film, but was unknown to the general public. Todd Louiso walked in to audition and quickly fell into the role of Dick. Settling on the woman Rob spends the film trying to win back did not go as smoothly. Frears was at the Berlin Film Festival in 1999, where a Danish actress named Iben Hjejle was starring in Mifune. Her mother was an English teacher and Hjejle spoke fluent “American.” Frears phoned Cusack to tell him that he’d found Laura in Germany.

High Fidelity commenced filming in Chicago in April 1999. To assemble a soundtrack, Frears gave Cusack and his co-writers free reign. Cusack recalls, “The film has 70 song cues, and we probably listened to 2,000 songs to get those 70 cues. We used our Rob and Dick and Barry dispositions a lot.” One scene in the script called for Rob to converse with Bruce Springsteen in his head. Cusack was sure The Boss would turn them down. To the actor’s surprise, “he kind of just laughed at the idea and said, ‘Send me a script.’ So when we finished shooting, we wrapped around 2 a.m., flew to New York, and taped him in his studio for an hour the next morning.”

Opening in the U.S. in March 2000, High Fidelity became one of the best reviewed films of the year. Stephen Holden, the New York Times: “Even more sharply than the book, the movie evokes the turmoil of urban single life with a quirky mixture of confessional poignancy and dry, self-deflating humor.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “A smart, funny, and youth-savvy relationship film.” Nick Hornby himself commented, “I never expected it to be so faithful. At times it appears to be a film in which John Cusack reads my book.” It grossed a modest $27 million in the States, quietly recouping its costs.

Why Should I Care?
One of the more sublime things about the film version of Nick Hornby’s hysterical novel is how Rob is altered from an Englishman obsessed with American R&B to an American obsessed with British New Wave and punk: Belle and Sebastian, Stiff Little Fingers, Elvis Costello and Sheila Nicholls all make appearances on the superlative soundtrack. The best news is that High Fidelity lives up to and then surpasses the emotional honesty, edginess and freewheeling creativity of the platters Cusack and company spin over the course of the film. If there’s such thing as a perfect movie, this is it.

Rob’s immaturity might remind women of their least favorite ex, and those too young to have experienced a painful breakup will likely be bored as well, but single urban dwellers with misplaced fetishes will find repeated enjoyment in the film. Stephen Frears deserves much credit for enabling Jack Black, Todd Louiso, Joan Cusack and Tim Robbins to go to another comic level here, while every concept in the script – addressing the audience, employing flashbacks, dramatizing Rob’s insecure psyche – shouldn’t work, but does. The movie contains not one tired plot element, but somehow manages an upbeat, hopeful ending all the same.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Cusacks” By Scott Tobias. A.V. Club. 2000 March 29

“Keeping Faith with High Fidelity” By Jamie Malanowski. New York Times, 2000 April 2

““Conversations with Cusack and Frears” High Fidelity DVD. Buena Vista Home Entertainment (2000)

Synopsis
Sunday, August 20, 1972. Memphis-based Stax Records descended on the L.A. Coliseum with most of their recording roster – Isaac Hayes, The Staple Singers, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas and many more – for an eight hour concert to benefit the annual Watts Summer Festival, the observation of the “rebellion” that burned through the community only seven years previous, claiming 34 lives. Passing through the turnstiles were 112,000 people, the largest assembly of African Americans at a non-civil rights event up to that point in history. To record the day, Stax contracted award winning documentary producer David Wolper, and under the direction of Mel Stuart, supplemented the groundbreaking concert with “man on the street” interviews with the people of South Central L.A. and staged performances in the community. Narrating the film and providing his own commentary was a rising comedian named Richard Pryor.

Production history
In the early 1970s, a record company in Tennessee was looking to expand. Cinematographer Larry Clark recalled, “Stax Records – you know – they came out of Memphis and they were kind of like this underground company. They didn’t have the same kind of promotional machine that other record companies had like Motown. But people did identify with the type of music that Stax was putting out there. They could identify with it culturally. Motown was more crossover, whereas Stax was really that down home kind of sound. The mindset of the African American community across the country had changed and we were at that place where Stax Records was. People were lookin’ more towards the African roots, more towards our musical roots. That’s just where we were politically, culturally.”

Concert promoter Forest Hamilton was in Los Angeles to establish a film division – Stax West – when he met writer Richard Dedeaux. Hamilton’s collaboration with Dedeaux on a movie script produced the idea of a benefit concert. Stax president Al Bell seized on donating the proceeds to the Watts Summer Festival, observing the anniversary of the “rebellion” – as it was known in the community – that ignited in the summer of 1965. Most of Stax’s recording roster signed on to perform for free and Bell booked the Los Angeles Coliseum. Stax underwrote most of the expenses and Schlitz Brewing Company stepped up as sponsor. With tickets going for $1, the 90,000-seat arena – home field of the Los Angeles Rams – completely sold out. Wattstax was on its way to becoming the biggest assembly of African Americans ever in one place for a non-civil rights event.

Al Bell recalled, “As it evolved though, the idea emerged, well, you know, when we pull this off, we’ll have pulled something off that hasn’t been done before, but we really ought to consider doing a documentary. Well, then if we do a documentary, what kind of documentary should it be? Well, it should be about something that demonstrates to the world that the music that we sing is a reflection of what goes on in our lives and in our lifestyle. We gotta pull that off. I told Forest, ‘I want to go and find out who the finest documentary producer is in Hollywood.’ We want the very best. And he came back and said: ‘David Wolper.’” The contract between Stax and Wolper gave the producer creative control, with one major exception: Stax retained the right of approval on content relating to Black relationships or feeling, as well as the narration and music contained in the picture.

A budget of $480,000 was set. To direct, New Yorker Mel Stuart was brought into the project. “I got involved with Wattstax because I had done many films for Dave Wolper. I had just finished directing Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and was at liberty. I had some mixed feelings, because I felt I wasn’t that familiar with the Black experience, so this was the condition. I met the staff of Stax: Larry Shaw (who became co-producer of the picture with me), Forest Hamilton and others and said, this is the way I want to do it. I am the only White person on the creative staff. Everything will be siphoned through your feelings, ‘cause I don’t know enough about the Black experience. I can interpret it, but I don’t know it.”

Isaac Hayes recalled, “I thought about the commemoration of what happened, with the Watts riots. We were not celebrating the devastation that went on there. We were commemorating lives that were lost and the coming together of a people that had been suppressed. That’s why all the violence broke out. We were suppressed. You know, police brutality, all those things added up. All that pent up frustration from a people, it just came out. So, somebody struck a match. I don’t know how it started. But I think the society we were livin’ in bred that, gave rise to it. You know, you can suppress a person for so long and they will rise up.” To keep tensions cool, Al Bell lobbied the city to keep the LAPD out of the stadium. Security was all Black and was not permitted to carry firearms. With an estimated 112,000 turning out for the eight-hour concert, no violent incidents were reported.

Reviewing the concert footage, Stuart was disappointed with what he found. “It was like a newsreel, a performance. And I knew we needed more. I knew for the film to be important, it just couldn’t be a record of a concert. And I came to the realization that it’s not the music, it’s how the people feel about the music that’s important, how the people feel about their lives that’s important, if this film is going to have any substance.” Stuart, Larry Shaw and Forest Hamilton turned to the Stax acts unable to make the concert and staged them performing throughout Watts. The Emotions did a gospel song at a small church. Johnnie Taylor tore the roof off The Summit Club singing “Jody’s Got Your Girl and Gone”. Little Milton was filmed in the shadow of the Watts Towers lip synching “Walking the Back Streets and Crying”.

The filmmakers still didn’t feel they had a movie. Larry Clark recalled, “So then we had this assignment: go out into the community and ask people about the blues. So we went out and we found people on the stoop, we found people sitting in front of grocery stores, wherever we could, and we started asking about the blues. Part of it was we would start talkin’ to people, all right, and, just talkin’. Camera’s not even rollin’. Eventually, you kind of get a sense – when people are gettin’ relaxed – and then very quietly you turn on the camera, so that the person talking is not actually aware that you’re shooting.” In search of a narrator – someone to serve as the voice of the community – Forest Hamilton took Mel Stuart to a club to a see a comedian named Richard Pryor. The next night, Stuart returned with a camera crew and sat down at the bar for two hours with Pryor, who gave an improvisational tour-de-force on racial relations, the police or whatever else flew through his mind.

Columbia Pictures agreed to distribute Wattstax and held a world premiere February 1973 in Los Angeles. The film climaxed with Isaac Hayes performing his monumental hit “Theme From Shaft”, and “Soulsville”, songs from the movie Shaft. MGM immediately filed a lawsuit. In order for Hayes to appear in the movie at all, he was called back to pen a new song – “Rolling Down the Mountainside” – and lip synch it on a soundstage, as if it had been performed at Wattstax. The original ending was buried for 30 years. Hayes recalled, “I was angry. I was angry at MGM. Why would they do that? Makin’ money’s one thing, monetarily speaking, but it would have been a contribution to allow that to go just like it was, ‘cause it meant so much to so many people. It was insensitive of them to do that. But – you know – they had control of it. So I don’t know who made that decision, I don’t know if attorneys or what. Again, they were representing that same kind of suppression that caused them riots in the first place. It’s always a struggle.”

Wattstax was generally dismissed in the mainstream press. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “I don’t mean that the film is in any way fake; it just has the air of something too carefully laid out in advance. It’s so busy being glossy and optimistic that it doesn’t even allow its performers time to create on screen a measure of the excitement they might have created in person.” Though Wattstax was invited to open the Cannes Film Festival in May 1973 and according to Stuart “did very well in Black neighborhoods”, within a year, the film was a memory. An arcane financing deal dividing the film’s rights between Columbia and Fantasy Inc. – the record label that purchased much of the Stax library in 1977 – prevented Wattstax from being broadcast on TV or released on VHS. For decades, Wattstax practically disappeared.

In 2001, film restoration expert Tom Christopher was on the Warner Bros. lot working on a director’s cut of Amadeus. He stumbled into a palette of boxes that hadn’t even been checked into the film storage facility and discovered the original 16mm negative of Wattstax. After some investigating, Christopher also tracked down the missing ending. Fantasy Inc. joined with Columbia and Warner Bros. to restore Wattstax to its original theatrical condition, cleaning the negative and remastering the soundtrack. A 35mm print of Wattstax: The Special Edition screened at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival and was re-released in 12 theaters that June. A long overdue DVD emerged later that year. Fantasy facility manager Scott Roberts commented, “We realized that the performances were really brilliant and quite a cultural find. So we coordinated with Warner Brothers and Columbia to get the film seen by the public as it was originally intended. The feedback we get is that it’s an important cultural document for African-Americans. It was a major event.”

Opinion
To get an idea of how epic the lineup of performers assembled at the L.A. Coliseum in August 1972 was, Isaac Hayes is nearly blown off the stage twice; first by cosmic bad assedness of The Bar-Kays laying down “Son of Shaft” and later in the afternoon, Rufus Thomas – the world’s oldest teenager – busting out “The Breakdown” and “Funky Chicken” and having enough energy left to coax hundreds of festival goers off the football field and back into the stands. It’s one hell of a show, but what makes Wattstax one of the top five concert films of all time is how poetically it weaves the music into the real world of the community surrounding the venue. Interspersed between the delicious drum beats and funky rhythm guitars, the filmmakers give the people a voice. Opening up about their experiences – hopes, fears, relationships – is more even more powerful than what takes place on the stage.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
Official Site Wattstax – The Special Edition Restoration

DGA Interview with Wattstax Director Mel Stuart

“Loud and proud” By James Maycock. The Guardian, July 20, 2002

“Wattstax back: Forgotten film revived with slot in Sundance” By Tommy Perkins. Memphis Business Journal, January 17, 2003

“Sound For Wattstax Concert Film” By Blair Jackson. Mix, June 2003

Wattstax (30th Anniversary Special Edition). Warner Home Video (2003)

Synopsis
Jimmy Rabbitte (Robert Arkins) – a peddler of bootleg tapes who lives with his family in the housing projects on the north side of Dublin – is approached by his friends Outspan (Glen Hansard, guitar) and Derek (Kenneth McCluskey, bass) to take over management of their band. “You had the Frankie Goes to Hollywood album before anyone had ever heard of ‘em. And you were the first to realise they were shite,” Outspan tells him. Jimmy accepts and announces they’re going to be playing “Dublin soul.” His musical aspirations are ribbed by Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. (Colm Meaney), but Jimmy’s newspaper ad brings every musical wanna-be in the neighborhood to the Rabbitte home for auditions. Dean (Félim Gormley, sax), Billy (Dick Massey, drums), Steven (Michael Aherne, piano) and a bus conductor Jimmy heard belting out drunken tunes at a wedding named Declan Cuffe (Andrew Strong) join the band.

Imelda Quirke (Angeline Ball), the most beautiful girl in town, and her friends (Bronagh Gallagher, Maria Doyle Kennedy) are enlisted as backup singers. The final piece becomes a trumpet player named Joey “The Lips” Fagan (Johnny Murphy). Old enough to be their dad, Joey wins over the kids by claiming to have jammed with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Otis Redding to The Beatles. Joey christens their band The Commitments. Tensions arise when Declan develops a star sized ego, the girls seduce Joey the Lips one at a time, and Billy quits before he kills their lead singer. Jimmy replaces the drummer with a skinhead named Mickah Wallace (Dave Finnegan), a psycho who earns a promotion from the band’s doorman. As The Commitments build a local following, Joey promises he can deliver Wilson Pickett – in town performing – to jam with them at their next gig. Stardom appears inevitable.

Production history
In the mid-1980s Roddy Doyle was teaching secondary school (high school) in the Kilbarrack neighborhood of north Dublin, where he’d grown up. He’d written a satiric novel called Your Granny’s A Hunger Striker that publishers he’d submitted it to didn’t even bother opening. Kicking around ideas for a better book, Doyle recalled, “I decided I wanted to write about the type of kids I taught and had become charmed by, really, and whose company I enjoyed, who are typical of the type of place I came from. I didn’t want it to be a school story. I wanted to see them a few years after they would leave school, still young, but adult. Forming a band just struck me as being a good excuse to bring them together. It could have been a football team because I’m also very fond of football, but I can’t see football being funny – or amusing on paper. Also, it would have been restricted to one sex.”

Launching what he dubbed King Farouk Press in 1987, Doyle printed 3,000 copies of The Commitments, dispersed them to local bookstores and built a cult following in Dublin. London publishing firm Heinemann picked up the rights and published the novel to critical and commercial success. It was so well received that interest in a movie began to filter in. Doyle recalls, “They said they loved the book and the first thing they do before your arse is warm on the seat is to tell you how to pull it apart and give it a happy ending. I was kind of frightened by this. I’d two questions I put to would-be producers and Lynda Myles was the only one to answer them correctly. Would the film have stars, because it didn’t seem to make sense to have stars in a film about unknown people? She agreed. I asked then would the language remain intact; not necessarily the expletives but the rhythm of the language, would it be Dublin? And she said yeah, of course.”

London based producer Lynda Myles recalls, “One of the things that was very important to him was he would be allowed to write the script. He wasn’t interested in signing away the rights. And what we agreed was we would start working with him and take it as far as we could go – given that he had never written a screenplay before.” While Doyle kept his day job teaching in Kilbarrack, Myles and her partner Roger Randall Cutler coached the novelist through the finer art of screenplay adaptation, instructing Doyle how to condense scenes. Their patience produced a completed draft, but Cutler admitted, “It somehow was just a wee bit short of the experience of reading the novel. One wanted to have a screenplay that did that and more, if you like.” The producers passed the book to British screenwriters Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais for help.

Dick Clement recalls, “Roger had shown it to us in London. We came back to Los Angeles. We thought we had money to develop movies, had lunch with Alan Parker just to sort of talk about what we were all doing, which we did fairly often. He said, ‘I’d like to do it.’ We called Roger Randall Cutler and said, ‘Now, this will make it more expensive, and it will probably become Alan’s movie, not yours, but at the end of it you’ll have an Alan Parker movie, which is pretty tempting. It took some convincing that this was actually for real. I mean, you can’t blame him, because these things don’t normally happen that way.” In terms of their rewrite, Ian La Frenias added, “It wasn’t a punch-up job. It needed to be rethought to just as a film. And I think Roddy – there was all that wonderful dialogue and characters – but it just had to be retold in a form that made a more dramatic and that more actually happened and there were bigger beats and the growth and the development of the band and their characters.”

Alan Parker – director of Fame, Pink Floyd: The Wall and Mississippi Burning – remembers, “The first time I heard about Roddy Doyle’s book was Dick Clement & Ian La Frenais – who are old friends of mine and are quite wonderful writers – they gave me the book. And I loved the book, for a number of reasons. First of all, it was a very slim volume. And I found myself laughing out loud. It’s a wonderful book because it’s mostly dialogue and all of the descriptions really are in the beauty of language, and if you’re laughing out loud at a book then you think to yourself, ‘Well, maybe the movie’d be all right.’” With the principals of Beacon Communications – Armyan Bernstein and Tom Rosenberg – locking down financing, Parker worked with Clement & La Frenais on the screenplay adaptation. Once a script was ready, casting convened in Dublin.

Andrew Strong (Deco) was discovered after his father – vocalist Rob Strong – was hired to give Parker an idea of what Otis Redding or Wilson Pickett were going to sound like interpreted by an Irish soul band. Strong was 16 when he was offered the part. Robert Arkins was an accomplished trumpet player and frontman of his own band, but was ultimately was offered the part of Jimmy Rabbitte. Of the ten leads, only Bronagh Gallagher (Bernie) and Johnny Murphy (Joey the Lips) had acted before. After five weeks of rehearsals, a 53-day shooting schedule commenced in Dublin. Parker recalls, “Barrytown – which is the mythical place where Roddy has set his book – obviously was based on Kilbarrack, where Roddy was a schoolteacher. And I just found it cinematically a little dull, Kilbarrack, I have to admit.” Parker ended up shooting the film in 44 different locations spread throughout Dublin.

Opening August 1991, critics in the U.S. did anything but applaud The Commitments. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “As in his earlier Fame, Mr. Parker immerses his audience in a world in which popular art amounts to a communal high, a means of achieving identity and a great escape from the abundant problems of everyday life. As in Fame, he does this with a mixture of annoying glibness and undeniable high-voltage style.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “Parker never promises us a profound human drama here, and the band is so good that maybe music was the best way to go. But I was left with sort of an empty feeling, as if after the characters were developed into believable people, Parker couldn’t find anywhere to go with them.” Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: “Parker gives Dublin’s poverty the same misplaced gloss he brought to the Japanese refugee camps in Come See the Paradise. And the predictable way in which the band’s nine men and three women argue about music, sex and fame robs the story of urgency.”

The Commitments only managed $14.9 million at the box office in the U.S., and while the film swept the British Academy Awards in 1992, it notched only one Oscar nomination, for Best Editing (Gerry Hambling). A decade after its release, Parker mused, “This film really was quite inexpensive to make for its time. I think it cost $12 million and bear in mind that all the music was done within that budget, and recorded and everything. And it’s the kind of film, I suppose it’s the music which gives it its chance of success as a movie, particularly in the United States, which is, you know, audiences in the States are not really very tolerant of films that are not filmed in the American language. The Irish accent could have been difficult; I don’t think it’s that difficult to follow.” In addition to winning many fans on home video, The Commitments did become a sensation as a two-volume soundtrack album. By 2008, the CDs had sold 12 million copies worldwide.

The popularity of the soundtrack has enabled Kenneth McCluskey and Dick Massey to tour the world with a band calling themselves The Stars of The Commitments. Glen Hansard – who performs and records with his band The Frames – returned to acting in Once (2007) and won an Academy Award for Best Original Song with Markéta Irglová. Soundtrack sales remained brisk enough to get the attention of Miramax Films. In 2000, the studio flew playwright Warren Leight to Dublin to sound out a sequel. But according to McCluskey, “Miramax bought the rights to make a sequel, they commissioned a script writer and he came to Dublin. We got him very drunk and sent him back to New York with a hangover, but nothing ever happened.” Roddy Doyle has maintained that he has no interest whatsoever in a Commitments reunion. “It’s a better story if they break up. I don’t think it would be as enjoyable if they went on became the biggest band in the world.”

Opinion
The Commitments is one of those special movies that just hit at the right place and right time. Within a few short years, construction cranes and venture capital would have made a film about a working class band on the skids in Dublin laughable. But in either a stroke of genius, case of first timer’s luck, or both, the movie caught everyone involved at the peak of their creativity. The audience gets to experience lighting in a bottle in what is probably the most entertaining movie I’ve ever seen featuring actors I’d never heard of. Roddy Doyle’s source material has a sharp ear for the vernacular of the north side of Dublin, but more importantly, contains a self-depreciating wit that slashes through the cheesy melodrama of the musical genre. Jimmy Rabbitte Sr. – an absentee character in the novel – acts as a partial observer in the movie, bringing even greater doses of humor and vitality to the story.

Alan Parker belongs to a class of British directors whose commercials won lots of citations in the 1970s, but unlike most of his films, The Commitments is focused on its characters, its dialogue and its ideals as opposed to lighting effects or trick editing. And unlike a lot of shitty musicals (or worse, American Idol) the emphasis here isn’t on how music can transform you into a superstar, but on what music can do for your dignity. Music supervisor G. Marq Roswell is one of many who deserve credit along with Parker for the four-star soundtrack. The Commitments’ versions of “Mustang Sally”, “Slip Away” and “Try A Little Tenderness” have stood up against the original recordings by Wilson Pickett, Clarence Carter and Otis Redding. The amateur cast is equal parts energetic and natural, particularly Robert Arkins, whose self-conducted interviews in the tub should resonate with anyone who ever dreamed of rising above their surroundings.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Something of a Hero: An Interview with Roddy Doyle” By Karen Sbrockey. Interview Literary Review, Summer 1999

“When Roddy Met Trudy” By Ciaran Carty. Sunday Tribune, February 25, 2001

The Commitments. 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment (2004)

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
Upon his release from Joliet Correctional Center, “Joliet” Jake Blues (John Belushi) is met by his brother Elwood Blues (Dan Aykroyd) in an old Mt. Prospect police car. Elwood takes Jake directly to St. Helen Blessed Shroud Orphanage to visit The Penguin (Kathleen Freeman), the nun who raised them. She reveals that the Cook County assessor has asked for $5,000 and is threatening to close the orphanage. Jake offers to have the cash for her in the morning, but The Penguin refuses to accept stolen money, and when the brothers curse up a storm, she kicks them out in disgrace. An old bluesman named Curtis (Cab Calloway) who raised the boys and also lives in the orphanage advises them to get churched up.

Standing at the back of the Triple Rock Cathedral to hear a sermon from the Reverend Cleophus James (James Brown), Jake is struck by the holy spirit. It occurs to him they can save the orphanage by reuniting their old band. Elwood reveals that might not be so easy; they all took straight jobs. Pulled over by a pair of Illinois State troopers for running a red light and driving on a suspended license, Elwood notifies Jake “We’re on a mission from God,” and leads the law on a wild car chase through a shopping mall. Laying low from the authorities, the Blues Brothers also dodge assassination attempts by a mousy brunette (Carrie Fisher) who has it in for Jake.

Steve Cropper (rhythm guitar), Donald Dunn (bass), Willie Hall (drums), Tom Malone (trombone) and Murphy Dunne (piano) are found playing a Holiday Inn. Trumpeter Mr. Fabulous (Alan Rubin) is lured away from his job as a maître’d when the Blues Brothers make a scene in his restaurant. Lead guitarist Matt Murphy and saxophonist Blue Lou (Lou Marini) are recovered in Calumet City working for Matt’s wife (Aretha Franklin) at a soul food diner. She doesn’t let her husband go without breaking into “Think”. In addition to state police and the Mystery Woman, the Blues Brothers are pursed through Chicago by a redneck band, Illinois Nazis and the state National Guard as they try to make it from their big gig to the county assessor’s office.

Production history
According to interviews given at the time, John Belushi pinned the birth of The Blues Brothers to the autumn of 1977 while he was stuck in Eugene, Oregon shooting Animal House. Belushi recalled, “There were a lot of rainy nights with nothing to do and this guy I met there, Curtis Salgado, began playing me all this music. It was fucking unbelievable. I was starving for it and Curtis kept asking me if I was really interested. Interested. I couldn’t stop playing the stuff! Magic Sam, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Junior Wells – I walked around playing that shit all the time. I bought hundreds of records and singles. And then I knew Danny had played the harp in Canada, and I always could sing, so we created The Blues Brothers.”

Dan Aykroyd traced the origin of The Blues Brothers to New York, where Belushi would warm up audiences for Saturday Night Live. Aykroyd recalled, “He used to sing rock stuff, and he introduced me to The Allman Brothers and Led Zeppelin. I introduced him to James Cotton and some of the white blues bands that were working up North, like The Lamont Cranston Band.” Aykroyd quickly got in on the act. “We just decided we’d go out and sing a couple of old blues numbers – and why don’t we wear the suits that you wore when you were doing Roy Orbison? That was the discussion. John did Roy Orbison once. He wore the thin tie and white shirt and black suit. And then the shades, you know? And we just added the hat to it and the digital watches and the locked briefcase.”

If TV audiences couldn’t decide whether The Blues Brothers were mocking someone or paying tribute, they weren’t alone. Aykroyd added, “Well, we thought it was a parody at first, but then we started to get in with these heavyweight musicians and we realized, ‘Hey, we’ve got to be pros here.’” Belushi – who played drums growing up in the suburbs of Chicago – was living out a dream. Aykroyd remained dubious about taking their act on the road. Then Steve Martin asked The Blues Brothers to open nine shows for him September 1978 at the Universal Amphitheatre in L.A. Under the guidance of Paul Shaffer, Aykroyd & Belushi assembled a band. The response was so overwhelming that when Atlantic Records put out a concert album – A Briefcase Full of Blues – it sold three million copies.

Pitching an idea for a movie over the phone, Aykroyd & Belushi found a buyer in Universal Pictures, which rushed The Blues Brothers into development. Belushi convinced Aykroyd to get to work on a script and summoned director John Landis to New York. Aykroyd recalls, “Then Landis came in and talked to me at Saturday Night one night, and said, ‘I want this, this and this in the movie.’ I took some notes, and said, ‘Fine, you’ll have it.’ And I sort of cut the script to what he wanted – including of course, the thought and myth that we knew. So from the beginning, it was like Landis and I putting it together. Landis saying, ‘I want the biggest car chase ever at the end of the movie,’ and I went, ‘Okay!’ And I said, ‘Well, I want to jump a swing bridge.’ And he said, ‘Fine.’ And you know, I turned in a three-hundred-plus-page script.”

When he sent the script for The Blues Brothers to producer Robert Weiss, Aykroyd wrapped it in the pages of the San Fernando Yellow Pages to blunt the effect. As written, each member of the band had been given their own story. Aykroyd recalls, “I didn’t even know how to write movies. I don’t think I’d even seen a screenplay. I was told most screenplays were 120 to 150 pages long, but when I sat down to write The Blues Brothers, there were so many descriptive passages in there, just paragraphs and paragraphs of shots, of concepts, of ideas, of descriptions and eventually it just kind of ballooned up.” The script ran 324 pages. Landis recalls, “When I read it and I got these calls from Bob Weiss and Sean Daniel and Ned Tanen, you know, hysterical, ‘What the fuck is this?’”

Landis adds, “So I basically distilled it, rewrote it, and then gave it back to Danny and then we worked together. But basically it was – don’t want to say streamlining because this movie’s anything but streamlined – but it was trying to make it as economic in the story as possible. I really wanted to simplify it to the point, I mean, it really is like Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, ‘Let’s put on a show and save the orphanage,’ just really make it a straight forward story on which we can hang all this craziness.” Shooting commenced July 1979 in Los Angeles. The musical numbers were largely shot on the Universal lot, while the climactic concert was filmed at the Hollywood Palladium. By the time the production moved to Harvey, Illinois to shoot a car chase in the shuttered Dixie Square Mall, the $27 million budget was climbing. It would end up at $36 million.

Released June 1980, The Blues Brothers was praised in its hometown; Gene Siskel ranked it #8 on his list of the year’s 10 best films, while Roger Ebert recommended the movie as well. Many critics outside of Chicago did not. Pauline Kael wrote in the New Yorker: “The film’s big joke is how overscaled everything in it is; this has an unfortunate result – Landis is working with such a lavish hand that his miscalculations in timing are experienced by the audience as a form of waste.” Richard Corliss, Time Magazine: “Alas, more is less, and The Blues Brothers ends up totaling itself.” Variety: “If Universal had made it 35 years earlier, The Blues Brothers might have been called Abbott & Costello in Soul Town. Level of inspiration is about the same now as then, the humor as basic, the enjoyment as fleeting. But at $30 million, this is a whole new ball-game.”

Speaking 25 years later, Landis commented that The Blues Brothers, “got the most hateful reviews. People wrote that it was Hollywood out of control. We had a bunch of films that were way over budget about that same time: Apocalypse Now, Star Trek: The Movie, 1941, Heaven’s Gate and The Blues Brothers. All of those films – with the exception of Heaven’s Gate – eventually showed a profit. But the press kept saying Hollywood had gone crazy, and The Blues Brothers took a lot of that rap.” The film grossed $57.2 million in the U.S. and another $58 million overseas, but due to its costs – and the fact that Animal House earned twice as much – was considered a wash commercially.

Asked in 2005 about the film’s impact, Landis stated, “When we made The Blues Brothers, it was all Bee Gees and ABBA. Now, I get questions like, ‘How did you get Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin and James Brown to be in the movie?’ And I have to tell them, ‘It’s because they were thrilled to get the job.’ To give you an idea of how different it is now, when we did The Blues Brothers, MCA/Universal refused the soundtrack album, because they said no one but old black people would buy it. Then we went to what was called a ‘black label’ – Atlantic – and they refused to put John Lee Hooker on the album! Fifteen years later, John had a platinum album. So The Blues Brothers was successful in its attempt to call attention to these guys.”

Opinion
If you hate musical numbers, car crashes, R&B, soul, gospel music or profanity, you’ll probably find a lot to dislike about The Blues Brothers, which brazenly – though a bit raggedly – serves up epic quantities of each. For its fans, time appears to have been very good to this film, which isn’t seamless, but stands as one of most enduring musicals or comedies ever made. Of the six or seven movies he appeared in, it’s probably the best testament to the immense talent and likability of John Belushi. Also documented are show stopping performances by James Brown, John Lee Hooker, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles and Cab Calloway that if nothing else, make the film a marvel in musical anthropology.

What’s truly awesome about The Blues Brothers is the vision of Aykroyd & Landis’ script, which is filled with enough music, characters and ingenuity for two movies (Landis intended the picture to have a retro, road show release, with an intermission and a running time of two and a half hours.) The difference between this flick and 1941 – which was bloated with zany ideas and cast members – is that unlike Steven Spielberg, John Landis knew his musical and comedy genres. Elwood’s closet sized apartment, the chicken wire in front of the stage at Bob’s Country Bunker, and Carrie Fisher popping up like Wile E. Coyote throughout the film are all terrific concepts, and Landis demonstrates the panache to get honest to goodness laughs from that stuff. Along with Aykroyd & Belushi, he should also be acknowledged for employing so many great R&B musicians who were on the verge of being forgotten.

D.J. Nock at DVD Times writes, “25 years later, it’s easy to see that The Blues Brothers is little more than the sum of its parts. Like a lot of popular films, its reputation seems to precede it; never possessing the quality that its status reflects. But don’t get me wrong – I find the film to be a very entertaining brew, but its ‘perfect’ reputation is probably unjustified. Director John Landis has certainly made better films (especially his masterpiece, Trading Places), and his skills as a filmmaker have been put to more efficient use elsewhere.”

Scott Weinberg at DVD Talk writes, “Easily of the most ebullient and smoothly enjoyable musical comedies ever made, The Blues Brothers boasts a roster of musical talent that must be heard to be believed: Cab Calloway, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, James Brown, and John Lee Hooker, all legends of the music industry, had their careers earn a well-deserved shot in the arm from their appearances in The Blues Brothers. And the musicians hired to play Jake & Elwood’s band? Top-notch artists across the board. The flick’s basically one-third blues music, one-third character-based comedy, and one-third car chase — and all of it’s grade-A prime American Comedy, brewed in the vintage year of 1980.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
Andrew Largeman (Zach Braff) receives a message from his estranged father that his mother has died. Wrapped in a cocoon of anti-depressant drugs, a sterile Los Angeles apartment and a thankless job waiting tables at a chic Vietnamese restaurant, “Large” returns to suburban New Jersey for the funeral. Confiding to his icy psychiatrist father (Ian Holm) that he’s been getting headaches, Large is booked an appointment with a neurologist. An actor whose claim to fame was playing a mentally retarded football player on a TV movie, Large reunites with a buddy named Mark (Peter Sarsgaard), a funeral park worker who spends his time smoking pot.

Even with street drugs he’s given at a party, Large is unable to relate to the people back home, including a buddy (Armando Riesco) who got rich off his patent for “silent Velcro.” Large remains in his stupor until he meets a patient at the neurologist’s office named Sam (Natalie Portman). With her taste in music (The Shins), messy family and manic affinity for lying, Large emerges from his funk. He opens up to Sam about why he got as far away from his family as soon as he could. Obsessed with tracking down the perfect going away gift for Large, Mark takes the couple on a wild goose chase that ends in an infinite abyss dug into the suburbs.

Production history
Zach Braff graduated Northwestern University film school in 1997 and made his way to Los Angeles, where he went out on acting auditions. Cast in the NBC sitcom Scrubs in 2000, Braff quit his day job waiting tables and spent the four months before he was due to start work finishing a script he’d been scribbling since college. “I’ve been to maybe a dozen funerals in my life and I was always struck by how there’d be all the people mourning the death at the gravesite and twenty yards away, there’d be two guys on a tractor checking their watch. That was always really upsetting to me. It also showed how different two people can be as far as where they are in their minds. So that was one of the seeds for the idea of the movie.”

With Scrubs, Braff became a client of the powerful Creative Artists Agency, which circulated his script – Large’s Ark – through the industry. Braff recalled, “Almost everyone had passed on it. They all said, ‘Make it a three-act structure movie.’ If I submitted it to a screenwriting class, I would have failed.” A 28-year-old president of production at Jersey Films – Garden State native Pamela Abdy – read the script and championed it. She introduced Braff to her bosses Danny DeVito, Michael Shamberg and Stacy Sher, whose producing pedigree helped attract Natalie Portman, Peter Sarsgaard and Ian Holm to the cast, with Braff both starring in and making his directorial debut.

Dropping the cryptic title Large’s Ark and renaming the film Garden State, the search for financing came next. Braff recalled, “I had envisioned in my head that being in Scrubs, having Natalie Portman starring and Danny DeVito producing that it would be a cinch. I was like, ‘I’m not asking for that much money. C’mon!’ I couldn’t find anyone that wanted to take a risk. It was a risk. The screenplay is not a traditional three act structure and it’s not a movie a studio would ever generate … People then said, ‘Okay, if you do this to it, if you do that to it.’”

“One thing that freaked them out, for example, was introducing a character that doesn’t come back. I’m like, ‘Well that’s life. I go home for four days. I meet somebody. They’re not going to teach me a lesson by the time I leave.’” With time running out, Gary Gilbert & Dan Halsted of Camelot Pictures agreed to finance a budget of $2.5 million. A 25-day shooting schedule commenced April 2003 in Braff’s hometown of South Orange, New Jersey, with cinematographer Lawrence Sher and production designer Judy Becker – stalwarts of indie film – giving Garden State its ethereal look.

Screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2004, the film was so well received that Fox Searchlight and Miramax put up $5 million to acquire worldwide distribution. Released in July, the reviews were favorable; while Keith Phipps wrote at The Onion A.V. Club, “Garden State coasts on this considerable charm until it hits a brick wall in its final segments,” Roger Ebert added, “This is not a perfect movie; it meanders and ambles and makes puzzling detours. But it’s smart and unconventional, with a good eye for the perfect detail.” Generating enthusiastic word of mouth among many who discovered it, Garden State went on to gross $26 million in only a limited release in the U.S.

Opinion
Too early to tell whether Garden State will affect the generational impact of The Graduate, Harold and Maude or The Breakfast Club, this is the first comedy/drama in years that warrants a comparison with the classics of disaffected youth. The reason is Braff’s righteously offbeat screenplay which – maybe out of ignorance for how most movies are written – ignores commandments carved into stone by Robert McKee and finds its own voice. In addition to introducing characters with no relevancy whatsoever to the plot, the story develops in loosely connected episodes. The couple likes each other as soon as they meet. Somehow, it all works.

While the chemically imbalanced Large and Sam don’t really seem like they would last 72 hours together, much less happily ever after, Braff evokes the right moods to patch over gaps in logic. Garden State feels truthful. Just as good, it’s hilarious, due to an inspired cast featuring Jean Smart as Mark’s stoner mom, Michael Weston as a miniature cop and Geoffrey Arend as a retail employee who harangues Large with his get rich scheme. And after being lost in so many big movies, the plucky Natalie Portman seems tailored for this type of treehouse production. The much praised autumnal soundtrack – cueing Coldplay, Frou Frou and Nick Drake – avoids sounding trendy and holds up well.

Matt Cale at Ruthless Reviews rants, “Garden State literally made my skin crawl. I hated it as much as I’ve hated anything all year, and only an unexpected Adam Sandler film festival will keep it off my Worst of the Year list … rather than tell a story or develop interesting characters, the filmmaker throws together dozens of scenes that make no sense within the context of the film, largely because they were conceived by a young prick who collected random thoughts in a dog-eared notebook over several years in the hope that one day his bloated smattering of paper would find a buyer.”

“Garden State is far from perfect, but the things that do work exceed any excesses in Braff’s tendency to overreach in trying to inject heavy-handed pathos into his silly comedy. A little less angst would go a long way, but for viewers who tend to attribute meaning though mood over substance, you will probably come away thinking this to be a deeper experience than is warranted. Still, it is original and perversely clever at times, and in the world of romantic comedies, if you can call this one, that alone puts it head and shoulders above almost all of them,” writes Vince Leo at QWipster’s Movie Reviews.

Mike Long at Jackass Critics writes, “The real standout in the film is Sarsgaard, who seems to get better with every role. He plays a character who is both likable and despicable at the same time, and thus, the audience hangs on his every move as we attempt to decide how we feel about him. Garden State is the best Kevin Smith movie that I’ve seen since Chasing Amy. However, Smith had nothing at all to do with this film and Garden State only proves the difficulty in making a quirky film which is both moving and funny.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In December 1983, acclaimed art rockers Talking Heads concluded their “Stop Making Sense” tour, documenting the event by filming three shows at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Ambling onto a completely empty stage in a pair of white tennis shoes and carrying an acoustic guitar, singer/ songwriter David Byrne performs “Psycho Killer.” As the show progresses, Byrne’s band mates – bassist Tina Weymouth, drummer Chris Frantz, keyboardist Jerry Harrison – join him on stage one at a time, one song at a time, while roadies assemble amps, instruments and an entire stage around them.

By the performance of “Burning Down The House,” the band has been joined by guitarist Alex Reid of The Brothers Johnson, Parliament-Funkadelic keyboardist Bernie Worrell, percussionist Steve Scales, and backup singers Edna Holt and Lynn Mabry. For the entirety of the film, focus is kept squarely on the performances taking place on stage. Highlights include Byrne doing jogging laps during “Life During Wartime,” and appearing in an oversized gray suit for the song “Girlfriend Is Better.” Only near the end of the show is the packed audience finally revealed, most of them up out of their seats and dancing.

Production history
After turning in his cut of the film Swing Shift in the summer of 1983, director Jonathan Demme was notified by Warner Bros. that they were bringing in Robert Towne to rewrite several scenes, steering the film away from the quirky period drama that had been scripted and turning it into a light romance, playing off the chemistry Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell had developed. “We had this hard-nosed feminist, all women together thing, and Kurt Russell was supposed to be a bastard, and suddenly all these scenes were being rewritten, and I found myself in a very awkward position because I had to cooperate with these new scenes.”

Demme and producer Gary Goetzman had seen Talking Heads perform at the Greek Theatre that summer as part of the “Stop Making Sense” tour the band had launched to promote their latest album. The way David Byrne had staged the show and sequenced the songs – evolving his demeanor as the evening progressed – floored the director. He felt that it was a movie waiting to be filmed. Equally enthused for any opportunity to hang out with Byrne, a mutual friend introduced Demme to the musician “to see if he’d be interested in putting a film together of the concert.”

The prospect of a movie intrigued Byrne in part because of technical challenges he’d encountered on the tour. Demme recalls, “He designed the lighting for the live show with a lighting director and found it very frustrating that he could never get the right lighting. He realized that on film he would finally get the chance to get the lighting right.” Demme had collaborated with Jordan Cronenweth on Handle With Care and suggested the master cinematographer – who had recently shot Blade Runner – to light the concert. A week later, Byrne got back to Demme with $1.2 million the band had agreed to put up themselves to bankroll a film.

While Robert Towne labored over rewrites for Swing Shift, Demme sought refuge on the road with Talking Heads. Byrne kept after him about how Stop Making Sense would be different from other concert films. The director approached each member of the band for input. Tina Weymouth recalls, “So, we said ‘We’re not crazy about split screen images and flashing images.’ There was always one camera straight on. The format was very flat. It was always like a painting – sort of like a Robert Wilson design in two dimensions, but also with four moving cameras. And even though there were cranes that would be observing things, a lot of the time we weren’t even aware we were being filmed. It comes across as being real.”

A great deal of what separated Stop Making Sense from other concert films was already in place on the tour. Chris Frantz recalls, “The whole staging of the show seemed to be the most obvious idea in the world: to construct a show where you saw what it took to construct a show, in the show. And you start with an empty stage with absolutely nothing on it, and you put the stuff on the stage during the show that it takes to make a show: the lights, the amps, the instruments, the players, everything, and then you proceed to use that stuff. So everybody sees what it takes to make a show when they see that stuff put into action.”

At the time, Demme stated, “There’s been a kind of curse on concert movies. They almost never do well commercially, and I’m very rarely excited by them. I wanted to eliminate two things that I don’t like about them: shots of the audience and backstage interviews with the singers.” Filmed over three nights in December 1983 on the tour’s last stop – the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood – the set ran two hours and fifteen minutes. Acknowledging the movie should play nowhere near that length, Demme left four songs on the cutting room floor. Editing the picture in six weeks, mixing the sound in another two, Stop Making Sense was completed only ninety days after Demme wrapped photography.

The movie was put before an audience for the first time in April 1984 at the San Francisco International Film Festival. The response was overwhelming. Demme recalls, “Very quickly, people started leaving their seats and moving up closer to the screen and also standing up in their seats. By the end of ‘Burning Down the House’ the building was literally shaking and the manager of the theater was truly sincerely freaked out. He thought something terrible structurally might be about to happen, and it was a big struggle with him to not stop the show.” Screening the picture outdoors for the Venice Film Festival produced the same result of audiences dancing in the aisle.

Twenty-five years after opening in the U.S. in October 1984, Stop Making Sense routinely lands atop lists of the best concert movies ever made. For its reissue on DVD in 1999, David Byrne stated, “Another thing I noticed was my character – if I could call myself a character – he takes a kind of journey in this thing. He starts off as Mister Stiff White Guy and does his very, very, very best to get down and get loose by the end of the show, to kind of shed his inhibitions and get loose … And so he’s kind of changed as a person, just like would happen in a regular movie with a regular story with three acts or whatever, which I think helps make this movie work in a way that some other concert movies don’t.”

Opinion
Unlike concert movies out to celebrate the pageantry of a musical event, or offer some glimpse into the mind of a musician, this is the first democratic concert film. Stop Making Sense is made expressly for the concertgoers who came to see a concert, producing a seamless, exhilarating document of a performance. The only reactions or insights to be taken away here are ones Jonathan Demme empowers the viewer to take away on our own.

Demme’s work seems almost effortless against David Byrne’s gloriously geeky staging, as well as the chemistry of Talking Heads themselves; enigmatic, witty and unpredictable. Instead of a band trying to blast you out of the arena, here we’re compelled to get as close to the stage as possible. Jordan Cronenweth strips the theatre of color and bathes it in gorgeous shadow – memorably during Byrne’s dance with a lamp in “This Must Be The Place” – while Pablo Ferro, whose hand drawn titles were scrawled over the credits of Dr. Strangelove, designed the opening titles here too.

Colin Jacobson at DVD Movie Guide writes, “No matter how hard I tried, I never could develop much of an affinity for Talking Heads. They are one of those acts that I always felt I should like but just never really did … I think SMS might finally have done it. Is it the greatest concert film of all-time? I don’t feel that way – I doubt anything will ever surpass Prince’s brilliant Sign O the Times – but this piece, directed by Jonathan Demme, makes a strong argument for the Heads’ case; the film presents the band cleanly, effectively and evocatively. It does what every good concert movie should do: it makes me really wish I could see the show live.”

“First let me say that the Talking Heads had a huge influence on me as a teenager. They were among my favorite bands and one of the reasons that I wound up learning the bass and spending the next fifteen years playing in bands of my own … Though considered an avant-garde art band the Heads put on a surprisingly energetic presentation that shows them to be both consummate performers and accomplished musicians. Stop Making Sense comes closer to capturing the feel of a live show than any concert film made before or since. If you let your self get swept up in the performance you may well be tempted to get up off the couch and dance around in front of your screen,” writes Chris Hughes at DVD Talk.

Dean Roddey at DVD Verdict writes, “There are a few times and places where the Universe or God or the Muse is caught on film talking to us through human conduits. On my short list of such religious musical experiences are Hendrix at Monterey Pop, The Band’s The Last Waltz, Sting’s Bring on the Night, and U2’s Rattle and Hum, and, last but not least, The Talking Head’s Stop Making Sense. These films, for those of us who appreciate such things, contain transcendent moments that definitely peg the Chill Bump Meter.”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez