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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Synopsis
Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) lies in bed unable to sleep. Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) confides to Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) that it’s been six months since the tornado, and all the girl does is talk about some place that doesn’t exist. On their farm in turn of the century Kansas, Dorothy finds a key with the word “Oz” emboldened on it. Aunt Em tells her it’s just the key to the old house, but Dorothy refuses to believe it. Leaving Toto behind, Dorothy is checked into a hospital run by the pompous Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson) and the nefarious Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh). When a storm knocks out the clinic’s electricity, Dorothy escapes with the help of another young patient (Emma Ridley). The girls fall into a river and are swept away.

When Dorothy regains consciousness, she finds herself in the company of a talking chicken named Billina, stranded in the Deadly Desert of Oz, which turns any living thing that touches it to sand. They escape and locate the house that fell on the Wicked Witch of the East, but the Munchkins are nowhere to be found, and the Yellow Brick Road is in ruin. Walking to the Emerald City, Dorothy finds the citizens of Oz – including the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion – turned to stone. All that’s left are the bizarre Wheelers, hoodlums who have wheels for feet and hands.

Dorothy activates a mechanical soldier named Tik Tok, who grabs one of the Wheelers and learns that the Nome King conquered the Emerald City, stealing back his emeralds and imprisoning the Scarecrow. To find him, Dorothy and Tik Tok are directed to Mombi (Jean Marsh again), a witch who changes heads as easily as wigs. Imprisoned by the witch, Dorothy befriends Jack Pumpkinhead, a stick man with a pumpkin for a head, who Mombi created with a Powder of Life. Dorothy steals the powder and is able to escape by bringing to life a flying sofa with the head of a moose. Dorothy and her new friends head to the mountain of the Nome King (Nicol Williamson again) to save Oz.

Production history
In the mid-1930s, Walt Disney was searching for a follow-up to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He inquired about the first in L. Frank Baum’s best-selling fantasy series. The Baum estate had sold the film rights to Samuel Goldwyn for $60,000, and Disney just missed out being able to make an animated version of what became The Wizard of Oz. Disney never lost enthusiasm for Oz. When eleven of Baum’s books became available in 1957, Disney bought them. At one point, he intended for The Rainbow Road to Oz to become a live action musical with the Mousketeers filling many of the major roles. For a myriad of possible reasons – too expensive, too inexperienced a cast, a weak script or a lackluster book of songs – that never happened, and Oz languished.

In 1980, the studio’s young production chief Tom Wilhite contacted Walter Murch, a sound designer and film editor who won an Academy Award for Apocalypse Now. Murch recalls, “it was just a fishing expedition on both of our parts. But one of the questions he asked was, ‘What are you interested in that you think we might also be interested in?’, and I said, ‘Another Oz story.’ … And Tom sort of straightened up in his chair because it turned out, unbeknownst to me, that Disney owned the rights to all of the Oz stories. And they were particularly interested in doing something with them because the copyright was going to run out in the next five years.”

Working with Gill Dennis, Murch wrote a treatment based on Baum’s The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz and when the studio responded favorably, the pair returned with a script in the spring of 1982. Darker than what the studio anticipated, Wilhite moved forward on what was then known simply as Oz, footing the bill for art director Norman Reynolds to begin designing sets, and work to begin on animatronic puppets. $6 million had been spent when in November 1983, Disney’s new head of production Richard Berger pulled the plug on Oz. He cited the film’s $27 million price tag, along with the failure of that summer’s dark and costly Something Wicked This Way Comes, which Disney had produced and had not gone over well with audiences. Shaving the budget down to $25 million by shooting the film on five soundstages at Elstree Studios in England – with the Salisbury Plains standing in for Kansas – Murch revived the project and filming commenced February 1984.

Murch recalls, “There were 114 days of shooting, which is a lot, and the character of Dorothy, played by Fairuza Balk, is in almost every shot. She was absolutely great, a fantastic ally in the making of the film, but there are laws in England and the United States that limit the amount of time you can shoot with a child actor, so it put great strains on how much we could do each day. Add on top of that all of the creatures she was with: puppets and claymation and animals. That old adage about never making a film with a child or an animal; we had not only a child and animals – talking chickens and dogs and all of that – but also puppets, each operated by three or four people, radio controlled devices, front projection, and claymation (for the nomes) that wasn’t there at the time of shooting.”

Return to Oz proceeded so slowly that Murch was fired after five weeks. After George Lucas guaranteed he’d step in for his friend the first time director if needed, the studio rehired Murch after a few days. But by the time the film was in post-production, Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had arrived to manage Disney. Murch recalls, “And they were not really interested in Return, probably because it was so dark, and not a musical, and particularly because it had been started by an executive two generations earlier, and so they mostly ignored it after it did not do so well in previews, which was both good and bad. The good part was that I was able to complete the film I wanted to make, the bad part was that they didn’t really get behind its release. Having said that, it was a difficult film to distribute, as we found out, given the zeitgeist of the mid-’80’s. Maybe any zeitgeist.”

Opening June 1985 with a lavish premiere at Radio City Music Hall, Return to Oz was blasted by critics. From the Los Angeles Times (Sheila Benson) to the New York Times (Janet Maslin) to At The Movies, the overwhelming consensus was that the film did not measure up to The Wizard of Oz, and was too intense for children. Gene Siskel: “Kids under six are gonna get nightmares from this picture. Kids over six, they’ll just have a bad time at the movies.” Roger Ebert: “Somebody should have thought at the very first when they were starting out with Return To Oz. somebody should have had this thought: ‘It oughta be fun, it oughta be upbeat, it oughta be sweet, it oughta be wondrous. It shouldn’t be scary.’” Return To Oz grossed a dismal $11 million in the U.S.

Murch – who would win two Academy Awards in 1996 as both the film editor and sound designer for The English Patient – never directed after Return To Oz. In 2000, he mused, “We knew going in that it was going to be risky, but it had been 45 years since the original film came out, and I thought enough time had passed for a different sensibility to have a chance, to present a somewhat more realistic view about Dorothy and her life on the farm, and have the film not be a musical … I definitely felt that if we had tried to really do a sequel, which is to say, do something in the style of an MGM musical, we would have been in even greater trouble, because there’s just no way you can reinvent that particular combination of people, technology, and attitude, which really reached a peak in the late 1930s and never recovered after the war.”

Opinion
The two components of this film’s disastrous reception were probably its title – Oz might have led to a little less buyer’s remorse among moviegoers – and the fact that Murch was simply ahead of his time here. In the 1980s, E.T. and its message of hope and reassurance were what most ticket buyers needed. Return To Oz is one dark, perilous and morally complex place to venture into. It’s also as majestically rendered a fantasy as you’re ever likely to see, grander than anything Jim Henson would produce in the same period, as textured and thrilling as the Harry Potter or The Lord of the Rings franchises, but black as gunpowder. It’s the quintessential adaptation of L. Frank Baum, striking out from the lighthearted, vaudevillian approach of The Wizard of Oz and right into the heart of darkness.

Just as much – if not more – genuine love went into the making of Return To Oz as the 1939 original. The screenplay is even more inventive in the way it establishes each character Dorothy will meet in Oz; the wheel of a gurney becomes a Wheeler, a wicked nurse becomes Mombi. That’s cool. The film is peerless in terms of set design and camera movement and spares no expense in its grandeur. Fairuza Balk – nine years old at the time she was cast – does a sublime imitation of Judy Garland’s voice, while matching Baum’s vision of Dorothy when it comes to her age; Balk gives a terrific performance. David Shire’s musical score is just as enthralling. Critics condemning the movie for being scary apparently forgot all about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Return To Oz, much maligned, is just as much a classic.

Jenny Jediny at Not Coming To A Theater Near You writes, ”While it is highly emphasized in The Wizard of Oz that Dorothy is purely in the midst of a dream, the argument is more ambiguous in Return to Oz; Murch has stated he never intended for this to be a sequel, but instead a version more akin to the vision in the Frank L. Baum novels, a decision that enhances the film and sets it apart from the shadow of the 1939 classic, bringing instead an edge of terror that is found in many fairy tales, particularly those of the Brothers Grimm. Having viewed Return to Oz at least a dozen times by this point in my life, I have to express my penchant for this vision of Oz.”

Matt Gamble at Where The Long Tail Ends writes, “Return to Oz is a decidedly different children’s film, with its dark themes and horrific moments it is not the typical candy coated fare released in American theaters. But it is this unique aspect of the film that makes it both so memorable and endearing. Return to Oz is a film that challenges its viewers, both young and old, and attempts to create a fascinating fantasy world that will be both remembered and revisited by the viewer. And while some special effects driven children’s fantasy films of the 80’s haven’t held up well over time, I’m looking at you The Neverending Story, Return to Oz is a film that has not only aged well, but has become even more enjoyable with each viewing.”

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In the town of “Scottsville,” the life of bank lending officer and single mom Samantha Prescott (Laura Linney) becomes exciting again when her wayward brother Terry (Mark Ruffalo) sends word that he’s coming for a visit. Orphaned at a young age when their parents were killed, Sammy responded to the trauma by trying to lead a tidy life, while Terry has moved around, but still doesn’t have any idea where he’s going. He notifies Sammy that he needs money to help a young girl he’s involved with. When he receives news that the girl tried to kill herself, Terry decides to stay in town for a while.

Sammy’s 8-year-old son Rudy (Rory Culkin) loves his uncle because he treats the boy as an adult, sneaking him into a bar to shoot pool, and answering questions about his father – who Rudy has never met – with brutal honesty. Sammy feels her brother would benefit by going with her to church and talking things over with the minister (Kenneth Lonergan), but when she has a fling with her married boss (Matthew Broderick), Sammy doesn’t endear herself as much of a moral authority. When Terry takes Rudy to meet his father, Sammy’s patience with her brother reaches the end of its rope.

Production history
Kenneth Lonergan studied dramatic writing at NYU and later worked with the theater company Naked Angels. Tasked with writing a one-act play on the theme of faith, the playwright arrived on two siblings meeting for lunch; the brother is a screw-up, but his sister refuses to give up hope in him. Lonergan liked the characters and when he saw a play featuring a young boy, hit on the idea of making the sister a single mother. The brother’s relationship with the boy would have both a positive and negative impact, forcing the sister to choose between helping her brother, or protecting her son.

Producer John Hart acquired the film rights to Lonergan’s first play – This Is Our Youth – after catching a performance in a small theater on 42nd Street. Hart and his partner Jeff Sharp hired Lonergan to adapt a screenplay, but the show became so successful that plans for a movie were held back. During the wait, Lonergan showed the producers his script You Can Count On Me. Hart and Sharp were impressed enough with the material to seek financing, with Lonergan – who had sold a spec screenplay for what became the comedy Analyze This! – making his directorial debut.

Hart pitched the story to Larry Meistrich of The Shooting Gallery and secured the backing of the New York based production company. Martin Scorsese and his producing partner Barbara De Fina of Cappa Films heard about the project next, and were also eager to lend support. Scorsese in particular had followed Lonergan’s work for years. “He has a basic element which a lot of people try to attain and never do – his understanding of the human being and his ability to convey that in writing. What I admire about Kenny is the irony and humor and ultimately the truth of what he expresses.”

With $1.5 million in financing, shooting commenced June 1999 around the town of Phoenicia in the Catskills Mountains of upstate New York. Lonergan wrapped the film in 28 days and had it ready to screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January, where it split the Grand Jury Prize with Girlfight and won Lonergan the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Paramount Classics acquired distribution, and when You Can Count On Me was released in November 2000, critics were equally effusive with praise. Industry peers of Laura Linney and Kenneth Lonergan nominated them both for Academy Awards.

On the DVD audio commentary, Lonergan attributed the uniqueness of the film to its characters. “I don’t think I could have made the movie at a major studio without pasteurizing certainly some of Terry’s personality, which is too bad because a lot of the people in the movie business who have seen the movie really like it just for the reasons they would have objected to before it got made. I think that’s a really evil trend – that there’s such a terror that the characters won’t be absolutely lovable from start to finish – that they all become extremely boring.”

Opinion
Even with a naturalistic look (Lonergan cites Coal Miner’s Daughter as one of his inspirations style wise) and a cast that would shame the first time efforts of most directors, You Can Count On Me remains a cut above the best independent films of the ‘00s because of its screenplay, which is about as perfect as you could hope to have in a movie. Lonergan doesn’t let one artificial moment slip into the film for the sake of entertainment value, but builds a story that manages to be both enjoyable to watch, and uncompromising in its depiction of relationships.

Instead of coming off as caricatures with lots of goofy quirks, the characters in You Can Count On Me are thinking, living adults who remain comically fallible in spite of their best intentions to do things right. The film is so unique because it develops a moral conscience without preaching to the audience, questioning whether Terry is doing more harm than good, and whether this is acceptable or not. The brother/sister chemistry between Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney is something special, as is the nuanced performance of Rory Culkin, who made his film debut here at the age of ten.

Lisa Skrzyniarz at Crazy For Cinema writes, “You Can Count On Me may be a small, independant film, but the emotions and relationships it reveals are anything but. This is a powerful film about the ties that bind family and how tragedy shapes the lives of those it leaves behind. It’s a well-acted film that deserves more attention and one that will leave you feeling glad you spent the time…as long as your family isn’t as crazy as this one. Otherwise, it might hit a little too close to home.”

“Only a person with no interest in or understanding of human beings could find this film slow. It’s as fucking true a film as you will ever see. Terry, the mildly self-destructive and aimless wanderer with firm convictions and Sammy, who depends on anchors, but does not accept confinement are two of cinema’s best characters this side of Robocop. They deal with the problems faced by thoughtful people in all walks of life and in all situations, mainly about how to live and finding a place in the world,” writes Erich Schulte at Ruthless Reviews.

Harold Gervais at DVD Verdict writes, “You Can Count On Me is one of those films that make me glad I do what I do. It is a gem of a movie that speaks with a voice that is consistent and truthful; exploring characters that are real and discovering emotions that almost anyone can relate to. In a sparkling directorial debut, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan has fashioned a movie that simply does not exist in the high concept, big budget world of today’s Hollywood. It is a film of small joys and profound pains. It has humor, warmth, sex and love. It moves along at a pace that is both comfortable and immediate; never losing sight of the people within it or the world they exist in.”

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
A soft spoken but unwavering police officer from rural Pennsylvania named John Klute (Donald Sutherland) is compelled to investigate the disappearance of his best friend Tom Gruneman. The FBI claims that Gruneman led “a Jekyll and Hyde existence” and wrote several obscene letters to a call girl in New York before vanishing. Klute has no experience in missing persons work and has never even been to New York, but a friend of the family (Charles Cioffi) says of Klute, “He’s a friend, he’s interested and he cares.”

Klute makes contact with the call girl, Bree Daniels (Jane Fonda), who has no desire to help him. She has a humiliating acting audition and then pays a visit to her psychiatrist, confused over why she still wants to pick up the phone and turn tricks. Her psychiatrist has no answers for her. She asks Bree why she does what she does. “I came to enjoy it because it made me feel good. It made me feel like I wasn’t alone, it made me feel that I had some control over myself, that I had some control over my life.”

After being followed all day, Bree invites Klute up to her apartment. She’s unable to recall Gruneman from hundreds of other clients and has no idea where “some guy from Cabbageville” might be. She reveals that she is being harassed by weird hang-up calls at night. She also has the feeling that she’s being watched. Going on the theory it could be Gruneman still hanging around, Klute takes up residence in Bree’s building. The two become intimate, while threats from Bree’s stalker become more and more ominous.

Production history
Alan J. Pakula had met Jane Fonda in 1969 to discuss a project her agent was interested in having Pakula direct. His heart wasn’t in the material and nothing came of it. Weeks later, Warner Bros. sent Pakula a first draft screenplay by Andy Lewis & Dave Lewis called Klute. It concerned a New York call girl who takes a small town cop from Pennsylvania into her world so he can locate a missing friend. The only actress Pakula could see in the lead role was Fonda. He sent her the script while she was in New York promoting They Shoot Horses Don’t They?

According to Pakula, “Then I flew to New York after she read the script and she said, ‘Well, why do you want to do this? This could get awful cheap, call girl and all that stuff.’ And I said, ‘Because I think you’d be wonderful in it and I think that it’s a remarkably written character. I think there are things in the story that need work but the character is there now and the rest we can work on.’” But the studio wasn’t interested in casting Fonda. When Pakula refused to consider anyone else, he was taken off the project.

Barbra Streisand was offered the role of Bree, but found the script “silly” and turned it down. She later admitted that if she’d known Pakula was going to be directing her, she’d have said yes. When Warner Bros. was unable to attract anyone else, they settled on Pakula and Fonda. With Donald Sutherland in the title role, Klute went before the cameras in July 1970, shooting exteriors for Bree’s apartment on West 43rd Street and interiors in the now defunct Filmways Studios in Manhattan.

The production manager arranged for Fonda to research her role with prostitutes, but the actress became nervous when none of the pimps at the after hours clubs tried to solicit her. She felt she was wrong for the part and begged Pakula to fire her. The director did restructure the schedule to ease Fonda into the heavier scenes, including those with her character’s psychiatrist, which were improvised. Her performance won Fonda an Academy Award for Best Actress, and today, is generally considered the role of her career.

Opinion
There have been lots of detectives and lots of hookers, but few with the perceptive grace of Donald Sutherland’s Klute, and none with the steel and the vulnerability Jane Fonda invests in Bree, which is one of the most complex studies in feminism ever brought to the screen. While the mystery behind the missing friend is the least interesting business of the film, Klute has endured as a masterpiece due to the work of its lead actors, and its atmosphere, which conjures a mood of gothic dread unmatched by some of the best horror movies.

The film’s claustrophobic lighting – courtesy cinematographer Gordon Willis, alias “the Prince of Darkness” – has found its way into countless urban thrillers, most notably those directed by David Fincher, while the musical score by Michael Small is positively spine tingling. Klute is not an easy movie to watch with the lights off. Pakula wastes little time burdening the audience with plot device and focuses instead on the tense, nervous and alienated moods of this couple, as well as the underbelly of the fascinating world they inhabit.

Pete Croatto at filmcritic.com writes, “If you want proof at how a great cinematographer can make an average movie better, rent Klute, the 1971 mystery starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland. Nobody utilizes the dark better than Gordon Willis. He used it in Manhattan to establish a romantic mood, and in Klute (as he later did in 1993’s Malice) it adds an element of terror that a weak storyline never provides.”

“Let’s turn or attention to Commie traitor Jane’s film. This is a good movie and certainly worth the critical praise it has received. Commie traitor Jane is mysteriously at home portraying a whore whom has difficulty seeing the trouble brewing around her. She certainly deserves the Oscar that wasn’t taken back by the amoral MPAA once she stabbed our country in the back,” spouts Scott Nehring at Nehring the Edge.

Harold Gervais at DVD Verdict writes, “Great films have a way of sneaking up on a person. They announce their presence not in a showy way but rather in the moments after the credits have rolled and a person is left sitting there considering what was just watched. Great films beg to be watched again. Klute is just such a movie. One of the highlights from the 1970s, Klute turns out to be a film for the ages.”

“Bree Daniels. Girl on the brink. Somewhere among her clientele is a freak who murders call girls. And a wholly incredible cop who insists her life is worth saving. ” View the spooky theatrical trailer for Klute.

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In a New England town, schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) takes his fellow faculty member and girlfriend Sarah Bracknell (Brooke Adams) to an amusement park after school. Johnny suffers a migraine on a rollercoaster. At the end of the day, he refuses her offer to stay the night, preferring to wait until they get married for that. But on the way home, Johnny collides with a jackknifed big rig and falls into a coma.

Regaining consciousness at a clinic run by the benevolent Dr. Weizak (Herbert Lom), Johnny learns that he’s been unconscious for five years. His parents inform him that Sarah has married. Johnny later grasps the hand of a nurse, and experiences a vision of her daughter trapped in a house fire. His warning saves the girl’s life. Later, he has a vision of Weizak fleeing the Nazis as a boy, and informs the doctor that his mother survived the war and is alive.

A sheriff (Tom Skerritt) looking for leads in the case of the Castle Rock Killer approaches Johnny. He refuses to get involved at first, but with little else to do once Sarah says goodbye for the last time, Johnny agrees to help. He tells Weizak about a “dead zone” in his visions, empty space that his doctor interprets as his ability not only to see the future, but to change it. Johnny then meets Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen), a charismatic candidate for state senate. He has a vision of Stillson winning the presidency and launching a nuclear war.

Production history
Stephen King crowned a prolific five year span – in which he wrote Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, The Shining and The Stand – with his 1979 novel The Dead Zone. The book – which alternates between a schoolteacher experiencing visions after waking from a coma, and a sociopath rising to power as a politician – was King’s first to reach #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. Producer Jon Peters approached King about acquiring the film rights, but the author hadn’t been impressed with The Eyes of Laura Mars and turned Peters down.

King sold the film rights to Lorimar Productions. Paul Monash wrote two drafts for veteran director Stanley Donen, but according to King, “Neither of the drafts were very successful.” Jeffrey Boam was brought in to pare the novel down to a two-hour film. A producer at Lorimar named Carol Baum had seen a 1979 Canadian horror movie called The Brood and without realizing they already had a director, contacted David Cronenberg. She offered him the job before having to retract it.

When a series of commercial failures forced Lorimar to suspend its theatrical operations, producer Dino De Laurentiis scooped up the rights to King’s bestseller in early 1982. David Cronenberg happened to be on the Universal lot when he met Debra Hill, who had been tapped by De Laurentiis to produce The Dead Zone. Hill offered Cronenberg the job. This time, he got to keep it. The director holed up in a hotel room in Toronto and working from Boam’s draft, restructured and rewrote the story with Hill.

King favored casting Bill Murray as Johnny Smith. Cronenberg liked Canadian actor Nicholas Campbell, who he ended up casting as the Castle Rock Killer. De Laurentiis wanted Christopher Walken. Budgeted at $7 million, shooting began in January 1983 in the Ontario town of Niagara-On-The-Lake, with interiors lensing at Lakeshore Studios in Toronto. The response from test audiences convinced Paramount to market The Dead Zone as a psychological drama as opposed to a horror movie, and when released in October 1983, it became the biggest success of Cronenberg’s career.

Opinion
The Dead Zone has been called the Stephen King novel to introduce people who don’t like King or horror novels to King’s work. The impressive film adaptation is the movie to introduce people who don’t like David Cronenberg or horror movies to Cronenberg’s work. Instead of shocking the audience with psychedelic or repellent imagery, here the director assuredly lures us in, using ordinary characters and a Norman Rockwell winter setting to spring King’s subversive tale of a political assassin as hero.

While the film feels chippy at 103 minutes and excises a lot of rich – and superfluous – material from King’s novel, present in almost every scene is Christopher Walken, giving a striking performance that was iconic almost the moment it hit theater screens. This is one of his five greatest film roles of all time. The conceit of a man who sets out to commit murder for the good of humanity gives The Dead Zone a real edge, particularly today. Michael Kamen added an enthralling musical score, perhaps his finest film composition ever.

Harold Gervais at DVD Verdict writes, “With its lonely vistas the film plays more like an Andrew Wyeth painting that has been brought to life than it does a horror shocker from the modern master of terror. It also helps that David Cronenberg is directing. If you look at the man’s body of work you will find one recurrent theme that runs throughout most of his films and that is the love story. Bizarre, otherworldly love stories to be sure, but still love stories.”

“There is no question that this is the most mainstream film that David Cronenberg has ever made, one devoid of his usual predilection for difficult, often controversial subject matter and disturbing imagery … However, considering the overall trajectory of the maverick director’s career, it did mark an important step forward in the development of a genuine emotional intensity hitherto absent from the filmmaker’s work,” writes Alan Daly at DVD Times.

Chris Coleman at Appreciating Great Trash says The Dead Zone is, “almost as crushingly sad as Cronenberg’s The Fly, and it functions even better than that film as one of his best character-studies; of particular interest is the story’s audacity in casting two characters who claim to have ‘psychic visions,’ but then committing the moral flip-flop of having the ostensibly crazed, gun-wielding assassin as the heroic proprietor of legitimate premonitions, while depicting the upright Populist politician as an insane, solipsistic fraud.”

© Joe Valdez