Primer (2004)
Written by Shane Carruth
Directed by Shane Carruth
Running time: 77 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
In suburban Dallas, Aaron (Shane Carruth) and Abe (David Sullivan) divide their time between jobs as software engineers with toiling in Aaron’s garage in a bid to develop a get-rich-quick gizmo. While their partners (Casey Gooden, Anand Upadhyaya) seem content to fool around with the equipment, Aaron and Abe focus on creating a product that will dazzle investors and achieve their entrepreneurial dreams. They see promise in a miniaturized semi-conductor, but instead of merely reducing the weight of a weevil, in a matter of hours, their test object presents a coat of fungus that would typically take months to develop naturally.

Aaron hits upon building a box big enough to allow a person to also reverse the arrow of time, but Abe takes him to a U-Haul self-storage facility and from afar, shows him what appears to be another Abe entering the facility. The engineers discover that they’ve already built two coffin-sized boxes with the power to transport users several hours backwards in time, depending on how long the boxes are powered up and how long the traveler remains inside. Using their invention to double up on the stock market and in sports betting, Aaron becomes obsessed with traveling through time in an effort to control the events unfolding in his past.

Who Made It?
Shane Carruth studied mathematics and computer science at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas. He spent a few days in the graduate program for math, but dropped out when he realized he’d mostly be doing research for other people. He recalled, “An entrepreneurial spirit took over, and I felt that whatever I did was going to be on my own terms, so I decided to make some money and apply that toward whatever venture I chose. I started writing software in C and C++ for a flight simulator at Hughes Aircraft and then got into Web work. I did back-end database design and then started consulting.”

Carruth had developed a love for narrative, penning a couple of short stories and getting half way through a novel. Realizing he had little taste for inner monologue and much preferred telling a story visually, Carruth spent three years in Dallas teaching himself screenwriting and filmmaking. Following the example of Robert Rodriguez and his book Rebel Without a Crew, Carruth cast, shot, edited and scored a 77-minute feature for the price of $7,000. The resulting film — Primer – was the sensation of the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, winning both the Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic and the Alfred P. Sloan Feature Film Prize with its $20,000 purse.

How’d He Do It?
“I’ve been asked whether, why I wanted to tell a story about inventors, or garage level inventors and to be honest, I knew what the story was way beyond, or well before, it had anything to do with science or science fiction. I was very interested in trust and how it’s related to what’s at risk, and I knew that I was going to have a story with a group of people — or what winds up being Abe and Aaron — who at the beginning of the film, or the beginning of the story, have this pretty conventional relationship and because of the introduction of this device or this power, changes what’s at risk.” After reading lots of scripts, Carruth “went to town writing”.

“When it came to production, I went to the few production houses here in Dallas. I asked them what they did and how they fit into the general scheme of things. I just asked a lot of questions from end to end about, you know, which cameras do what. Once I found out that cinematography was really photography with a set shutter speed, I got an old 35mm Minolta and bought some tungsten slide film, because I knew that motion-picture film for the most part was tungsten, and I used it to storyboard the entire script. It took a long time, because I didn’t know about photography. I didn’t know anything about depth of field or how to get the look I wanted.”

Carruth added, “I had to learn everything through the pre-production process. So I storyboarded and I set up my lighting, which wasn’t elaborate — it was mostly available light. I had read Soderbergh stuff where they talk about him using available light, which is true for the most part. So I thought I could get away with that, but I found there were some situations where I had to buy some florescent bulbs from Wal-Mart and set up a rudimentary bank.” He also opted to shoot in 16mm format instead of going digital. “Because the story gets so fantastical, I didn’t want to be experimental when it came to the medium itself.”

When it came to casting, Carruth met with around 100 local actors, most of which he found either “a little too theatrical” or unprepared. “In the end, only one professional actor ended up in the movie. The rest were either family members, or friends-of-friends. It’s funny because I’ve heard several nice comments specifically about the acting.” After finding David Sullivan to play Abe, Carruth settled on playing Aaron himself. In the summer of 2001, Primer commenced a five-week shooting schedule around Dallas. With nearly 40 locations (and permission to shoot in about 10 of them) Carruth resorted to spaces he had access to, like his brother’s apartment.

Recounting his expenses, Carruth stated, “It was a few thousand for the camera rental, a couple of thousand for processing, and then, of course, the cost of film stock. I called around and managed to get a lot of expired stock donated.” $7,000 would not cover the transfer from Super 16 to 35mm; a friend loaned Carruth the cash for that. “I had a few offers from certain bodies to pay for the blow-up, but they demanded that they be credited as executive producers and that their credit show before everyone else’s. I didn’t think that was fair to me and everyone who worked on the film for free before it was a ‘Sundance’ film. Luckily, my friend Scott Douglass saved the day.”

Trying to find a movie in the footage Carruth had shot proved the most daunting task of getting Primer seen. He recalled, “It took two years to edit and compose and loop and Foley and all that.” He admitted, “It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.”

Screened at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, Primer became a sensation in Park City and among critics as well. Dana Stevens, The New York Times: “At a certain point, Mr. Carruth’s fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration.” Marjorie Baumgarten, The Austin Chronicle: “It’s hard to always know what Primer is saying or where it’s heading, but it looks fantastic while it unfolds and you won’t be able to forget what you’ve witnessed.” Carina Chocano, The Los Angeles Times: “Frustrating as I ultimately found it, Primer is undeniably geek heaven. For everyone else, it’s a nice antidote to big-budget bogusness.”

Primer won a North American distribution deal from THINKfilm and opened October 2004 in the United States. Never expanding beyond 31 theaters, it scooped up $424,760 domestically. Carruth commented on his debut film’s passionately baffled reception by stating, “My favorite films are the ones that can’t be tidily summed up, yet I walk away with a sense of the core. I wanted to make a film like that. As I was writing, my brother would say, ‘It’s confusing.’ I would ask, ‘Well, what do you think is happening? Just take a guess.’ He always got it right. He’d say, ‘No, no, I get it, I just don’t think anybody else would.’ But that’s exactly what I was going for. I wanted it to be right on that line.”

Should I Care?
If you had to prepare a primer on viewing Primer, the consensus Carruth and most of the audience reached was that watching the audacious, mind bending flick twice really seems to help. Really, really helps. Some have compared it to Memento in that respect, but I didn’t find it nearly as accessible. Carruth does a yeoman’s job resisting genre temptations or Hollywood bullshit by grounding the film with geek-speak in all its hyper focused and argumentative glory. Without the sci-fi, this is a striking portrait of garage inventors, right down to their sleeping habits, uniforms and paranoia once they strike on an innovation braced for huge success.

Carruth is a highly intelligent and skilled storyteller who in the middle of his tale, not only walks out on the audience, he shuts off the lights and leaves it up to us to find our way out of the story. The effect is either invigorating or insulting, depending on your personal taste. Regardless of how baffling the finished film, Primer is mandatory viewing for anyone flirting with the DIY aesthetic. The film looks stunningly sharp for the money, has good performances and a decent music track. If a software engineer with less than $10,000 can make a movie this successful in the suburbs of Dallas, anybody can.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Shane Carruth” MakingTheFilm.com, 7 March 2004

“Mad Math: Bending Time with Primer Director” By Polly Shulman. The New York Times, 19 October 2004

“Interview with Shane Carruth” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 22 October 2004

“From Math to Movies” By Steven Wallich & Wayne Slater. IEEE Spectrum, November 2004

“Primer: The New Whiz Kid on the Block” By Amy Taubin. Film Comment. 2004

Primer. DVD audio commentary by Shane Carruth. New Line Home Video, 2005.

Quid Pro Quo (2008)
Written by Carlos Brooks
Directed by Carlos Brooks
Produced by Sanford-Pillsbury Productions/ HDNet Films
Running time: 82 minutes

By Joe Valdez

So, What’s This About?
“I don’t remember any of what I’m about to tell you. I only know what the police and coroner reports said.” So begins a personal remembrance from Isaac Knott (Nick Stahl), correspondent for “Public Radio New York”. His editor (Jessica Hecht) shares with him a tip from an anonymous caller — known only as Ancient Chinese Girl — who claims a man entered a bayside hospital and tried bribing an intern to chop off his leg. The tipster wants to meet Isaac, who’s been paralyzed and restricted to a wheelchair since the age of eight, the only survivor of a car accident that killed his parents in upstate New York.

After Ancient Chinese Girl dispatches him to a clandestine gathering of “wannabes” — able bodied men and women who share the unusual desire to be disabled — Isaac finally meets his wily tipster, an art conservator named Fiona (Vera Farmiga). Fascinated by why someone would want to be paralyzed who isn’t, Fiona agrees to tell Isaac what she knows about this underworld if, quid pro quo, he helps her understand what it’s like being disabled. Daffy and unpredictable, Fiona’s complicated feelings for the reporter change when a pair of antique spectators shoes suddenly give Isaac the ability to walk.

Who Made It?
Carlos Brooks attended Western Washington University as an English major and was later accepted into USC on a merit scholarship to study film and writing. Brooks would win an Abraham Polonsky Award for screenwriting at USC and marry classmate Helen Childress, who was hot as a bottle rocket after authoring the 1994 Winona Ryder/Ethan Hawke flick Reality Bites. Brooks spent the next decade carving out a career as a screenwriter. Among his scripts was a spec called Empire – which Robert Zemeckis was to produce through his company Imagemovers — that took place amid construction of the Empire State Building.

In 2004, Brooks appeared to finally be getting his shot at the director’s chair through HDNet Films, a division of Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban’s 2929 Entertainment. Mark Cuban is the billionaire who owns the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks and once spent a day managing a Dairy Queen in Coppell, Texas after Cuban accused a game referee of being unfit to run a DQ. Sticking his big toe into film financing, Cuban has had an energetic run, producing Good Night and Good Luck, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Bubble, among many others. HDNet Films was launched to develop, finance and produce feature films to be shot in High Definition.

How’d They Do It?
The idea that would become Quid Pro Quo began germinating in 2000 with Carlos Brooks, whose focus of study at USC had been Alfred Hitchcock. “I wrote the script just to write. I didn’t write it to direct or anything; I just wanted to write something different. I’ve always wanted to write a detective story, and what this really is is a detective story in disguise. It’s an investigative journalistic piece, and the best detective stories are the ones where the detective ultimately realizes he’s been investigating himself. I would never write an actual detective story — at least I don’t think I would — but that’s what this secretly is.”

Brooks’ original idea involved an agoraphobic and a pair of headphones that gave him access to the outside world, Rear Window style. Googling through disabilities, Brooks stumbled upon the wannabe subculture. “I kind of vectored in on them. I’ve never met anybody who had Body Dysmorphic Disorder — that’s what it’s really called, I guess. I just kind of lurked, and I was fascinated by the tone of their writing. They knew they sounded quote, unquote ‘crazy.’ It’s entirely different talking about something we think is crazy without knowing you’re crazy. They were incredibly self-aware, painfully self-aware and wanted acceptance despite what they were saying.”

Intended as a writing sample, Quid Pro Quo started attracting interest from directors. Brooks decided he could do no worse himself and working with producers Midge Sanford & Sarah Pillsbury, landed a $2 million commitment from HDNet for his directing debut. He faced a long slog after being greenlit in 2004. Pre-production was shut down for 11 months after Brooks reached an impasse with the producers over casting. For the female lead, Brooks was set on an unknown named Vera Farmiga. “To find an actress who can make that role sympathetic and living and breathing was too good to pass up. When you find the right actor, you stick by them.”

Vera Farmiga mused, “I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote and Love Boat. Quirky detective stories and oddball romances. I imagine initially that’s what drew me. I love romance. I am always on the quest for an unusual romance, and this was it. There always has to be something about the character in the script that really turns my head and Fiona — I have a stiff neck from craning at this one. My initial response was she’s that woman in your life that you are absolutely terrified of but at the same time have to be around. She fascinated me. And the fact that it is just an unusual detective love story, and also a taboo subject that you don’t hear anything about.”

Quid Pro Quo began rolling October 2005 for an 18-day shoot in New Jersey. Brooks revealed, “I shot on a Sony 900 camera, and we used the 950 for a few scenes where it was a tight space. My production designer, Roshelle Berliner, and the DP Michael McDonough, and I experimented with shiny metallic surfaces to trick the video lens into thinking it’s film. I don’t know why this works, but it does. It tricks the chip in the video camera into softening those hard video lines and edges. If you walked on the set, you would think it’s the strangest looking place because Isaac’s apartment was full of wallpaper with metallic inlays. But on video, it looks like film. It gives it this Sidney Lumet-circa-The Verdict look, and that’s what I wanted.”

Joining Vera Farmiga was Nick Stahl, the best John Connor (in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines) and the lead in the HBO series Carnivale. Stahl elaborated on the film’s difficult journey. “We actually ended up re-shooting some stuff, and adding a couple of scenes. I think it was the kind of thing that, it was so clear on the page, the story, and the tone of it was so clear, but, for whatever reason, it’s such a different process once you actually film it and then you actually go to start editing it.” He added, “A lot of people didn’t get it, and that was the reason why we had to go back and retool some stuff. Carlos Brooks worked endlessly for so long. He kept cutting it and working at it.”

Screened January 2008 at the Sundance Film Festival, critics went along with Quid Pro Quo, for the most part. Justin Chang, Variety: “An exceedingly odd meeting of the minds (and bodies) occurs in Quid Pro Quo, a strikingly original and provocative first feature from scribe-helmer Carlos Brooks.” Stephen Holden, The New York Times: “After spinning out metaphors of paralysis and eroticism in its characters’ feverish imaginations, Quid Pro Quo decides at the last minute that it has to explain everything. The moment it pulls away from the fantastic, it lands with a thud.” Jenni Miller, Premiere: “Fans of strange love stories and detective thrillers would do well to investigate this indie gem.”

Should I Care?
Quid Pro Quo has been unfortunate to draw comparisons to David Cronenberg’s Crash, but I didn’t find anything disturbing about the movie. It’s edgy and a bit dark, but immensely fresh, sharp witted, impeccably well cast and I would even describe this as a film David Fincher might have shot if given only $1.6 million. I don’t care for the title and wonder why Mark Cuban is producing so many movies that barely see the light of day. Distributed by his Magnolia Pictures in June 2008, Quid Pro Quo never expanded beyond four theaters in the United States, grossing $11,864. This movie deserved an attentive publicity campaign and a much better commercial fate.

I liked how Quid Pro Quo defies categorization — if I had to, I’d label it an unusual romantic comedy with mystery — and forced me to both pay attention and react to it, as opposed to just watching passively. The dialogue has a lot of crackle and pop, and for a film with such a grotesque sounding premise, is pretty funny. Rachel Black puts in a cute performance as Stahl’s office buddy. But the chief reason to see this is the daffy Vera Farmiga, who once again spins through a movie like a punk ballerina. Carlos Brooks demonstrates a sharp ear, a terrific eye and great taste not only delivering a solid debut, but executing a film with such a high degree of difficulty.

Your thoughts?

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Carlos Brooks, Quid Pro Quo” The Reeler, 20 January 2008

“Local Film School Drop-out Gets into Sundance” By Sam Vicchrilli. The Seatle Times, 25 January 2008

“Nick Stahl” By Terry Keefe. Venice Magazine, March 2008

“Vera Farmiga Offers up Quid Pro Quo” By Jenni Miller. Premiere, June 2008

“Interview: Carlos Brooks on Quid Pro Quo” By Matt Singer. IFC. Com, 13 June 2008

By Joe Valdez

What the *&#! Are They About?
Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) and her husband Guy (John Cassavetes) move into the 7th floor New York apartment of a recently deceased old woman. They ignore the advice of a close friend, who tells them about the Bramford Building’s “unpleasant reputation around the turn of the century”, including a couple of notorious tenants who practiced witchcraft there, earning the building the nickname “Black Bramford”. Before they even meet their neighbors (the Castevets), the couple can hear them bickering through the thin walls. Rosemary later meets a reformed junkie named Terry who was cleaned up and taken in by the Castevets.

After Terry is found dead on the sidewalk of an apparent suicide, the nosy Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon) invites her new neighbors to dinner with her husband Roman (Sidney Blackmer). Guy is won over by the energetic couple, while Rosemary is suspicious of the strange potables and desserts Minnie tries to push on her. Guy’s acting career suddenly heats up and he suggests they have a baby. Following a strange dream the night they conceive, Rosemary is urged to leave her obstetrician for one the Castevets recommend. Weight loss and paranoia follow, leading Rosemary to believe those around her be to a coven of witches keenly interested in her baby.

While digging for antiquities in northern Iraq, Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) unearths an ancient stone carving of a demon, strangely buried with a modern day St. Christopher medal. The discovery causes grave alarm for the priest. Across the world in Georgetown, Maryland, film actress and single mother Chris MacNeil (Ellen Burstyn) hears something strange in her attic, leading her to check and make sure her 12-year-old daughter Regan (Linda Blair) is all right. Also in D.C., Father Karras (Jason Miller) wrestles with guilt over abandoning his elderly mother and questions whether he still has the faith to be a man of God.

Regan is diagnosed as hyperkinetic, which her mother is made to believe by doctors explains “lies” her daughter has been giving about her bed shaking at night. Chris experiences poltergeist activity as Regan’s behavior becomes more unsettling: spouting vile obscenities, running down the stairs backwards on her hands, and masturbating with a crucifix. A homicide detective (Lee J. Cobb) investigates a church desecration and the bizarre death of Chris MacNeil’s director, while Chris looks to the church for help. They turn to Father Karras, who reaches out to Merrin to help him expel whatever evil has taken hold of the child.

Writing
Bitten by a sting of commercial failures as a playwright, Ira Levin — whose debut novel A Kiss Before Dying was published to great acclaim in 1953 when Levin was 22 — found inspiration in his wife’s pregnancy for a second novel in 1967. Rosemary’s Baby would sell 5 million copies in the U.S. William Castle — the schlock movie director and promoter whose gimmicks included sending inflatable skeletons flying over the heads of audiences during House on Haunted Hill and rigging seats to shock moviegoers watching The Tingler – was sent the novel in galleys form and anticipated that a film version might be his bid for respectability.

Having already bet the farm acquiring the film rights to Rosemary’s Baby, Castle took on a partner in Paramount Pictures, whose young head of production Robert Evans loved the material, but had no interest in producing a William Castle cheesefest. Evans wanted Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski to direct. Knowing Polanski was an avid skier Evans lured him to the States under the ruse of directing Downhill Racer. Agreeing to adapt Rosemary’s Baby instead, Polanski consulted with production designer Richard Sylbert, a New York native who spent 30 days honing a shooting script with Polanski after he’d completed a first draft.

Ira Levin — who later authored The Stepford Wives — has been accused by some of being a hack, but for me, Rosemary’s Baby is a brilliantly executed study in paranoia; every character Rosemary encounters seems to have a vested interest in her pregnancy, or could they just be trying to help? Whether it was the fact that he was a committed agnostic, or just felt that it was better filmmaking, Roman Polanski also resisted supernatural thrills and instead, gave his adaptation an intense psychological edge, keeping us guessing until the end of the movie whether Rosemary is in danger from witches, or just experiencing some pregnancy related dementia.

William Peter Blatty was enrolled at Georgetown University in 1949 when his New Testament class covered a case he’d read about in the Washington Post, detailing the alleged exorcism of a 14-year-old boy in Mount Rainer, MD. A Catholic whose faith was wavering at the time, Blatty sold the idea of The Exorcist to paperback publisher Bantam Press, which commissioned a novel and ultimately sold it to Harper and Row. Published in 1971, The Exorcist was a runaway hit, selling 13 million copies in the U.S. alone. Blatty adapted a screenplay and attaching himself to the project as producer, saw every studio in Hollywood turn his bestseller down.

Warner Bros. had passed on The Exorcist when head of production John Calley was slipped a copy of the novel. So terrified reading it at night that he tried getting his dog to share the bed with him, Calley would pursue every major director of the day — Mike Nichols, Arthur Penn, John Boorman — to helm the picture. Each turned it down for technical or personal reasons. Blatty even pleaded with Peter Bogdanovich to direct before arriving on William Friedkin, whose kinetic, documentary-like approach had helped The French Connection win an Academy Award for Best Picture. Blatty felt a realistic aesthetic was just what his fantasy/horror picture needed.

Not caring for a 226-page first draft full of flashbacks, Friedkin compelled Blatty to adopt a straight forward narrative. The resulting script may have won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, but isn’t very cohesive. Father Merrin drifts into and out of the story, most of the characters share tenuous relationships and the dialogue is passable at best. Still, the result is one of the most visceral portraits of evil ever conjured. In addition to the phantasm of levitation, projectile vomiting and demonic possession, the story does deal with the crisis of faith and hopelessness in subtle and powerful ways, making the story that more unnerving.

Writing edge: Rosemary’s Baby

Casting
Seeking an all-American girl for the role of Rosemary, Roman Polanski wanted to cast Tuesday Weld. But Robert Evans — looking for a bigger name — preferred Mia Farrow, who was appearing on the popular TV show Peyton Place. While I think Weld would have been extraordinary, there’s no question that the nervy but beguiling Farrow went full throttle here and made Rosemary her own. Robert Redford was the first choice of both Evans and Polanski to play Guy and would also have been terrific, but legalities apparently kept him out of the cast. John Cassavetes brings much greater edge to the role of a struggling actor who might turn to the occult for career help.

In casting the supporting players — the sweet old faces who might possibly be witches — Rosemary’s Baby is in a class all its own. It’s impossible to imagine the film being as great without Ruth Gordon, who is nothing short of a force of nature in this; Minnie Castevet alternates between being one of the great little New York characters of all time, and the neighbor from hell. Gordon won a richly deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Elisha Cook Jr. plays a realtor, Ralph Bellamy is Rosemary’s suspect obstetrician and newcomer Charles Grodin appeared as a physician whose best intentions only end up harming his patient.

The first actress Blatty sent a script to had been Shirley MacLaine, who’d been his neighbor in California and provided the inspiration for Chris MacNeil. Once casting began in earnest, the writer-producer’s first choice for Father Karras had been Marlon Brando, but skittish that The Exorcist would become Brando’s show instead of his, Friedkin turned to a capable list of actors who were hardly matinee idols: Ellen Burstyn, Jason Miller, Max von Sydow. This decision goes a long way to giving The Exorcist a realistic texture. Burstyn in particular seems cognizant of the frustrations and fears of a single mother and communicates both vividly.

The Exorcist wouldn’t be the masterpiece that it is without two actors. Radio and film veteran Mercedes McCambridge supplied the voice of the demon and it’s her vocal work — sounding like an ancient woman with a glass bottle jabbed in their throat — that makes The Exorcist so terrifying. The entire movie hinged on the casting of Regan. An above average child actor might have been cast here and the results would have been laughable, but Linda Blair’s ferocious, no holds barred performance is a standard bearer for any actor working under makeup. Strangely, Blair seems to make a much more convincing demon than she does a 12-year-old.

Casting edge: Even

Production value
Roman Polanski’s aesthetic for Rosemary’s Baby has been discussed ad nauseum over the decades. In the 1992 documentary Visions of Light, cinematographer William Fraker relates a great anecdote about Polanski moving Fraker’s camera to the left so that only Ruth Gordon’s back would be visible during a shot where she’s in a room talking on the phone. When that scene went before an audience, 1,500 people actually craned their necks around to try to peek inside the room. I don’t subscribe to the notion of Director As God, but Robert Evans and Fraker have both credited Polanski with pushing the film’s look and finding unusual ways to create tension visually.

Intricately designed by Richard Sylbert, Rosemary’s Baby was shot in 14 weeks: two weeks in New York for exterior shooting around the Dakota Hotel were followed by 12 weeks of interiors on the Paramount lot in Los Angeles. The dream sequences are like tiny art films in their own right. What surprised me watching this film again was how these sequences refuse to indulge in the psychedelia of the time. Watching Ken Russell flicks, I often feel like I’d enjoy them much better with pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, Rosemary’s Baby features some of the most textured dream sequences ever put to film, whether viewed sober or otherwise.

What began as a 105-day production schedule when shooting for The Exorcist commenced on a soundstage at 20th Century Fox studios in New York would stretch on for 200 days, back when it was considered insane to spend more than $1 million on a horror flick. But the bucks are on the screen. The opening sequence in Iraq gives the movie an ominous, almost epic feel, while William Friedkin’s decision to shoot a good portion of the film handheld certainly has a sense of immediacy to it. We’re constantly kept off balance and while the jarring approach has produced vomit in most of Friedkin’s films since, The Exorcist is a punch in the gut.

The makeup effects in The Exorcist were designed by Dick Smith, whose protégé Rick Baker also worked on the film and credits his mentor with being responsible for the state of the art of prosthetic makeup in film today. Beyond just making an actor look like a demon, Smith’s work was pioneering: the projectile vomit, the welts that appeared on Regan’s stomach spelling out HELP ME, or her head spinning around. None of that stuff had been done before and it holds up remarkably well. Smith’s work is so great that watching the movie again, it never really occurred to me that I was seeing special effects.

Production value edge: Even

Music
Neither Rosemary’s Baby nor The Exorcist feature the type of bombastic musical arrangements I’ve learned to endure in Jerry Bruckheimer type productions, thankfully. Instead of punctuating how we’re supposed to feel at any given moment, both films opted for very unconventional scores to eerie, even unsettling effect. Many people remember the lullaby that plays over the opening credits of Rosemary’s Baby, with a fine organ and string accompaniment floating underneath. There’s an elegance and bit of sadness in Krzysztof Komeda’s compositions for the film, subtle but extremely effective.

Lalo Schifrin was commissioned to compose the score for The Exorcist, but William Friedkin — who reportedly likened Schifrin’s score to “fuckin Mexican marimba music” — literally threw the reels out the door and brought in classical recordings he felt suited the movie better. These include “Night of the Electric Insects” by George Crumb’s string quartet Black Angels and portions of the 1971 “Cello Concerto” by composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Stanley Kubrick would later use Penderecki to great effect in The Shining. The spine tingling theme is “Tubular Bells” by Mike Oldfield and can be heard every Halloween in TV or radio advertising to conjure spookiness.

Music edge: Even

Cultural impact
Arriving in theaters June 1968, Rosemary’s Baby ultimately earned $15 million in the U.S. and finished the 7th highest grossing picture of the year. Today, it not only figures in debates over which horror films are the scariest ever made, but marked the beginning of a six year run for Robert Evans that would transform Paramount into the most prestigious movie studio in the world. The film was followed only by a forgettable made-for-TV movie in 1976 — Look What’s Happened To Rosemary’s Baby – in which Patty Duke played Rosemary and Ruth Gordon reprised her Oscar winning role, but does continue to be referenced in sitcoms and on cartoons.

No contest. The Exorcist was a box office sensation. Opening December 26, 1973, not even freezing weather kept audiences from lining up outside theaters on the East Coast. Through several re-issues, it would gross $232.6 million in the U.S. and $208.4 million overseas, making it the highest grossing R-rated movie ever in its day. Four sequels followed: John Boorman’s maligned Exorcist II: The Heretic (1975), the subpar Exorcist III (1990) written and directed by William Peter Blatty, Paul Schrader’s little seen Dominion (2005) and the version reshot by Renny Harlin, Exorcist: The Beginning (2004). The original is widely considered the scariest movie ever made.

Cultural impact edge: The Exorcist

Winner: Rosemary’s Baby

The Exorcist is the scarier movie. Rosemary’s Baby is the better film. I can watch it over and over and always find something new to savor — in the art direction, in the performances, in the story — while The Exorcist is not a movie I feel the need to revisit. Though in many ways superior, once The Exorcist is over, that’s all folks, it doesn’t resonate for me all that much.

Your thoughts?

What the *&#! Is This About?
“People are always asking me if I know Tyler Durden,” narrates a young man we will come to know only as the Narrator (Edward Norton) as someone holds a gun barrel in his mouth. Minutes before he’s to witness dozens of office buildings explode in controlled demolition, The Narrator explains how he got here. Sleepwalking through life as an insurance claims adjuster for a major car company and gripped in what he refers to as “the Ikea nesting instinct,” he comments, “I’d flip through catalogs and wonder, ‘What kind of dining set defines me as a person?’” Unable to sleep, the Narrator crashes support groups for testicular cancer, blood parasites or sickle cell anemia, finding that when people think you have a terminal disease, they listen to you.

The Narrator’s catharsis is threatened by the appearance of another faker, Marla Singer (Helena Bonham Carter), who attends group therapy because “It’s cheaper than a movie and there’s free coffee.” The Narrator’s day job sends him across the country investigating fatal car crashes to determine if a recall would be cost effective for his company. He dreams of a midair collision to break the monotony, while seated next to him, a dapper soap peddler named Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) demonstrates how ridiculous the emergency landing procedures on an airliner are. When he returns home to find his apartment has mysteriously exploded, the Narrator meets Tyler for a drink. His new buddy points out the Narrator’s dependence on consumer culture. “The things you own end up owning you.”

In the parking lot, Tyler asks the Narrator for a favor. “I want you to hit me as hard as you can.” If for no other reason than they’ve never been in a fight, the men wail on each other before calling it a night. The Narrator is invited to crash at the decrepit house Tyler occupies between jobs as a renegade caterer and film projectionist. The boys’ nocturnal fisticuffs start drawing the attention of other disaffected young men. Tyler gives it a name – Fight Club – and sets some ground rules. “The first rule of Fight Club is that you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is you do not talk about Fight Club.” Marla re-enters the Narrator’s life when she and Tyler meet and engage in round the clock, rambunctious sex in the house. Tyler then hatches a plan to expand the social anarchy of Fight Club from the basement to the streets.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
After graduating the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, Chuck Palahniuk returned to his hometown of Portland and wrote for a local newspaper (The Oregonian) for a time. He ended up having to take work writing service procedures for freight trucks. It was during a trip to the Pacific Coast Trail that Palahniuk got into a dispute with some campers. The author recalled, “The other people who were camping near us wanted to drink and party all night long, and I tried to get them to shut up one night, and they literally beat the crap out of me. I went back to work just so bashed, and horrible looking. People didn’t ask me what had happened. I think they were afraid of the answer. I realized that if you looked bad enough, people would not want to know what you did in your spare time. They don’t want to know the bad things about you. And the key was to look so bad that no one would ever, ever ask. And that was the idea behind Fight Club.”

Palahniuk used his newfound affinity for brawling to write Fight Club over a three-month period in 1995. He later mused, “I never expected the book to be published. I had been rejected so many times because my work was seen as too dark and depressing, that when I sent off Fight Club, I thought it was just a fuck off to New York publishing. It was my last gesture.” But within weeks of sending a first draft to his agent, the galleys came to the attention of Raymond Bongiovanni, a literary scout for Fox 2000 in New York. He phoned president of production Laura Ziskin, who recalled, “He was very excited about it, not sure it was a movie, but sure he had read the work of an exciting new voice. Thirty six hours later I was sitting on the edge of my bed in the middle of the night reading passages of the book out loud to my husband.”

Big name producers had passed on the book before it got to Joshua Donen and Ross Bell, who were enthusiastic about the material. Donen ultimately zeroed in on David Fincher – the director of Seven – imploring him to read Fight Club. Amid protests that he was too busy, Fincher finally cracked open the book. He later recalled, “It’s sardonic, it’s sarcastic, and naïve, and cynical and funny. I knew Marla. I knew the Narrator, I knew the Narrator’s attraction and repulsion to Marla, I knew his need for Tyler. I knew why he looks up to Tyler. I just knew it.” Much to the amazement of everyone involved with the project at that point, Fox expressed interest in actually producing Fight Club. Ross Bell reportedly told friends, “This is a seditious movie about blowing up people like Rupert Murdoch.” Fincher had sworn never to make a movie at the Murdoch owned studio again after the ordeal he’d gone through over his first feature film, Alien³.

David Fincher recalled, “I didn’t have a very good time with Fox the first time, so I was basically going thinking, ‘Oh, no that’s over with.’ But Josh called and told me to just go in and talk with Laura Ziskin, and tell her that I wanted to make it. So I do – I go in and talk with Laura Ziskin and I told her, ‘Here’s the movie I’m interested in making and I’m not interested in watering any of this shit down. I’m not interested in explaining, but I think I can make a movie that you don’t need to have read the book in order to understand what’s going on. I have no interest in making this anything other than what this book is, which is kind of a sharp stick in the eye.’ She was very cool with it. We could have made it a three million dollar or five million dollar Trainspotting version, or we could do the balls-out version where planes explode and it’s just a dream and buildings explode and it’s for real – which is the version I preferred to do – and she backed it.”

Fincher proposed developing a script on his own, without taking a fee, but also without studio executives needling him with notes. After eight months working with screenwriters Jim Uhls and Andrew Kevin Walker and producer Art Linson, Fincher came back with a script, a $60 million budget, a schedule – including stages on the studio lot that Fincher wanted to shoot in – and two leading men, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Norton recalled, “Fincher sent me the novel, and I read it in one sitting. It’s obviously a surreal piece that operates at an almost allegorical level within someone’s madness, and I felt immediately that it was on the pulse of a zeitgeist I recognized. It speaks to my generation’s conflict with the American material values system at its worst. I guess I’ve felt for a long time that a lot of the films that were aimed at my generation were some baby boomer perception of what Gen-X was about. They seemed to be tailored to a kind of reductive image of us as slackers and to have a banal, glib, low-energy, angst-ridden realism, none of which I or anyone I know relates to.”

After presenting their package, Fincher and Linson gave Fox three days to decide whether they were in or out. The next day, the studio agreed to produce Fight Club. Studio chairman Bill Mechanic had become an advocate of the project. To afford Fincher’s vision, he reached out for $25 million from Arnon Milchan and his New Regency Enterprises. In order for Fincher to get his budget – which had climbed to $67 million – the director surrendered final cut to his financiers, but Milchan still wanted the director to bring his budget down to $62 million, arguing that Rupert Murdoch – the media tycoon who owned Fox – would not see this as a good investment. Fincher dug in, reportedly saying, “That $5 million is not going to come from Eastman Kodak, it’s not going to come from Teamsters, it’s going to come from visual effects, it’s going to come from sets, from costumes, it’s going to come right off the screen. It’s going to come from the moments they want in the fucking trailer.” Milchan passed on co-financing the picture.

In June 1998, Fight Club commenced a 100-day shooting schedule around Los Angeles. Once he got a look at three weeks of footage Fincher had shot, Arnon Milchan changed his mind about getting involved in the film; he agreed to split the risk with Fox. In early 1999, after 10 weeks of editing, Fincher screened a cut of Fight Club for the top brass at the studio. The screening was not met with enthusiasm. Mechanic delivered the news to Fincher: the movie was simply too long and too violent. Laura Ziskin elaborated on the concern at Fox. “I was afraid of it. I thought it was really smart, it had real ideas in it, and that’s hard. I was afraid. Could we sell it? I was always afraid of that.” Many at the studio had a far stronger reaction. Mechanic recalled, “There were people who abhorred it. They’d walk up to me and say, ‘I hated it.’”

When Fight Club premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 1999, the bad taste was amplified among critics. Kenneth Turan, the Los Angeles Times: “What’s most troubling about this witless mishmash of whiny, infantile philosophizing and bone-crunching violence is the increasing realization that it actually thinks it’s saying something of significance.” Anita Busch, the Hollywood Reporter: “The film is exactly the kind of product that lawmakers should target for being socially irresponsible in a nation that has deteriorated to the point of Columbine.” Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun Times that Tyler Durden came off “sounding like a man who tripped over the Nietzsche display on his way to the coffee bar in Borders. In my opinion, he has no useful truths. He’s a bully – Werner Erhard plus S&M, a leather club operator without the decor.”

Bill Mechanic later mused, “I had wanted the Pauline Kaels of today – and there isn’t one – to provide a context for understanding the film. Forget about whether you liked it or not. There should be people who see things in a broader context, and there aren’t. I understand not liking the movie. I don’t understand not understanding the movie, or not thinking that it’s an important film.” Laura Ziskin was also one of the few supporters of Fight Club left in the film industry. “A lot of people condemned the movie without seeing the movie. But it is a scary movie. I think that’s right. It was at the crest of something.” Fight Club came and went from theaters in the U.S. with $37 million in grosses. Even after adding $63.8 million overseas, it was deemed a commercial failure.

But on college campuses and in repertory theaters, screenings of Fight Club were selling out. A few journalists started rethinking their reaction to the film. In the independent student newspaper of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, Samuel McKewon wrote, “Fight Club is an essential movie for the 21st Century – one of the few out there – that skewers materialism with such a bold, fierce bravado, and certainly, you wonder what all the fuss over American Beauty was for. The latter has ice water running through its veins; it’s detached, damning, judgmental. Fight Club has hot, black blood running through its two-hour-plus running time. It judges by showing.” By the time the DVD arrived – with four commentary tracks and subversive menus – even Entertainment Weekly ranked Fight Club #1 on its list of “The 50 Essential DVDs.”

While Fight Club was dying a quick death at the box office, Edward Norton offered his take on whether the film was socially irresponsible. “You can’t not pursue a creative statement because of the fear it will be misinterpreted. If you did, nothing of any substance would get done.” He added, “Many of the things that have been called subversive are regarded as classics now, including much of Oscar Wilde. Because some men pursue their sexual obsessions with young girls, does that mean Nabokov shouldn’t have written Lolita? Should Martin Scorsese not have made Taxi Driver because there was the potential that someone like John Hinckley would use it as the excuse for his particular pathology? I think the answer to that is definitely no. Art has an important role in holding up a mirror to the things that are unhealthy in a culture.”

Should I Care?
Mixing brooding atmosphere, wildly inappropriate information – “Did you know if you mixed equal parts of gasoline and frozen orange juice concentrate you can make napalm?”- perversely twisted black comedy and a wry mockery of the consumer culture that most of the audience participated in daily, Fight Club was the film version of a Molotov cocktail. 10 years later, it’s still riled up about the state of the planet; the only difference is that after 9/11, Enron, Martha Stewart’s fall from grace and Britney Spears’ ascension to near royalty, audiences seem to have caught on with what Chuck Palahniuk was getting at in the mid-1990s. Going back to watch Fight Club again is like downloading Nostradamus to a techno vibe.

From screenplay to David Fincher’s visionary direction, casting to music (The Dust Brothers composed the groovy synthesizer score), editing (James Haygood) to sound, the film delivers a 9.0 to a 9.5 in virtually every routine it puts on the floor. There’s not really a flaw exposed in the entire movie. Marla Singer may be the only female character of consequence, but this morbidly creative heroine is anything but eye candy, expressing herself in wonderfully kooky ways, like talking on the phone with the cord wrapped around her throat. Gleefully sardonic moments like that demand the film be seen more than once, if for no other reason than to savor the terrific plot twist 1 hour and 50 minutes in and how it rewires the viewing experience. If Fight Club isn’t a masterpiece, I’m not sure what is.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Fighting Talk” By Graham Fuller. Interview, November 1999

“Todd Doogan Interviews Director David Fincher” By Todd Doogan. The Digital Bits, May 2000

“Bruise Control” By Stuart Jeffries. The Guardian, 12 May 2000

Rebels On The Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System. By Sharon Waxman. HarperCollins (2005)

What the *&#! Is This About?
In Antarctica, a Siberian Husky races across a field of ice. In the sky above, a helicopter appears, with a man on board shooting at the dog. The animal makes it to a United States research station manned by 12 men. These include a burnt out pilot named MacReady (Kurt Russell), who rather than let a computer beat him at chess, pours a bottle of Jim Beam into the wiring. The circling helicopter gets the attention of the men and when it lands, a man steps out babbling in Norwegian. He opens fire on the dog and when he hits one of the Americans, is shot and killed by the base commander (Donald Moffat). Fearing the Norwegian camp might be in serious trouble, physician Dr. Copper (Richard Dysart) has MacReady fly him there to investigate.

MacReady and Copper discover the camp gutted by fire and most of its inhabitants dead. They also uncover a block of ice that appears to have been thawed out, while outside in a burn pile, they find the remains of something that looks like it might have been human. The men take the specimen and stacks of videotape back for study. The men don’t know exactly what happened to the Norwegians, but are getting the drift that it was bad. After wandering the station all day, the Siberian Husky is placed in a kennel with the other dogs. There, it transforms into a hideous creature, part crab, part spider, part dog. By the time the men get there, the Thing has attacked and partially absorbed two of the dogs. The ill-tempered Childs (Keith David) blasts it with a flamethrower, but the Thing escapes into the ceiling.

The station biologist Blair (Wilford Brimley) theorizes what they’re dealing with is an organism that imitates other life forms, absorbing its prey and producing a perfect imitation. Studying the Norwegian tapes, MacReady flies to a dig site, where he finds a massive spacecraft buried in the ice. By the time the station realizes that the alien remains may not be dead, at least one of the men is partially absorbed by the Thing. Calculating that if it were to reach a populated area, the organism could infect all life on Earth within 27,000 hours, Blair smashes the radio. Isolated and unsure who they can trust, the men look to MacReady, who comes up with a test he believes will prove who’s who.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Who Goes There? was a short story by John W. Campbell Jr., published under the pen name “Don A. Stuart” in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1938. The story concerned scientists in Antarctica who discover a spacecraft buried in the ice. They thaw out an occupant, only to find the alien has the ability to assume the shape and memories of anything it devours. The men are unsure who among them has been taken over by an alien. Campbell’s story became the inspiration for a Howard Hawks production released in 1951 as The Thing From Another World. The film version presented the Thing as a lumbering monster played by James Arness. The picture was a great commercial success and along with The Day The Earth Stood Still, ushered in an era of science fiction – sometimes provocative, almost always cheaply produced – in Hollywood.

25 years later, producer Stuart Cohen optioned the screen rights to Campbell’s original story. He brought in producers Lawrence Turman and David Foster, securing a development deal with Universal Pictures. Kim Henkel & Tobe Hooper worked on the project, but Cohen wasn’t impressed with the script they delivered. A classmate of Cohen’s from USC Film School named John Carpenter had been a fan of The Thing most of his life, particularly after reading the short story that inspired the movie while he was in high school. Having directed one low budget hit after another – Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York – Carpenter was offered the job of updating The Thing for Universal. The director recalled, “The John W. Campbell story Who Goes There? was basically an Agatha Christie, kind of Ten Little Indians: This creature is in your midst and he’s imitating either one or all of us. Who’s human and who isn’t? And that kind of an idea really fascinated me. So we went in that sense back to that idea, with Bill Lancaster and his screenplay.”

Bill Lancaster recalled, “Well the short story itself was, I wouldn’t say it’s a really great, although it’s a very admired one in the science fiction realm. Back in the late ‘30s and I think it was the first story to deal with this shape shifting, body snatcher type element and all that stuff. Seriously, that’s not what 100% attracted me to the piece, it was more the ambiance and this, all the characters involved and the mood of it, and the enclosure, and elements of the paranoia. And the short story was a stepping stone to take advantage of all those elements. From the story and the film, I loved the idea of being trapped in Antarctica, these people working up there for whatever reasons, horrible winter, freezing conditions, cold, and there’s a monster lurking.”

With Kurt Russell heading the ensemble cast and a $13.7 million budget, second unit shooting for The Thing commenced June 1981 on a glacier above Juneau, Alaska. Interiors began filming August 1981 on the Universal lot in Los Angeles before the production moved to Stewart, British Columbia in December for two weeks of shooting the ice camp exteriors. Carpenter felt his challenge was making the Thing seem as real as possible. “See, I grew up as a kid watching science fiction and monster movies and it was always a guy in a suit. Or sometimes it was kind of a bad puppet, like It Conquered The World comes to mind right now, Roger Corman’s movie, this kind of vegetable monster, kind of going like this woodenly, and my fear was, they’ll laugh at us, you know, they’ll laugh at it, it’ll be a joke. I mean, even as great as the movie was – and Alien was a terrific movie – it’s still in the very end, up stood this big guy in a suit. I don’t want a suit, I want something that’s alive.”

John Carpenter turned to makeup effects artist Rob Bottin, whose pioneering transformations for The Howling had been devised the year previous when Bottin was only 20 years old. The director remembered, “He came in with a wild concept, which is that the Thing can look like anything. It doesn’t look like one monster, it looks like anything, and out of this changing shape, this imitation, comes all the creatures throughout the universe that the Thing has ever imitated and it uses these various forms. And Rob was very daring in his approach. Let’s say even sometimes I was doubtful as to whether he’d pull it off.” Rob Bottin recalled, “The interesting thing about The Thing, right, and the fact that it was actually done a long time ago, you know, people actually think that the imaging and special effects and creature work or whatever hold up to this day. Even in light of the fact that there are computer graphics and things now. And I think part of the reason for that is you just can’t beat wild imagination, you know?”

Director of photography Dean Cundey recalled, “One of the tricks of working with rubber – whether it’s a mask or a makeup appliance, or whether it’s a completely fabricated creature – is lighting it carefully so that it looks real, so that there’s a, so you don’t give away the tricks, the little seams and paint and wires and all the things that are necessary to make it work. And Rob was always very sensitive about his creatures, whether there was too much light on them. We always sort of joked that if it was up to Rob, he would build the creatures, you know, to be incredibly interesting and imaginative, and then not put any light on them, because he was afraid of showing them. So it was always a case of Rob wanting less light, less light. So we developed techniques of little tiny spots of light and shadows, and also that you never really looked blatantly at a rubber creature.”

When The Thing went before audiences for two test screenings, it became apparent that the film might have done its job too well. It was so unsettling, John Carpenter remembered a man running out of a screening to throw up. Kurt Russell stated, “A lot of the things though that bothered the audience – more than the monster – were the poking around the monster, you know, and poking around human beings that had been burnt.” Speaking in 1999, Carpenter put the film’s reception in historical perspective. “Two weeks before our movie comes out, they release this other movie called E.T. And there’s this burst of love all around this movie. I guess the country was going through a recession and there were tough times. Audiences wanted an up/cry and E.T. gave it to them. Two weeks later, out comes my movie. And my movie is exactly just the opposite of E.T. It is not an up/cry. It is a downer. It is the grimmest thing you have ever seen. Here I thought I had made this really great movie, right? “

Arriving in theaters June 1982, the picture was reviled by critics. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “John Carpenter’s The Thing is a foolish, depressing, overproduced movie that mixes horror with science fiction to make something that is fun as neither one thing or the other … There may be a metaphor in all this, but I doubt it.” Pauline Kael, the New Yorker: “In its own putting-the-squeeze-on-the-audience terms, Alien was effective. This picture isn’t (except for an early episode with a husky trying to escape the hunters shooting at it from a plane). It appears to be a film of limited imagination with unlimited horror effects.” Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun Times: “The Thing is a great barf-bag movie, all right, but is it any good? I found it disappointing, for two reasons: the superficial characterizations and the implausible behavior of the scientists on that icy outpost.”

John Carpenter added, “But even during the preview stage I knew something was wrong because I had this sixteen year old ask me what happened at the end – which one of them was the Thing? I told her she had to use her imagination. She told me she hated that. So I realized I was in deep trouble with that film. And I was right. The industry turned against me because they thought I had gone too far with the gore. I think it probably changed my career. I had made a deal during the filming of The Thing to make another film for Universal called Firestarter, a Stephen King novel. A friend of mine, Bill Phillips, had written a great screenplay and we already were scouting locations. Universal was so upset and so shocked by the reviews and the fact that The Thing had not made the kind of money they expected. I lost the directing job on Firestarter, even though they had to pay me my salary. I was in shock. I didn’t work for eight or nine months. I didn’t have anything. I thought my career was going to end.”

Hit by the hostile reaction and the film’s dismal $13 million take at the box office in the U.S., Carpenter’s career never made a full recovery. Looking back 17 years later, the director recalled, “My reaction, I was pretty stunned by it at the time because I made a really grueling, dark film and I just don’t think audiences in 1982 wanted to see that. They wanted to see E.T. And The Thing was the opposite of that. The thing that disturbed me about it was that the fans turned out hating it so much. There was a famous magazine back then called Cinemafantastique which was loved and hated by various directors and they had a cover with a story that said ‘Is this the most hated film of all time?’ which didn’t do a lot to assuage my ego, but I’m very proud of the movie. I’ve always loved it.”

Joining Carpenter in 1995 to record an audio commentary for the film’s release on laserdisc, Kurt Russell remarked, “There are some movies that you do – I’ve done more I guess than my fair share of them – and I do think that, you know, maybe that I sort of have to look at that and realize something; that I have a tendency to like movies that perhaps aren’t going to be accepted at the time and – if they’re done well though – they will be accepted later on. And I think that with the advent of video, that’s a great, I’m very happy about that because ultimately you’re making movies for the enjoyment of as many people as possible. And I like that there’s video and that people can take it and make their judgment later on and perhaps without the politics of the time or without whatever’s in the air at the time to set a tone to get in the way of just the project and just the story itself.”

Should I Care?
With Conan the Barbarian and Poltergeist both selling popcorn the same month The Thing was unleashed in theaters, only someone with selective memory would suggest that gore or visceral intensity were somehow responsible for its box office failure. But just as The Thing From Another World would still be a terrific movie without the monster, you could cut the violence out of John Carpenter’s remake and still find – with its unremittingly stark chords and pulsating doomsday pace – one dark fucking movie audiences just weren’t in the mood for at the time. It refuses to trump good over evil, clarity over ambiguity, and that becomes what is most troubling about it, as well as special. Now regarded as a masterpiece by many of the fans who rejected this dose of strong medicine on its original release, The Thing remains a masterwork of technical acuity, pioneering makeup effects and most of all story, which probes what it means to be human, and whether or not you’d even realize you were an imitation if the Thing took you over.

The apocalyptic vision of The Thing has grabbed hold of me and as the years pass, refuses to let go. The gothic lighting by cinematographer Dean Cundey, rich production design by John Lloyd and the ominous musical score by Ennio Morricone are all just perfect. The fact that the makeup effects still hold up as some of the most amazing ever captured on camera is a testament to Rob Bottin; without his imagination, the movie would not be nearly as nightmarish as it turned out to be. As for John Carpenter, this represents the director at the peak of his creative energy. While his career may have taken a different turn had the movie gone over well, The Thing has inspired directors Robert Rodriguez, Frank Darabont, Neil Marshall and others with its unmistakable tenor of doom and relentlessness. It’s still schooling the horror moviemakers of today.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
The Thing – Collector’s Edition. Universal Home Video (1998)

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the town of “Castle Rock,” Maine, a powerful electrical storm sends a tree through the lakeside home of graphic designer David Drayton (Thomas Jane), his wife (Kelly Collins Lintz) and their nine-year-old son Billy (Nathan Gamble). Surveying the damage the next morning, David tells her, “It’s just stuff, you know. We’re safe, that’s all that matters.” His wife appears anxious about a strange mist drifting off the mountains and headed toward them across the lake. Father and son are more interested in a tree belonging to their obstinate attorney neighbor Norton (Andre Braugher) that has flattened the Drayton boathouse. The men put aside past differences when David offers Norton a ride into town for supplies. Taking Billy along, they pass an army convoy. The soldiers are stationed at a base in the mountains known to the locals only as “the Arrowhead Project”. The convoy appears to be in a hurry, prompting Norton to comment, “Maybe their power’s out too.”

At the Food House, David chats with a teenage clerk (Alexa Davalos), amiable assistant manager (Toby Jones), Castle Rock’s resident nutter Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), schoolteacher (Frances Sternhagen) and realtor (Susan Watkins). David also observes an MP abruptly cancel leave for three soldiers. Everything at the store comes to a dead halt when an air raid siren sounds. A monstrous mist overtakes the town on the heels of a panic stricken local (Jeffrey DeMunn) who makes it to the store covered in blood. Warning the others to shut the doors and not to go outside, a shopper decides to make a break for his car. Disappearing in the mist, the last that’s heard of him are his terrified screams. One theory voiced is that the mist may be a chemical explosion from the local mill. Mrs. Carmody believes this is the end of days. Norton tries to keep the crowd calm, while David is more focused on trying to calm his hysterical son.

Searching for a blanket in the storeroom, David hears something outside attempt to rip down the loading dock door. A mechanic (William Sadler) copes with the disaster by trying to get the store’s generator working, with a bag boy (Chris Owen) eager to go outside and clear whatever’s blocking the duct. When David is unable to convince them that this is a bad idea, the door is raised; tentacles slither inside, tear into Norm’s skin and drag him into the mist. When confronting Norton with this, the attorney’s logic prevents him from accepting it. He organizes a group to venture outside for help, but a rope one of them ties to their waist only makes it 300 feet before returning a torso. As Mrs. Carmody begins spreading her Old Testament gospel of a stern and vengeful god – slowly converting frightened followers – David, a third grade teacher (Laurie Holden) and a few others start worrying more about the monsters inside the store than the ones in the mist.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Mist began with a phone call Stephen King received in 1980 from his literary agent Kirby McCauley. King recalled, “Kirby McCauley was putting together an anthology called Dark Forces and he wanted all these original stories from people who wrote in the genre. I said, ‘You know, Kirby, I don’t think I can do that because I’m blocked, I’m not writing anything.’ And I hadn’t. I had just finished three books. There was Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Night Shift, and I was kind of stuck, really. I happened to be in the local market one time and a lot of people were shopping. I looked at the front windows and thought, if something bad happened, those windows would all blow in — because that’s the way I think. It’s not necessarily a good thing, but it’s been a profitable thing over the years.” The resulting story – The Mist – unblocked the author and a slightly re-edited version appeared in King’s 1985 short story collection Skeleton Crew. At 155 pages, it qualified as a novella.

A couple of years later, Frank Darabont was getting his feet wet as a screenwriter. He recalled, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3 was my very first credit as a writer and there was The Blob remake and there was The Fly II. I remember sitting on the set of Nightmare on Elm Street 3 one night and thinking I’d love to have something in my pocket that I could nurse along and try to get made as a director.” Darabont had taken advantage of Stephen King’s “Dollar Babies” initiative, in which the author makes available to student filmmakers the movie rights to select King short stories for the fee of only $1. In 1983, Darabont directed a short based on The Woman In the Room. Searching for a feature length project, it came down to either The Mist or Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. In choosing the latter, the emotionally resonant 1994 prison drama starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman earned seven Academy Award nominations and set Darabont on the path to prestige.

Darabont’s company Darkwoods Productions entered into a first-look development deal with Paramount Pictures, which was where the filmmaker brought The Mist in 2004 when he was ready to return to his horror roots. Darabont recalled, “What always appealed to me about it was, okay, here’s this story about monsters, very basically, on the surface of it. Underneath, Steve King was telling a completely different story. He was telling a story about the fragility of human behavior under pressure. What he was saying was that civilization has a very thin veneer and it can crumble very quickly, especially when you apply fear. And people turn against one another when subjected to stress and fear. It winds up being great sociological context for how we are as a species, how screwed up we are, how fearful we are.” Paramount agreed to put up $30 million to produce The Mist, provided Darabont reconsider the ending he’d written, which was … downbeat, to say the least.

Darabont concluded, “Obviously not a studio movie. That’s the ultimate horror for a studio, is a horror movie that might actually horrify people. You give ‘em something that might upset the audience they run screaming in the other direction.” He added, “Through this whole set of circumstances I wound up with Bob Weinstein at Dimension. He was the only guy who said, who had the balls to say, ‘Yeah, I love this ending, I love this movie, let’s make it.’ With the understanding of course that it had to be done very quickly and very inexpensively. Let me put it this way: A lot of great horror movies that I love, that I grew up watching have a tradition of being done under extreme duress of time and on very, very low budgets. And I thought, okay, if we’re really going to embrace what I love – horror movies – let’s embrace that tradition as well. Let’s embrace the tradition of shoot it as fast as you can, shoot it as cheaply as you can.”

In October 2006, it was announced that Dimension Films would bankroll The Mist, with a spring 2007 start date. The budget was roughly $17 million. Casting the lead, Darabont’s first choice was Thomas Jane. “I had met him a few times and he read for The Green Mile I always remembered his work. I’ve seen roles that he’s done, smallish roles in other movies. He’s one of those guys that I just knew had way more depth that he’s generally been elicited to show in other roles that he’s done. So I called him and I said, ‘I got this script and I’d love for you to play the lead. Let’s read it and let’s discuss it.’ And our very first conversation once he’d read it was, ‘Tom I think you have more depth than something like Deep Blue Sea allowed you to show. What I don’t want is a square-jawed action hero here. What I want is a really flawed, well intentioned guy who loves his son and it’s a movie about a guy trying to protect his little boy. As far as you’re concerned that’s what the whole movie is about. Are you ready to take that leap?’ And indeed it was something he had been hungry to do.”

The rest of the cast quickly fell into place. Darabont recalled, “Jeff DeMunn and Bill Sadler, both of them were those roles, and Laurie Holden, she was also always in my head for the role of Amanda. Others you have to think about a little bit, and there’s where you really have to depend on a great casting director, is, okay, who’s going to play Mrs. Carmody? Who’s going to play Billy? Where do we find a nine-year-old boy who’s got that kind of ability? Deb Aquilla and her associates, they found Nathan Gamble and she brought him to my attention and we hired him immediately. It was Deb’s inspiration to cast Toby Jones as Ollie, which I couldn’t be more delighted with. Toby’s a brilliant guy and gave us a fantastic performance, but he’s not the obvious actor. I’m also the very grateful beneficiary of a lot of good will, so I get to work with people like Andre Braugher and Marcia Gay Harden who wouldn’t necessarily be lookin’ for a horror movie to do, but suddenly, bam, they’re there.”

Darabont added, “We prepped the movie in six weeks, folks. I’ve never prepped a movie in less than five months, but this was part of the spirit of this movie: Get in, do it, don’t over think it, don’t second guess, do it fast, do it loose, and that’s pretty much the way it went.” Darabont signed up for a crash course in guerilla style filmmaking by directing an episode of the FX cop drama The Shield in late 2006. The experience proved so invigorating, Darabont tapped the show’s cinematographer – Rohn Schmidt – and camera operators Bill Gierhart and Richard Cantu to shoot The Mist. Filming commenced February 2007, mostly on a soundstage at StageWorks of Louisiana in downtown Shreveport. Nearby Cross Lake doubled for lakeside Maine, while the exteriors of the Food House were shot in the Louisiana town of Vivian.

Opening November 2007 in the U.S., even critics who admired The Mist seemed to object to it, in part. Anthony Lane, the New Yorker: “The Mist is itself a supermarket of B-movie essentials, handsomely stocked with bad science, stupid behavior, chewable lines of dialogue, religious fruitcakes, and a fine display of monsters.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “The Mist has extended passages that pause to preach, to demonstrate the dark impulses of irrationality, magical thinking, and mob mentality. Sadly, these interludes only take away from the magnificent moments in which the stunningly crafted beasties in the mist … come out to prey.” Justin Chang, Variety: “Much nastier and less genteel than his best-known Stephen King adaptations (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), Frank Darabont’s screw-loose doomsday thriller works better as a gross-out B-movie than as a psychological portrait of mankind under siege, marred by one-note characterizations and a tone that veers wildly between snarky and hysterical.”

In April 2008, Eugene Novikov – who ranked The Mist among the best films of 2007 – opened the floor on website Cinematical to a discussion of what viewers thought about that ending. John: “In regards to the ending: it’s one of the better twist endings I’ve seen in a while. Nowadays, I feel like twists or reveals have become cheapened by how frequent they have become in movies, and most of them just happen to trick the audience. But with The Mist, the twist ending was surprising AND thought-provoking.” Gary Triestman: “Balderdash and hogwash! I saw The Mist yesterday, and am utterly pissed at the ending. Pissed not such because it was bleak and useless, it was, but because it absolutely did NOT fit into the personalities, drives or character motivations of the people who allegedly assented to being sacrificed.” Okie: “I thought the ending was perfect. Its what made me recommend this movie to so many people. Most don’t like the ending because they don’t think they could ever do that to their child. But the alternative was definitely worse.”

The Mist would gross $25.5 million in the U.S. and $31.5 million overseas, then quickly dissipate from theaters. Even a two-disc DVD – which supplemented the theatrical version of the film with a black & white version closer to Frank Darabont’s retro vision of the material – did little to spark a reevaluation of the film. Less than enthralled with many of the flicks based on his work, Stephen King mused, “This movie has echoes of political and religious situations that we find ourselves in now, it raises a lot of interesting topics that have been debated in the press and current events over the last couple of years and all of those things obviously played a part when Frank got around to writing the screenplay and directing the movie, casting the movie – which is part of direction – but they’re not for me to say, other than to say he and I share some political convictions. As to what they are, the viewer who comes to the movie with an open mind and a clear eye will see that for themselves.”

Should I Care?
The Mist tries to be a provocative movie, one I was supposed to love or hate with a passion and occupy no middle ground on. While that’s true of he ending, as time passes, the film has actually inched into a twilight zone for me; not the failure I originally thought it was, but ultimately, not up to snuff with the nihilistic freakshows that inspired it, like Night of the Living Dead or John Carpenter’s remake of The Thing. But for all its flaws – and there are a gaggle here – it’s not easy to put The Mist out of your mind. For one thing, instead of the usual bag of bogeymen, Stephen King’s source material unleashes an ecosystem of hideous animals – equipped with tentacles, stingers, beaks, acid webs or giant pincers – that disturb on some primal level. Along with The Shining, this may be most terrifying story King has ever concocted.

Frank Darabont was inspired to adapt this material with the same thrift store economy Alfred Hitchcock brought to Psycho, but the results here are more amateurish than masterful. The abbreviated schedule not only handicaps the extensive makeup and digital effects, but turns what might have been an atmospheric and profoundly disturbing story about mass hysteria into a blunt, condescending and at times silly moral sermon. The Mist is short on B-movie nastiness and long on message. Ugh. Superbly cast in spite of the script’s high handedness – with local actors Robert Treveiler. Melissa Suzanne McBride and Kelly Collins Lintz doing outstanding work – the story might have been better realized with a more elegant, less in-your-face approach. The controversial ending is a failure simply because Darabont rushes headlong into a Big Message at the expense of credibility. The results are similar to trying on a bomb vest and plunging the detonator to see what happens.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“An Exclusive Interview with Mr. Frank Darabont!” By Edward Douglas. Shock Till You Drop, 16 November 2007

“Stephen King and Frank Darabont Step Out of The Mist” By Brad Balfour. Pop Entertaiment.com, 23 November 2007

“When Darkness Came: The Making of The Mist” The Mist (Two-Disc Collector’s Edition). Genius Products (2008)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
Moving through a movie studio lot in a single take, several stories unfold. Executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) listens to a pitch from screenwriter Buck Henry for The Graduate Part 2. The banker who owns the studio has dispatched his playboy son (Randall Batinkoff) to appraise operations, sending nervous ripples across the lot. Security chief Walter Stuckel (Fred Ward) chats with Henry on his way out about the greatest single takes of all time (“My old man worked for Hitchcock. Rope was a masterpiece. Story wasn’t that good; shot the whole thing without cuts. I hate all this cut, cut, cut.”) While listening to a pitch from director Alan Rudolph for a political thriller, Griffin receives a threatening postcard in the mail. Development executive Bonnie Sherow (Cynthia Stevenson) dresses down her assistant (Gina Gershon) for having coffee with Rudolph, while Griffin hovers outside the office of his boss (Brion James) upon hearing rumors that Griffin might be on his way out of a job.

Griffin and Bonnie are a couple, but rather than spend quality time with her, he takes his girlfriend to a power party at the house of his attorney (Sydney Pollack). As Jack Lemmon plays piano and Harry Belafonte is among the movers and shakers, Griffin confides to his attorney that he’s been receiving ominous postcards from “some writer I must have brushed off.” He arrives on a suspect and after snooping outside the home of the writer’s girlfriend, an artist named June Gudmundsdottir (Greta Scacchi), Griffin tracks down the tempestuous David Kahane (Vincent D’Onofrio) at a theater in Pasadena showing The Bicycle Thief. Griffin offers Kahane a development deal, but the writer displays nothing but contempt for the corporate hatchet man. When a scuffle breaks out in the parking lot, Griffin is overcome with rage and kills Kahane. Before fleeing the scene, he makes it appear as if it was a mugging gone awry.

Walter discovers that Griffin may have been the last person to see Kahane alive and preps the executive for his interview with a wily police detective (Whoopi Goldberg). Her suspicion of Griffin intensifies when her kooky partner (Lyle Lovett) tails him and discovers that he’s romancing Kahane’s icy ex-girlfriend. But without motive, evidence or a reliable witness, the detectives are unable to tie him to the murder. Griffin is much more concerned that a young executive named Larry Levy (Peter Gallagher) is after his job. Hatching a Machiavellian scheme, Griffin pursues a death row tearjerker titled Habeas Corpus from a hack director (Richard E. Grant) and pestering producer (Dean Stockwell). Their insistence on “no stars, just talent” and a realistic ending convinces Griffin that the movie will be a colossal disaster and backfire on Levy, enabling the player to rescue the studio.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Michael Tolkin had show business in his blood. His father was an Emmy Award winning writer for Your Show of Shows, while his mother was senior VP of legal affairs at Paramount. Tolkin struggled as a writer, starting with Delta House – the short-lived TV spin-off of Animal House - in 1979. It took a decade for him to get credit on a feature, the Christian Slater skateboarding flick Gleaming the Cube. Tolkin recalled, “I must have been in a couple of meetings when I was looking at producers or the executives of producers and I saw how bored they were with me. And I realized that they had hard jobs; that they had to listen to a lot of bad ideas. I wasn’t happy in there and I was uncomfortable and I think that they could see that and I wasn’t helping them. And they were desperate for good ideas, because they couldn’t advance if they didn’t have them. I was listening to all of us complain. And I thought we were complaining just because we were frustrated. And we weren’t necessarily right; maybe our ideas weren’t as good as we thought they were. And somehow in that, this idea began to take hold.”

A motion picture executive whose morals – or lack thereof – empower him to murder a screenwriter became the basis of a novel Tolkin started writing in 1984. “When I finished the book, I sold it to Atlantic Monthly Press, and then an editor at a magazine called Manhattan Inc took the book and went through the manuscript and took out the whole Larry Levy story, and put just a little bit of editing and a little pasting, put together the Larry Levy story as a short story and published it in Manhattan Inc. Ned Chase – who was a book editor and is Chevy Chase’s father – read that and was interested in who I was, he liked the writing. And somehow, talked about this to David Brown, the great producer, and one day, my agent told me David Brown had called and wanted to talk to me about buying the novel.”

David Brown – producer of Jaws, The Verdict and Cocoon – recalled, “I have been an avid magazine reader ever since I began as a magazine editor. There was a magazine I was reading called Manhattan Inc and inside there was a little story called The Player, which was an excerpt from a novella. I read it and felt that the author, Michael Tolkin, really knew what he was talking about in relation to Hollywood. I had read many stories, spent decades in Hollywood and felt that this was the real stuff. Unfortunately, I felt it was impossible to make because of all the internal monologue of the characters. I hadn’t given it any further thought until I had lunch with a publisher at Time Books who said, ‘We are publishing a little book that might interest you called The Player.’” Brown read the book and still didn’t think it would translate into a movie. No one else in Hollywood did either, which enabled Brown to option the film rights for a pittance of $2,500.

David Brown brought Michael Tolkin on board The Player as a producer and commissioned him to adapt his novel to a screenplay. Tolkin recalled, “To my surprise it only took about six or eight weeks to write the script, which was in the fall of – I guess – probably by now we’re probably talking about 1989. And then I finished the script, with David’s notes, back and forth, after about three months I think we were really done and then the script went out into the world. And David tried to set it up.” Brown recalled, “Tolkin and I had a series of humiliating meets at studios with people one-third my age. They said, ‘We don’t do stories about Hollywood. You’ve got a totally unsympathetic character here, a man who gets away with murder.’ I said, ‘Doesn’t everyone?’” Sidney Lumet spent several weeks attached as director, but wanted more money – for the budget and his salary – than Brown could afford.

Around the time that producer Cary Brokaw and Avenue Pictures stepped up to finance The Player, director Robert Altman signed with the William Morris Agency, which also represented Michael Tolkin. The acclaimed director of M*A*S*H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye and Nashville had gone sixteen years between hits and had hit a brick wall trying to get a personal project off the ground. Altman recalled, “I’d written Short Cuts, based on Raymond Carver short stories, and I was trying to get that picture financed. That’s what I was really working on; I just couldn’t quite get the financing to make the film. The Player was offered to me as a picture they were gonna make. I was a director for hire. I needed the job. I saw it as an easy shoot and I kind of liked the idea of it, so I did it.”

Brokaw had mixed feelings about Altman. “I had known Bob when I was a marketing guy at Fox and he was tough to deal with. He was brash. When things didn’t go well, it was inevitably our fault. He always had the studio earmarked as the enemy and, from the corporate, conventional Hollywood point of view, Bob was a kind of loose cannon.” Altman stated, “All this thing about me being outside of Hollywood is simply, the truth of the matter is, I can’t make the kind of movies they wanna make, and the kind of movies I can make and like to make and make are not the kind of films that they know how to distribute. So we just basically aren’t in the same business. There’s no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes.” Brokaw added, “We talked very openly about how we would work together. We talked about how this was a structured thriller at heart. My concerns were overcome. This is, after all, a movie that Bob was born to direct. He’s a very charismatic guy who, once he began casting, got just about everyone he wanted.”

Within a month, Tim Robbins agreed to star and in June 1991, shooting commenced in Los Angeles on a budget of $8 million. Altman felt that instead of fabricating celebrities, it would be more realistic to populate The Player with the real deal. “I began calling movie stars. Calling and saying, ‘I’m doing a film about a movie executive who murders a writer and gets away with it.’ They laughed when I said it was a happy ending. They said, ‘You’re going after Hollywood?’ and I said, ‘No, but I’m certainly going to give Hollywood the opportunity to go after itself.’ They said, ‘I’m in.’” To play the couple in the climactic movie-within-a-movie, Altman contacted Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis. To his surprise, without asking to read a script, both said yes. At least 64 more celebrities joined the production. Some – like Cher – appeared only as faces in the party scenes, while others – Angelica Huston & John Cusack, Andie MacDowell, Lily Tomlin & Scott Glenn, Burt Reynolds – had speaking parts, which they were left free to improvise. Each received scale wage for a day’s work and donated their salary to the Motion Picture Home.

When The Player began screening for distributors in the winter of 1992, it became the talk of Hollywood. David Brown kidded to Newsweek that Barry Diller – then chairman of Fox – laughed so hard that Brown thought he might go into cardiac arrest. Universal’s chairman Tom Pollock was equally boisterous. Studio executives pleaded with Altman to run the film for them at their homes. The director flatly refused, but was tickled by the reaction in the executive suites. “The fact that we came out and said it, it’s like the fool in the court of the king; you can get away with real criticism. And of course it gives them a chance to talk about themselves, their favorite topic.” The only row Altman got into was with Mark Canton – chairman of Columbia Pictures – when the executive reportedly asked a projectionist to skip to the last reel. All but two of the major studios put in a bid to distribute The Player. Fine Line – the specialty division of New Line Cinema – won out.

Opening April 1992 in the U.S., The Player drew some of the best critical notices of Altman’s career. Vincent Canby, the New York Times: “As a satire, The Player tickles. It doesn’t draw blood. It says nothing about Hollywood that Hollywood insiders don’t say with far more venom in their hearts. Mr. Altman’s most subversive message here is not that it’s possible to get away with murder in Hollywood, but that the most grievous sin, in Hollywood terms anyway, is to make a film that flops.” Steve Davis, Austin Chronicle: “From its brilliant and sublime opening sequence to its self-reflexive ending, The Player distills everything that’s wrong with the American film industry with the precision of someone who’s been there.” Variety: “Mercilessly satiric yet good-natured, this enormously entertaining slam dunk quite possibly is the most resonant Hollywood saga since the days of Sunset Blvd. and The Bad and the Beautiful.”

Five years later, Michael Tolkin mused, “When I wrote The Player, I had absolutely no intention of selling it as a movie. I thought the book was too internal and that since the whole novel really takes place in Griffin Mill’s head, and since it’s about a killer who gets away with murder, I didn’t expect it to sell to the movies and I didn’t intend to sell it to the movies. Everybody said that Hollywood was too tough a topic and that like baseball that was just one of these things that you’re not supposed to make a movie about because nobody wants to see it.” The industry praise culminated in three Academy Award nominations: Best Director (Robert Altman), Best Adapted Screenplay (Michael Tolkin) and Best Editing (Geraldine Peroni). Though The Player enabled Altman to direct nine more features – including Short Cuts – before his death in 2006, audiences steered clear of the movie, buying only $21.7 million in tickets at the U.S. box office.

While Robert Altman maintained that Hollywood had given him more than his fair share of breaks, no love was lost between the director and the Griffin Mills of the world. “The Player is my take on a lot of things, but Hollywood, what is Hollywood, anyway? A guy like Paul Newman starts a company, makes $54 million in profits last year, and it all goes into a charity; you don’t hear a lot about that. A guy like Steve Ross makes $63 million a year, a guy like Michael Eisner, Lee Iacocca, Barry Diller, these guys don’t feed that money back. They gather as much as they can, and the profits don’t have any real meaning. They can’t spend that money. All they’ve got, they can say on their record they have the most chips in front of them when they die.” Altman added, “Hollywood doesn’t mean anything, it doesn’t exist anymore. My film, nobody’s even upset about it. One guy, Mark Canton, is the only one who got pissed off, because he’s a fool. Most of these guys, they’re sitting there doing a job, they’re making money – they don’t even have a sense of shame.”

Why Should I Care?
The TV pilot it inspired in 1997 – starring Patrick Dempsey as a moodier Griffin Mill and Jennifer Garner as his boss’s daughter – may have been too dry for ABC to pick up, but over on HBO, The Larry Sanders Show, Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm all gleefully ran with the conceit of celebrities spoofing themselves and Hollywood with terrific success. The Player is nowhere near as barbed or as funny as any of those sitcoms proved to be, and they also seem to have a lot more conviction than Robert Altman’s cool take on Michael Tolkin’s droll source material. What neither director or writer manage to do is get a handle on Greta Scacchi’s character, who comes off as vaguely superficial with little or nothing to add to the story. Equally flat is director of photography Jean Lepine’s smudgy lighting, an unfortunate reminder of how poorly funded this movie actually was.

Even if The Player doesn’t stand up all that well, it still has to be respected as a statement, as a reminder of what movies can achieve both in technical craftsmanship and moral resonance. The masterful opening tracking shot – which at 8 minutes 5 seconds is one of the longest in film history – is a small work of art, while the movie-within-a-movie that climaxes the film is as clever as Griffin Mill’s curtain call. Altman gets excellent mileage from his cast, with Tim Robbins, Dean Stockwell and Richard E. Grant virtually disappearing amid the silly power brokers they portray. The novelty of the celebrity cameos tilts disproportionately in favor of faces from the ‘70s, and also seem passé when viewed today, but in 1992, The Player was terrifically innovative. Its strike against an economic system that places corporate profit above personal decency still has bite.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Hollywood Is Talking” By Jack Kroll, David Ansen and John Leland. Newsweek, 2 March 1992

“When Hollywood Is a Killer” By Bernard Weintraub. The New York Times, 1992 April 5

The Player (Special Edition). New Line Home Video (1997)

Robert Altman: Interviews. Edited by Davd Sterritt. University Press of Mississippi (2000)

Movie Moguls Speak: Interviews with Top Film Producers. By Steven Priggé. McFarland (2004)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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