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

Stop-Loss (2008)
Written by Mark Richard & Kimberly Peirce
Directed by Kimberly Peirce
Produced by Peirce Pictures/ Scott Rudin Productions/ MTV Films
Running time: 112 minutes

So, What’s This About?
While manning a checkpoint in the Iraqi city of Tikrit, a U.S. Army infantry unit is sucked into an ambush in which three of its men are killed and one critically wounded. Staff Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) finishes his service and returns home to “Brazos, Texas” with two busloads of men on leave. These include his friends Steve Shriver (Channing Tatum) and Tommy Burgess (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). Steve is a marksman going on five years of promises to his fiancée Michelle (Abbie Cornish) that he’s coming home. Tommy is unable to cope as a soldier or civilian and his fiancée (Mamie Gummer) calls off their wedding.

Brandon is notified that he is to be shipped back to Iraq under a clause known as a stop-loss. Challenging the legality of this with his CO (Timothy Olyphant) earns Brandon a trip to the stockade. Overpowering the MPs and going AWOL, Brandon’s mother (Linda Emond) urges him to head to Mexico, while his veteran father (Ciarán Hinds) feels his son should turn himself in. Brandon hopes a senator he knows might help and Michelle drives him to D.C. Along the way, they visit one of Brandon’s men, the disabled and blinded Rodriguez (Victor Rasuk). Brandon comes to realize his options are Canada or Iraq, with the possibility of never coming home from either.

Who Made It?
Kimberly Peirce grew up in South Florida and bounced all over the globe after high school. She moved to the Windy City to enroll at the University of Chicago. Running low on money, Peirce landed in Kobe, Japan next, where she worked as an English instructor (to mob lawyers) and as a model. She also began taking photographs, until a motorcycle accident in Thailand prompted her return to the United States. She completed her bachelor’s degree at U of C — in English and in Japanese literature — and enrolled at Columbia University Film School, where Peirce became absorbed with the murder of Teena Brandon. This became the focus of her first feature film: the award winning Boys Don’t Cry (1999).

After being offered projects from virtually every major film studio, Peirce began dealing with the events of 9/11 and subsequent deployment of her brother to Iraq by interviewing hundreds of soldiers and combing through videos they’d shot within their unit. She considered a documentary, before funneling her research into a screenplay about an AWOL soldier, which she wrote with Texas novelist Mark Richard. With producer Scott Rudin and a 5-minute trailer consisting of soldier videos helping make her pitch, Paramount bought the script and immediately greenlit Stop-Loss, one of six politically charged dramas that would be released around the same time and go largely ignored by audiences.

How’d They Do It?
Kimberly Peirce considers herself a New Yorker and was there on September 11, 2001. She recalled, “New York was in a state of crisis and mourning. There were people still looking for their loved one wondering, ‘Did he miss going to work that day?’ For us, we were in that state of mind and then, it was like, suddenly the country is going to war and I realized we were in the middle of a seismic change here. I became immediately interested why soldiers were signing up, what their experiences in combat were and what was going to happen when they got home. As I started thinking about all that as a movie, that’s when my little brother enlisted.”

She continued, “It wasn’t that I had a problem with him enlisting. I understood the whole patriotic response, the whole wanting to get the guys who did this. I was just very curious what the experience was going to do. My brother is significantly younger than me. I brought him home from the hospital as a baby. This was literally like it was my little baby and he’s pure innocence. Who is he going to be? What’s he going to do?” After Peirce’s first feature film — Boys Don’t Cry — won Hilary Swank an Academy Award for Best Actress and Chloë Sevigny a nomination for Best Supporting Actress, Peirce was deluged with offers from the major studios.

Warner Bros. hired David Mamet to pen a script about John Dillinger for Peirce, which she loved, but the studio got cold feet with. Peirce was attached to direct an adaptation of Dave Eggers’ best-selling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Universal, but that project never got off the ground either. She traveled to the Middle East to research the life and death of Israeli spy Eli Cohen; Columbia enthusiastically bought her pitch and hired Andrew Davies to pen a script, which didn’t work. DreamWorks offered her Memoirs of a Geisha, but Peirce didn’t cotton to the idea of directing a big budget, PG-13 movie about a Japanese courtesan.

Peirce spent years exhaustively researching the case of William Desmond Taylor, the silent film director whose 1922 murder was covered up by the film studios. Titled Silent Star, it almost became Peirce’s sophomore film. “I’d cast that movie: Annette Bening, Hugh Jackman, Ben Kingsley, Evan Rachel Wood, a dream cast. The studios said, ‘We love this movie.’ I was on the one-yard line. We were going to shoot it and they said, ‘We would love to shoot a $30 million version of this movie, but we would like to pay for the $20 million version.’ I was like, ‘Should I cut $10 million?’ They were like, ‘No, we want to see the $30 million version, but we want to pay for the $20 million version.’”

Peirce mused, “This is the thing that people should understand about directors’ careers. Unfortunately, if you want to do stuff that you really believe in and really love, it can take longer than you would like it to take. I was offered millions of dollars and I was offered a number of projects. As I would go down the road with them, for me, it really is about telling stories that I love and that are meaningful to me. I couldn’t just pick up a script and do it if I didn’t believe in it because every day of my life is living and breathing the movie.” On her own dime, Peirce had already begun interviewing soldiers and military families with her friend Reid Carolin.

Brett Peirce enlisted in the Army at the age of 18 and kept in touch with his sister through instant messaging. She recalled, “He came home on his first leave and he brought soldier’s homemade videos. It was shocking. It was like anthropology. It was like archeology. It was discovery. It was Thanksgiving 2003 and I was in my bedroom and I heard, ‘Let the bodies hit the floor, let the bodies hit the floor.’ Came out the door to pounding rock music to see my brother just sitting there, staring at these images.” Peirce hit on the idea of a soldier-made video documentary and buying cameras to send to soldiers in Iraq. Participant Productions was willing to finance it, but Peirce’s research pulled her toward a fictional approach.

Peirce had met Mark Richard in 2005 to work on an adaptation of his short story collection The Ice at the Bottom of the World. That project never came to pass, but when Peirce made the decision to write a spec script about soldiers coming back from Iraq, she contacted Richard, who would quit his day job on the Showtime series Huff and move in with Peirce to work on their script full-time. By his count, they went through 65 drafts. Richard recalled, “I’m this Southern conservative, she’s this incredibly intense liberal, but I think by the end of the process, the scales had fallen off both our eyes. I’ve always respected soldiers’ sense of honor, duty, service to the country. Stop-loss abuses the faith of these guys. You can’t keep sending them back and chewing them up.”

What began as a soldier’s story for the YouTube generation coalesced when a soldier Peirce was instant messaging with in Iraq told her about the stop-loss clause, referring to it as a backdoor draft. After 11 weeks, Richard & Peirce had draft ready to present to buyers, along with a 5-minute DVD trailer Peirce had cut together with Reid Carolin consisting of interviews with soldiers and their self-made videos. Peirce’s experiences in the studio trenches compelled her to seek an ally in producer Scott Rudin and in November 2005, it was announced that Paramount Pictures had outbid several other studios for Stop-Loss, promising a $25 million budget and a start date of April 2006.

Peirce enthused, “I don’t know if it’s ever happened before, but we greenlit a movie off of a script. That was a different experience than the one I’d had on the last movie, and to me it was a corrective experience. It will never take me that long to make another movie because I’ve already learned that lesson. Don’t put the things that are most precious to you in the hands of people who may not make them, whatever the cost.” Working with casting director Avy Kaufman, Peirce spent months auditioning actors and assembling the right cast: Ryan Phillippe, Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Abbie Cornish. Shooting commenced August 2006 in Lockhart, Texas. Morocco stood in for Iraq in the opening sequence.

Stop-Loss came on the heels of a slew of politically themed films in the fall of 2007: In the Valley of Elah, The Kingdom, Rendition, Redacted, Lions For Lambs. Each divided critics and was ignored by audiences. But hitting the road for a screening tour and Q&A, Kimberly Peirce wasn’t buying that audiences had Iraq War fatigue. “If you tell them the movie is going to be non-stop warfare they’re not going to go, it’s too threatening. But when you deliver a movie about people coming home and human emotions, they’ll go and they’ll love it. There is an appetite for that. I think that the reporting on Iraq and not making the stories personal has numbed the audience out.”

Screened at the South by Southwest Music & Film Festival in March 2008, Stop-Loss opened in the United States that month. Critics nudged it to the head of its class. David Edelstein, New York Magazine: “Stop-Loss doesn’t come together, but in its ungainly way it evokes the anguish of American shit-kickers who’ve lost all sense of autonomy.” Jessica Reaves, The Chicago Tribune: “While Stop-Loss doesn’t pack anything like the emotional wallop of her previous film, the movies do share Peirce’s clear-eyed refusal to answer difficult questions with simplistic answers.” David Denby, The New Yorker: “Stop-Loss is not a great movie, but it’s forceful, effective, and alive, with the raw, mixed-up emotions produced by an endless war.”

While Stop-Loss managed $10.9 million in the United States and $291,386 overseas, Peirce remained buoyed by how well her film had been received on the road. “We went to 24 cities, I showed it to soldiers who were both pro-the-mission and anti-the-mission at this point, wounded warriors, soldier’s families, and over and over what I got was: ‘Thank you for making an emotional movie. Thank you for making a movie that got it right. Thank you for making a movie that’s emotionally moving.’ Because it’s very cathartic for them to see reflections of themselves in the movies, and what they said is that people don’t always take the time to make it from a soldier’s point of view. That’s what was really satisfying — to bring it back to the community of soldiers.”

Should I Care?
With Boys Don’t Cry and now Stop-Loss, Kimberly Peirce has already demonstrated the empathy of a documentarian, the curiosity of a journalist and the eye of a first class filmmaker. Barely mentioning other movies in interviews, Peirce seems less keen on recreating her experiences as a film geek and more interested in answering questions nagging her as a human being. Peirce’s sophomore feature film isn’t bad; it’s exquisitely well made and very well cast, but feels like it needed to be run through the typewriter at least a few more times. Flying either too far over-the-top or so under-the-radar it barely registers as a blip, it’s also fatally flawed at its core.

Cinematographer Chris Menges (The Mission), production designer David Wasco (Kill Bill) and editor Claire Simpson (Platoon) each deliver Oscar caliber work. The movie features star making performances by Abbie Cornish and Channing Tatum. Ryan Phillippe almost had me convinced he was a rugged Texan, so the film totally loses credibility by having his character suddenly disobey stop-loss orders and go AWOL. The film just doesn’t earn this conceit and I didn’t buy it. The melodrama gets poured on too thick at times, while the story and characters just never hit me on a gut level. Victor Rasuk’s role as a disfigured vet committed to staying positive is a standout, but sadly, Stop-Loss never ascends good work to become a great film.

Where’d You Get All of This?
“Phenom Director Goes To War” By Katrina Onstad. The New York Times, 23 March 2008

“War and Peirce” By Karen Valby. Entertainment Weekly, 28 March 2008

“A Soldier’s Story” By Sarah Michelle Fetters. MovieFreak.com, 28 March 2008

“Interview: Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Monika Bartyzel. Cinematical, 8 July 2008

“Interview with Kimberly Peirce, Director of Stop-Loss” By Melissa Silverstein. Huffington Post, 8 July 2008

“Kimberly Peirce Interview Stop-Loss” By Sheila Roberts. MoviesOnline

“Unstoppable: An Interview with Filmmaker Kimberly Peirce” By Gregg Shapiro. Chicago Free Press

What the *&#! Is This About?
On the 16th of November 2027, London wakes to the following news: “The world was stunned today by the death of Diego Ricardo, the youngest person on the planet.” For 18 years, women have been infertile, and no one has been able to explain why. In the absence of all hope, anarchy has overwhelmed most of the world, but Britain “soldiers on” by banning all immigration, rounding up and deporting any asylum seekers. A group calling themselves the Fishes have organized an anti-government insurgency in support of immigrant rights, and are blamed for a bombing that almost kills Theo Faron (Clive Owen) as he’s ordering his morning coffee.

Theo was a political activist in his youth, but following the death of his son and the dissolution of his marriage has become a low-level bureaucrat. He remains largely apathetic about the future of the planet. The only thing Theo looks forward to are visits to the Bexhill area – which in addition to housing a refugee camp – is home to his friend Jasper (Michael Caine), a retired, ganga smoking cartoonist who cares for his wife (Philippa Urquhart), a photojournalist who experienced something so horrific, possibly in New York, or possibly at the hands of British intelligence, that she remains in a catatonic state. Returning to London, Theo is abducted by the Fishes, who he discovers are led by his fugitive ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore).

Julian implores her ex-husband to help them smuggle a girl past security checkpoints and to the coast. Theo’s cousin Nigel (Danny Huston) has government financing for a project called Ark of the Arts – spiriting the masterpieces of the art world and relocating them to London – and it’s believed he can help. Theo is offered £5,000 for his services, but the only travel permit his cousin can obtain stipulates that the girl remain under Theo’s supervision. With the aid of an insurgent (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and a nursemaid, Theo realizes that the girl he’s transporting, Kee (Claire-Hope Ashitey) is carrying a child. Julian hopes to deliver her to the Human Project, a think tank who as legend would have it, is working on mankind’s cure for infertility.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
Published in 1993, The Children of Men was a change of pace for mystery writer P.D. James. She imagined a world of the year 2021, where global infertility has brought civilization to its knees. James had come across a newspaper article that mentioned human fertility in the west had declined in the last 20 years. Not long after, she encountered another article, which stated that most of the life forms that have existed on earth have since died out. The author recalled, “And I thought – suppose it happened to human beings, suddenly, all in one year? What kind of world would it be? What would it mean for the way people lived, their motivation? It is almost unimaginable, what it might do to human beings.” She added, “I suppose it is a sort of moral fable; I don’t like to describe it as science fiction.”

Talent agent Hilary Shor read The Children of Men two months after delivering her first child. With her partner in the newly formed Hit & Run Productions – Tony Smith – Shor brought the project to producer Marc Abraham of Beacon Communications (later Strike Entertainment). Due to the detailed requests of P.D. James – her book be developed only as a feature, the story had to be set in England – it took a year, but Beacon finally negotiated the film rights. After a pass by Paul Chart, Shor hired Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby to adapt a screenplay. Fergus recalled, “We had done A Scanner Darkly for our first writing assignment – not the Richard Linklater one that ultimately got made. We were hired by Jersey Films to try to crack that book, and I think we had a lot of success with that adaptation so they said, ‘Hey give these guys a shot at Children of Men because it seems to be one that’s not going anywhere.’ We just read it, and we said, ‘Oh my God! This is Casablanca!’ It’s the perfect love triangle. It fit that mold and that’s when they got excited and thought, ‘Wow this could actually be a film.’”

After two years of writing, Fergus & Otsby had a draft that was good enough to be sent to Alfonso Cuarón, a Mexican director of two widely praised but little seen Hollywood films: A Little Princess and Great Expectations. A low budget Spanish language feature he’d shot in his native country – Y Tu Mamá También – had yet to be released. Cuarón recalled, “The truth of the matter is I didn’t respond to the material. I was not interested in doing a science fiction film and also the book takes place in a very posh universe. I respect, I love P.D. James. I enjoy the book, but I couldn’t see myself making that movie. And, nevertheless, the premise of infertility kept on haunting me for weeks and weeks and weeks.” Cuarón was committed to shooting Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, but promised the producers he’d tackle The Children of Men next.

Ignoring the Fergus & Ostby draft – as well as one by David Arata, which Cuarón referred to as “a generic action movie” – the director co-wrote a script with Timothy Sexton, who was tasked with adapting the novel, while Cuarón sketched his own ideas for what he wanted in the movie. “When I started working on the film I met with the art department and they undusted all the old rejections from science fiction movies they had done, they were so excited to do this movie that took place in the future. They started showing me all these amazing things. Supersonic cars, buildings, gadgets and stuff and I was like, ‘You guys this is brilliant, but this is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we are doing is this,’ and I brought in my files. It was about Iraq, Somalia, Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Chernobyl and I said this is the movie we are doing. The rule I set is this movie is not about imagination, it is about reference.”

Referencing The Battle of Algiers and the lead actor in a movie they liked called Croupier, Cuarón & Sexton finished their adaptation and sent it to Clive Owen, who recalled, “He was very high on my ‘directors I would love to work with’ list and even some of his films that were not as commercially successful I think are very special. When he first sent me the script I wasn’t sure about the part, I didn’t quite know why he wanted me to do it. It’s a highly unusual lead part, you look at that character and there are very unusual traits that he’s got. It’s not the kind of part where you can do your thing as an actor, it’s about sacrificing yourself to Alfonso’s vision and not getting in the way of it, which seemed more important than doing any sort of acting.” Cuarón added, “I’m thankful that this movie didn’t happen before Harry Potter. For two years I was working on Harry Potter in London – which is very different from being a tourist. Suddenly, you’re inside and witnessing the social dynamic. I can’t claim to understand the Brits, but at least I witnessed the class system, for instance, and other subtle things.”

With Cuarón’s freshly minted prestige and Julianne Moore, Michael Caine and Chiwetel Ejiofor joining the cast, Universal rolled the dice on Children of Men and its $72 million budget. Shooting commenced November 2005 in London. Cuarón recalled, “All the time we were shooting, we kept saying, ‘Let’s make it more Mexican’. In other words, we’d look at a location and then say: yes, but in Mexico there would be this and this. It was about making the place look rundown. It was about poverty.” Children of Men premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2006 before opening in the U.K. and Spain that same month. Universal bumped its release in the U.S. back to Christmas Day, supposedly so the picture could vie in awards contention.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Risky Biz Blog wrote that the studio was in fact orphaning Children of Men. “While many critics were impressed by the film’s virtuosity and bravado, the industry types were seeing a downer film that was going to lose money. The movie is a brilliant exercise in style, but it’s another grim dystopian look at our future – like Blade Runner or Fahrenheit 451 – that simply cost too much money (between $72 and as much as $90 million, I’ve heard) to make a profit.” Brandon Gray of Box Office Mojo said at the time. “These pictures tend to be box-office disappointments. A lot of them develop an audience later on television or DVD. They grow in esteem over time.”

Critics wasted no time lavishing the film with acclaim. Manohla Dargis, the New York Times: “Children of Men may be something of a bummer, but it’s the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking.” Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly: “It’s a work of art that deserves a space cleared for its angry, nervous beauty.” Derek Elley, Variety: “Picture more than delivers on the action front – not in bang-for-your-buck spectacle but in the kind of gritty, doculike sequences that haul viewers out of their seats and alongside the main protags.” However, the overwhelmingly positive ink was not spun into box office gold.

Nominated for three Academy Awards – Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Emmanuel Lubezi) and Best Film Editing (Alfonso Cuarón, Alex Rodriguez) – Children of Men was ignored on its release, grossing $35.5 million in the U.S. and $34 million overseas. Responding to an interviewer who mused that the film was too dark, Cuarón stated, “It pretty much depends on your own sense of hope. What we wanted to do at the end was to give a little glimpse of a possibility of hope. A very small glimpse. So you invest your own sense of hope in the story. After you go through this journey of what I consider to be the state of things, outside our green zones, then at the end is the question: Do we have a possibility of hope? I personally believe yes. Hopefully people believe that the movie is a very hopeful movie.”

Should I Care?
With bursts of documentary-like photorealism, Children of Men depicts one of the most subliminally disturbing visions of the future ever rendered to film. The only thing that doesn’t provoke a visceral reaction may be the pedestrian title, which P.D. James may have resorted to because Apocalypse Now was taken. “That movie really stayed with me” can be used to sum up any of the great films of a decade, but where Children of Men is most pronounced is in its verisimilitude. In this depiction of Things To Come, the future is not flying cars or robots. It’s Cuba. Fashion and technology have been frozen for 20 years. Infrastructure is in decay. Solders stand on every corner. Trash bags and stray dogs line the streets. Billboards advertise euthanasia kits under the brand name Quietus (“You decide where”) and remind citizens “Suspicious? Report all illegal immigrants”.

While the conceit that Theo would go on the run with Kee rather than hand her over to the authorities constitutes what is known as a plot hole, instead of being badgered by gaps in the narrative, I was absorbed by the reality of the environment being portrayed. The randomness of terrorist atrocities, suppression of human rights, impunity of death squads and dwindling flicker of hope bleed into a sort of nightmare you know you can wake up from, even though it seems a little too similar to the world we’re living in now. Alfonso Cuarón demonstrates not only technical virtuosity, but maintains a strong moral conscience in the story. Along with director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki and the art department, Children of Men may replace Blade Runner as the dystopia that other filmmakers rip off for the next 20 years.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“Mistress of Morality Tales” By Jan Dalley. The Independent, 20 September 1992

“Children of Men Feature” Time Out London, 21 September 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron Discusses Children of Men” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, 20 December 2006

“Alfonso Cuaron on Children of Men” By Brad Brevet. Rope of Silicon, 22 December 2006

“Tribeca Film Festival conversation with Mark Fergus” 11 February 2007

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the *&#! Is This About?
In the San Fernando Valley of 1977, busboy Eddie Adams (Mark Wahlberg) catches the eye of Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds), maker of “adult films, exotic pictures” at the nightclub where Eddie works. Jack lives in Reseda with Amber Waves (Julianne Moore), a coke sniffing adult film star whose line of work has cost her custody of her son. After Jack sends another one of his performers – the legendary Rollergirl (Heather Graham) – to inspect Eddie’s stuff up close, the troupe takes him for a cup of coffee. Jack expresses his vision to make an adult film where the story is so compelling the audience can’t get up and leave until they find out how it ends. Once Eddie’s spiteful mother (Joanna Gleason) kicks him out, Eddie finds a home with Jack.

Eddie’s new family includes the exuberant Reed Rothchild (John C. Reilly), actor/stereo salesman/cowboy Buck Swope (Don Cheadle), a grip (Philip Seymour Hoffman) who develops a crush on Eddie and The Colonel James (Robert Ridgely) who puts up the money for all of Jack’s films and urges Eddie to think about changing his name, “some name that makes you happy, or something with a little pizzazz.” Coming up with the handle “Dirk Diggler” while lounging in Jack’s hot tub, Dirk makes his film debut having sex with Amber. His physical endowments and charisma propel Dirk Diggler to the top of the adult film world, a position he solidifies with the character of Brock Landers, super agent and super lover whose debut Angels Live In My Town prompts Jack to declare, “This is the best work we’ve ever done.”

Dirk’s fortune takes a detour in 1980, after Amber introduces her “baby boy” to cocaine and the adult film industry transitions from film to the much cheaper format of video tape, ushering in an era of amateurism in the industry. Dirk’s drug use effects his acting and his ego gets him tossed off Jack’s set. Dirk and Reed take a shot at becoming rock stars, but shoot so much cash up their noses that they can’t pay the recording studio to retrieve their pathetic master tapes. On his way to rock bottom, Dirk falls in with desperado Todd Parker (Thomas Jane) who hatches a scheme to rob Rahad Jackson (Alfred Molina), a drug smuggler with a fondness for mix tapes and firecrackers. Reaching a new low in life, Dirk Diggler realizes he has nowhere left to go but up.

Who Should Be Held Responsible?
The Dirk Diggler Story was a 30-minute short Paul Thomas Anderson made when he was seventeen years old. Shooting on video and using two VCRs to edit, he was inspired not only by the porn movies he was obsessed with, but by fake documentaries like This Is Spinal Tap. Anderson chronicled the rise and fall of a porn star he based loosely on John Holmes, as well as a performer he’d seen profiled on A Current Affair named Shauna Grant. Anderson recalls, “There was some humor that I saw in it, I guess in a sick twisted way, maybe because it was the first time I was recognizing that a lot of these people in this story on A Current Affair were people I’d seen peripherally around the Valley, just in an area where I grew up, which is not a real shady area or anything, but there’s a lot of kind of goofy characters. So maybe it was just kind of being tickled by that.” Anderson ultimately wrote a feature length script based on The Dirk Diggler Story that ran 300 pages.

A 26-minute short Anderson made starring Philip Baker Hall opened doors for the filmmaker at the Sundance Film Festival in 1994. When Samuel L. Jackson agreed to join the cast of a feature Anderson had written – ultimately titled Hard Eight – financing was secured from Rysher Entertainment. Anderson enthused, “I remember on day two of shooting, calling my agent and saying, ‘After I’ve finished this movie, I wanna go right away and make Boogie Nights, ’cause I’m here with four actors and I LOVE IT! But I need more! I need fucking more! I need 80 of them!’ I knew it would be cool to consciously make a small movie – and a big fucking epic sloppy huge movie.” In the summer of 1995, Anderson went back to The Dirk Diggler Story, jettisoning the documentary approach and honing his script to a straightforward narrative of 185 pages.

One of the first people to get a look at Anderson’s script for Boogie Nights was the 31-year-old president and chief operating officer of New Line Cinema, Michael De Luca. Anderson’s pitch to DeLuca was that this was a four hour movie with a disco intermission. He talked about the opening shot of Close Encounters of the Third Kind and how he wanted to open with something similar: a black screen with disco music thumping underneath, which would then explode into a club marquee with the film’s title. Anderson described a long tracking shot that would descend into the club and introduce nearly every character, without cutting. DeLuca – thinking this sounded like Lawrence of Arabia, with disco – was hooked. He signed on immediately, regardless of the running time. “I would do Berlin Alexanderplatz with Paul. He’s Orson Welles. I’m the blank check guy.”

New Line chairman Robert Shaye had reservations about the thick script, which DeLuca assured his boss that Anderson could cut. Other executives remained dubious. VP of Marketing Karen Hermelin recalled, “I remember Mike DeLuca asking me to read it and I thought, ‘Who would watch this? You can’t make this.’ But DeLuca was totally passionate, he believed in Paul. And Paul believed in himself.” Hermelin came around. “And he was totally uncompromising. He had this five-thousand page script which was completely misogynistic. I loved it.” Shaye struck a deal with Anderson: He could make Boogie Nights with the freedom to cast whoever he wanted, provided he kept the budget below $15 million, secured an R-rating from the MPAA and delivered a running time of no more than three hours, which New Line would ultimately retain final cut over. Anderson agreed.

The first actor Anderson seriously considered for Jack Horner was Warren Beatty, who had phoned to flirt with the role. Appearing on The Charlie Rose Show in October 1997, Anderson revealed, “I think what I eventually, I started to figure out was that Warren wanted to play Dirk Diggler, you know? ‘You don’t really want to play Jack Horner. You want to be the kid on this movie. He said, ‘Yeah.’” Anderson felt Beatty’s reticence had something to do with morality. “I think what he might have been looking for, which maybe some other people were looking for, was a clear kind of moment or a clear moment when someone stands up and says, ‘What we are doing is wrong,’ you know?” After considering Jack Nicholson, Anderson made an offer to Sydney Pollack, but the director/actor blanched over the subject matter. Once they saw the film, Beatty and Pollack both regretted saying no. Burt Reynolds had said yes and received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.

Leonardo DiCaprio attached himself to the role of Dirk Diggler, but weeks before shooting was to begin, the rising star was talked into taking the lead in Titanic. On his way out the door, DiCaprio recommended one of his co-stars from The Basketball Diaries – Mark Wahlberg – for the job. Joining him were most of the cast from Hard Eight - John C. Reilly, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robert Ridgely, Philip Baker Hall – as well as actors that Anderson was eager to collaborate with. Don Cheadle had previously worked with Julianne Moore in a production of Jean Genet’s The Screens at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. “I called her and said, ‘What’s up with this script? Are you down with this?’ And she told me she got a real good feeling from Paul. I did too, but I was still nervous about how the film would come off. I didn’t want to be naked and exploited. I wanted the film to take a deep look at these people. And it does.”

A twelve week shooting schedule commenced in July 1996. The perfect house for Jack Horner had been found, but the location ended up being in West Covina, a 45 minute commute. Little about the production was a breeze. Producer John Lyons recalls, “Boogie Nights was a truly grueling shoot. It was made for basically no money, $12 million. It was a period piece and we shot a lot of it in the San Fernando Valley and West Covina. It was very hot and we shot so many days where it was 104 or 105 degrees. We shot a lot at night, which was really exhausting. When we made that movie, there was a lot of talk about workers in the sex industry and how it was a liberating thing. The reality was that I think we all got sort of depressed during the making of the film. It was intense and the reality of the lives of those people were leading are far from glamorous.”

Screened for the executives at New Line, Boogie Nights met with enthusiasm, for the most part. At 165 minutes, Robert Shaye felt the picture was just too long. While Anderson hemmed and hawed at trimming anything, Shaye brought in his own editor to cut the movie. When test screened, New Line’s 140 minute version somehow scored even lower than Anderson’s version, which was generating a miserable 30% among recruited audiences. New Line marketing chief Mitch Goldman explained, “The truth was – people didn’t want to say they liked it, even if they did. That’s the fallacy of testing a picture like this. They’d applaud, laugh, cry at the right places. Then the cards would come in shitty. When they put pencil to paper they’d say, ‘I don’t know anyone I’d recommend this to’ because it was a distasteful subject. But you could tell they loved it.”

The MPAA’s reaction to Boogie Nights was predictable. Anderson recalled, “When we submitted the movie, it was NC-17. I said, ‘I can’t argue with you.’ What they said next surprised me: ‘We just want you to know we love this movie, and we want it to be NC-17.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ They said, ‘We created that rating for movies like this, movies that deal with explicit material but that are also legitimate films. Then Showgirls came along and made us look like girls, sort of wiped the rating back to an X. So we need a movie like this.’ That changed my mind. I understood, but I said, ‘I can’t be the guinea pig.’” After recutting and resubmitting the film at least six times to no avail, Anderson reshot the sequence in which William H. Macy discovers his wife nonchalantly enjoying sexual relations at a New Year’s Eve party. “The MPAA broke it down like this: you can either hump or talk. You cannot hump and talk.”

Boogie Nights premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 1997. By late October, it had opened in the U.S. to nearly universal critical acclaim. Janet Maslin, the New York Times: “Some of the most distinctive American films of recent years – Pulp Fiction, The People vs. Larry Flynt, L.A. Confidential and now this one – have invoked a sleaze-soaked Southern California as an evilly alluring nexus of decadence and pop culture. Boogie Nights further ratchets up the raunchiness by taking porn movies and drug problems entirely for granted, and by fondly embracing a collection of characters who do the same.” Marjorie Baumgarten, the Austin Chronicle: “From the second it begins, Boogie Nights seizes your senses and pulls you right in: no turning back, no time for debate, no regrets.” Emmanuel Levy, Variety: “Darkly comic, vastly entertaining and utterly original.”

Far from a blockbuster – grossing $26.4 million in the U.S. and another $16.7 million overseas – Boogie Nights did receive three Academy Award nominations (Burt Reynolds, Julianne Moore and Anderson’s script were up for Oscars). Anderson trumpeted his magnum opus in one of many interviews by stating, “It’s about finding a family, to tell you the truth. I know that sounds kinda preposterous, ’cause it’s about porno! You know, and that’s a really kinda weird thing, is that you want to say ‘Well, it’s about the pornography industry’ and then you want to quickly say well, not really. And then maybe people might look at you sideways and go, ‘Come on, which is it?’ But I think ultimately, the thing that I really liked most and really focused on is that it’s about a lot of people searching for their dignity, and trying to find any kind of love and affection they can get. And they find it in really fucked up and twisted ways – but they get it, you know?”

Why Should I Care?
Just about every minute of Boogie Nights – which clocks in at 155 minutes – looks, sounds and feels almost exactly like I’ve imagined that movies should look, sound and feel. Photographed by Robert Elswit, we’re dazzled on a technical level. Karyn Rachtman – music supervisor for Pulp Fiction – deserves some kind of special award for mixing up The Chico Hamilton Quintet and Charles Wright & The Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band with the usual suspects like The Commodores and K.C. and the Sunshine Band. In his script, Anderson tackles challenging subject matter and takes on big, sloppy ideas, while swinging back and forth between darkness and light. If the picture has a flaw, it’s in the two dimensional portrait of just about every single character, who speak, act but very seldom it seems, think. Rollergirl flies out of the movie almost as thinly sketched as when she flew in.

Great insight is not a service Anderson offers. Where Boogie Nights succeeds masterfully is as a document of a moment in show business history and how the camaraderie of the players binds them together after the show is over. As a pure entertainment, it features plenty of ‘70s kitsch, a consistently twisted black wit, a ceaselessly mesmerizing visual palette, and that ass kicking retro soundtrack. Musician Jon Brion pitches in with a sparse but wonderfully kooky musical score. The cast – which includes Luis Guzman, Melora Walters, Nicole Ari Parker and Ricky Jay – has to be one of the finest groups of character actors ever assembled under one tent. What’s most admirable is how Anderson resists making a crowd pleasing, derivative comedy and instead, has the maturity to explore the darkness in each his characters, redeeming the ones still left standing.

© Joe Valdez

Where Are You Getting This *&#!?
“The Don” By Justine Elias. Interview, 1997 August

“The Innocent Approach to an Adult Opus” By Margy Rochlin. The New York Times, 12 October 1997

Boogie Nights (New Line Platinum Series). New Line Home Video, 1997

“Q & A with PTA” By Matt Grainger. Cinemattractions. 1998 February

“20 Questions” By David Rensin. Playboy, 1998 February

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

Rebels on the Backlot. By Sharon Waxman. Harper Entertainment (2005)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

Stone. By James Riordian. Hyperion (1995)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

@ Joe Valdez

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