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

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

By Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your thoughts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

Dazed and Confused. Criterion Collection (2006).

[All through the month of February, Jeremy Richey at Moon in the Gutter has declared a tribute to films that are "M.I.A. on Region 1 DVD." This article is a contribution to his series.]

Synopsis
In Planet Terror - the first half of a double feature – go-go dancer Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan) walks off the job and ends up reuniting with her enigmatic ex-boyfriend El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) at a Texas barbecue shack. At a nearby military base, a platoon led by the stoic Lt. Muldoon (Bruce Willis) accidentally unleashes a nerve toxin, exacerbating the marriage between Dr. Dakota Block (Marley Shelton) and her temperamental husband Dr. William Block (Josh Brolin) as townspeople filter into the ER with grotesque skin conditions. A full blown outbreak of cannibalistic sickos is soon at hand. Cherry is attacked and loses her leg, which the resourceful El Wray replaces with a table leg and later, a machine gun. Also banding together against the onslaught of freaks are the sheriff (Michael Biehn), his estranged brother and rib shack owner (Jeff Fahey) and a pair of nutty babysitters (Electra Avellan, Elise Avellan).

In the bottom half of the bill – Death Proof – Austin drive-time deejay Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier) is picked up by her friends (Vanessa Ferlito, Jordan Ladd) and goes in search of a party the night of her birthday. They end up drunk, stoned and bored at the “Texas Chili Parlor,” where the girls cross paths with a scarred loner who goes by the name Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). When the girls decide to head to Lake LBJ, Stuntman Mike follows them out, giving a ride to a bar patron (Rose McGowan again) in his loaded for bear 1970 Chevy Nova. None of the ladies reach their destinations. Months later, Stuntman Mike appears in Tennessee, where a pair of stuntwomen (Zoe Bell, Tracie Thoms), a makeup artist (Rosario Dawson) and a model/actress (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) takes a prized 1970 Dodge Challenger for a spin through the backroads. Stuntman Mike intercepts the girls, but gets a little more than he bargained for.

Production history
Robert Rodriguez met Quentin Tarantino in 1992 at the Toronto Film Festival. “I knew about his movie, Reservoir Dogs already ’cause my agent had seen it and said, ‘You’re going to love this guy Quentin Tarantino; he’s made a new movie, Reservoir Dogs, it’s really cool.’ I saw it at the Telluride Film Festival; he wasn’t there, but then we met in Toronto. So Toronto Film Festival, we ran into each other in the lobby; I had already seen the movie and I just went on and on about it. And he hadn’t seen Mariachi yet … We went to the El Mariachi screening together; he sat next to me, because by then we had become fast friends. I was video taping all my screenings at that time to get audience reactions; I couldn’t believe anyone was screening the movie. And so I had gotten the Telluride screening on tape with Quentin’s laugh track through the whole movie.”

After shooting a 3-D picture in 2004 (The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl), Rodriguez was kicking around ideas for another gimmick that would lure audiences into a theater. He came up with the idea of a double feature. Before Rodriguez could get very far, he was in post-production on Sin City, which featured a scene that he’d invited Tarantino to direct. “When I went to show him my cut of Sin City, I went to his house and laying on the floor with a bunch of other junk was a double bill poster for Rock All Night and Drag Strip Girl which was the same one I had at my house also on the floor. I was using that as inspiration for my double feature – just the layout of it. I said, ‘I got that same poster and it’s on my floor.’ This underlined how similar we were, but then I thought, ‘You know what? I had this crazy idea. I was going to do two short features but you do one and I’ll do one.’ He said, ‘I love double features! I love double features! We gotta call it Grindhouse.’”

In the film’s production notes, Tarantino described the experience of the grindhouse. “… they were all-night theaters that would play three or four movies. It would be a place for the bums to go and sleep. If you’re hiding out from the law you’d go there for the night. Then, at six in the morning they wake you up and send you out, and you’d walk around for ninety minutes and come right back in again. Drive-ins had the same shows, but were a whole different setting. Grindhouse theaters were in more urban areas. Dallas would have grindhouses, and Houston would have grindhouses, but when you get into the outer regions of Texas, it’s more about drive-ins.” In terms of the motion picture typically offered at the grindhouse, Tarantino exclaimed, “That shit was raw. The shit was off the hook. Sexuality was wild. You couldn’t even believe some of the sexuality and brutality that they got away with in these movies, and gore. You literally had to pinch yourself and say, ‘Am I even watching what I’m watching?’”

Rodriguez had 30 pages of a zombie script he’d been doodling on for close to a decade. Makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero recalls, “I remember during Spy Kids, maybe even as early as The Faculty, that Robert said, ‘I’ve got this cool idea for this zombie movie. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen yet, but there’s going to be a doctor and his wife, and they’re going to be working in a hospital, and there’s going to be this really great scene where we see a girl on the road, and every time a car passes we reveal silhouettes of zombies getting closer and closer to her.’” Titled Planet Terror, Rodriguez styled his contribution to Grindhouse as a brooding B-movie John Carpenter might have directed between Escape From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982), with zombies. Sort of. Nicotero adds, “It’s a big misconception because technically they’re not zombies. They don’t die then come back, and they don’t necessarily all eat flesh. We have a couple guys that eat brains, and people get torn apart and get disemboweled, but generally they don’t really die. They just become infected and become these mindless killers.”

To write his segment, Tarantino started virtually from scratch. “And the first idea was a bunch of young college history students that were going through a tour of the plantations of the old South. And there’s a ghost of an old slave that is part of negro folklore. Jody the Grinder actually went down and bested the devil, by fucking him. And so the devil put him on earth for all eternity to fuck white women. And that was the devil’s punishment. The opening scene would take place in the classroom, with the professor telling the story of Jody the Grinder in a big four-page monologue. I would probably have had Sam Jackson playing that part. And it was really good. But then I didn’t have anywhere to go with it, because if you have a story about a killer slave with supermacho powers done in the style of a slasher films, then even if he’s doing it today, and even if the white girls are innocent, how can you not be on the slave’s side?”

Tarantino continued, “Then I remembered a time when I told somebody I was thinking about getting a safer car. I was thinking about a Volvo and he says, ‘Oh, Quentin, if you want a safer car all you have to do is buy any car and give it to a stunt team plus $10,000 and they’ll make it death proof.’ And for two seconds I actually thought about doing that. He actually used the words ‘death proof’ but I forgot about it – this was 11 years ago. So now I’m thinking about this tale, and I thought, what if he uses a car? And what if his thing is to follow girls who travel in a posse? His car wipes the girls out and he gets to live, because it is death proof. To me he was a sex act, so what he was doing was a rape murder, his act of sex. He does it in such a way that it looks like an accident so he gets away with it. Then we wait until he recovers and, like a serial killer, he goes to another state and does it again.” Tarantino titled his segment Death Proof.

As far as Bob and Harvey Weinstein – co-owners of Dimension Films – were concerned, Grindhouse would cost $40 million to produce, with Rodriguez and Tarantino delivering segments running 70 minutes each. But Tarantino – who enjoyed inserting vintage trailers into grindhouse film festivals he programmed for his buddies – got directors Eli Roth and Edgar Wright involved. “They just seemed natural guys to just step into the breach, especially where their interests were concerned. Eli would make a slasher film trailer using the one holiday that hadn’t been used: Thanksgiving. And Edgar was going to do a ’70s-style British horror film trailer because he remembered that nobody opens their mouth in the trailers. You never wanted the audience to know that it’s a British movie.” Rob Zombie – directing a remake of Halloween for Dimension – also wanted in on the act. He got the go-ahead from Rodriguez to shoot a trailer based on his title alone: Werewolf Women of the S.S. The production cost for Grindhouse soon rose to $53 million.

Planet Terror commenced filming March 2006 at Troublemaker Studios, the production facility Rodriguez and then-wife Elizabeth Avellan built on the former site of the Robert Mueller Municipal Airport in Austin. Tarantino not only made a cameo appearance in Planet Terror (as Rapist #1) but filmed second unit as well. He somehow found time to direct an audition reel Josh Brolin submitted for a role in No Country For Old Men. With the intended release date of Christmas scrubbed, Tarantino began shooting Death Proof in August 2006, also around Austin. The high speed stuntwork took until January 2007 to complete, leaving Tarantino with a mere six weeks to edit his film. By chance, both Planet Terror and Death Proof would clock in at 85 minutes. This prompted the Weinsteins to suggest the directors release their segments as two separate movies, but Tarantino – who had gone along with the scheme to split his last movie (Kill Bill) into two volumes – insisted that Grindhouse would give audiences two movies for the price of one.

While Dimension always planned on exhibiting Planet Terror and Death Proof separately as extended versions in non-English speaking countries – where moviegoers had little idea what a double feature was – the design was always to present Grindhouse in the U.S., the U.K. and Australia as one epic theatrical experience. Headed into theaters April 2007 in the States – over the Easter holiday – Harvey Weinstein felt the picture was a throwback to the gambles he’d taken out of necessity in the early days of Miramax Films, with groundbreaking films like sex, lies and videotape, The Crying Game and Pulp Fiction. “When you see it, you just say, ‘OK, you’ve got to be brain-dead not to get that one, it’s so good and fun.’ It’s the fastest three hours you ever spent in a theater. It’s an event, like a Stones concert, or The Who at Leeds. We’re asking people to go to the movies. It’s not something to watch on DVD or cable.”

Critics flew out of their pants praising Grindhouse. Nathan Lee, the Village Voice: “Rodriguez, Tarantino, and Co. aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it’s about goddamn time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents’ permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours.” Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: “Grindhouse, like Ed Wood and Boogie Nights, celebrates how certain low-grade entertainment, viewed in hindsight, looks different now than it did then, since we can see the ‘innocence’ of its creation – the handmade quality of it – in a world not yet ruled by corporate technology.” Scott Foundas, L.A. Weekly: “I suspect that Death Proof will throw some of its director’s admirers for a loop, though it may be the most revealing thing Tarantino has yet done – a full-throttle expression of a singular artistic temperament disguised, like so many gems of grindhouses yore, as a glittering hunk of trash.”

But for reasons that would be debated beginning the Monday after its opening weekend, audiences stayed away from Grindhouse, which would gross a shabby $25 million in the U.S. and $25.1 million overseas. Daily Variety’s Anne Thompson offered theories galore: “What went wrong? Let’s list the ways. Grindhouse was a cult concept, with a cult following. It was the kind of movie critics praise (Metacritic gave it a very good 78) but it was beat by Ice Cube’s execrably reviewed comedy Are We Done Yet? (Metacritic ranking: 39). Many audiences said: ‘I don’t have three hours.’ The Rodriguez half of Grindhouse was for horror fans, and was far too gross for women, who might have liked the Tarantino half, which is a total female empowerment flick. My friend in Chicago who eagerly took a pal on opening day reported about 30 people in the theater. Not a good sign.”

Plans to turn Grindhouse into a franchise – with Rodriguez interested in adapting his fake trailer Machete into a feature length film – were put on hold. The Grindhouse experience now exists as two separate DVDs; Planet Terror is extended 20 minutes over its theatrical running time, while Death Proof is padded with almost 30 minutes of trivial footage. Rodriguez’s fake trailer for Machete can be found on the Planet Terror disc, but the other trailers and promos exist only on YouTube. Some observers pegged the failure of Grindhouse on the seeming inability of its filmmakers to put away their childhood obsessions, to which Tarantino mused, “I remember 25 years ago reading critics slugging on Lucas, on DePalma, on Spielberg saying these guys are so talented but they’ve dedicated their lives to recreating the junk of their childhood. I guess the same people could say that about me and Robert Rodriguez.”

Opinion
Grindhouse was a theater going experience like no other. Viewing Planet Terror or Death Proof on a DVD is a lot like showing up first for a party; the kegger is out, but without other guests, the event leaves something to be desired. In an era where even the decent movies resemble consumer entertainment product – to be guzzled down, tossed in the recycle bin and forgotten – almost every scene of Grindhouse beams with sincere adulation for B-movies, busting out three hours worth of intense audience appreciation. Planet Terror is the best work Robert Rodriguez has done yet. It’s loaded with a ridiculous amount of gags – my favorite is the steely eyed anesthesiologist who loses use of her arms for half the film – but aside from recapturing the ingenuity of El Mariachi, Rodriguez pulls together a complete film for once, as opposed to what feels like six or seven shorts held together by duct tape.

Death Proof provoked the usual suspects who rant “Tarantino is a hack” at the drop of a lightsaber. These are the same douche bags who can tell you shot-by-shot how Reservoir Dogs ripped off City on Fire; if they’re bitching about the length of Death Proof, they might actually have an argument this time. At 85 minutes the exhaustive banter between the girls tested my endurance, while at 113 minutes on the DVD version, the chatter becomes nearly unbearable. It’s too idle for too long, but like all master directors, Tarantino knows how to play an audience, and rewards our patience with not only the greatest car stunt sequence of all time, but the audacity to cast an actual stuntwoman (the charismatic Zoe Bell) as the lady in peril. Like the male leads in all Tarantino films, Kurt Russell gives his best performance in decades. To watch Tarantino give us his version of My Bloody Valentine or Vanishing Point - completely breaking with formula while worshipping it at the same time – is fucking exhilarating.

© Joe Valdez

Sources
“Weinsteins ready for Grindhouse” By Anne Thompson. Variety, March 30, 2007

“Filmmakers and Friends Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez Talk Grindhouse” By Rebecca Murray. About.com, March 31, 2007

“Enter the Grindhouse with Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez” By Steve Chupnick. MovieWeb, April 1, 2007

Grindhouse production notes. Dimension Films, April 2007

“Quentin Tarantino: Cult Hero” By Philip Berk. Film Ink, November 2007

“Tarantino Bites Back” By Nick James. Sight & Sound, February 2008

Synopsis
On May 28, 1976 – the last day of the semester at “Lee High School” somewhere in Texas – quarterback Randall “Pink” Floyd (Jason London) faces an existential crisis over whether to sign a pledge promising not to take drugs or engage in summer activities which might jeopardize the “goal of a championship season in ‘76.” His teammates (Sasha Jenson, Cole Hauser, Jason O. Smith, Ben Affleck) spend the last day of school sanding down paddles and chasing 8th grade boys home for their freshman initiation. This includes Mitch Kramer (Wiley Wiggins), whose sis Jodi (Michelle Burke) seals his doom by asking her classmates to “take it easy” on her kid brother.

The senior girls (Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams) organize the 8th grade girls and spill condiments on them in the parking lot for their initiation. One of the pledges (Christin Hinojosa) catches the eye of a journalism geek (Anthony Rapp). His friends (Adam Goldberg, Marissa Ribisi) plan to attend a big keg party, but when it’s busted, end up cruising around with all the other kids. Mitch eludes his tormentors long enough to befriend Randall, who welcomes the self-respecting freshman into his circle. Hanging around this scene is Wooderson (Matthew McConaughey), a grown adolescent who spreads word that the kegger will convene under the Moon Tower.

Production history
Richard Linklater was a Sam Houston State dropout who left college to find work on an oilrig in the Gulf of Mexico. He saved enough money to buy a Super 8 camera and by 1985 had settled in Austin, where he began to make short films and founded the Austin Film Society with cinematographer Lee Daniel. A feature that Linklater shot for $23,000 – a free form examination of Austin’s subculture titled Slacker – became a sensation in arthouses and film festivals in the summer of 1991. During the press tour, Linklater mentioned an idea he had for his next project, a teen movie.

Linklater recalls, “But at that time, teen movies were John Hughes movies. There was so much drama. Maybe I’m an undramatic guy, but I remember a complete lack of anything big going on in high school. The essence of being a teen to me was a whole lot of energy and music but nothing much technically happening. On any given night there wasn’t a car wreck. There was no one impregnated, no huge love story from the wrong side of the tracks.” Producer James Jacks was a fan of Slacker and when he read the idea, flew Linklater to Los Angeles. This resulted in a script Linklater wrote called Dazed and Confused.

To assemble a cast, Jacks and his partner Sean Daniel hired Don Phillips. As he’d done for Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Phillips met every up and coming actor and actress for parts. Vince Vaughn was passed over for the roles Cole Hauser and Ben Affleck were given. Claire Danes was found to be too East Coast to play a Texas teen. Ashley Judd didn’t even get a callback. One person who did stand out was Renée Zellweger. Though all the roles had been cast by the time she came to Linklater’s attention in Austin, Zellweger was awarded a walk-on part. Wiley Wiggins was walking out of Quackenbush’s when producer Anne Walker-McBay discovered him.

Phillips was at the bar in the Hyatt he’d been booked into in Austin. Matthew McConaughey was there with his girlfriend and when the bartender mentioned that Phillips was producing a movie, he went over to introduce himself. McConaughey had appeared in a beer commercial and a music video, but had never acted in a movie. He ended up drinking and talking with Phillips for hours. Linklater recalls, “Matthew looked like he’d do fine with college girls, but I needed Wooderson to be a little creepier. But Matthew just sunk into character. His eyes shut to little quarter slots, and he said, ‘Hey, man, you got a joint?’ He just became that guy.”

With a $6.9 million budget from Universal, Dazed and Confused began filming July 1992 in Austin. Linklater wanted a movie that felt like it had been shot in 1976. “I didn’t use a Steadicam, for instance. Had I been able to get film stocks from that era, I would’ve. I just wanted it to look like a ‘70s movie, in a way. Blown out windows, just a certain style. I was very much playing off that. The way music was used in movies pre-MTV, for instance. Sort of a storytelling narrative element to music, more along the lines of Easy Rider, Mean Streets, Graffiti, even, you go back to Scorpio Rising, films like that, but pre-MTV influence, so, I was very consciously looking at that era stylistically.”

One of Linklater’s first disputes with Universal concerned the film’s language. “They were in some delusion about this could be a PG-13 movie if we had less cussing. ‘I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? Teenagers drinking, driving, smoking pot, this is an R rated movie.’ But they: ‘Well, less. Maybe there could be less.’ They were afraid they were gonna offend people.” The studio had so little faith that a soundtrack comprised of forgotten ‘70s artists would sell that they pressured Linklater to abandon his meticulously selected music cues and replace them with current bands singing cover versions. To keep the songs he wanted, Linklater gave up his profit points in the soundtrack.

When Dazed and Confused was put before test audiences in L.A., its box office fate was sealed. Linklater recalls, “You’d watch the movie with a test audience – this is the down side of making a studio film – you’d watch the film with an audience, and they’d laugh and applaud and have a great time and then the cards would come back ‘Poor.’ You know, we tested poorly. So those audiences at those testings more or less killed this film for being a wide release and we just got marginalized. It was kind of a studio production with an independent release, sort of the worst of both worlds.”

Released in September 1993, Dazed and Confused was praised by critics. Rolling Stone labeled it, “The ultimate party movie, socially irresponsible and totally irresistible.” Entertainment Weekly called it, “The most slyly funny and dead-on portrait of American teenage life ever made.” Audiences missed the film in theaters, but over time, video cassette and DVD sales topped $30 million as its reputation among college students grew. Two volumes of the soundtrack have sold more than two million copies. Don Phillips adds, “To this day you can’t go to a video store on a Friday night and get Dazed and Confused, because the kids still have Dazed parties, and everybody knows every line in the movie.”

Opinion
Perhaps more than any other movie in recent history, to watch Dazed and Confused is to step into the Way Back Machine and spend a couple of hours in another place and time. Not only did Linklater dial the clothes, the cars, the tunes and the film’s sensibility back to 1976, but the filmmaker’s laid back take on his teenage years refuses to lay any moralizing or tired plot devices on the audience. Instead of feeling phony, the film empowers us to become active observers in the rituals and celebrations of another decade’s youth.

Spanning less than eighteen hours, Linklater’s script digs no more than skin deep into these characters, but when it comes to casting, the film is in select class. Matthew McConaughey was the discovery of the picture, while Linklater gets terrific performances from the pros (Milla Jovovich, Rory Cochrane, Nicky Katt) and the Austin area novices in his ensemble. The lengths Linklater went to accurately depicting his youth – in all its petty cruelties and substance use – gives the film a real edge, softened at the right moments by the presence of Wiley Wiggins as the empathetic freshman navigating his way through this wild and crazy world.

The Vocabularist at Movie Cynics writes, “I want to say that this movie is great, but the only reason I would be doing that is because of some sick sense of nostalgia that I have from my high school days of getting wasted. I relate to the film, but in the end the movie is about nothing. It’s just serves as a reminder of how stupid we all were when were in high school, how idealistic and self-serving we were in the name of a good time. Dazed and Confused is a movie about the past, so if you like living in it, you’ll probably like the film.”

“Much more than the superficial teen romps that passed for generational insight during the 1980s, Richard Linklater has crafted the definitive adolescent allegory. Illustrating how music makes our experiences more ethereal and touching on almost every issue inherent in the high school of eras past (and present), this drunken, drugged out comedy is a benchmark in the way young adulthood is illustrated and explained in the modern motion picture. Without gimmicks, it achieves a greatness that few films can ever hope to emulate … Without a doubt, Dazed and Confused is a great film,” writes Bill Gibron at DVD Talk.

Brendan Babish at DVD Verdict writes, “Dazed and Confused gets nearly everything right … After a Little League baseball game the teams are forced to line up, slap the other team’s hands, and mutter, ‘Good game’ (remember that?); on the way to the parking lot everyone yells ‘Shotgun!’ at the same time; at night everyone drives around town looking for fun, and nothing much happens … Linklater said with Dazed and Confused he was looking to make the American Graffiti of the ’70s. I think in about ten years another young director making a period teen comedy is going to say he wants to make the Dazed and Confused for the ’90s.”

Visit Jeremy Richey’s week long tribute to the images and music of Dazed and Confused at Harry Moseby Confidential.

© Joe Valdez

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© Joe Valdez

Synopsis
In 1949, John Grady Cole (Matt Damon) learns that the family spread in San Angelo has fallen into the hands of his estranged mother. She intends to sell the land to an oil company. “It’s a sorry piece of business, but son, not everybody thinks that life on a cattle ranch in West Texas is the second best thing to dyin and goin to heaven,” her sympathetic lawyer (Sam Shepard) tells him.

John sells his friend Lacey Rawlins (Henry Thomas) on the idea of seeking adventure in Mexico. Lighting off on their horses, the young men inherit a tagalong named Blevins (Lucas Black) who’s run away with a horse and a pistol worth too much for him to handle. They cross the Rio Grande, and Blevins’ horse escapes in a storm. The kid steals it back, while John and Lacey are hired on at the ranch of horse breeder Hector de la Rocha (Ruben Blades).

John gains el jefe’s trust with his horse breeding acumen, but trouble arises when he falls for the boss’ headstrong daughter Alejandra (Penélope Cruz). Her aunt (Miriam Colon) warns John to keep away from her. Luisa sleeps with him anyway, and John is dragged off with his buddy Lacey by a police captain (Julio Oscar Mechoso). In jail, they’re reunited with Blevins. Since they last saw him, the kid has shot and killed three men.

Production history 
Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All The Pretty Horses was the first work in the author’s Border Trilogy, which later included The Crossing and Cities On The Plain. MGM/UA head John Calley purchased the screen rights for Mike Nichols. Ted Tally adapted a screenplay, but in typical fashion for Nichols, he decided he didn’t want to direct it. Calley suggested Billy Bob Thornton for the job, and on the set of Primary Colors, Nichols gave the script to the actor.

Thornton wasn’t familiar with the book, but loved westerns. He brought in Tom Epperson to rewrite the script and met with Leonardo DiCaprio about starring. But Thornton was nervous about the cost; he’d shot his directorial debut Sling Blade for $1 million and was concerned that a production budgeted at 50 times that would be taken away from him. Columbia – who was now producing – wanted an epic prestige film for the holidays. They told Thornton not to worry about cost.

With Matt Damon in the lead, shooting wrapped in June 1999. Thornton edited the length down to what he felt was a presentable length and screened it for Calley and Nichols. The movie ran 220 minutes long. Dennis Rice called it “the most self-indulgent director’s cut I’ve ever seen.” Test screened by Columbia at the Sherman Oaks Galleria, the audience scores were disastrous. But Thornton refused to alter it, and the film’s Christmas 1999 release came and went.

Miramax Films held options on Thornton’s next three films as director and Harvey Weinstein had brokered an equity stake in All The Pretty Horses. Sensing they had a disaster on their hands, Columbia traded domestic distribution with Miramax, in exchange for the international rights. Thornton was now Weinstein’s problem. The studio chairman forced the director to cut the picture from 220 minutes down to “a Cliff Notes version” of 115 minutes.

Finally released on Christmas Day 2000 on 1,400 screens, All The Pretty Horses received respectable critical notices, but bombed with audiences, grossing only $15 million in the U.S. When approached by Weinstein with the opportunity to release a director’s cut for the DVD, Thornton turned him down, reportedly over not being allowed to restore the original musical score by Daniel Lanois. Thornton hasn’t directed a movie since.

Opinion 
Whatever vision Thornton had about unrequited love on a horse ranch in postwar Mexico lies in an editing bay somewhere. The 115-minute version has a great performance by Matt Damon – who broods and mutters like a Texan – but the rest of the cast is reduced to superficial cameos. All The Pretty Horses makes as much sense as an elegant novel that’s had 105 pages ripped out. What’s left is a sad, orphaned film in need of restoration. Miramax: Free Billy Bob!

“All The Pretty Horses isn’t bad, per se; it’s just a film you have to be in the right mood to see. Deliberately slowly paced, it’s not for the faint-hearted. Or the sleepy. Or those unimpressed by repetitious slow motion cuts and meandering storytelling,” writes Rose “Bams” Cooper at 3BlackChicks Review.

Michael W. Phillips Jr. at goatdog’s movies says, “The book was like a daydream of a hazy, distant past. Something about trying to recreate that dreaminess on film seems like an exercise in futility. Thornton tries, fails some of the time, and succeeds often enough to make the film worth watching.” He gives it 3 out of 5 goats.

“It’s apparent early on that this is as much an ode to simple life on the unspoiled range as it is a film with a story to tell. And this is a good thing, as the storyline is easily the film’s weakest element,” writes Brian Webster at Apollo Movie Guide.

© Joe Valdez

Ray (John Getz) drives his employer’s wife Abby (Frances McDormand) down a dark, rain slicked highway in Texas. She’s asked Ray to take her away, but the two end up spending the night together in a motel. The couple is awakened by a call from her husband, bar owner Julian Marty (Dan Hedaya), who has hired a vile private investigator (M. Emmett Walsh) to follow Abby around.

Marty shows up to Ray’s house to rough up his wife. Abby breaks his finger and sends him on his way with a sore groin to boot. Marty notifies the detective that he’s got a job for him. “Uh, well, if the pay’s right, and it’s legal, I’ll do it.” Marty notifies him that it’s not strictly legal. “Well, if the pay’s right, I’ll do it.”

The detective steals a pearl handled .22 that Abby keeps in her purse, but rather than kill the couple, merely photographs them sleeping together and doctors it to make Marty think he shot them. Greed, a body that isn’t dead yet, mistrust, betrayal and other complications ensue.

After spending four years in the undergraduate film program at NYU, Joel Coen worked as a production assistant on an assortment of music videos and industrial films. He met director Sam Raimi, who was looking for an assistant editor for his first feature film, The Evil Dead.

With his brother Ethan Coen – who had an undergrad degree in philosophy from Princeton and was working as a clerical typist – the Coens wrote a script called Blood Simple on nights and weekends. With Joel directing and Ethan producing, they followed in the footsteps of Raimi, who shot a teaser trailer for The Evil Dead on Super-8 to raise $90,000 to make the film. In the Coens’ teaser, Bruce Campbell played the Dan Hedaya part, bloody and crawling across a road.

The Coens had seen Holly Hunter performing in Crimes of the Heart in New York and offered her the lead. Hunter was already committed to Beth Henley’s next play, but suggested they audition her roommate, Frances McDormand, who the brothers ended up casting. Hunter lent her voice to the picture, as one of the messages played back on the answering machine of a bartender.

Steven Spielberg, the Coens, Kevin Reynolds, Richard Linklater and Wes Anderson all shot their first feature films in Texas, and out of that class, Blood Simple is the best. It’s dark, gruesome and not for the weak-kneed, but also features the same skewered sensibility that stood out so well in Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski.

The noir story is nothing new. It’s the visual wit that makes this an overlooked classic; a black bartender at a redneck bar who plays The Four Tops on the jukebox, or the fact that Getz lives on a dead-end street and people dramatically racing away from his house have to turn around and drive past him again. That would have been cut from any other movie, but the Coens are all about non-sequiturs. The music by Carter Burwell is just as eccentric.

McDormand and Walsh are both terrific, particularly Walsh, who plays one of the most treacherous crackers of all time. A director’s cut released in 2001 trimmed three minutes from the theatrical release, and replaced “I’m A Believer” by The Monkees with “It’s The Same Old Song” by The Four Tops over the end credits, a much more ironic musical cue. The film was shot around Austin, Round Rock and Hutto.

Ruthless Reviews calls Blood Simple, “a thriller that is as convoluted as a Mexican election but presents nary an inconsistency or implausibility.”

“It knows exactly what it’s up to and provides a solid ninety-odd minutes of genuine suspense and sly, gallows humor,” or so says DVDTown.

“It’s a forceful and significant debut, well-deserving of its ranking as a classic,” raves Kasia Anderson at Reel.com.

In 1969, Lou Jean Poplin (Goldie Hawn) arrives at the Jester Unit pre-release facility to visit her husband Clovis (William Atherton). He only has four months left on his sentence, but Lou Jean notifies him that welfare is coming to take their beloved Baby Langston and put him in a foster home. She’s just been released from prison herself and has been deemed an unfit mother.

Lou Jean has worn extra clothes and after disguising Clovis, sneaks him out of pre-release to retrieve Baby Langston from the town of Sugarland. They hitch a ride with an old timer, but he drives so slow, rookie Texas Highway Patrolman Slide (Michael Sacks) pulls them over. Lou Jean takes off. She crashes the car, but gets her hands on the rookie’s revolver and hijacks the patrolman and his vehicle.

Captain Tanner (Ben Johnson) is summoned to take command of the pursuit. He refuses to endanger the patrolman by allowing Texas Rangers snipers to fire into the car. Instead, he takes his time and attempts to negotiate with Clovis as the convoy makes its way towards the border. The incident quickly turns into a public sensation.

After directing a highly touted TV movie-of-the-week called Duel, 25-year-old Steven Spielberg spent months preparing his first feature film. Titled White Lightning and set to star Burt Reynolds, Spielberg dropped out, later claiming no matter how good his work, it would be a Burt Reynolds movie, not a Steven Spielberg film.

Spielberg had a news item about husband and wife fugitives who’d kidnapped a state trooper, commandeered his car, and led police on a chase through the backroads of Texas. Universal chairman Lew Wasserman was skeptical. He thought the days of Easy Rider were over, but told producers David Brown and Richard Zanuck to go ahead. Spielberg enlisted Hal Barwood & Matthew Robbins to write the script.

Instead of a producer pressuring the director to make the movie more commercial, it was the other way around. Spielberg went back to Zanuck after filming had wrapped with a new idea: the couple should make it to Mexico with their baby. Zanuck told Spielberg to stick with the ending he’d written, which was downbeat, but historically accurate. The film was not a success at the box office.

Pauline Kael called The Sugarland Express “one of the most phenomenal debut films in the history of movies” and it is. Working with director of photography Vilmos Zsigmond, editor Verna Fields, and composer John Williams for the first time, Spielberg enables the film with a visual panache that could be the envy of any filmmaker. He used new, compact Panaflex cameras that permitted complicated setups to be done from moving cars, and that alone gives this a kick.

Instead of making a “hot pursuit” movie, the tone of the film is dignified throughout, but unfortunately, it’s woefully miscast. Ben Johnson is perfect for this, but Goldie Hawn got on my nerves from the get-go. Her Blondie routine is all wrong for the role of a Texas fugitive. Her and Atherton’s characters are written as hayseeds and elicit nothing in the way of sympathy. I was rooting for the snipers.

The geography is the most ridiculous in Texas film history, with Spielberg not only ignoring the real life chase, but relocating “Sugar Land” from the suburbs of Houston to somewhere out on the Rio Grande. That’s a minor gripe. The movie looks great, but I really didn’t care about what I was watching. Shooting locations included San Antonio, Pleasanton, Floresville and Del Rio.

goatdog’s movies gives The Sugarland Express 3.5 goats. “Critics who dismiss Spielberg as the manipulative and goody-goody director of sentimental Hollywood fluff would be hard-pressed to see that aspect of him in this film.”

Needcoffee.com has no truck for The Sugarland Express at all. “Spielberg completists who have never caught it might want to rent it, but the rest of us can avoid it with a clear conscience.”

“Spielberg would not make another film as mature as The Sugarland Express for another 20 years,” says The DVD Journal.

Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall) wakes up on the floor of a motel somewhere between Austin and Dallas. His drinking buddy has left him broke, but Mac asks the single mother who owns the motel/gas station – Rosa Lee (Tess Harper) – if he can work off his bill. She agrees, as long as he doesn’t do any drinking. Mac sobers up, stays on and eventually, the couple marries.

One day, a reporter shows up looking for Mac Sledge the singer. Mac was once married to Dixie Scott, who rose to fame and fortune singing a song Mac wrote for her. Mac turns down the interview, but starts playing guitar again. A struggling band stop by to pay their respects, and ask Mac if he’s ever going to perform again. “I’m not gonna start singin’ again, son. I’ve lost it.”

Mac goes to see Dixie (Betty Buckley) perform, hoping she’ll record a song he wrote for her. Her manager Harry (Wilford Brimley) agrees to give it to her, but as soon as she sees Mac, Dixie warns him to stay away from their daughter. “All she remembers about you is a mean drunk tryin’ to beat up her mama.” Harry later tells Mac that Dixie wouldn’t do his song even if it were good, which in his opinion, it isn’t.

Rosa Lee likes it, as do the boys in the band, who find out about the song and ask Mac if he’ll not only let them perform it, but record it with them so they can get airplay. He eventually agrees. Mac’s 18-year-old daughter (Ellen Barkin) shows up and is eager to get to know her father, but just when things seem to be going pretty well for a change, life takes another turn on Mac.

Screenwriter and playwright Horton Foote was living in New Hampshire, working on his The Orphan’s Home series of plays, and needed money. His agent convinced him to do something he never did, pitch an idea to the film studios, any idea. Foote had a nephew in a country western band, and his rejections as a musician struck a chord with Foote’s experiences being rejected as an actor.

Foote’s pitch made it to production chief Gareth Wigan at Fox, who liked it, but suggested there be an older character in there somewhere. Wigan soon left Fox with Alan Ladd Jr. to form their own company, but Foote wrote the screenplay on spec. Once finished, he thought it would make a wonderful part for Robert Duvall, who had made his film debut in Foote’s adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird almost twenty years earlier.

Duvall agreed to play Mac Sledge, but director after director passed on the script. Foote was a fan of the Australian film Breaker Morant directed by Bruce Beresford, and though he didn’t think he’d do it, Foote sent the script to him. Beresford only got halfway through and agreed to direct, on the condition he got along with the writer. Foote was on the set every day of filming in the towns of Palmer and Waxahachie.

Tender Mercies features one of the five greatest performances Duvall has ever devoted to film, but that said, there’s not an overplayed emotion, speech or hokey reconciliation in the whole deal. It’s as underplayed as the language and people of Texas that Foote knows so well. As a film about music, creativity and redemption, it ranks with the best ever made.

The film was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture. After only being nominated for The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and The Great Santini, Duvall won the Oscar for Best Actor, while Horton Foote won for Best Original Screenplay. Some might consider this melancholy, but I found Tender Mercies uplifting. The story unfolds as purely as do the best written country western songs.

goatdog’s movies gives Tender Mercies only 2 goats, saying “everything is so toned-down that it’s toneless.”

Nick’s Flicks Picks is even less sympathetic, saying “This is one script that isn’t doing anything or going anywhere.”

“One of the things about this movie I love is how simple it is. No special effects, no flashy sets or costumes, just a rock solid movie with a great cast and story,” says DVD Authority.