ONE FROM THE HEART (1982) is breathtaking in its experimentation with how a movie can be made and pushes the boundaries of how much of this a moviegoer is willing to endure. After spending 238 days in Southeast Asia making Apocalypse Now (1979) and risking his own financial security to do so, co-writer/ director Francis Coppola had more reason than anyone to test techniques capable of streamlining the filmmaking process, bringing them closer to the intimacy of live theater. Produced in an age where, like the revisionist western, the revisionist musical was dark and had largely alienated both lovers and haters of the genre, this is one for the director first, his collaborators second, and the viewer further on down the line.

Armyan Bernstein’s spec script One From the Heart was simple: a Chicago couple break up, flirt with new partners and decide they can’t live without each other, all over the course of a weekend. Bernstein had written Thank God It’s Friday (1978), a comedy that was essentially Car Wash (1976) at a discotheque and featured disco queen Donna Summer at the height of her popularity. To get a taste of the sensibility and scale of his script for One From the Heart, it’s worth noting that Bernstein would later write the romantic comedy Cross My Heart (1987), which simply chronicled the third date between a couple, played by Martin Short and Annette O’Toole. Producer Edward S. Feldman had a first-look development deal at MGM, and he sold the studio on developing One From the Heart. According to his memoir Tell Me You Love the Picture, Feldman had Jill Clayburgh and Michael Douglas in mind to play the tempestuous couple from Bernstein’s script (for a taste of how that would’ve worked, Clayburgh and Douglas teamed for the romantic comedy It’s My Turn instead).

To direct, Feldman proposed Mark Rydell, whose most recent picture Harry and Walter Go To New York (1976) had been lavish, star-studded, and critically and commercially dismissed. The studio proposed Francis Coppola. The filmmaker was in San Francisco, and – over the nearly two years he’d spend in post-production – Los Angeles cutting Apocalypse Now. Coppola didn’t have his next feature film lined up, and despite having never made a romantic comedy, the co-writer/ director of The Godfather (1972), The Conversation (1974) and The Godfather, Part II (1974) was at the top of the list in terms of prestige. In an interview with Jonathan Cott published in Rolling Stone magazine on March 18, 1982, Coppola held court on how his involvement with One From the Heart began. “So I was walking around in Tokyo, reading Goethe, reading Mishima, going every day that I could get in to the Kabuki, and also coming out of a very difficult – if you’ve read my wife’s book – personal romantic mess. I felt I was kind of alone in Japan, trying to get hold of myself. And then I happened to come upon Armyan Bernstein’s script, which had been sent to me, and I carried it around, and I read it. It was set in Chicago, and I thought, what would happen if you just took the story – a guy, a girl, another guy, another girl (as simple as it could be, dumbbell but sweet) – and set it in Las Vegas? And I’m walking down the Ginza – the Ginza’s in the heart of Tokyo, and it looks just like Las Vegas – thinking that Las Vegas was the last frontier of America. When they ran out of land, they built Las Vegas, and it was built on those notions of life and chance – which, to me, are sort of like love.”

MGM spent sixteen months negotiating with Coppola, beginning in the weeks before Apocalypse Now debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1979. By August 1980, a year after his epic had opened as a blockbuster in the U.S., MGM reached terms with Coppola’s company Zoetrope Studios for him to rewrite and direct One From the Heart. The experience of surviving Apocalypse Now suggested to the director that there had to be an easier way of making movies. The tried and true method had been perfected in Hollywood in the early 20th century: factory assembly on soundstages, where light, sound and weather could be controlled, and a repertory company of actors under contract could be plugged into the next production. Coppola also drew inspiration from his contribution to Jerry Brown’s bid against President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 Democratic primary. Rather than campaign ads, Coppola directed a live, half-hour television event from Madison that aired before voters went to the polls in Wisconsin. Coppola’s production stumbled over its technical limitations and didn’t help Brown to victory, but the director was all in on what he saw as a communications revolution on the horizon.

In late 1979, Coppola had completed the purchase of Hollywood General Studios, a 7-acre facility on Santa Monica Blvd./ Las Palmas Ave. The studio was where the first two seasons of I Love Lucy had been taped, from 1951-1953, and later, all of producer Paul Hennings’ classic sitcoms: The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction, Green Acres. When Coppola arrived at the studio for a tour, all nine soundstages sat empty, and by the time he’d walked the property, he’d made up his mind to buy it, moving his operation from the Bay Area to L.A. The Los Angeles Times reported the sales price for what Coppola renamed Zoetrope Studios to be $6.7 million. Whatever the industry gossip over the next couple of years, no one would accuse Coppola of lacking imagination. He’d realize a few of his ideas. A father of three, Coppola opened the studio to children, who under minimum supervision could wander anywhere or talk to anyone, including the stars. On the opposite end of the spectrum, he added “directors emeritus” like Michael Powell and Jean-Luc Godard to the payroll as mentors. Coppola wanted to hire understudies for each of the six primary roles in One From the Heart and shoot the entire movie on video with them to see how it might cut together. When the Screen Actors’ Guild mandated Coppola’s video actors be paid the same rates as his screen actors, the director scrapped his idea but kept the understudies on as stand-ins. He made an exception for Rebecca de Mornay, Nastassia Kinski’s understudy. Coppola put de Mornay in a restaurant scene as a diner, and giving her a line, secured her union membership in SAG.

Coppola issued a vast array of proclamations. He envisioned nothing less than the first digital movie studio, what he referred to as “electronic cinema,” with digital cameras, digital editing, digital projectors, and a network of Xerox Star computers connecting his soundstages. At a press conference convened at Zoetrope and covered by Lee Grant for an article in the Los Angeles Times on February 6, 1981, Coppola explained, “You can make computers do whatever you want them to do. We are on the eve of a totally wonderful world of moviemaking — art and entertainment becoming so easy and inexpensive it can’t help but influence the world. I believe the only way a modern motion picture company can avoid becoming makers of Styrofoam, packages off the line, is to stay at the vanguard of industry … we should master it.” He envisioned his electronic cinema producing twelve modestly budgeted Zoetrope pictures per year.

Coppola heralded a four-day work week, Fridays reserved for Zoetrope employees and their families to utilize the studio for whatever projects they wanted. He’d open a Zoetrope restaurant where employees and their families would dine for free. His prototype film production for these grand designs would be One From the Heart. In August 1980, actors Frederic Forrest, Teri Garr and Raul Julia were announced for what the press reported to be an “adult fable.” Coppola had zero interest in making a formula romantic comedy, picturing what he described to Rolling Stone as “a kind of Kabuki play set in Las Vegas.” He altered enough of the script for the Writer’s Guild of America to award screenplay credit to Armyan Bernstein and Francis Coppola, story credit to Bernstein. Rather than submitting his changes to MGM for approval or asking them to sign off on anything, Coppola leapt into pre-production, commencing rehearsals atop the Kit Kat Club, a burlesque-themed music venue across the street from Zoetrope. To neutralize MGM’s creative input into his film, Coppola negotiated the purchase of Armyan Bernstein’s script, ultimately giving up U.S. and Canadian distribution rights and a 20% equity stake to MGM. To produce, Coppola drafted Gray Frederickson, a former Paramount production executive he’d first worked with on The Godfather, and Fred Roos, promoted from co-producer of Coppola’s last three masterworks.

The budget for One From the Heart was penciled in at $15 million. That was on par with what Warner Bros. Pictures would spend to produce the Burt Reynolds-Goldie Hawn romantic comedy Best Friends (1982) and under the $21 million Columbia Pictures would report the Dustin Hoffman comedy-romance Tootsie (1982) cost to produce. Without MGM footing the bill, Coppola secured $7 million in loans from Chase Manhattan Bank and $8 million from foreign investors, as he had to bankroll Apocalypse Now. Self-finance would grant Coppola ownership of the films he made. According to reporting by Dale Pollock for the Los Angeles Times in an article published February 6, 1981, Coppola’s financial troubles started in September of the previous year. A Zoetrope production titled Hammett – starring Frederic Forrest as pulp fiction writer Dashiell Hammett, in a sort of biographical detective story – was deemed by Coppola to be unreleasable. German director Wim Wenders, in his English-language debut, was working from a screenplay that Ross Thomas and Dennis O’Flaherty and Thomas Pope had all taken turns at adapting from a book by Joe Gores. Wenders had roughly 70% of the film in the can before Coppola halted production, putting the sets in storage, to resume filming in May 1981 when Forrest was available and someone had (hopefully) figured out how to salvage Hammett on the page. Coppola’s foreign investors were on the hook for $3 million of the troubled picture’s $9 million production budget.

Meanwhile, the price for One From the Heart was climbing. Dean Tavoularis, production designer of Coppola’s four major films, was building sets on virtually every stage at Zoetrope, where the idea of a “sweet” little picture to follow Apocalypse Now was undergoing massive renovations. $4.5 million would be spent on sets dripping in neon, and $500,000 on a miniature model of Las Vegas for bird’s eye shots of the metropolis. Though Frederic Forrest had been Academy Award nominated for Best Actor in The Rose (1979), the picture that director Mark Rydell landed after being rejected for One From the Heart, as the budget rose to $23.1 million, in December 1980, Coppola’s foreign investors bailed on what looked like another Zoetrope production with Forrest and an escalating budget. In the search for more money, Coppola was turned away by MGM, which not only refused to put up a cent for a movie they wouldn’t own, but also rescinded their offer to distribute the picture. United Artists, which had distributed Apocalypse Now, had their own runaway production, Heaven’s Gate (1980), its financial woes playing out on the nightly news. Coppola had sold off distribution rights to One From the Heart, giving new financial partners precious little return on their investment. The option of declaring Chapter 11 bankruptcy was floated to Coppola as a means for Zoetrope to cover its payroll and complete One From the Heart.

Instead, Coppola forged ahead as if he had the money. Nastassia Kinski, Harry Dean Stanton and Lainie Kazan were added to the cast and filming commenced on February 2, 1981. The next day, with money to get him through one week of filming, Coppola held his press conference. Rather than contemplating failure, he sounded as confident of victory as ever. “We’re on the eve of something that’s going to make the Industrial Revolution look like a small out-of-town tryout. I can see a communications revolution that’s about movies and art and music and digital electronics and satellites but above all, human talent – and it’s going to make the masters of cinema, from whom we’ve inherited this business, believe things that they would have never thought possible.” This rallying cry got the attention of Jack Singer, a Calgary real estate investor, who, appropriately for someone on the flamboyant side, wanted to be in the picture business. Singer put up $3 million in collateralized loans to Coppola. This would hand Singer the keys to Zoetrope Studios if the filmmaker defaulted on his payments. Until then, Singer’s loans made it possible for Zoetrope to continue operation.

In 1997, Harry Dean Stanton, having booked over 200 roles in film and television, was interviewed by Alex Simon for Venice Magazine. The character actor was asked about The Godfather, Part II, perhaps the best picture he’d appeared in. Stanton went his own way with an answer. He responded, “I love Francis. He’s a wonderful director. Respects actors. He did something on One From the Heart that was, especially for a ‘big time’ director, really wonderful. There was a scene with Teri Garr and Fred Forrest and he came up to me and said ‘Harry Dean, you direct this scene.’ No director has done that before, or since with me. And I did, I helped him direct it. Of course he had the final word on it, but for a director to do something like that is pretty special.” Speaking to Rolling Stone in 1982, Coppola elaborated on his approach to directing. “The key to it, for me, is that I enjoy doing theater more than making films. The process of theater — the way you congregate everyone together and build the scenery and go through it and have a performance — is what I really enjoy. During the early years of my career, I was always a little frustrated by the fact that it really wasn’t so much fun to make films: the process is very strung out and long, and you don’t have the same camaraderie, the same coming together. You don’t get that thrill. So part of me flirted with doing theater again.”

While Coppola was testing techniques he believed would streamline production of One From the Heart – recording scenes on Betamax videocassette in tandem with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro lighting the picture for 35mm film stock, foreshadowing the “video village” that would soon enable filmmakers to watch scenes as they were being shot rather than sending film off to a lab to be developed first – Coppola’s ambition to get his Independence Day themed movie in theaters for July 4, 1981 proved impractical. Though they’d stayed away from financing One From the Heart along with all the major studios, Paramount Pictures agreed to distribute the film. Under the regime of chairman Barry Diller, the studio had been happy to help Coppola, for the price of a well-regarded science fiction script by Scott Bartlett titled Interface which Zoetrope agreed to part with for $500,000. Paramount loaned Coppola another $500,000, the million dollar sum allowing Zoetrope to cover payroll for two weeks. With One From the Heart, Paramount must’ve anticipated getting a prestige film, another Faberge egg in its basket with Ragtime (1981) and Reds (1981) they could position for awards consideration, opening the Coppola picture first, on October 9, 1981.

In the week of August 17, Paramount convened a private screening for exhibitors, adhering to anti-blind bidding laws in five states which mandated booking agents be allowed at least an early look at the pictures they were bidding on. A work print of One From the Heart was screened without color timing or sound effects. Due mostly to the hype Coppola had whipped up for his film, reaction to the screening leaked to the press, and none of it was good. Speaking to Judy Stone for an article the San Francisco Chronicle ran August 22, 1981, one anonymous exhibitor said, “It was probably one of the worst 10 movies I’ve ever seen. The scenery was real pretty, but the parts that did not work at all were the dialogue, the acting and the directing. All the creative energy went into the visuals. I was bored.” Another source added, “It’s like The Emperor’s New Clothes all over again. People were twitching – they were so uncomfortable.” Zoetrope announced that their adult fable would not be ready for release on October 9 and when it was ready, they hoped exhibitors would RSVP for a fresh look.

Up until mid-January 1982, Zoetrope’s plan was to deliver One From the Heart to Paramount for a Valentine’s Day release. While not a musical per se – characters break into dance, not song – Coppola wanted music to be a major part of the audience’s experience. He’d discovered Tom Waits in a duet with Bette Midler on the track “I Never Talk To Strangers” from Waits’ 1977 LP Foreign Affairs. The artist fit the $15 million version of One From the Heart like a wrinkled paper bag fit a bottle of Wild Irish Rose, the music conceived as a Las Vegas-styled lounge act – piano, bass, drums – with a muted saxophone and Waits’ growly vocals. Waits spent most of 1981 occupying a two-room office off Santa Monica Blvd. writing. In an interview with Peter Guttridge for the July 1-7, 1983 issue of City Limits, he confided, “Francis was very open to suggestions. For example, there’s a used car lot piece conducted with a dipstick. The main lead owns a wrecking yard for abandoned cars. It’s a perfect set-up because he loves cars – he’s a little mad but that’s why he’s in the business – then he has to sell his Studebaker – breaks his heart. So I came up with this idea for a used car lot piece where the music is conducted with a dipstick. Coppola shot it. I gave him a few other ideas too.” Waits added, “But you know that man is incredible. There’s no distance for him between imagination and execution. It’s devilish. I have an idea, Francis says great, starts working out ways to do it. I’m saying, well it’s, em, only an idea just occurred, Francis, next day he’s set up the machinery and doing it.” Waits wrote twelve songs for One From the Heart without scoring them for a particular scene, describing what Coppola wanted as “a glass of music” he could dip into. With Bette Midler unavailable, Crystal Gayle was commissioned to lend her vocals to the soundtrack.

As the calendar turned to 1982, Coppola was haggling with Paramount over $1.6 million he was owed to complete One From the Heart. In an attempt to force the studio’s hand, the director made a costly bet. Without asking permission, Zoetrope booked Radio City Music Hall in New York City and ran advertisements for two public screenings of One From the Heart, on Friday, January 15. Despite freezing temperatures, the line to get in wrapped around the building. Coppola’s gambit might’ve worked if his movie did. Early word from the New York critics who’d gotten a look at the film was dismal. Writing for the New Yorker, Pauline Kael would state, “This movie isn’t from the heart, or from the head, either; it’s from the lab. It’s all tricked out with dissolves and scrim effects and superimpositions …” Andrew Sarris, renowned film critic for the Village Voice, would add, “With all this technological huffing and puffing, Coppola has thrown out the baby and photographed the bathwater.” Paramount announced to the press that the studio would no longer be distributing One From the Heart.

Coppola responded to the report that his studio had been fired by claiming Zoetrope had in fact quit its deal with Paramount. Regardless of who was fired or who quit, the result was that One From the Heart was without distribution. Coppola quickly arranged a public screening on January 20 in Los Angeles, at the Village Theater in Westwood, not far from where Coppola had earned his master’s of fine arts in film at UCLA. Filmgoers eager for a sneak peek at the film waited in line, and the reaction from West Coast critics, like Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times, was much kinder. Coppola had also invited executives from four studios – Columbia, Embassy Pictures, Universal Pictures, Warner Bros – with Columbia agreeing to kick in $3 million in completion funds and distribute the film. Considering the high wire act the upstart studio had been performing for twelve months, Zoetrope president Robert Spiotta remained guardedly optimistic. “We will require assurances on how the film will be handled. The movie is too unusual to open in 714 theaters on the same day. That original plan would have changed even if we had stayed with Paramount. We would hope to open the film on St. Valentine’s Day weekend in 50 key markets in theaters that have the 1.33:1 ratio screen for which the movie was intended and to go broad to 700 theaters at Easter.” Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about what could become of Zoetrope if One From the Heart failed at the box office, Coppola was blunt. He stated, “Our studio couldn’t survive it.”

One From the Heart opened February 12, 1982 in 41 theaters in the U.S. Writing off the New York critics, whom Coppola had referred to as “the boring old guard” and compared to the Golden Globes, his film received at best a lukewarm critical reception. Gene Siskel, in the Chicago Tribune, wrote: “This is a pretty film, worth seeing, but it barely touches the heart.” Siskel awarded it 3 stars out of 4. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert was less favorable. “Arriving after two years of sound and fury, after all the news items on the financial pages and alarms and excursions in the movie trade press, Francis Ford Coppola’s One From the Heart is an interesting production but not a good movie.” Ebert stuck the film with 2 stars out of 4. In the pages of LA Weekly, Michael Ventura offered, “Be that as it may, the proof of Coppola’s technical ideas is on the screen, they work, and this delightful toy of a movie has its place in film history because of that.” (It’s worth noting that Siskel and Ventura, who’d interviewed Coppola earlier in the year, were gentler in their appraisal of his film than critics who hadn’t conducted one-on-ones with the maverick director).

Coppola’s new movie entered the market a day after the 1982 Academy Award nominations were announced, and On Golden Pond (1981), up for ten Oscars, expanded its release. The sentimental Henry Fonda-Katharine Hepburn drama crushed everything in theaters, though many other holdovers from the previous year continued to draw ticket buyers: Chariots of Fire, Reds, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Absence of Malice, Taps, Arthur. One From the Heart never came close to cracking the top ten grossing films of the week. Headed into Easter weekend, MGM was adding theaters to Victor/ Victoria (1982), a musical comedy generating positive word of mouth among the sophisticated urban audiences Coppola had needed to win over. The fact that his film had not prompted Columbia to pack up its promotion and advertising. A source at Zoetrope offered a postmortem to Lee Grant of the Los Angeles Times, “The hype was so big that when people walked in they expected a Godfather or Apocalypse Now, something big and gigantic. What they found was a simple little love story that went nowhere. The script just didn’t have enough.” Unable to pay his creditors, Coppola would declare bankruptcy, closing Zoetrope Studios and turning the keys over to Jack Singer, who renamed the facility Hollywood Center Studios and returned it to what it had been before Coppola arrived: soundstages for rent. The director was in Tulsa, Oklahoma shooting his next picture, an adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s young adult novel The Outsiders (1983) while his studio was being dismantled. Coppola would direct eight feature films over the next ten years, not including his segment of New York Stories (1989) which he co-wrote with his daughter Sofia. Coppola spent the rest of his forties working to repay debts he’d run up over two years of his early forties, and once he did, for all practical purposes, Francis Coppola segued into semi-retirement as a writer/ director/ producer of movies.

One From the Heart is enthralling to the degree Coppola imagined the film industry would evolve and – with real estate and generous bank credit from The Godfather films – how he could help seed that evolution. Considering how music video and the videocassette market were on the eve of transforming the entertainment industry, he was on the right track, and his musical fantasy certainly looks and feels like something new. Coppola continued to marry production techniques from film and theater, and as in most of his work, the performances here are stellar. Frederic Forrest, playing the type of working class lug Fred Ward would make his own in the eighties, is both sensitive and volatile. Teri Garr is cast against type for once as a dreamer, rather than the shrew standing in the way of the man’s dream. Her character is allowed a sex life and even has some fun for a change, showing what a gifted comedian Garr was. Natassja Kinski (billed as Nastassia Kinski) mesmerizes as a French acrobat, as does Raul Julia as Garr’s weekend lover, both actors using dance and exotic allure to attract their new partners. Harry Dean Stanton (sporting a brown perm) is as natural as ever playing a ladies man.

Coppola’s vision requires a lot of unwrapping to get down to a gift that barely justifies such a ceremony. We’re given no reason to care about these characters. Their relationship woes are recognizable, but too many artificial barriers are erected between them and us for those concerns to matter. The emotional impact the movie is missing might have been generated if it were a musical, with Tom Waits and Better Midler as the lovers, expressing their angst through song. Waits’ compositions are wonderful accompaniment, but there’s not enough of his music if you’re a fan and far too much if you’re not. Coppola’s script is a house of cards that keeps piling more and more stuff on top of the flimsiest pretext. It takes more than one viewing – ideally in a theater, where sight and sound overwhelm the viewer and modern distractions can’t compete for our attention – for the film’s stagecraft to really work its charm. The models and most of the stages deliberately look like models and stages, but the Fremont Avenue sequences featuring dance on the streets or movement on sidewalks look as slick as any that could’ve been shot in Las Vegas, whose downtown is marked by neon artifice and lack of a horizon. Coppola, who in his hiatus from directing, recut Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Part III (1990) and The Cotton Club (1984), also revisited One From the Heart, first in 2003 for the film’s DVD release, trimming the 103-minute theatrical version to 99 minutes. Restoring the film to 4K resolution for a 2024 theatrical re-release, Coppola continued to whittle Forrest & Garr’s and Stanton’s dialogue to bring the running time down to 93 minutes, a good length for what is essentially an intricate model electric train set with Tom Waits music.

Video rental category: Musical Drama

Special interest: Candy Cinema

HEARTS OF DARKNESS: A FILMMAKER’S APOCALYPSE (1991) is something like a documentary inside a Matryoshka doll. This makes it a sublime companion piece to one of the best directed movies of all time, if not best movies: Apocalypse Now (1979). The documentary involves archivists in 1990 using film and sound they scrounged from 1976-77 documenting the production of a movie about the corrupting abuse of power and madness, which Joseph Conrad depicted at the turn of the 20th century in his novella Heart of Darkness. A constant across generations is that everyone who adapts this material seems to come out of it changed.

George Zaloom and Les Mayfield were producers of electronic press kits and Fax Bahr was a director Zaloom had employed to direct a couple of them, Bahr interviewing cast and crew of The Great Outdoors (1988) and Tap (1989) on set. They knew that Eleanor Coppola had, at the request of her husband, director Francis Coppola, shot hours of behind-the-scenes footage on 16mm while his Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now, which was loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, originally published as a three-part serial in Blackwood’s Magazine from February to April 1899. Seventy-seven years later, the average shooting schedule for a major studio release was somewhere between 60–80 days. Production of Apocalypse Now elapsed over 238 days in the Philippines. Eleanor, who’d met Francis fifteen years earlier as an assistant art director on his film Dementia 13 (1962), had since worked as a designer creating fabric and collage murals for architecture firms. When her husband embarked for the Philippines, she and their three children–Gian-Carlo (12), Roman (10) and Sofia (5)–accompanied him. United Artists had inquired about sending a professional crew to record enough behind-the-scenes footage to generate a five-minute promo for television, but Coppola gave the job of documenting the production to Eleanor. She not only ended up with much more access, but returned to the States with at least 60 hours of footage.

Assembling a “making-of” short for the European sales market was one option. Directing a documentary about her experience in the Philippines was another. Neither Eleanor or editors who’d examined the footage, which the Coppolas owned, really knew what to do with it, and the film remained in storage in Napa Valley. Eleanor instead published a production diary, titled Notes, in 1979, composed of letters she’d written to friends while living in the Philippines. Having read her book, Zaloom, Mayfield and Bahr all knew about the footage Eleanor had shot. In an unrelated meeting with producer Doug Clayborne (formerly Francis Coppola’s assistant), Zaloom inquired about the film reels. Clayborne put Zaloom and Bahr in touch with Eleanor Coppola and Apocalypse Now co-producer Fred Roos, who screened roughly three hours of footage for the archivists. Zaloom and Bahr quickly realized they had terrific material for a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Apocalypse Now and with the cooperation of the Coppolas, Les Mayfield was able to sell Steve Hewitt, VP of programming at Showtime, on financing what they were calling Apocalypse Now Revisited.

At that time, Zaloom and Mayfield’s ambition was to air their Apocalypse Now documentary on cable television in time for the film’s ten-year anniversary, in 1989. Bahr began lining up cast and crew members for retrospective interviews. Thirty would consent, and eighteen interviews would make it into the documentary—a cross-section of the film’s creative tempest, including Francis Coppola, Eleanor Coppola, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, John Milius and George Lucas, the latter being Coppola’s protégé who’d been slated direct Milius’ screenplay guerilla style in Vietnam in 1969. There were holdouts. Bahr took a job doing the press kit for The Freshman (1990) specifically to get access to Marlon Brando. Making his pitch as Bahr followed the 20th century acting institution to his trailer one day, Brando told him, “Kid, I do my shit and go home.” Harvey Keitel, who’d been cast as Willard and spent three weeks working in the Philippines before Coppola replaced him with Sheen, wanted to see the documentary and assess how he felt about it first. Screened a cut on videocassette months later, Keitel declined to sign a release that would’ve at least permitted outtakes and behind-the-scenes footage of him to be used. The filmmakers had to recut the movie around the actor.

Realizing they needed help in the cutting room, Zaloom hired George Hickenlooper, director of two documentaries about moviemaking that had aspired to more than a press kit. Art, Acting and the Suicide Chair (1988) was about Dennis Hopper attaching dynamite to himself in 1980 and with Rice University students as witnesses in Houston, lighting the fuse for what he considered an art exhibit. Hickenlooper followed with Picture This: The Times of Peter Bogdanovich in Archer City, Texas (1990) about the cast and crew of The Last Picture Show (1971) reuniting twenty years later for a sequel, Texasville (1990). Hickenlooper didn’t care to participate in the “making-of” of a movie that had been released ten years ago, but having read Notes, he proposed using Eleanor Coppola’s correspondence as a narrative thread, in effect, making her the documentary subject. Despite initial hesitation from Eleanor Coppola and resistance from Showtime, Hickenlooper proposed a documentary feature at twice the budget the cable network had allotted.

According to Hickenlooper, he was the one who–rummaging through Zoetrope’s boxes–discovered audio tapes that Eleanor had made of her husband while he was on the telephone in the Philippines, often conducting damage control or trying to prevent his picture from being shut down. While Eleanor hadn’t tried to hide the fact that she was recording him, she hadn’t asked her husband for permission either. In the interest of supporting the filmmakers–as long as truth is what they were after–Francis Coppola consented to the tapes being used, on the condition that Hickenlooper disclose in a title card that the director’s conversations had been taped without his knowledge. Hickenlooper and editors Michael Green and Jay Miracle spent a year at Universal Studios in Los Angeles cutting the film. Fax Bahr had taken a job as a writer on the Fox sketch comedy series In Living Color in 1990. Addressing a baffling credit on the poster which would state, “Written and Directed by Fax Bahr with George Hickenlooper,” Hickenlooper would clarify in an email to entertainment reporter Jeffrey Wells that his co-director spent three weeks with them in the editing room over the course of a year.

Running 96 minutes, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse debuted October 1991 on Showtime. A limited theatrical release in November–buoyed by rave reviews–grew to as many as 28 theaters in the U.S. Critics didn’t simply recommend the documentary , many heralded it. Compiling his list of the year’s ten best films for the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel ranked it #1. “Using outtakes and new interviews with the participants, we have one of the best records of the creation of a major film. And the oddest thing occurs: There is so much drama that we actually fear that the movie might not get finished even though, obviously, it was released in 1979.” Hearts of Darkness didn’t factor into Roger Ebert’s annual ten best list, but writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, he gave the film 3 ½ stars out of 4. “It strips Coppola bare of all defenses and yet reveals him as a great and brave filmmaker. It also reveals the ordeal he put his actors and crew through, on location in the Philippines — and what he endured at their hands.” Writing for the New York Times, Janet Maslin added, “Even allowing for the aggrandizing nature of a film largely shot by his wife, Mr. Coppola emerges for this portrait in legitimately heroic terms.”

Hearts of Darkness is a breathtaking film-school-in-a-box. Not many movies have been made in the conditions Apocalypse Now was made, fewer with a director as skilled as Francis Coppola, and fewer still recording their making as thoroughly as this. The documentary reveals the finesse that comes from being a director who can also write, with Coppola making adjustments at the typewriter based on what his actors and locations were giving him. In spite of his finesse, we also watch how fallible even Coppola is, at the mercy of bureaucracy, weather, and the casting decisions he’d whiffed on. The largest gap in the documentary is Harvey Keitel’s refusal to participate. Though it isn’t addressed, Coppola has stated that he made the decision to replace Keitel when he realized that, as a character actor, Keitel was attracting attention to his performance, but the role of Willard was meant to be an observer through which the viewer needed to experience the story.

What makes Coppola one of the great film directors of the 20th century is his facility with actors, Marlon Brando, Martin Sheen, and Dennis Hopper, who have nothing in common in terms of their preparation, energy, or health. Coppola’s understanding of drama and the needs of actors is beautifully reflected by Sheen as he remembers expressing befuddlement over who his character was, and Coppola reassuring him, “He’s you. Whoever you are. Whatever we’re filming at the time, you are that character.” What’s fascinating about Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse is that its title is ambiguous about which filmmaker it’s referring to. We assume it’s Francis Coppola, but Eleanor Coppola shot the 16mm footage we’re watching, recorded the phone calls we hear her husband making, and her book Notes serves as the spine of the documentary. That’s her voice we hear narrating the picture. Archivists Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper place Eleanor—not her husband—at the center of their film in a way it’s very unlikely she would have if directing or editing it herself. In that regard, she gets the respect she deserves as a documentarian. As opposed to a “making-of” feature that goes behind the scenes of a movie, Hearts of Darkness goes behind the scenes of a wife. It tells the story of a woman observing her husband and the future of their family walk a tightrope, and while his mood and emotional health fluctuate, hers appear to remain steady. How she does this is one of the enticing mysteries of the film. The documentary leans into anti-climax and might have used more interviews exploring how each participant changed, Coppola directing several more pictures in an experimental fashion but with instincts dulled by his experiences in the Philippines. The outtakes that Hickenlooper pulls out of the bag are harrowing—Sheen intoxicated and splitting his thumb open in an improv in which he punches a mirror—while Eleanor’s narration pulls us back there as all of this is happening.

Video rental category: Documentary

Special interest: Performing Arts

CONAN THE BARBARIAN (1982) was the opening act in a summer movie festival that in 1982 included a dozen future classics: Mad Max 2 (released as The Road Warrior on May 21 in the U.S. and Canada), Rocky III, Poltergeist, Star Trek II, E.T., Blade Runner, The Thing, The Secret of N.I.M.H., Tron, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and An Officer and a Gentleman. Where Conan falls on that list might depend on the viewer’s awareness of the Marvel Comics line or the pulp fiction by Robert E. Howard it was adapted from, but as a fusion of sight and sound, it enthralls for much of its running time, building a world from the ground up and announcing the arrival of a major film star, perhaps the biggest in terms of musculature ever.

Robert E. Howard was born in Peaster, Texas, in 1906. An only child, his father was a traveling physician. Howard’s mother, Hester Jane Ervin Howard, the emotional center of his life, struggled with tuberculosis. Howard grew up in the oil boomtowns of the Texas Panhandle, eventually settling in Cross Plains, roughly 160 miles northwest of Austin. His mother’s love of poetry, Howard’s interest in boxing, and the hardscrabble environment of West Texas shaped his fiction, which combined fantasy, ancient settings, and heroes of formidable strength. To meet the demands of the pulp market, Howard wrote quickly. He became a defining contributor to Weird Tales during the Great Depression and also published in Argosy, Action Stories, Oriental Stories, and Sports Story Magazine. This led to a fruitful correspondence with author H.P. Lovecraft, with whom Howard often debated culture and history. Many credit Howard with founding the “sword and sorcery” genre. His characters included Solomon Kane, an English Puritan who battled witches and vampires; Red Sonya of Rogatino, a Polish-Ukrainian fighter who faced the Ottoman Turks during the Siege of Vienna in 1529; and Conan the Cimmerian, a warrior of the prehistoric Hyborian Age—a mythic era Howard placed after the fall of Atlantis and before recorded history.

Despite his publishing success, Howard struggled with his share of inner turmoil, including an intense attachment to his ailing mother. In 1936, she slipped into her final coma, and hours before her death, Howard shot himself in the head with a revolver. He died at the age of 30. Howard’s work might have faded into obscurity if not for Lancer Books, which in 1966 published Conan the Adventurer, a collection of tales centering on the warrior, with larger-than-life cover art by Frank Frazetta that would define Conan’s look. The success of Lancer’s paperbacks led Stan Lee, seeking a popular literary character to launch a new comic line, to select Conan. With Marvel Comics associate editor Roy Thomas overseeing the writing of mostly new stories, Conan the Barbarian was one of the best selling books the publisher of The Fantastic Four, The Amazing Spider-Man and The Incredible Hulk ever printed, running for 275 issues from 1970 to 1993, captivating a new generation of fans.

Edward R. Pressman was in his early thirties and had already produced two pictures for writer/ director Brian DePalma–Sisters (1973) and Phantom of the Paradise (1974)--and in an executive producer capacity, raised financing for Badlands (1973), the acclaimed directorial debut of screenwriter Terrence Malick, which Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek starred. In 1976, Pressman was invited to a screening of a new documentary titled Pumping Iron. The film chronicled the 1975 Mr. Olympia bodybuilding competition, in which Brooklyn’s Lou Ferrigno competed for the title against Arnold Schwarzenegger, the so-called “Austrian Oak.” The documentary helped launch personal fitness in the U.S. and introduced Schwarzenegger to a global audience. In spite of his name, accent and background, the bodybuilder had the amusing notion of launching an acting career. Arnold had been featured prominently as a weightlifter in Stay Hungry (1976), a romantic comedy starring Jeff Bridges and Sally Field. As an early demonstration of Schwarzenegger’s finesse with the international press, the Golden Globes awarded him New Star of the Year for his performance.

Pressman had invited a friend to the screening of Pumping Iron named Edward Summer, owner of Supersnipe Comic Art Emporium in Manhattan. Pressman pointed out that there had to be an appropriate film vehicle for a performer with Schwarzenegger’s gifts. In a making-of documentary produced for the 2000 DVD release of Conan the Barbarian, Pressman recalled, “And Ed immediately turned and said, ‘Well, Conan, of course!’ So he took me to his comic book store and showed me the world of Frank Frazetta and the world of Conan, which at that point I was not familiar with. And that started me on a journey–first to get the rights, and at the same time meeting Arnold. Together, we spent close to five years trying to get the film set up.” In 1977, with little more than belief and a stack of comic books, Pressman met with Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles to pitch the actor his vision: not one sword and sorcery film, but a series, a new entry to be produced every two years. Schwarzenegger had never heard of Conan, but the kinetic Frazetta illustrations Pressman showed him hooked his curiosity, while the popularity of the Marvel Comics line may have landed the actor’s attention.

The deal Arnold’s reps negotiated in the fall of 1977 was by far the most financially lucrative Schwarzenegger had ever been offered: five films, $250,000 for the first, $1,000,000 for the second, $2,000,000 for the third and so on, plus 5% of the net profits. The roughly $10 million deal was contingent on all the movies being made, of course, and Schwarzenegger refusing offers to play other Conan-like characters, as he had in his first movie, the silly Hercules In New York (1970). Schwarzenegger booked supporting roles in The Villain (1979) opposite Ann-Margret, and the TV movie The Jayne Mansfield Story (1980) with Loni Anderson, in which Schwarzenegger played Mansfield’s husband, Hungarian bodybuilder Mickey Hargitay. Pressman’s negotiations with Robert E. Howard’s estate for an option on the film rights to Conan dragged on for two years. The producer would ultimately cut the Howard estate a check for $7,500, and surrender at least $100,000 in legal fees. By that time, Pressman had engaged Edward Summer and Roy Thomas to work under the table on a story treatment. Paramount Pictures–then a powerhouse executive regime led by Barry Diller as chairman, Michael Eisner as studio president and Jeffrey Katzenberg as president of production, with Don Simpson and Dawn Steel as junior executives–agreed to put up development costs for Conan.

Paramount’s offer was predicated on Pressman bringing in a top screenwriter to adapt a script. The producer had been impressed by the writing sample from a screenwriter named Oliver Stone titled Platoon that in 1978, nobody wanted to produce. In The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz published in 2016, Stone stated, “I’d read and loved all the Conan books, and I loved the comics, and I really had a vision of this thing as a … I guess it was before all the series or franchise stuff became popular, but I’d seen the first Star Wars, so I could see a series of twelve movies! James Bond came to mind. It could have lasted, because it’s a great story! If you follow him, he starts out a nobody, he becomes king in the end, but then he walks away from the kingdom and finds more adventures. In other words, he rises to the top but he walks away, like Siddhartha, and then he becomes something else, becomes Old Conan. So the idea was really a twelve-film series, I guess like what they did later with Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings.” [Referencing an appointment at Paramount with the “murderer’s row” of Diller, Eisner, Katzenberg, Simpson and Steel at the table, Stone, an Army infantry veteran twice wounded in Vietnam, admitted to Seitz, “That was the worst meeting I ever had in the movie business.”]

Stone actually started writing before Schwarzenegger’s deal was closed and shifted gears to tailor Conan for the actor. “I could see him also as a Tarzan figure, more Edgar Rice Burroughs than Robert E. Howard, and that was the way he was drawn by Frank Frazetta. I always thought Frazetta’s Conan was a little overdone, though. There was another fellow I went to who was English, Barry Windsor-Smith. Beautiful, classical renderings, he did the original Conan comics. We got him to do the hero’s drawings in The Hand (1981).” Pressman compared Stone’s 141-page screenplay–simply titled Conan, dated August 1, 1978, based on the stories of Robert E. Howard, with later additions by L. Sprague De Camp and Lin Carter–to Dante’s Inferno. Hell on earth. In the making-of documentary, Stone stated, “I had a lot of mutants, a lot of animals. I was into DNA cloning, all that stuff, a long time ago. It really made sense. I was never able to realize it on film, that vision. I saw armies of forty, fifty thousand mutants coming at each other.” Having already bet on Terrence Malick and Brian DePalma early in their directing careers and ready to put his chips on an unproven leading man in Arnold Schwarzenegger, Pressman was willing to gamble on Oliver Stone, who wanted to direct Conan.

One proposal would have paired Stone with a co-director in Joe Alves, the production designer of Jaws (1975) and art director of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), an expert in visual effects who was also interested in directing. Paramount–perhaps after their meeting with Stone–didn’t go for it. Pressman and Stone began the search for a director who could get Conan made. The producer recalled, “We spent a lot of time talking with different directors. We talked to Alan Parker. We spent a lot of time with Ridley Scott, and I remember being in London and Ridley or one of the directors we hoped would do it turned us down and we were sitting there totally dismayed not knowing what to do next.” Pressman knew that producer Dino De Laurentiis was in town at a hotel within walking distance of their own. Ready to wash their hands of Conan, Pressman and Stone sold the Italian mogul their film rights and screenplay, Paramount reimbursed for their development costs as well. This was possible because De Laurentiis reached an agreement with Ned Tanen, president of Universal Pictures, to finance and distribute Conan. Remarkably, considering the finished film, Tanen appraised Stone’s script as too violent and in need of being toned down, as well as made filmable.

De Laurentiis was working with writer/ director/ military historian John Milius on a project titled Half the Sky about mountain man Jedediah Smith and the American frontier. He believed Milius–a larger-than-life character who’d written the initial drafts of Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979)--was the man to rewrite and direct Conan. In the making-of documentary, Milius recalled, “I knew nothing of Conan the Barbarian, or Robert E. Howard or any of the books or the comic books or anything until Oliver Stone came and told me about it. The one thing I knew about, that I was aware of, was Frank Frazetta’s paintings, and of course, I love Viking things, and I’d always wanted to do a Viking movie. And I was a surfer. One of my first names was Viking Man because I had this great big sword. Oliver had already written a script and I read it and it was really inspirational, probably because it was so insane. And then I saw that I could do a movie that I really wanted to do.” Milius spent nine months reading Howard’s pulp fiction and working on his own draft, occasionally submitting material to Stone for approval, but working alone. He salvaged some elements of Stone’s feverish script: Conan surviving the massacre of his village as a boy (the heads of his father and mother impaled on pikes by the raiders), an adult Conan being seduced by a witch, a 25-foot serpent protecting a stone the thief sets out to steal, and Conan being crucified to a solitary tree.

Conan’s partner in crime and lover, Valeria, was also retained. Milius picked a necromancer from Howard’s stories named Thulsa Doom to become Conan’s primary antagonist. He pruned Stone’s mutants from his script, as well as a great deal of fantasy, preferring an action film rooted in an ancient world that felt lived in. Milius’ love of samurai movies, as well as certain philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche (“That which does not kill us makes us stronger”) filtered their way into his script, which he titled Conan the Barbarian. The WGA would award “written by” credit to John Milius and Oliver Stone, based on the character created by Robert E. Howard. Speaking of the script in 2016, Stone mused, “It ended up bastardized. He had big ideas, Dino: ‘I’m going to do the Bible!’ But Dino was lacking in vision. He fucked up Conan, and he fucked up Year of the Dragon! John had big ideas and a sort of warped vision. Dino had no vision.” The mogul’s daughter, Raffaella De Laurentiis, who’d worked as a production assistant for her father on Hurricane (1979) and was twenty-six years old at the time, was promoted to producer, sharing credit with Buzz Feitshans, who’d line produced the ambitious Big Wednesday (1978) for Milius the director and the massive 1941 (1979) for Milius the producer.

Cartoonist, conceptual artist and production designer Ron Cobb, who’d created practically everything industrial in Alien (1979) from spacecraft to astronaut helmets to company insignia, had been added to the payroll of Conan the Barbarian, sitting in on pre-production meetings and contributing tentative artwork for the weapons, wardrobe and buildings of the Hyborian Age. Cobb was available because he was actually waiting on director John Milius to return from Europe and start working with him on Half the Sky, but as Milius began to incorporate elements of his mountain man script into Conan, agreed with executive produce Dino De Laurentiis to tackle Robert E. Howard’s pulp hero next. Cobb came aboard as production designer. In the 2000 making-of documentary, he stated, “I loved the idea of inventing an architectural style you couldn’t quite identify. That was one of the things I wanted to do. You know, kind of design the snake cult so all the artifacts looked like they fit together, sort of like corporate logos and things like that.” (Cobb also appears as the Black Lotus Street Peddler who only ends up feeding Conan and Sabotai information).

To complement Arnold Schwarzenegger, Milius cast several athletes the filmmaker felt he could coach decent performances out of, as opposed to actors who might struggle with the physical acting requirements. Milius was awestruck by a dancer named Sandahl Bergman in Bob Fosse’s musical All That Jazz (1979), exclaiming that she was a real Valkyrie. He cast her as Valeria. After handicapping most of the actors being considered for Subotai against his friend, surfing legend Gerry Lopez, Milius simply cast Lopez as the archer (Lopez would ultimately be dubbed by Japanese actor Sab Shimono). To play Thulsa Doom’s henchmen, Rexor and Thorgrim, Ben Davidson, a 6’8” retired NFL defensive end, and Sven Ole Thorsen, 6’5”, a Danish bodybuilder Schwarzenegger had trained with, were cast. The voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, was cast as Thulsa Doom, and Mako as the Wizard. To mitigate Schwarzenegger’s thick accent, the decision was made for Mako to narrate Conan’s tale rather than the Austrian Oak himself. Sterling Hayden had agreed to take the small role of King Osric, who dispatches Conan, Valeria and Sabotai on their quest to rescue his daughter from Thulsa Doom, but the actor’s health led De Laurentiis to engage Max Van Sydow, who’d played Ming the Merciless for the producer in Flash Gordon (1980).

To complement Arnold Schwarzenegger, Milius cast several athletes the filmmaker felt he could coach decent performances out of, as opposed to actors who might struggle with the physical acting requirements. Milius was awestruck by a dancer named Sandahl Bergman in Bob Fosse’s musical All That Jazz (1979), exclaiming that she was a real Valkyrie. He cast her as Valeria. After handicapping most of the actors being considered for Subotai against his friend, surfing legend Gerry Lopez, Milius simply cast Lopez as the archer (Lopez would ultimately be dubbed by Japanese actor Sab Shimono). To play Thulsa Doom’s henchmen, Rexor and Thorgrim, Ben Davidson, a 6’8” retired NFL defensive end, and Sven Ole Thorsen, 6’5”, a Danish bodybuilder Schwarzenegger had trained with, were cast. The voice of Darth Vader, James Earl Jones, was cast as Thulsa Doom, and Mako as the Wizard. To mitigate Schwarzenegger’s thick accent, the decision was made for Mako to narrate Conan’s tale rather than the Austrian Oak himself. Sterling Hayden had agreed to take the small role of King Osric, who dispatches Conan, Valeria and Sabotai on their quest to rescue his daughter from Thulsa Doom, but the actor’s health led De Laurentiis to engage Max Van Sydow, who’d played Ming the Merciless for the producer in Flash Gordon (1980).

In Los Angeles, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sandahl Bergman underwent months of training. They often spent mornings working with stunt coordinator Terry Leonard, Harrison Ford’s second double in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) who’d been dragged under a moving chassis for the film’s truck chase. After horseback riding and martial arts training with Leonard, the actors hit the gym by noon, including sessions with Kiyoshi Yamazaki, who instructed them in swordplay (Yamazaki also appears as the Sword Master in the film). In contrast to Sam J. Jones in Flash Gordon or Klinton Spilsbury in The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981), who came to work so ill-prepared to carry a major motion picture that their voices were dubbed in post-production, Schwarzenegger trained with a vocal coach throughout production. Prior to filming the climactic Battle of the Mounds, Milius presented the actor with a half-page of dialogue he’d just written between Conan and Subotai. Confiding to Milius that he was struggling with his delivery, it was suggested he visit James Earl Jones in his trailer. Agreeing to help, the stage veteran asked Schwarzenegger to recite his lines. He then recommended two alternate copies be typed up for him and studied: one copy with the lines spaced in staccato fashion all the way down the length of the page, another with the lines spread sideways along the width. Learning his dialogue with unconventional line breaks had helped Jones ease into a less programmed rhythm and it worked for Schwarzenegger.

Raffaella De Laurentiis and Buzz Feitshans spent three to four months preparing to make Conan in Yugoslavia, setting summer 1981 as their release window. The political instability that swept through Belgrade following the death of strongman Josip Tito in May 1980 forced the producers to find an alternative. According to Arnold Schwarzenegger in his autobiography Total Recall, filming the picture in Italy would’ve cost $32 million, the rocky desert outside Las Vegas even more and a soundstage in Hollywood even more. Production relocated to Spain, where De Laurentiis had produced several pictures dating back to Solomon and Sheba (1959), and John Milius had used the province of Almería to stage the desert sequences for The Wind and the Lion (1975). In October 1980, it was announced that Conan the Barbarian would begin shooting in the Kingdom of Spain in January 1981 with a production budget of $22 million. The release was pushed back to December 1981. Cast and crew were housed in a hotel in central Madrid, which also served as a production hub. In temperatures of 0°F, the attack on Conan’s village was shot in the mountains near the town of Valsaín, in the province of Segovia (where Milius enthused was where the bridge in Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls was dynamited). The lair of the Witch (Cassandra Gaviola) was shot in the natural rock formations outside La Ciudad Encantada. The ancient city of “Zamora” was filmed at Fuerte El Condor (or El Condor), a large Western-style film set erected in the 1960s in the Tabernas Desert, where Schwarzenegger and Lopez were also filmed running. Thulsa Doom’s “Mountain of Power” was built in the desert terrain of El Peñon de Bernal, in the Tabernas Desert near Vicar. Many of the interiors were filmed on sets constructed at Madrid 70 Studios, a film facility in Fuenlabrada.

Universal Pictures chose cost and quality and appeared willing to sacrifice speed, granting John Milius more time to work on the film and moving the release of Conan the Barbarian back to summer 1982. This allowed an independently financed sword and sorcery film on nobody’s radar starring Lee Horsley, Simon MacCorkindale and Richard Lynch titled The Sword and the Sorcerer to sneak into theaters first, on April 23, 1982. Working with cost and speed and sacrificing quality, with much dialogue exchanged on cheap sets, the Group 1 release held a spot among the top ten grossing films in the U.S. for nine weekends, a hit. According to Schwarzenegger, the first test screening of Conan took place in Houston just after Valentine’s Day. On a scale of 1 to 100, the audience scored it an extraordinary 93. Universal wanted to know immediately if this was a fluke or they had a hit on their hands, arranging another screening the following night in Las Vegas and inviting Arnold to attend. His autobiography recounted, “Driving past the cineplex the next afternoon, we could see this was no ordinary screening. A line stretched around the block, and besides the comic book fans that Universal had expected, there were bodybuilders with tight shirts and bulging muscles, gays, freaks with weird hair and glasses, people wearing Conan outfits. There were some women but the crowd seemed to be mostly men, including a major contingent of bikers in full leather. Some of these guys looked ready to riot if they didn’t get in. Universal simply kept opening auditoriums, until everybody was seated–it took three to accommodate them all.” The Las Vegas test audience scored the movie the same as Houston had: 93.

Conan the Barbarian opened May 14, 1982 in 1,395 theaters in the U.S. At that time, this was a huge release, and no other movie except E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (also from Universal) would reach more venues that year than Conan at its peak: 1,683. Perhaps as surprising as the test scores, newspaper critics leaned positive. Gene Siskel opened his review in the Chicago Tribune by mentioning George C. Scott and the actor’s commitment to the joy of acting. “ … there is the same joy in the performance of muscleman turned actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in his role as Conan the Barbarian, an avenging angel type who’s tall, swings a big sword and trusts no one. And it is Schwarzenegger’s good humor about his imposing looks and his Austrian accent that make his Conan characterization and the movie itself so much fun.” Siskel rated the film 3 stars out of 4. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert added, “The movie’s casting is ideal. Arnold Schwarzenegger is inevitably cast as Conan, and Sandahl Bergman as Valeria. Physically, they look like artists’ conceptions of themselves. What’s nice is that they also create entertaining versions of their characters; they, and the movie, are not without humor and a certain quiet slyness that is never allowed to get out of hand. Schwarzenegger’s slight Teutonic accent is actually even an advantage, since Conan lived, of course, in the eons before American accents. The movie is a triumph of production design, set decoration, special effects and makeup. At a time when most of the big box-office winners display state-of-the-art technology, Conan ranks right up there with the best.” Ebert also graded the film 3 stars out of 4.

F.X. Feeney wrote in LA Weekly, “Great stuff, but also depressingly familiar stuff. Nevertheless Arnold Schwarzenegger proves himself a capable actor, combining his innate gentility with Conan’s brute directness to good effect. He gives credibility to the film’s humor. John Milius–especially in the film’s first, and best hour–directs with force and intelligence. Ron Cobb’s sets are wonderful throughout.” Conan the Barbarian opened #1 and held a spot among the top ten grossing films in the U.S. for five weekends, audiences pouring into theaters for the first of several contests between Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone at the box office, with Rocky III opening #1 over Memorial Day weekend. Oliver Stone–who since turning in his script for Conan had written and directed The Hand, Ed Pressman producing the critically panned psychological horror film starring Michael Caine–did not look back on the picture or its legacy fondly, perhaps still directing it in his head. “God, it breaks my heart that Dino ended the series. He was so stupid and so short-sighted! Making the first one with Milius was bad enough, but it got by and made a little bit of money: you know, it wasn’t derided. It was silly, I thought, the way he made James Earl Jones look–it was terrible. I didn’t buy it–and there was a lot of hokey shit, especially the snake thing. And the second movie was so bad! [Conan the Destroyer, screenplay by Stanley Mann, story by Roy Thomas & Gerry Conway, produced by Raffaella De Laurentiis, directed by Richard Fleischer]. That ended the series, right there! Of course, the whole thing went into turnaround, and the other movies never got made. It was all lost due to Dino De Laurentiis. No question about it. It could’ve survived anything but him, and I’m sorry we lost it.”

It’s difficult to put into words how much fun it was to discover Arnold Schwarzenegger on the big screen in the summer of 1982, or in the months following on videocassette. Arnold was like a star built in a lab, a world class athlete whose performing arts background set him apart from other sportsmen who’d gone into movies, from Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan to Joe Namath as C.C. Ryder and everyone in between. Instead of being hindered by his physique or his accent, Schwarzenegger’s biceps and his voicebox, and his good humor about them, were key in making him a superstar. Edward R. Pressman–credited as an executive producer–deserves most of the credit for not only appraising this Mr. Olympia’s unique mix of dedication and playfulness, but remaining dedicated to seeing those star qualities were served by the right material, rather than exploiting the bodybuilder for a quick buck. When the Witch flings her magic powder into the hearth, or Conan contemplates the horrors Valeria suggests lie inside the Tower of Serpents, Schwarzenegger’s wonder is what sells his portrayal of a medieval warrior and makes the movie around him so enjoyable, not muscles. Before Valeria in Conan the Barbarian, there hadn’t been a dynamic female character in a sword and sorcery film, and there haven’t been many since. Sandahl Bergman’s physicality and spirit are so aligned with Schwarzenegger’s that given the choice between avenging his parents or going on sensual adventures with Valeria, it’s unconvincing Conan would choose the former except that the plot requires it.

John Milius, who had a choice between serving comic book fans or trusting his sensibilities were in step with a wider audience, chose the latter, the same as Tim Burton did when he accepted the job of directing Batman (1989). Conan the Barbarian is a more exciting film. It builds a fantasy world from scratch, an alternate Eurasian antiquity, somewhere between the lost civilization of Atlantis and the steppes of Mongolia. Filmed entirely in Spain, the production utilizes the country’s diverse ecosystem of mountains, grassland, desert and coast superbly. Like Schwarzenegger, Ron Cobb would’ve had to be invented if he wasn’t available, an immensely talented designer capable of drawing up practical appliances to do unbelievable things, like the Wheel of Pain young Conan is sentenced to like a prehistoric factory job. The non-union Spanish crew and exchange rates in Spain seem to have saved Universal enough nickels to realize the best possible version of a Robert E. Howard story. Thulsa Doom’s Mountain of Power draws more followers than a Grateful Dead concert, while his palace orgy looks like a palace orgy. What Conan is missing here is his Joker. For a sorcerer, Thulsa Doom doesn’t strike fear into our hearts. Milius tries to empower him as a cult leader, but there’s little doubt once Conan hacks his way through Doom’s men the magician will hold his own. The Witch, memorably played by Filipino-American actor Cassandra Gaviola, makes a stronger impact in her two scenes. The ancient world aspects Milius is drawn to are well balanced with the fantasy elements leaking from Oliver Stone’s draft, namely the demons who come for Conan while he’s near death, sparingly depicted and cleverly animated. Along with Schwarzenegger, the film’s biggest star is composer Basil Poledouris, who provided an eccentric musical score both thunderous and forlorn when elevating the emotional content of the piece.

Video rental category: Fantasy

Special interest: Sword and Sorcery

KRULL (1983) is a toy box crammed with so many amusements that Santa Claus would have needed to jump on the lid to shut it. Plastic is all over the place, some of it busted, but for those who want toys, we get toys. Trespassing on the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons and plundering Star Wars (1977), the filmmakers do steal their way through this fantasy adventure, but steal from the right sources–Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Ray Harryhausen monster pictures, even some Robert E. Howard–with technical finesse and robust cheer.

In 1980, Columbia Pictures chairman Frank Price and VP of production Guy McElwaine called for a meeting with Ted Mann, founder of Mann Theaters, the mogul having signed a two-year development deal with the studio to pitch them ideas he was reasonably certain his customer base would purchase tickets for. With Mann’s business partner Ron Silverman serving as producer, Mann-Silverman Productions had produced a modest commercial hit, the prison drama Brubaker (1980) starring Robert Redford. Wherever the idea originated–no one has assumed blame or tried to take the credit–Price and McElwaine wanted to use TSR’s massively popular role-playing tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons as the basis for a movie, taking the swordsmen, sorcerers and creatures out of the imaginations of game players and populating a fantasy adventure film with them. Instead of bidding on the film rights at considerable cost, their film would be called anything but Dungeons & Dragons.

To develop a story, Silverman turned to screenwriter Stanford Sherman. A native of Akron, Ohio and graduate of Yale, Sherman had started his professional career with an advertising agency in New York. Writing on spec, Sherman sold scripts for television’s The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and in 1966, the first of eighteen episodes he’d pen for Batman, beginning with a two-parter in which the Penguin (Burgess Meredith) runs for mayor of Gotham City and to oppose him, Batman (Adam West) announces a Bat campaign. Sherman would write a spec script titled Sweeter Than Honey that Alan J. Pakula came close to directing and was commissioned to write a madcap comedy for producer/ director Stanley Kramer titled The Sheiks of Araby. Neither would be produced. Ron Silverman had worked with Sherman and thought the writer had the requisite imagination for the fantasy adventure that Columbia wanted. Sherman and Silverman came up with enough of a story to commit to paper, which the screenwriter was commissioned to sketch a treatment from. Sherman came back with the first thirty pages of a script. Wary of having to go through Columbia’s story department and getting a pass, Silverman took a chance on what Sherman had titled The Dragons of Krull and invited Price and McElwaine for breakfast at Mann’s apartment to read their thirty pages in person. Price committed to developing the project on the spot.

Stanford Sherman would turn in a draft of The Dragons of Krull quickly. Silverman’s only serious choice to direct was Peter Yates, a skilled journeyman whose British heist film Robbery (1967) had punched his ticket to Hollywood. Bullitt (1968), The Hot Rock (1972) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) were considered new classics by some film aficionados, while Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976), The Deep (1977) and Breaking Away (1979) pleasing to general audiences. Silverman thought highly enough of Yates to wait two months for him to wrap his new film, the thriller Eyewitness (1981), without engaging other directors. Yates was dubious about repeating himself, encountering an underwater sequence within the first ten pages of The Dragons of Krull that reminded him of The Deep, but according to Silverman, the director’s wife saw in the material an opportunity for her husband to try something new: an epic fantasy. With the press in an uproar over films that had run lavishly over-budget–Apocalypse Now (1979), 1941 (1979), Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), The Blues Brothers (1980), Heaven’s Gate (1980)--Columbia took the measure of placing Mann, Silverman and Yates on the company payroll for three months in late 1980 so the filmmakers could storyboard, budget and schedule The Dragons of Krull before the studio committed to production or distribution.

When Ron Silverman and Peter Yates arrived in London for pre-production, they made three key hires: Steven Grimes, the British production designer who’d worked with director Sydney Pollack on six pictures up to The Electric Horseman (1980); Peter Suschitzy, the cinematographer of The Empire Strikes Back (1980); and Derek Meddings, the visual effects supervisor of Moonraker (1979) and For Your Eyes Only (1981), a miniature and model effects wizard who’d worked on several James Bond films, as well as Superman: The Movie (1978). Yates huddled with Stanford Sherman to work on the script before proposing that a fresh writer–Steve Tesich, author of Breaking Away and Eyewitness–take over. According to Silverman, Tesich’s draft backed away from adventure in favor of dialogue, a result that neither the producer or studio deemed acceptable, and after spending the entirety of 1981 in pre-production, Sherman was brought back in December to generate the shooting script for what was now titled simply Krull (the WGA would award sole writing credit to Stanford Sherman).

The engine of Sherman’s early scripts had been a dragon, the familiar beast abducting a princess and setting the plot in motion, but Dragonslayer (1981) had beaten the filmmakers to the punch, an extraordinary live-action dragon animated by Industrial Light & Magic. The screenwriter refashioned his villain into an interstellar creature referred to as the Beast, whose army arrives on the planet Krull to enslave its populace, riding forth from a Black Fortress which teleports to a new corner of Krull each day. Tasked with describing his new film to the press, Yates likened it to Captain Blood (1935), Star Wars and Excalibur (1981), in other words, a swashbuckling science fiction film with sword and sorcery elements. Christopher Tucker, the makeup designer of The Elephant Man (1980), had been commissioned to design the creatures, but when his work proceeded at a pace too slow for what had been scheduled for a December 1981 start, Nick Maley, a member of the makeup team that had built Yoda for The Empire Strikes Back, was approached. Looking to make his own mark, Maley accepted the job, redesigning and building costumes for the Slayers–in six weeks.

The producers and financing for Krull were American, and so was the lead actor, 31-year-old Ken Marshall, who’d starred in the Italian-produced television mini-series Marco Polo. Much of the remaining cast was composed of players from the U.K.: Lysette Anthony (then an 18-year-old model making her film debut), Freddie Jones, David Battley (as the film’s comic relief, a magician named Ergo), Alun Armstrong, Liam Neeson, Robbie Coltrane, Bernard Bresslaw (playing a benevolent Cyclops) and Francesca Annis as “the Widow of the Web.” The production budget for Krull was roughly $25 million, a less extravagant price than either Return of the Jedi ($32.5 million) or Superman III ($39 million) would come with, but a considerable cost. Filming commenced January 1982 at Pinewood Studios in England, where twenty-three sets would be constructed on ten soundstages. Pinewood’s colossal 007 Stage–built in 1976 to film the submarine base for the James Bond extravaganza The Spy Who Loved Me–would be utilized to shoot the swamp sequence, in which the heroes contend with an ambush by Slayers and with quicksand. Location shooting took place on the volcanic island of Lanzarote in the Canary Islands of Spain (noticeable in the scene where the party wrangles the Fire Mares) and in the photogenic region around the city of L’ Aquila in northern Italy (for the mountain climbing scene).

The marathon to get Krull into theaters concluded on July 29, 1983, when Columbia opened the picture in 1,281 theaters in the U.S., a bigger release than blockbusters like Flashdance and Vacation had enjoyed. Critics were unimpressed, to put it mildly. On At the Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the picture two thumbs down, fixating on the films logical contrivances, of which there are several. Ebert tipped off by stating, “Our next movie is named Krull and it’s a very expensive, ambitious version of those sword and sorcery movies, in which the past meets the future and knights with swords battle villains with laser guns, and these movies are basically ridiculous. I mean, you just know a horse can’t outrun a spaceship. Krull is one of the most boring, nonsensical, illogical fantasies in a long time, maybe all the way back to Dragonslayer.” Siskel chimed in, “I sat here with so many questions, including if the mountain could transport itself, why do we have to see it in the opening titles?” Siskel acknowledged the villain was one of the best since Star Wars, but one that the heroes should have had no way to defeat.

Siskel & Ebert ranked Krull even lower in the quality than another summer movie they reviewed that week: Staying Alive, a glam rock sequel to Saturday Night Fever starring John Travolta. Writing in LA Weekly, Michael Dare panned it. “The only people who will have a swell time watching Krull are fans of plot inconsistencies. For one thing, why doesn’t the bad guy tie down and rape the princess he’s kidnapped instead of just threatening her and waiting for her daring rescue? One can only assume that Peter Yates has never read Ursula LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, or any other practitioner of true fantasy. That so much money was obviously spent on such mindlessness only compounds the misery. It might not be in 3D, but is one of the best films entirely in clicheorama.” Krull opened head-to-head against National Lampoon’s Vacation and a horny teenager comedy starring Matthew Modine and Phoebe Cates titled Private School. The PG-rated fantasy adventure earned less per screen than either, and spent only three weekends among the top ten grossing films in the States. It qualified as a critical and commercial flop, but over time, did win over a significant number of science fiction/ fantasy fans, building a cult following among viewers who might have been too busy playing Dungeons & Dragons to see Krull in theaters.

Krull is broken in two critical areas. Its villain, the Beast, doesn’t work, not when it’s on screen. As a galactic villain, it might’ve been effective as something teased in dialogue for subsequent films, like Jabba the Hutt in Star Wars. Played here by an actor in a rubber suit, it looks vaguely like Gill Man from Creature of the Black Lagoon, distorted optically to appear huge. While the effect is eerie, it’s not clear that the Beast is enjoying being the Beast, or what it wants by conquering worlds and in particular, abducting a princess, their relationship complicated by a height gap of about fifty feet. The gold standard for villainy in films like Krull is Maleficent in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959), or for space opera, Darth Vader, and the corner the filmmakers backed into when they discarded their dragon leaves them without a good villain. Stanford Sherman is largely writing with his wrists bound, revering faerie tale tropes too strictly, like the stoic prince setting off to rescue his princess. Even in 1982, the characters played by Ken Marshall and Lysette Anthony (the latter dubbed by American actor Lindsay Crouse for no credible reason whatsoever) warranted agency. There’s no compelling storytelling reason for the princess to be imprisoned. Having their wedding party wiped out and being left to watch their world enslaved would be sufficient punishment, and more interesting, sending the princess off on a fool’s errand to vanquish the villain, the prince reluctantly going along to protect her. While not necessarily original, it would’ve at least given the characters depth.

There are some treats to be had in Krull. James Horner, coming off Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and 48 HRS. (1982) and establishing himself as the most prolific film composer not named John Williams or Jerry Goldsmith, composed a bold, exciting score–performed by the London Symphony Orchestra–that fits a fantasy adventure like a glove. The band of thieves employed by the prince aren’t differentiated by unique skills or characteristics, but in a credit to casting director Patsy Pollock, who cast Reds (1981), the actors look letter perfect, Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane in early roles, and Alun Armstrong as their gravel-cheeked leader. In spite of a Cyclops (courtesy Nick Maley’s prosthetic makeup) who is to Krull what Chewbacca is to Star Wars, there are no creatures that measure up to the best in Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion pantheon, and for a director as enamored by Errol Flynn as Yates, the fight choreography is surprisingly mundane. The film is designed and shot with a panache Harryhausen’s films lack, and the fanciful script gets close to what makes Dungeons & Dragons fun, a seer played by Francesca Annis having cloistered herself in a cavern protected by a giant spider. It arrived on the market too late, the ideal release date for a family-friendly movie like this being Thanksgiving 1982. Krull would’ve been best served as as an appetizer for Return of the Jedi instead of a dessert. The movie plays much better today, particularly compared to most of the Star Wars films that have followed the original trilogy into release.

Video rental category: Fantasy

Special interest: Sword and Sorcery

WILLOW (1988) opened the door to two new possibilities. Cast as a swashbuckler who brandishes a rude and surly sensibility, Val Kilmer would be booked to play Jim Morrison in The Doors (1990) as a direct result of this movie. Next, Industrial Light & Magic advanced the art of digital compositing, in service of one standout scene, permitting a longer scene in The Abyss (1989) which then made Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) possible. This is to say that what’s most wonderful about Willow would pay off down the line, in films with a more consistent vision as well as a less derivative one.

During his writing process for Star Wars (1977)–when his script went by such rejected titles as Journal of the Whills and The Adventures of Luke Starkiller–George Lucas had the notion of making his hero a little person, the idea being that the evil Galactic Empire would be toppled by an individual who based on appearances would seem the least likely to lead such an uprising. Luke Skywalker instead became a restless teenager with a need for speed and his sights on the horizon, a character similar to Lucas as a teenager, growing up in Modesto, California. As a writer/ producer, he would work the idea of a warrior as powerful as he was diminutive into The Empire Strikes Back (1980) with Master Yoda, but Lucas never let go of his desire to make a fantasy adventure with a little person in the lead. In 1985, he came to Los Angeles to pitch Ron Howard what he had of an idea. Howard had graduated from acting in the ensemble of Lucas’s breakout film American Graffiti (1973) to seven seasons playing Richie Cunningham on the fifties-era sitcom Happy Days. More or less retiring his acting career in 1980, Howard quickly established himself as one of the more sought-after film directors in the business. In his first feature, Howard introduced movie audiences to Michael Keaton with Night Shift (1982), made Tom Hanks a star in Splash (1984), and directed Don Ameche to an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Cocoon (1985), all commercial hits.

Preparing to meet with George Lucas to discuss what sounded like a fantasy adventure in the spirit of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings books, Howard phoned Toronto to speak with Bob Dolman. A writer on SCTV, Dolman had met Howard in 1983 for a television pilot Dolman had written and Howard directed called Little Shots, about the misadventures of a group of junior high school kids (Joey Lawrence, Soleil Moon Frye and before he was cast as “Chunk” in The Goonies, Jeff Cohen, were part of the gang). The pilot hadn’t been picked up for series, but Dolman was working with Howard on the screenplay for what would become Far and Away (1992). Before he got back to his epic about Irish immigrants and the Oklahoma Land Rush, Howard was game to work with George Lucas again and challenge himself by directing an epic fantasy. Lucas asked him to suggest a writer, and Howard nominated Dolman. Meeting at Howard’s office on the Twentieth Century Fox lot, Lucas laid out a sketchy story predicated mostly on feeling, and at that point, existing only in his head. By their second meeting, Lucas provided a three-page story treatment, a necessary document that would not only secure Lucas a story credit, but guarantee him merchandising rights. Titled Willow, the piece took place in a fantasy world where two armies stand in opposition and a dwarf named Willow Ufgood must transport a baby prophesied to destroy an evil king.

Willow Ufgood, who Lucas described as a “willfully good” person, seemed to Bob Dolman like a character he’d tire of writing quickly, and the screenwriter had never trafficked in fantasy or adventure. But Lucas read the teleplay Dolman had written for WKRP In Cincinnati, and told Dolman that he liked the detail he’d brought to the show’s characters. As executive producer, Lucas maintained that he’d handle the fantasy adventure, Ron Howard would direct, and Dolman would script the details. They considered their target audience to be a twelve-year-old boy, and Lucas proposed they draw up forty-five scenes–three acts, fifteen scenes per act–their ideal viewer would want to see. Howard participated in script meetings before departing for Pennsylvania in the summer of 1985 to direct Michael Keaton in the comedy Gung Ho (1986). By the time Howard was ready to focus on his next project, Dolman was at Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, California writing Willow in an office right next to Lucas (the WGA would award screenplay credit to Bob Dolman, from a story by George Lucas). The screenwriter fancied a pre-patriarchal society mostly run by women. Considering the evil king in Lucas’s treatment too similar to Darth Vader in Star Wars, Dolman proposed an evil queen, a sorceress opposing a good, exiled sorceress for the fate of an infant princess. Dolman gave the evil queen a daughter named Sorsha, an architect of war who’d be turned away from treachery by love. By contrast, his male characters–the dwarf Willow and the bandit Madmartigan–would start off as meek and disgraced and seek to fulfill their potential, as a magician and swordsman, respectively.

Over the span of a year, Dolman wrote a draft and six revisions of Willow. Despite a torrent of fantasy films in the 1980s, the film industry had come to regard the genre warily. Clash of the Titans (1981) and The Dark Crystal (1982) had performed reasonably well commercially, but Dragonslayer (1981), Krull (1983) and Legend (1985) had not, while Lucas’s collaboration with Jim Henson, Labyrinth (1986) was completely ignored in theaters. Rather than finance the picture through bank loans and retain ownership of the negative–as he planned to with Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)--Lucas split the risk in a co-financing deal with MGM, whose chairman, Alan Ladd Jr., had been the one to sell Twentieth Century Fox on Star Wars while he was president of Twentieth Century Fox. For Willow, MGM came in for half the film’s $35 million budget in exchange for theatrical and TV rights. Covering the other half, Lucasfilm retained home video and pay TV rights, selling those to RCA/ Columbia Pictures Home Video for $15 million. By virtue of Ron Howard developing the script, Imagine Entertainment, the company he’d co-founded in 1985 and went public with the following year, was credited “in association with” Lucasfilm. Nigel Wooll, a veteran production manager on films like Force 10 From Navarone (1978), Reds (1981) and Krull, assumed duties as producer. Joe Johnston, a concept artist and effects technician on Star Wars who became one of the pioneers of Industrial Light & Magic–remaining with the effects house rather than launching his own–and was being nudged by Lucas toward directing, took on the roles of second unit director/ associate producer.

Warwick Davis, a 17-year-old actor who’d played Wicket the Ewok in Return of the Jedi (1983), was cast in the title role, with Val Kilmer and Joanne Whalley joining him as Madmartigan and Sorsha, respectively. Jean Marsh, who’d played the witch Mombi in Return To Oz (1985), was cast as the evil queen, Bavmorda, and Patricia Hayes, who’d appeared as the state’s witness in A Fish Called Wanda (1988) who Michael Palin’s character keeps trying to kill, was cast as Fin Raziel, the good sorceress, who spends much of the film transforming into different animals. Shooting commenced in April 1987 at Elstree Studios in England, where interiors were filmed over twelve weeks. The Nelwyn village and cart chase were shot in the forests of nearby Hertfordshire. The production moved to a slate quarry in North Wales to film exteriors for Bavmorda’s fortress, Nockmoor Castle. The search for snowfall in the summer took the show to Queenstown, New Zealand, alpine scenes shot on the summit of Mount Cardona. The more elaborate special effects–such as those featuring actors Rick Overton and Kevin Pollak as nine inch tall tricksters called Brownies–were filmed at ILM in Marin County. Leading the effects team were Dennis Muren, Michael McAlister and Phil Tippett. Miniature and optical effects wizards, Muren was a photographic innovator at ILM, while Tippett was heir to Ray Harryhausen in the field of stop-motion puppetry.

Willow was produced in what would be the twilight of visual effects generated on celluloid and the dawn of the digital age. For a scene in which Fin Raziel transforms into a variety of beasts, Muren proposed they might be able to accomplish this in one seamless shot by using computers. At the time, ILM’s computer graphics department had five or six men in it. A programmer named Doug Smythe was drafted to write software that could generate what became known as “morphing,” Smythe credited with inventing a term that became commonplace in film, commercials and music video. With Star Wars on hiatus and Indiana Jones expected to conclude as a trilogy, many in the film industry pondered whether George Lucas was ending his run as an independent hitmaker. Before Labyrinth found its audience on home video (courtesy twelve-year-old girls), Lucas’s production of Howard the Duck (1986), which he’d reluctantly agreed to help promote with his name, was a widely mocked disaster. Lucas’s critics snickered through a teaser trailer MGM debuted for Willow in November 1987, finding it vague and pretentious. Some forecast the movie would share the fate of Howard the Duck.

Opening May 20, 1988 on 1,024 screens in the U.S., Willow got off to a rough start, with critics going strongly negative. On Siskel & Ebert & The Movies, Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert cast “two downturned thumbs.” Ebert capped his commentary by stating, “Instead of Three Men and a Baby you could’ve called this movie A Warrior, A Dwarf, Two Brownies and a Baby. But the baby is basically just dragged along as a trophy and the movie misses a bet, which would’ve been to play up the everyday troubles that these characters have caring for the child. Instead, the kid is simply made unbreakable and waterproof, and the characters slog on through an endless landscape.” Siskel chimed in, “When you watch this film, you’re seeing–there is no clear vision. There’s no breaking of any new ground. I wasn’t surprised by anything in this film. And I found it tedious. And I’m particularly finding the whole genre a little bit tedious because if George Lucas and Ron Howard–Ron Howard made Cocoon–they can’t come up with anything fresh in this genre, I think it’s wiped out.” Writing in LA Weekly, film critic John Powers seconded that. “This mega-budget snoozer from Lucasfilm will almost certainly ring the death knell for movies that seek to bring sword and sorcery to the screen … Director Ron Howard probably does as well as anybody could with such worn-out material (there’s one great effect of a transubstantiating sorceress) but you spend your time remembering the scenes that Lucas ransacked to ‘create’ the story.” Without legitimate competition, Willow opened #1 at the box office and held its own against the early summer’s big films–“Crocodile” Dundee II and Rambo III following in into theaters Memorial Day weekend–to carve out its own niche, spending seven weekends among the top ten grossing films in the U.S.

One constant as Ron Howard embarked on a career as a film director is what a delight it was to watch the leading men in most of his movies. Committed, often high key, they bound off the screen. It’s almost as if Howard, who gained stardom as a child actor, playing Opie Taylor on all eight seasons of The Andy Griffith Show, is living vicariously through the roles he dreamed of being offered as an adult, forever Richie Cunningham, never Fonzie. Imagine Entertainment having produced the comedy Real Genius (1985), Howard knew what he had in Val Kilmer, and the actor swings from the rafters in Willow, a terrestrial buccaneer we have no choice but trust, hoping his character finds something more socially redeeming than larceny, or PG-rated womanizing, to devote his wits to. As a screen couple, Kilmer and Joanne Whalley even look better on film than Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars trilogy, unencumbered by cheap wardrobe or some questionable hair. This is a couple we’re ready to follow anywhere. That becomes difficult as the story’s flaws pile up. Whether Warwick Davis was a good actor or had the potential to prove it on film, the role he’s thrown here didn’t help. His character is surrounded by people, all of which are taller than he is–even in his village–and as a venturing hero, Willow is reduced to waddling after or yelling at other characters for attention, a weak position for a hero to operate in. Dolman and Howard aren’t living vicariously through this character, or know how to make Lucas’s little goodwill ambassador compelling.

Needing a strong villain to rescue the movie, we instead have Bavmorta, a poor copy of the Evil Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959) with none of their menace. A sorceress as powerful as she is wouldn’t require a human army, and like Davis, Jean Marsh isn’t given anything remotely interesting to do. Another problem is the baby, Elora Danan (Lucas and Dolman get points for cool-sounding names, something fantasy filmmakers struggle with). The toddler is carried across Creation, but there’s absolutely nothing special about her. Those who come into contact with the baby don’t change in discernible ways. She’s in the picture because the American film industry was gripped in baby fever, Three Men and a Baby the highest grossing movie of 1987. Here, the kid is simply a prop. Borrowing from a source less obvious than The Lord of the Rings, Lucas could have put Willow on the road to challenge Bavmorta in a contest of magic, like David volunteering to fight Goliath, the dwarf improbably raising an army along the way. In another misappropriation of resources, Rick Overton and Kevin Pollak, superb comedians, are reduced to playing twig-sized figures scampering around the bottom of the screen, their performances buried under tribal makeup and gestures too tiny to see. The uninspired tropes leave no room for the sort of irreverence Howard and Dolman were capable of. Even the film’s novel attempt to fashion a matriarchal society is buried beneath the abundantly familiar. John Williams wasn’t available to score the picture, James Horner composing the music in broad strokes without memorable themes for the characters.

Video rental category: Fantasy

Special interest: Sword and Sorcery

LEGEND (1985) leaves no doubt we’re watching something, faint praise for a motion picture with the ambitions and resources of this one. Its art and makeup departments granted generous budgets to design a traditional faerie tale with modern tools, it is dazzling to look at. The director’s cut addresses many, if not all, of the narrative problems plaguing an abridged theatrical version, but the movie’s artistic and commercial sensibilities are arm wrestling each other the entire time. After much grunting and sweat, each wears the other out.

Director Ridley Scott prepared his ascension from commercials to feature films by working on at least three scripts in the 1970s. In an interview with François Guérif and Alain Garel published in 1985, the director revealed that one project had been contemporary, another a black comedy, and another a faerie tale, the latter inspired by Scott’s reading of The Once and Future King by T.H. White and his love of Jean Cocteau’s film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast (1946). Scott was planning to shoot his fantasy film in Yugoslavia until financing evaporated. This led him to The Duellists, which starred Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel as French soldiers beefing for fifteen years during the Napoleonic Wars. A modest success, Scott followed it with a massive one: Alien (1979). The blockbuster did come at the cost of another project the director had toiled on. In an interview by Alan Jones published in Cinemafantastique magazine in January 1986, Scott began, “One of the reasons I wanted to make Legend was because of my aborted project Tristan and Isodole. After The Duellists I couldn’t see the point of spending another year of my life on what would essentially be another art movie that only a limited audience would see. For me it just wasn’t enough–not in monetary terms but artistic ones. So I dropped the idea and did Alien instead. I was right to do that in retrospect.”

Scott continued, “Then I prepared Dune for a year. All I saw with that project was another two-and-a-half years stretching in front of me before I ever got behind the cameras. Filmmaking is actually going out and doing it and not spending three years in preproduction. But I always wanted to return to the mythological or faerie tale idea as I’m one of those people who find the real world of no particular interest.” Given his name, novelist/ screenwriter William Hjortsberg could be mistaken for Scandinavian or possibly German, but he was born in New York. Hjortsberg briefly attended Yale Drama School, from 1962-1963, long enough to realize he was more partial to playwriting than set design. It was at Yale that Hjortsberg met novelist Thomas McGuane, whose friendship would help him publish his debut novel Alp, in 1969. Hjortsberg was so drawn to McGuane’s orbit that he followed the author to Livingston, Montana, country that would cast its spell on a number of actors or writers who bought property or worked there full-time. Hjortsberg published several novels–Gray Matters in 1971, Symbiography in 1973, Falling Angel in 1978–using them as calling cards to get work writing freelance magazine articles (mostly for Sports Illustrated) and screenplays.

Hjortsberg was employed by Roger Corman to adapt one of the producer’s ideas for a routine “hot pursuit” movie, which starred David Carradine and Kate Jackson and was released as Thunder and Lightning (1977). His fiction was building him a serious reputation for history, mystery and the occult, and his novel Falling Angel, with its potent mix of noir and the supernatural, would begin to attract the attention of filmmakers. In the fall of 1980, Ridley Scott invited William Hjortsberg to Los Angeles, where the director was in pre-production on Blade Runner (1982). Meeting for drinks at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Scott asked Hjortsberg if he’d be interested in scripting a live action faerie story for him. It turned out that the screenwriter had been scribbling “brief tales and fables” for his own amusement without anticipation anything would come of them. To demonstrate for Hjortsberg what he meant by a faerie story, Scott moved their meeting to the screening room of the hotel to project a 16mm print he owned of Beauty and the Beast.

In his introduction to the published version of the Legend screenplay in 2002, Hjortsberg wrote, “The prospect of writing an epic faerie tale held great appeal. My brief fictional efforts in that vein had largely been ironic in tone, modernist takes on the genre. I wanted to play it straight this time and hopefully create a classic, a story with elements which would echo eternally in the public imagination, like glass slippers and magic beans, pumpkins that turned into golden coaches and cannibalistic witches living in gingerbread houses. Great faerie tales live forever. This is as close to immortality as any writer might imagine.” Hjortsberg returned to Los Angeles to meet with Ridley Scott in the kitchen of the director’s rental house, in the a.m. before Scott was due at work. They didn’t start with much, and spent a week batting around ideas. As the director elaborated to Cinemafantastique, “To begin with, I only had the vague notion of something in pursuit of the swiftest steed alive, which, of course, was a unicorn. One aspect I was very definite about was that I wanted the outside world shown as economically as possible. To that end we settled on the solitary clockmaker’s cottage. Originally the quests were more prolonged and involved the classic earning process, but all these had to be substantially reduced. I was nervous about getting too complex in filmic terms. Every quest story tends to have side quests that depart from the main thrust of the story in order to get a weapon or a super power. I wanted to give Legend a more contemporary movement, rather than get bogged down in too classical a format.”

In their kitchen conferences, Hjortsberg proposed that a commoner, perhaps a miller, would be infatuated with a princess, whose curiosity has drawn her out of the safety of her castle to flirt with him. In a playful mood, the princess slips off a ring and chucks it into a pond, proclaiming that whoever retrieves the ring will have her hand in marriage. The boy dives in after the totem but when he emerges, darkness has taken over the land and swept the princess away. Scott loved it and told Hjortsberg to get back to Montana to start writing. Living in a cheap rented apartment with a view of the Absaroka Mountains, Hjortsberg relied on Faeries, the illustrated compendium of folklore by artists Brian Froud and Alan Lee, as a reference, copying their witch Jenny Greenteeth and goblin Jimmy Squarefoot and even referring to them as such in his first draft. Five months later, Hjortsberg had completed a 145-page draft, titled Legend of Darkness. Scott loved it, believing he’d found the right balance between American romanticism and European stoicism.

Arnon Milchan, an Israeli entrepreneur who’d gotten his start with a small agricultural chemical company he’d inherited from his father, had been appointed Israel’s sales agent to a variety of companies, including Bell Helicopter, Magnavox and Raytheon. What Milchan really wanted to do was produce movies. He recalled Ridley Scott approaching him with two projects. One was a musical about a spaceship that crashes in Jerusalem. The other was Legend of Darkness. The producer much preferred the latter and got to work setting up major studio financing and distribution. Those who recall Hjortsberg’s first draft described it being wondrous–the unicorns conjuring a trail of posies wherever they step, Darkness being a griffin–and expensive. Given Scott’s love of Walt Disney animation, which in films like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Pinocchio (1940) and Fantasia (1940) trended toward the dark and operatic, Walt Disney Pictures was their first stop. Scott explained to Cinemafantastique, “When we were trying to sell the project it was very dark in tone. I tend to lean in that direction, anyway. The fear of distributors at that time was extraordinary. When we submitted it to Disney, I tried to reassure them that my intention was not to go too far in that direction, but they couldn’t seem to understand such a change of pace, considering my previous work.”

At that time, Disney wasn’t interested in a live-action reimagining of their animated classics. Universal Pictures and Twentieth Century Fox agreed to co-finance what was now titled Legend, Universal retaining distribution rights in the U.S. and Canada, Fox distributing the picture overseas. A production budget was dialed in at $24.5 million. Scott had wanted to work with Assheton Gorton–the art director of Blow Up (1966) — on Alien and Blade Runner, and finally landed him for Legend. Needing a forest fit for a storybook, they considered filming at Yosemite National Park in central California, but the practicality of rigging sufficient light or working with prosthetic makeup outdoors drove the show indoors, to Pinewood Studios in England, where the filmmakers fabricated their forest on the 007 Stage, erected to shoot the submarine base for the James Bond extravaganza The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). To build the dells, hills and valleys necessary for a dramatic-looking forest, some 20,000 tons of soil were imported. In audio commentary recorded for the issue of Legend on DVD in 2002, Scott stated, “And one of the trickiest things was, you don’t want to build one of these things one-sided. There’s no mattes in this, no CGI because it didn’t exist in those days. I didn’t want a matte because mattes always look like mattes. I wanted it to be real, so I built each tree with a full three-hundred sixty degree trunk …”

Scott continued, “The cyclorama in this studio I think was, let’s say fifty feet high. I made, on runners, massive steel frames. I made mirrors that went fifty feet up and ran on runners all the way around, so whichever way I looked when I lined up a shot I would have the back of the tree reflected in the mirror, so the forest went on forever. And it worked great until we started to feed a lot of pigeons in the forest, and the amusing thing would be when they decided to take off in the morning, they’d fly around, fly down in the forest and fly straight into a plastic mirror.” The woods in Legend took craftspeople fourteen weeks to construct. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise–posed to become a star following his debut as a leading man in the blockbuster Risky Business (1983) and a modestly successful high school football drama titled All the Right Moves (1983)--chose to work for Ridley Scott next, taking the role of the commoner, named Jack o’ the Green. Cruise was 21 years old when filming commenced, and the impossibility of finding a female lead as young and talented and popular to play the princess, Lili, led to the casting of Mia Sara, making her film debut at the age of sixteen.

The process of casting Darkness was unique. Scott told François Guérif and Alain Garel, “First I thought of Peter O’Toole, but he was so skinny and so pale. I had never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), but I was looking for someone to be the sorceress of the swamps. One of the actresses from The Rocky Horror Picture Show seemed to fit that role. Then I saw Tim Curry and I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is Darkness.’ I like the control he has over himself. He is very physical and powerful, theatrically speaking. He knows when he needs to stop. It was great to work with him.” Earning the commission to create the makeup effects for Legend was Rob Bottin, who’d barely been old enough to buy a beer when he designed the werewolf transformations for The Howling (1981) and the stunning alien organisms for The Thing (1982). Curry all but disappeared under the hulking, devilish makeup Bottin devised for Darkness. Scott continued, “The Beast in Cocteau is never horrible. When I was a kid, the beginning of the movie made me very afraid, but every soon you realize there is something else. I wanted that with Darkness. I didn’t want to put a barrier between the audience and him. We could have created a monster that was terrible, disgusting, really horrible to look at, but we wanted something between beast and man. And we wanted to give the character the most depth possible. I wanted Darkness to be healthy, not disgusting psychologically and physically, because I had the feeling that Evil treats itself better, more often than not, than Good.”

Visual effects supervisor Richard Edlund had been consulted to solve how Ridley Scott might cast actors of average stature as the little people of Legend. “At one stage I wanted Mickey Rooney to play one of the characters but at 5’2” next to 5’8” Tom Cruise he didn’t look that tiny. Edlund came up with a method of shooting everything on 70mm and taking that negative and shrinking the actors to any size we wanted to make the illusion more realistic. The budget for this alone was enormous and affected everything so I had to axe it and take the gamble on finding an ensemble of good, small actors.” Swiss actor David Bennent (17) and British actor Annabelle Lanyon (23) were cast as the sprites, Gump and Oona. Billy Barty, who was old enough to have appeared in The Wizard of Oz (1939) as a Munchkin but strangely hadn’t, accepted the part of Screwball, while Carl “Cork” Hubbert, another little person, was cast as Brown Tom. American stage actor and Obie Award winner Alice Playten had been cast as the goblin Blix when Scott phoned to ask what she thought of the drawings she’d been shown for her character. Playten confided that she thought of Blix as Keith Richards. Scott and Bottin agreed that the rocker had a great face and used him as their model for Playten’s makeup. To play the unicorns, six white Andalusian horses were acquired in Spain, and in thirty hours, driven to France and ferried across the English Channel to their job site.

Legend commenced filming on March 26, 1984 at Pinewood Studios. With sixteen weeks on the 007 Stage in the can and ten more days to go, on June 27, natural gas utilized to light the bonfire of the faeries sequence had accumulated and caught fire, abundant polystyrene on the set serving as fuel. In a stroke of good fortune, the inferno broke out while cast and crew were at lunch, and there were no human fatalities as the building burned to the ground. Speeding up the construction of the stage they were scheduled to move onto, Scott acknowledged losing only three days of filming, the remaining forest scenes picked up at Pinewood in October. The 007 Stage would be rebuilt in time for the new James Bond film A View To a Kill (1985). Once Scott and Terry Rawlings–dubbing editor on The Duellists who’d been promoted to film editor to solely cut both Alien and Blade Runner–began assembling a work print of Legend into a version that could play for an audience, Universal penciled in a U.S. release date of November 6, 1985.

Ridley Scott admitted to having been a little envious of how terrific The Company of Wolves (1984)--a postmodern take on the Little Red Riding Hood tale based on the novel by Angela Carter–looked with its storybook forest in comparison to its cost, but also noted how the movie had struggled to cross over from the U.K. to the U.S. The director told Cinemafantastique, “American audiences couldn’t seem to grasp the denseness of the plot or the sequential build up of the story, which is one reason why I have eliminated a lot of the subtext and detailing from my original cut of Legend.” According to Rawlings, the first cut of Legend ran 125 minutes, which Scott and his editor trimmed to an efficient 113-minute version the director deemed ready to put before a test audience, in Orange County, California. The screening went poorly. Very poorly. Scott’s cut had screened at the Venice Film Festival in late August 1985, but Universal made the decision to move off its planned November release in the States to give Scott time to triage what wasn’t working.

The biggest alternation to Legend in the U.S. was the decision to jettison an orchestral score by Jerry Goldsmith and replace it with a score by electronic band Tangerine Dream, whose musical accompaniment for Tom Cruise in Risky Business may have been considered MTV-friendly and a part of that film’s appeal among teenagers. Goldsmith had clashed with Ridley Scott during the scoring of Alien, the director rejecting some of the composer’s work in favor of cues Goldsmith had written years earlier for Freud (1962) and cutting Goldsmith’s music out of the end credits entirely, inserting Howard Hanson’s Symphony No. 2, Romantic. Goldsmith, a fourteen time Academy Award nominee with one win, for The Omen (1976), would have had to fly to Europe to hear his music for Legend in a theater. David Bennent, who’d performed Gump with his own (German) accent, had his voice dubbed by Alice Playten, giving the character what studio executives considered an accent palatable to Americans. William Hjortsberg came back to write a title crawl explaining the world of Legend (“Once long ago, before there was such a thing as time, the world was shrouded in darkness,” it began). Several of the cuts were intended to refashion Jack from an unwilling hero into a hard-on warrior. In Scott’s version, the boy employs his wits to distract Meg Mucklebones (Robert Picardo) from attacking him in the swamp, while in the version made for the U.S.A., Jack simply cuts her down with his sword as quickly as he can. A 95-minute version of Legend would open in limited release in the U.K. on December 6, 1985, but the version that Americans would see was chopped down to 89 minutes.

When the Los Angeles Times reached out to Ridley Scott in January 1986 to comment about his film’s post-production woes, the director was not amused by implications his movie was in trouble. “I came out of advertising and marketing. So I believe when you do something to communicate, you must aim for the widest audience possible. To ignore that audience is utterly foolhardy.” Rather than force Tom Cruise to compete against himself–Top Gun set to open a week ahead of Memorial Day weekend–Universal scheduled Legend a month earlier, for April 18, 1986 in 1,187 theaters in the U.S. Critics summoned more derision for the film than the test audience had. In the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel completely wrote it off. “Oh, sure, I could tell you more about Legend–about how the princess turns into a Dark Ages disco queen and writhes in terror in front of a red devil. But I don’t want to remember any more about Legend than to make sure I include it in my ‘worst films of 1986’ list and never rent it when it comes out on video cassette.” Siskel gave the movie 1 ½ stars out of 4. Roger Ebert was more complimentary in his pan, for the Chicago Sun-Times. “Despite all its sounds and fury, Legend is a movie I didn’t care very much about. All of the special effects in the world, and all of the great makeup, and all of the great Muppet creatures can’t save a movie that has no clear idea of its own mission and no joy in its own accomplishments.” Ebert pinned it with 2 stars out of 4.

For readers of LA Weekly, Michael Dare dug the dagger in deep. “A magnificent example of visual storytelling and not much else. You get the feeling that if director Ridley Scott could have told this story with no words whatsoever, he would have done so gladly. Instead of a nice little bedtime story, he’s constructed a nice enormous bedtime story, a 5,000-pound Twinkie guaranteed to give an unparalleled sugar rush to all.” Whatever could be written about Legend, the competition it opened against stunk. Cannon Films chucked Charles Bronson into another substandard action thriller, Murphy’s Law, while Danny DeVito and Joe Piscopo starred in Wise Guys, a mob comedy directed by Brian DePalma with no laughs in it. The Money Pit, Police Academy 3: Back In Training and Gung Ho were hanging around in their fourth, fifth and sixth weekends of release. Legend opened #1 at the box office and without any new competition in its second weekend, held that spot. After four weekends in release, Top Gun and the films of early summer shoved Legend out of the top ten. Ridley Scott’s 113-minute cut was thought to be lost, but in a credit to Universal, a pristine answer print was discovered in 2000 and with the director’s approval, issued on DVD in 2002, with Jerry Goldsmith’s score restored. (Buyer beware, the 89-minute version of Legend is in circulation among streaming services).

The 113-minute version is the only acceptable version of Legend. It offers the viewer a few treats, first being the opportunity to spend as much as twenty minutes more in the storybook forest designed by Assheton Gorton, without a pixel of computer generated effects. Everything we see from duck feathers to demons were shot live and most of it looks fantastic. In an era when Ridley Scott was in friendly competition with Adrian Lyne and his brother Tony Scott to see which director could light a set in more spectacular fashion, Legend stands as an achievement in cinematography, Alex Thomson having lit Excalibur (1981) and Year of the Dragon (!985). The director’s cut allows us to spend enough time with Lili to not only detect something like a character–a precocious brat, perhaps even a Book of Genesis-styled temptress–but offers fewer distractions from Tom Cruise, whose presence as a nature boy is misbegotten, to put it mildly. Cruise–playing someone other than an American high school student for the first time in his film career–is a good actor being very badly directed. Surrounded by artifice on a soundstage, he’s asked to play the dutiful farm boy Westley from William Goldman’s novel and soon-to-be major motion picture The Princess Bride (1987) but without any of Westley’s athleticism or joie de vivre, two of Cruise’s strengths.

Rather than creating a myth chock full of fresh motifs for a new generation, Scott shoplifts from Disney and stripmines Star Wars. Legend is so sold on the Luke Skywalker-Princess Leia-Darth Vader model that it never questions if the story needed a boy and a girl. Lili enters a magic forest, defies nature by touching a unicorn, and could have easily been the character sent on a hero’s journey to set her blunder right. Jack’s presence in the story is as unnecessary as Jennifer Connelly’s young heroine in Labyrinth (1986) turning a corner and finding Keanu Reeves sitting there. By pretending that all of Cruise’s scenes are being played by Mia Sara, Legend can masquerade as a good film. Rob Bottin’s work is beyond peer, with Robert Picardo turning in another small but perfect performance in Bottin’s makeup, having played Eddie Quist in The Howling and the obnoxious aliens in Explorers (1985). The film was drawn up to top everything that had come before it, for example, having Picardo leap out of water in full prosthetics as the swamp hag, but the picture is shot and edited in a way that seems embarrassed of its technical ingenuity, refusing to share it with the viewer. Unlike Alien or Blade Runner, Legend largely resembles every other otherworldly film of its era, something critics latched onto and left to discover the film on their own, viewers can pick up on.

Video rental category: Fantasy

Special interest: Sword and Sorcery

HIGHLANDER (1986) might be the worst movie to ever launch a franchise, at least a franchise that has spread from film to television to print with this sort of wildfire intensity, and forty years after its release, has yet to be contained. Its novel blend of new world action and old world adventure is a big part of its appeal, the original film mining the best of both worlds to introduce something as fresh now as it was then. When it comes to achieving greatness, both screenplay and casting get halfway there, leaving much to be desired.

Gregory Widen grew up in Laguna Beach, California and by the age of eighteen had already trained as a paramedic. He had his mind set on becoming a firefighter. In 1980, the year Widen graduated high school, he accompanied family on a trip to the United Kingdom. Among the tourist sites the Widens visited was the Tower of London. “They have the world’s largest collection of armory. I was walking through it and I thought, ‘What if you owned all this?’ Then I thought, ‘What if you wore all this?’ And then I thought, ‘What if you never died and you were giving someone a tour saying you owned all this?’” Visiting the Scottish Highlands pitched the seeds for what would become Widen’s story about an immortal Scotsman. After taking a gap year to complete his training as a firefighter, Widen enrolled part-time in the graduate screenwriting program offered by the University of California Los Angeles. His love of movies had introduced him to The Duellists (1977), the feature film directing debut of Ridley Scott. The historical drama dramatized a fifteen-year rivalry between two soldiers (Keith Carradine and Harvey Keitel) fighting for France during the Napoleonic Wars.

Tasked with completing a student thesis screenplay, Widen imagined a rivalry between two immortals spanning five hundred years. With the working title Shadow Clan, his script was set mostly in present day Washington D.C., where a Scottish warrior from the 16th century named Conor MacLeod is lurking around. His adversary, the Knight, seeks to be the last immortal standing. Widen transitioned between police investigating a series of headless corpses piling up in the present and MacLeod’s mentorship five hundred years ago by an immortal Spaniard named Juan Cid Romirez. In the climax, MacLeod duels the Knight at the Jefferson Memorial. Two of Widen’s UCLA screenwriting classmates were full-time students and roommates, Fred Dekker and Ethan Wiley. Widen huddled with the duo to generate a stronger title for his script. (In the category of things least likely to ever occur, Highlander would open in the U.S. one weekend after a horror picture Dekker had started writing and Wiley had finished, adding much tongue-in-cheek humor, as House). Their instructor Richard Walter saw in Widen’s screenplay the nuts and bolts for a script that might sell. He contacted a literary agent named Harold Moskovitz, a player who trusted Walter to scout UCLA for fresh writing talent.

Agreeing with the instructor’s positive assessment of Highlander, Moskovitz got Widen’s script to the producing tandem of Peter S. Davis & William Panzer. Davis had started his career in New York as an attorney before moving to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s with dreams of producing movies. Panzer was a graduate of New York University Film School, who as a cameraman or editor was working in commercials. In an executive producer capacity, Davis had helped raise financing for a crime film Panzer produced titled The Death Collector (1976), which featured Joe Pesci in his first movie role. They followed this with a thriller that predated The Stunt Man (1980) titled Stunts (1977) starring Robert Forster, based on a story by Robert Shaye, founder of New Line Cinema. Davis originated the story for Steel (1980), which Lee Majors both starred in and produced, and spent nearly eighteen months wrangling for a theatrical release, briefly opening under the title Look Down and Die. Panzer’s first impression of Highlander came with coverage by Harold Moskovitz, who’d retain an associate producer credit for his services.

Panzer recalled, “He said, ‘I don’t think this is the best script I’ve ever read, but a really good idea.’ It did have some of the principal characters in it and the idea of immortality, the idea of Immortals in conflict, but it was much darker. And it was less romantic.” In late 1982, Davis-Panzer Productions took out a $1,500 option on the script and didn’t waste time bringing in professional screenwriters to forge the material into a movie. Peter Bellwood held an M.A. in History from Cambridge University, where he auditioned for the Cambridge Footlights and met Peter Cook. After a stint in advertising, Bellwood was invited to write and perform with Cook & Dudley Moore in the stage revue Beyond the Fringe. Once the show completed two national tours of America, Bellwood remained in New York, writing the libretto for the 1970 Broadway adaptation of the novel Elmer Gantry, a notorious flop. Moving to Los Angeles, Bellwood found a writing partner in Larry Ferguson, who’d grown up in Klamath Falls, Oregon. Ferguson was a red-blooded jock who discovered theater arts in high school and spent much of his youth pursuing an acting career in New York and L.A. Bellwood & Ferguson were commissioned to write what qualified as Davis & Panzer’s biggest success to that time, the disaster drama St. Helens (1982), one of the first made-for-television pictures by HBO.

Working off a 62-page outline of Gregory Widen’s screenplay, Bellwood & Ferguson started adapting Highlander in early 1983. The faster typist, Bellwood took dictation while Ferguson prowled the room generating ideas. They relocated the contemporary action to New York, staging the opening duel in the parking garage of Madison Square Garden (Widen had staged the duel in the alley behind an adult theater). Instead of a national monument, Bellwood & Ferguson set the climactic duel at Coney Island Amusement Park. Connor MacLeod is going by the name Russell Nash in the present, while his adversary was sketched in greater detail, a Prussian named Count von Krohn, answering to the name Victor Kruger in the present. Bellwood & Ferguson cooked up a mythology for the Immortals, binding them together in an energy they called the Quickening. When an Immortal lopped off the head of another Immortal in battle, whoever was left standing inherited his foe’s power. The Quickening also made Immortals aware of each other when in close proximity. When only a certain number of Immortals were left, they would be drawn into final combat in what was referred to as the Gathering, the victor to inherit what Bellwood & Ferguson called the Prize, the lifeforce of all the Immortals. A line in Widen’s script, “There can be but one,” became a mantra in Bellwood & Ferguson: “There can be only one.”

The success of St. Helen’s earned Davis & Panzer a six-picture distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox. Financing for Davis-Panzer Productions’ latest picture, The Osterman Weekend (1983), had been assembled by a British sales executive named Michael Ryan, and he was retained by the producers to raise the money for Highlander. Ryan had sold an Australian creature feature titled Razorback (1984) and believed its director would be a good fit for an international action/ adventure film. Russell Mulcahy had his start editing news segments for Channel 7 in Sydney. Mulcahy found himself shooting promos for local bands like AC/DC and Hush, and discovered there was an emerging market for these musical short films, which would shortly become known as music video. In a lengthy interview with Paul Rowlands for the Money Into Light blog in July 2016, Mulcahy recalled, “I went to England for two weeks to make a small video and I ended up staying two years. I did the video for Buggles, ‘Video Killed the Radio Star’, which opened up MTV. Before I went off to do Razorback I did a whole series of videos in a row: ‘True’ with Spandau Ballet, ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ with Bonnie Tyler, ‘I’m Still Standing’ and ‘That’s Why They Call It The Blues’ with Elton John, and ‘The Reflex’ with Duran Duran.” (Mulcahy was being modest about his credentials. He also directed Duran Duran’s first music video “Planet Earth” and the British New Wave band’s two most iconic, “Hungry Like the Wolf” and “Rio”).

In 1984, Michael Ryan put together a reel of Mulcahy’s music video work and presented it to Davis & Panzer, who liked what they saw. Mulcahy continued, “I read the script when I was cutting the ‘Wild Boys’ video. I loved the genre, I loved the action, and I loved the strange complexity of the intercutting timelines. What really grabbed me though was the sense of tragic, epic romance in the story, the man who couldn’t die and had to watch people he fell in love with wither and die in front of him. That continual pain and angst was a driving force in the character of Connor. He wanted to win the Prize because he was sick and tired of being Immortal.” William Panzer phoned Peter Bellwood with news that they’d found their director. The screenwriter recalled, “I said to Bill, ‘Has he made any movies?’ and Panzer said, ‘Yeah, he made one movie.’ When I got off the phone I called Larry and said, ‘They’re going to hire this guy Russell Mulcahy,’ and Larry said, ‘Great, what’s he done?’ and I said, ‘Well, he’s only made one movie, it’s called Razorback and at the climax of the movie, the heroine is eaten by a giant warthog.’ There was a long pause and Larry said, ‘This may be our guy.’” Mulcahy was announced as director of Highlander in December 1984.

Thorn EMI Screen Entertainment saw in Highlander the potential for a movie that had something for everyone, and could perform well in markets all over the world. In exchange for distribution rights outside the U.S. and Canada, including home video, EMI–which Mulcahy was familiar with as Duran Duran’s record label–had offered to put up a production budget of $13.8 million, in effect, making Highlander a British film. When it came to casting the villain, now named Kurgan to avoid any association with Freddy Krueger, the producers threw out Arnold Schwarzenegger’s name due to his turn as The Terminator (1984), but the star had been inspired to go into acting by watching John Wayne, and was neither interested in becoming known as a bad guy or available if he had been interested. Russell Mulcahy was at a party in New York where he was talking to Sting about the character. The musician/ actor recommended his co-star from The Bride (1985), who’d played Frankenstein’s Monster to his Dr. Frankenstein. At 6’3” with a presence that made him seem a half a foot taller, the actor’s name was Clancy Brown.

The first name that came to Davis & Panzer’s mind when it came to casting their hero, a Scottish warrior, may have been Sean Connery’s. Twenty-five years past his expiration date to credibly play Connor MacLeod, the producers instead zeroed in on Connery for MacLeod’s mentor, now named Juan Sánchez-Villalobos Ramírez. In an obituary published February 23, 2021, the Hollywood Reporter quoted the late Peter S. Davis on one of his career accomplishments, booking Connery to play the master swordsman in his movie. “I thought he would be great in the role, but I was discouraged by everyone. Everyone told me there was no chance in the world I’d get Sean Connery. I talked to his agents at the time, and they said, ‘Davis, just make an offer … you know he’s a very well-paid actor. Make an offer.’ I offered $300,000 for one week’s work. They told me I was far off the mark. But then, I upped the ante from $500,000 to $700,000. Still nothing. So finally, his agents said, ‘Peter, we like nice round numbers.’ So we offered a million.”

Davis continued, “That got the script to Sean. We immediately heard back that he enjoyed the piece if he got to make certain changes to broaden the role. We finally settled on the million for the week’s work. David Tringham, who was first assistant director on the film–from the old school of filmmaking–told us shooting Sean would be near impossible in a week. But they made it work. David, director Russell Mulcahy and production designer Allan Cameron built the sets back to back to back so Sean could be moved from one scene to the next. Russell shot the shit out of it and managed to get true value out of our million dollars.” David Keith–who’d played Richard Gere’s navy training buddy in An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)-and Barry Bostwick interviewed for the role of MacLeod, but Mulcahy took credit for flipping through magazines at Davis & Panzer’s office in Los Angeles and coming across publicity Christopher Lambert had done for his starring role in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Notified that Lambert, an American by birth who’d grown up in Switzerland and France, didn’t speak English, the director was undeterred, believing the actor had the look he was after for his otherworldly hero.

The production’s tax subsidies came with certain strings attached, the hiring of a certain number of British cast and crew. This prohibited Mulcahy from employing either of two cameramen he’d worked with previously, Dean Semler (Australian) and Tony Mitchell (American), to light the picture in the U.K. Director of photography Gerry Fisher, who’d lit Sean Connery in The Offence (1973), got the job by virtue of his British citizenship. Shooting commenced May 1985 in London. A parking garage at Earls Court Exhibition Centre stood in for what was supposed to be Madison Square Garden in New York. Jacob Street Studios, which wasn’t much of a “studio” but located in what had been a pet food factory in central London, was adjacent to streets and alleys that in 1985 looked as sketchy as those in the Big Apple. This location was used to stage most of the street scenes. The duel between Kurgan and Ramirez was also shot at Jacob Street Studios. With Connery’s meter running, the production jumped to Loch Shiel in Scotland for the scene where Ramirez trains MacLeod on a rowboat, while Lambert and Connery’s sprint was filmed on a small beach near the village of Arisaig in an area referred to as Refuge Bay. The battle sequence was filmed near the village of Glencoe, under the peak of the Buachaille Etive Beag ridge. The majestic 13th century fortress where MacLeod is introduced marching into battle was shot at Eilean Donan Castle, on an inlet near Dornie.

The production’s tax subsidies came with certain strings attached, the hiring of a certain number of British cast and crew. This prohibited Mulcahy from employing two colleagues, Dean Semler (Australian) or Tony Mitchell (American), to light the picture in the U.K., director of photography Gerry Fisher, who’d lit Sean Connery in The Offence (1973), getting the job by virtue of his British citizenship. Shooting commenced May 1985 in London. A parking garage at Earls Court Exhibition Centre in London stood in for what was supposed to be Madison Square Garden in New York. Jacob Street Studios, which wasn’t much of a “studio” but located in what had been a pet food factory in central London, was adjacent to streets and alleys that in 1985 looked as sketchy as those in the Big Apple. This location was used to stage most of the street scenes. The duel between Kurgan and Ramirez was also shot at Jacob Street Studios. With Connery’s meter running, the production jumped to Loch Shiel in Scotland for the scene where Ramirez trains MacLeod on a rowboat, while Lambert and Connery’s sprint was filmed on a small beach near the village of Arisaig in an area referred to as Refuge Bay. Connor’s cottage and forge–the latter of which doesn’t appear to have many customers–was filmed in Glen Nevis. The battle sequence was shot near the village of Glencoe, under the peak of the Buachaille Etive Beag ridge. The majestic 13th century fortress where MacLeod is introduced marching into battle was shot at Eilean Donan Castle, on an inlet near Dornie.

Back in London, the church where MacLeod and Kurgan parlay was filmed in St. Augustine’s Kilburn. America was further spoofed in England, with MacLeod’s drunken duel (said to take place at Boston Commons) filmed outside Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire. When Coney Island became cost prohibitive to shoot the climax, the filmmakers settled on the rooftop of Silvercup Studios in Queens, which was topped with a magnificent, red and white neon-lit sign and offered views of the Queensboro Bridge and Manhattan skyline. The production built a ⅔ scale version of the front side of the sign in London, shooting the back side in Queens for its views of New York. Unable to get inside Madison Square Garden or obtain permission from the NHL to film a hockey game, the filmmakers settled for shooting an AWA wrestling match at Meadowlands Arena, home of the New Jersey Nets. In the wrestling contest, the Fabulous Freebirds (Michael Hayes, Terry Gordy, Buddy Roberts) face off against Greg Gagne, Jim Brunzell, and the Tonga Kid. One of the few sequences actually shot in New York was Krugan’s vehicular rampage, filmed on Canal Street alongside Broadway in Lower Manhattan. Central Park provided the most memorable location in the picture, Bow Bridge used for the scene with MacLeod meets the friendly neighborhood Immortal played by Hugh Quarshie.

To record a theme song, the producers of A View To A Kill (1985) had already snared Duran Duran at what would be their commercial peak to write and perform a song for the new James Bond film, but fortune may have been smiling on Highlander when all four members of Queen accepted an invitation to attend a screening of the film in London. Russell Mulcahy had visited the set of Flash Gordon (1980) and was familiar with how well the science fiction fantasy had incorporated the rock band’s sound. To his surprise, Queen didn’t agree to contribute a song, but an album’s worth, each member of the band writing at least one. Freddie Mercury penned the opening title track, “Princes of the Universe.” Brian May wrote “Hammer To Fall” (which would be included in Queen’s historic Live Aid set in July 1985) and the film’s main theme, “Who Wants To Live Forever.” Bassist John Deacon contributed “One Year of Love” and drummer Roger Taylor “A Kind of Magic” and “A Dozen Red Roses For My Darling.” To score the film, Peter Davis & William Panzer commissioned Michael Kamen, the composer and conductor having worked with the producers on Stunts.

Film editor Peter Honess, who’d cut Electric Dreams (1984) and Plenty (1985), was responsible for dialing Highlander into a picture audiences the world over could access. The U.S. and Europe would initially see slightly different cuts. At 111 minutes, the version of Highlander that would screen in the States was missing scenes or shots that would be preserved overseas. Two scenes were chopped: MacLeod rescues a girl from the SS during World War II (later revealed to be his secretary in the present day) and later, visiting the Central Park Zoo with the antiques expert Brenda, the Immortal talks about losing his wife four hundred years ago, Kurgan lurking in the background. Moments considered too weird for the American palette were excised: flashbacks to a Scottish battlefield in the 16th century intercut with the wrestling match in the present, MacLeod’s parking garage opponent Fasil (stuntman Peter Diamond) doing backflips, MacLeod enduring extended physical abuse while being driven from his village, and Kurgan licking a priest’s hand. The 116-minute European version of Highlander is the one now available for streaming, while the U.S. version has been relegated to the dustbin of history.

At Fox, these cuts weren’t nearly enough to excite the studio. Peter Davis & William Panzer had struck their distribution arrangement with then vice-chairman Norman Levy, who in September 1984 resigned. Levy alleged that Denver oilman and studio owner Marvin Davis had reneged on promises of a bonus and a 5% ownership stake in Fox, awarding those to chairman Barry Diller. Levy filed a lawsuit, which Fox responded to with discovery motions looking into Levy’s business dealings at the studio, including those with Davis-Panzer Productions. There’s no evidence that Highlander was test screened or performed poorly at those screenings, but Fox punted on the picture. Interviewed for the Projection Booth podcast airing December 6, 2016, Russell Mulcahy responded, “It didn’t do well in the U.S. One, because … have you ever seen the poster? The U.S. poster? It’s probably the worst film poster I’ve ever seen. It looks like a serial killer film, a cheap sort of like, I don’t know what it looks like, it had nothing to do with the film. And then you see the French posters and the other posters and they tell a story, they give you an idea of the genre. That black and white poster killed the film. I think. And the complete zero lack of publicity.”

Fox declined to screen Highlander for critics, opening it March 7, 1986 on 1,040 screens in the U.S. Critical reaction there was strongly negative. Roger Ebert didn’t review the film, but when his television partner Gene Siskel filed a report for the Chicago Tribune, he didn’t pull his punches. “Oh, how one wishes for some human moments in Highlander. If these are indeed the people who are going to save our planet, as the film suggests in quick conclusion, well, maybe it’s a good time to consider buying an acre in Montana or someplace else remote. The Highlanders in this film are the kind of superheroes who would want to make swordsmanship mandatory in grammar school.” He gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four. Walter Goodman, backup film critic at the New York Times, was no more accommodating. “But the movie is not especially funny, and of course it is not serious. What is it? There is no point asking for much of a rationale for this sort of exercise, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with a farfetched premise or with hyped up effects, as long as they make us believe, for a while, that it matters. Since none of the characters makes sense even on the movie’s own terms, Highlander keeps on exploding for almost two hours, with nothing at stake.” Michael Dare with the LA Weekly was brutal. “Mulcahy directs not just like a man who’s only directed rock videos but like a man who’s never seen anything but rock videos. Whenever the music swells, you expect Freddie Mercury to step out from behind a rock. Mulcahy’s a generic von Stroheim, taking time-honored effects and bleeding them out by raising questions and ignoring answers.”

With Pretty In Pink and House atop the box office in their second weekend of release, Highlander opened at #7. By its second weekend, it had fallen out of the top ten. Opening in the U.K. in August 1986, Highlander received a kinder reception from British critics, and in France and Belgium, where Christopher Lambert was a star, box office was far better than it had been in the States. The film’s home video distributor–HBO/ Cannon Video–packaged it as an A-class version of a Chuck Norris or ninja movie, and video is how Highlander caught on in popularity. Investors came running to Davis & Panzer for a sequel. Written by Peter Bellwood and directed by Russell Mulcahy, Highlander 2: The Quickening (1991) reunited Lambert and Connery, but the decision to film it in Argentina (with a British crew arriving soon after the Falklands War) was a fiasco, and Mulcahy was kept out of the editing suite. Highlander 2 alienated nearly everyone familiar with the original, Lambert going as far to promote it as a decent movie, but warning Highlander fans that it wasn’t a sequel. The series should have died a quick death, but fans wanted more. Highlander: The Series debuted in 1992, Adrian Paul playing MacLeod’s clansman Duncan for five seasons in syndication. (Xena: Warrior Princess actually followed on the coattails of Highlander, running for six seasons beginning in 1995). The success of the series spawned a spin-off, Highlander: The Raven, that lasted one season (1998-1999). Christopher Lambert returned for two more feature films, Highlander III: The Sorcerer (1994) and with Adrian Paul for Highlander: Endgame (2000). A short-lived comic book was published in 2006, and many licensed novels followed it.

Highlander was conceived during the peak of the Dungeons & Dragons gaming craze, the success of The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982) and its lavish neighbor Conan the Barbarian (1982) fueling the sword and sorcery sub-genre on the big screen for five years. Most, if not all, of those films boiled down to a well-oiled He-Man swinging a broadsword around a magician named something like Skeletor, this being the foundation of Hasbro’s Masters of the Universe toyline and the animated series that promoted it. By opening in the familiar present, Highlander immediately sets itself apart visually, aligning itself with Anne Rice’s gothic vampire novels more than another B-movie about mazes and monsters. It is half cast superbly. Clancy Brown–who the James Bond producers missed out on booking as a heavy–stabilizes Kurgan as an ancient bad penny and sustains his character through a script that isn’t worthy of Brown and a director who didn’t really care what his character wanted. The goodwill Sean Connery brings to the picture can’t be overstated. Highlander began a fifteen-year wave in which the tide of several movies rose considerably due to Connery’s transition from action hero to mentor. Not many actors other than Morgan Freeman could lay claim to becoming cooler with age, but Connery could. He is the chief reason to see the movie.

The rest of the cast don’t deserve Highlander. Christopher Lambert has a suitably alien quality, but beyond his utility as a model, isn’t a credible film star, unable to rise above whatever material has been given to him. For a few years, his contemporary was Viggo Mortensen, and long before The Lord of the Rings trilogy, he was the sensitive warrior both Greystoke and this series needed. Roxanne Hart comes off more as a department store manager than a sword expert. Her character calls for an athlete/ scholar like Joanna Cassidy. The less said about the actors cast as New York cops–the Dennis Franz school of smug policemen wasn’t consulted–the better. The screenplay spends too much time invested in its police subplot, wasting time considering that the poster has already solved the case for us. Opportunities to explore what abilities an otherwise normal man would develop after 500 years–knowing what people are going to do or say, or having read 500x the number of books–are squandered. The swordfighting is more ridiculous than MacLeod or Ramirez’s accents. The Prize is neither tangible nor ultimately compelling, looking more like whatever possesses Michael Jackson in one of his music videos. The subdued pop music sound by Queen–a clear reflection of Freddie Mercury’s declining health–isn’t simpatico with the hyperkinetic energy Mulcahy injects into his film’s pace.

Video rental category: Fantasy

Special interest: Sword and Sorcery

Thanks to Jonathan Melville, author of A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander, his 2020 book documenting much of the film’s production history that might’ve otherwise been lost to time.

MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN (1992) goes to considerable expense to excavate a existential mood piece out of what is by its nature a ridiculous, old-fashioned romantic thriller—like To Catch a Thief (1955) or North By Northwest (1959)—by way of Industrial Light & Magic. There are moments given to visual splendor, but far from being a fantasy thriller that works, like The Lost Boys (1987), no two people involved in this one seem to have been able to agree on what the movie was about.

Harry Freeman Saint grew up in Pennsylvania. He graduated from a local liberal arts school, Haverford College, in the mid-1960s. Saint’s ambition was to be a writer, and on the press tour for his debut novel twenty years later, he claimed he sold a piece of fiction to Esquire magazine in 1967. After the death of his father, Saint returned to the Keystone State to oversee his family’s real estate interests. A squash player, he bet that the sport was primed to take off in popularity. In 1973, Saint founded St. John Squash Racket. In the intervening years, he opened squash clubs in New York and Washington D.C., changing his company’s name to Town Squash, Inc. The company was owned by his wife’s family, and by 1982, when squash failed to take off, Saint cashed in his shares of Town Squash to pursue his passion. Appearing on NPR’s Fresh Air with guest host Liane Hansen on August 10, 1987, Saint discussed the genesis of his debut novel. “Yes, I think that when I was looking for something to use in this book–having abandoned my business career in order to become a writer–the image came into my mind of a woman embracing a completely invisible man, and the image was so ridiculous and appealing at the same time that I was sure that I had a good idea.”

As reported by Edwin McDowell in the New York Times on January 28, 1987, a year of work by Saint yielded an incomplete manuscript of 150 pages, which the author dangled before several New York publishers. Titled Memoirs of an Invisible Man, it was the first-person account of Nick Halloway, a smart-alecky securities analyst who invites a New York Times reporter named Ann Epstein to what he believes will be a boring press event at a government contractor in New Jersey, where he plots a rustic rendezvous with the lady. The company is doing magnetic field research, and an explosion renders Nick invisible. When agents from a non-government agency arrive, he overhears them discussing the national security benefits of capturing and studying the invisible man, and with the clothes on his back and invisible items he’s able to recover from the plant, goes on the run. Halloway discovers that sleeping without eyelids, descending stairs without feet, or eating foods which remain visible while his invisible digestive tract breaks them down make the life of an invisible man tough, but he is in a position to eavesdrop in corporate boardrooms and make a dollar and a cent as the ultimate inside trader.

One or two publishers returned Saint’s manuscript unopened, but he got interest from Athenum, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, whose editor Tom Stewart offered the debut author a $5,000 advance, half payable on completion of a book. This emboldened Saint to query Georges Borchardt, one of the more respected literary agents in New York. Borchardt negotiated with Athenum to kick in an extra $500 for his new client, and more importantly, foreign and film rights. In December 1985, with Saint three-fifths of the way through a manuscript, Borchardt sensed that Hollywood–where the highest grossing movies of each of the last six years were special effects extravaganzas–might be interested in Memoirs of an Invisible Man. He slipped the unfinished manuscript to Phyllis Levy, director of literary development at William Morris Agency. Levy passed the manuscript up the chain to representation for actor Chevy Chase. The first cast member to depart Saturday Night Live for greener pastures (in 1976), ten years later, Chase was one of the five biggest movie stars on the planet. After a rocky start to a film career, his last three pictures–Fletch, National Lampoon’s European Vacation, Spies Like Us--were all among the fourteen highest grossing films of 1985.

At the height of his prestige in 1986, Chase wanted to star in Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and several studios, including Columbia Pictures, Universal Pictures (which had produced an adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man in 1933, starring Gloria Stuart and Claude Rains) and Warner Bros. Pictures put in bids. Offers climbing at clips of $100,000, Warner Bros.--where Chase and his business manager Bruce Bodner had made Caddyshack (1980), National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) and its sequel, Deal of the Century (1983), and Spies Like Us (1985)--put in the top bid to acquire the film rights to H.F. Saint’s debut novel, for $1.45 million. (Memoirs of an Invisible Man would arrive in bookstores in April 1987 to mostly enthusiastic reviews). Three weeks after William Morris Agency brought the unpublished manuscript to Chase, the star jumped ship to their rival, Creative Artists Agency. Now dealing with CAA’s co-founder Mike Ovitz, considered by many the most powerful person in Hollywood, Warner Bros. was given little choice on who would be directing Chevy Chase and adapting the screenplay for Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Unsurprisingly, both were CAA clients.

Ivan Reitman had lost some chips he won with Meatballs (1979), Stripes (1981) and Ghostbusters (1984) with a meager entertainment titled Legal Eagles (1986) that had been proposed as a co-starring vehicle for Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray before transitioning into a romantic thriller with Robert Redford and Debra Winger, but Reitman was one of the top comedy directors working. Under Ovitz’s management, screenwriter William Goldman was rehabilitating his entire career. According to his 2000 memoir, Which Lie Did I Tell?, Goldman — a two-time Academy Award winner, for writing Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) and adapting All the President’s Men (1976) — was visited by Ovitz, who courted the screenwriter away from the law firm representing him, and recently, not too well. Goldman had been recused from The Right Stuff (1983) when director Philip Kaufman proposed they make Chuck Yeager, the maverick test pilot who never flew in space, the central figure in a movie about the Mercury astronauts. Goldman hadn’t earned a screen credit since Butch and Sundance: The Early Days (1979), for “based on characters created by.” In 1986, one month into his representation by CAA, the agency offered Goldman the job of adapting Memoirs of an Invisible Man.

Though Goldman had written chase pictures, he’d never dabbled in science fiction, but accepted the gig. Reitman–who as producer of National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978) had come close to landing Chevy Chase to play Otter–had met with the star to discuss Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and Goldman’s agent told them director and lead actor were on the same page. According to Goldman, his first draft was met with encouragement by both Reitman and Chase. The star did trigger an alarm bell when he casually mentioned to Goldman that he hoped the second draft would touch on the “loneliness of invisibility.” In his memoir, the screenwriter admitted that troubled him. “Why? Because my director wanted to do a funny farce with special effects and my star wanted to do a serious, sad drama. I went to my new agents, CAA. ‘Listen to me,’ I told them, ‘There’s going to be a train wreck and I’m in the middle.’ Here’s what they said: ‘Bill, you’ve been away for a while, things are a little bit different. Ivan is represented by us. Chevy is represented by us. It is what we at CAA specialize in. It is called a package. And there will be no train wreck. Just write the script. It will all sort itself out.’ I met with Ivan. ‘Chevy is kind of interested in investigating the loneliness of invisibility,’ I told him. His reply? Total unruffled calm. ‘Let me handle Chevy.’”

Goldman wrote two more drafts, sprinkling dramatic loneliness here or there. He continued, “And do you want to know why? Because Chevy had a valid point. How could you deal with this material without discussing the awful reality of what it would be like if no one could see you? If you were, I guess, the ultimate freak on Earth? But this had to be considered too–Olivier was not playing the lead. Young Brando was not playing the lead. Or Cagney. My truth was this: I had no problem investigating the loneliness of invisibility, I just didn’t want to investigate it with Chevy Chase. Bright as Chevy was, he had not gotten famous playing drunks or scientists or death-row convicts, he had become so playing a goof who had trouble with stairs.” On the strength of William Goldman’s third draft, Ivan Reitman was ready to go into production, to make Memoirs of an Invisible Man his follow-up to Legal Eagles, in theaters for Christmas 1988. Chevy Chase, who in the nearly two years Reitman and Goldman were adapting the novel had made three pictures with diminishing returns–Three Amigos! (1986), Caddyshack II (1987), Funny Farm (1988)--wasn’t thrilled with Goldman’s third draft.

In a lengthy article by Ric Gentry published in the Los Angeles Times on February 23, 1992, Chase stated, “I think my true talents are in making people laugh. And I enjoy that. But there’s a very different side of me, a darker, more morose side that’s never come through and that I feel I need to explore. And one way to do that, I’ve realized, is through the craft of acting.” Chase shared that when Bodner and he had first met with Warner Bros. executive VP Mark Canton and senior VP William Gerber to discuss making Memoirs of an Invisible Man, they were told, “‘You can make this book as long as it’s hilarious.’ In other words, let’s see a real comedy with Chevy Chase invisible. That they’d go for. But my answer was, ‘Read the book and you’ll see it’s not about that.’ So they read the book. And they said, ‘Well, there’s lots of funny parts in it. It’s 450 pages. You take 150 of those pages–funny.’ And my response was, ‘I want to maintain the integrity of the book. I want it to have substance and depth. Where there’s comedy, I’ll have it in there.’ They just sort of looked at me.” Chase explained his misgivings for William Goldman’s script. “Within a page of the character becoming invisible, he was in a taxi looking up women’s skirts. To them, this was a very Chevy Chase film, Clark Griswold becoming invisible. I said, ‘Wait a minute. This isn’t the direction I want to go at all.’”

After spending nearly two years on the project, Reitman and Goldman walked, briskly, into collaborating on Twins (1988). Chase and Bodner would later meet with the screenwriter in an effort to bring him back for more rewrites, but Goldman allegedly got up to leave, telling them, “I’m sorry, but I’m too old and too rich to put up with this shit.” Robert Collector & Dana Olsen were screenwriters who’d met through Olsen’s agent and would partner on five or six scripts over a period of three years. Based on their work on an unproduced script with Steve Zacharias titled The Vulgarians, which Olsen described as a precursor to Borat (2006), Collector & Olsen had signed a production deal with Warner Bros. They met Chevy Chase for uncredited rewrite work on National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989) and worked on a couple of unproduced projects for the star. Switching gears for a director who had experience with action as well as special effects, Chase and Bodner had chosen Richard Donner, as close to a director-in-residency at Warner Bros. — after the success of The Goonies (1985), Lethal Weapon (1987) and Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) — as there could be. Collector & Olsen spent eight months working on three drafts of Memoirs of an Invisible Man for Donner.

While H.F. Saint was able to tell the reader what Nick Calloway was thinking or feeling, showing an audience an empty screen where Chevy Chase was supposed to be just wouldn’t work. At a loss over whether his character would remain invisible after the lab accident, or be visible to the audience occasionally, and if so, when, Donner dropped out of the project. Chase and Bodner started working their way down the list of available directors, more than one of whom raised the same point-of-view concerns Donner had. Then they landed on John Carpenter. In a candid interview by Steve Swires for Starlog magazine published in April 1992, the director admitted, “I ran out of energy after They Live (1988). I wanted to take some time off and figure out where I wanted to go. I was very proud of They Live, but it was extremely difficult to make. I was working in the low budget area, but I had designs on reaching a broader audience. I wasn’t convinced that that was the way to do it.” Carpenter had completed two pictures in a proposed four-picture deal with Alive Films, with Universal Pictures as distributor. Neither Prince of Darkness (1987) or They Live received the financing to realize their potential, and when Alive backed out of a science fiction picture Carpenter wanted to direct titled Victory Out of Time, claims and counterclaims were filed in court.

The co-writer/ director of Halloween (1978), Escape From New York (1981) and The Thing (1982) offered his services as a director-for-hire. Columbia Pictures attached Carpenter to direct a post-apocalyptic action film for Cher titled Pincushion. “We got a great screenplay [by John Raffo and Jeb Stuart] for it. But, for whatever reason, Cher was unwilling to commit to it. I left the project, because I didn’t want to do it unless she was in it. It could have been a real cool picture. Somebody else should still do it.” Carpenter spent far less time developing The Exorcist III with author/ screenwriter William Peter Blatty. “I was on that film for about a week. I read Blatty’s script, which was based on his novel Legion. Up until the ending, it was riveting. And yet, it didn’t quite have it in the end. It got strange, and there was no exorcism. I worked with Blatty, and I realized that he wanted to direct the film. I finally discovered that he wasn’t going to do what I wanted. I respect him, so we decided not to work together.” Memoirs of an Invisible Man seemed unlikely to work out either, but in the summer of 1990, Carpenter visited Chevy Chase on the set of Valkenvania, which would be dumped into theaters by Warner Bros. in February 1991 as Nothing But Trouble.

Carpenter continued, “I always liked Chevy in his movies. I thought I could get a good performance out of him. I first met with him as he was about to start filming Nothing But Trouble. I could tell there was something really wrong. Chevy told me that he hasn’t been particularly proud of his work, especially recently. He feels he has made a lot of shitty movies. Some of them were by his own choice, and some of them he was talked into by the studio. He felt Invisible Man was his chance to make a good film for a change.” Robert Collector & Dana Olsen spent the next eighteen months developing a script with John Carpenter, who’d made something of a chase picture with Starman (1984) and recycled that model again, using North By Northwest (1959) as a touchstone. In an interview by Steve Cooper for the podcast Cooper Talk in January 2020, Olsen stated, “They didn’t know what to do with that one. Chevy, I think–respectably–wanted to stretch a little bit. He’d been a huge box office star for Warner Bros in the eighties, and wanted to do something a little different than Clark Griswold, and so he got this book Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and I think the studio wasn’t sure how to sell it as something other than Clark Griswold. And so ultimately that was a tough project. It was a really good script at one point. I don’t know what the hell happened.”

A production budget of roughly $35 million on the line, including nine months of research and development by Industrial Light & Magic, Warner Bros. was nervous about the picture and anxious about trusting it to Carpenter, who’d gone a while without a commercial hit. Seeking to control the look and feel of Memoirs of an Invisible Man, virtually none of the cast or crew of Carpenter’s previous pictures were welcomed back, exceptions being actor Donald Li from Big Trouble In Little China (in a cameo as a cab driver) and production designer Lawrence G. Paull, tasked with constructing a semi-invisible six-story building on Stage 16 of the Warner Bros. lot. Carpenter worked with ILM visual effects supervisor Bruce Nicholson. The director told Starlog, “Bruce and I watched all the Invisible Man movies, and we picked out what they did and didn’t do well. What John Fulton did for that time is astonishing. He used wire work, and an actor moving around black velvet sets. It was humbling to see how much he accomplished with such primitive technology.” Fifty-five years later, ILM was in the developmental stages of an expensive but state of the art process they referred to as “digital compositing,” scanning film into digital code and manipulating that code via computer. This offered endless applications for shots never before achieved in motion pictures. This would become known the world over as “CGI.”

With Daryl Hannah, Sam Neill and Michael McKean filling out the cast, and Dan Kolsrud producing the film with Bruce Bodner, an 84-day shooting schedule commenced in May 1991, with three weeks on location in San Francisco. Warner Bros. anticipated having the lavish entertainment in theaters for December 1991. Chairman Robert Daly and president Terry Semel convened for a screening of a rough cut in September. What they saw compelled the studio to kick the release date for Memoirs of an Invisible Man back. The reason stated to the Los Angeles Times was that the picture required sophisticated marketing to alert audiences that it wasn’t the usual Chevy Chase funny business. In other words, Warner Bros. didn’t know how to sell what they’d seen. They set a release date of February 28, 1992, on 1,753 screens in the U.S. February was a month in which distributors often dumped films with poor commercial prospects. January was a filmgoing graveyard, as moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas, students returned to school, and bad weather depressed attendance in many markets, but February, August and September saw plenty of dumping too.

Critics panned the picture. Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Gene Siskel commented, “In terms of the invisibility gimmick, the film appears to play fast and loose with when we can and cannot see Chase as well as with when other characters can see him. Obviously, the commercial instinct of wanting the audience to be able to see Chase, as long as he is collecting a big salary, overrode any desire to make a daring entertainment.” He gave the movie one star out of four. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun Times, offered the filmmakers constructive criticism. “How about a movie that was about the real subject of this one: A relationship between a man who can see a woman, and a woman who cannot see a man? What would they really talk about? What unsettling or intriguing sexual possibilities might there be? Daryl Hannah, who is onscreen some of the time all by herself (talking to Chase’s disembodied voice) makes as much of such opportunities as she can, and has fun with the cosmic absurdity of her situation. But the movie doesn’t help her much.” Ebert pinned on two and a half stars out of four. Eric Lindbom panned the movie in LA Weekly. “With horror pro John Carpenter directing, this adaptation of H.F. Saint’s story was positioned as that nihilistic, adult comic-book movie that Hollywood has flirted with (Darkman, Batman, TV’s Flash) but never quite delivered. Alas, Memoirs doesn’t even come close, and with Carpenter operating on a no-gore leash, the movie also fails to thrill.” Memoirs of an Invisible Man opened a distant second behind Wayne’s World, then in its third weekend of release. It was surrounded by new movies with big stars (Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Medicine Man, Final Analysis) whose studios had diminished hopes for. For its third weekend in release, Warner Bros. pulled Memoirs of an Invisible Man from almost 400 theaters.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man exceeds expectations when it comes to its lowest bar: employing state of the art visual effects to depict an invisible character. Using tools that Topper (1937) couldn’t dream of, Carpenter, Collector & Olsen, and visual effects supervisor Bruce Nicholson play with a grab bag of tricks. The invisible man inhaling tobacco smoke into briefly visible lungs is striking, and in its standout sequence, he strips out of his clothes while running through Huntington Park in San Francisco. The movie gets some laughs when Chase’s invisible man uses a drunk to hail a cab, and later, overwhelmed by his situation, projectile vomits. For students of visual effects, or the history of CGI, the picture is a must-see. The writers seem to have paid a sufficient amount of thought to the predicaments of invisibility and were ready for a comic star capable of doing pratfalls–someone like Chevy Chase in his prime–to take on the challenge of tripping down stairs because he can’t see his feet, or slamming into doors because he can’t see his hands.

Relocating the action of the novel from the Big Apple to the Bay Area, Memoirs of an Invisible Man starts to go wrong by going moody. In an attempt to get an author’s voice onto the soundtrack, the filmmakers employ voice-over narration by Chase, but instead of wry observation, upload a downcast mood reminiscent of a seedy detective film. John Carpenter’s gifts as a filmmaker communicate quite well how rough it would be to live invisibly, making the voiceover null and void. Chevy Chase, the right star to play the film for physical comedy, is the wrong star to elicit sympathy in an existential drama, at his best when being a know-it-all jerk. Even in the Vacation movies, the characters we sympathize with are those suffering from Clark Griswold’s ineptitude, not Clark. Chase’s desire to stretch while admirable, is awkward at best, and his love scenes with Daryl Hannah are as creepy as those opposite Cindy Morgan in Caddyshack (1980). Tom Hanks or Jeff Bridges would’ve been ideal casting in Reitman or Carpenter’s versions, a likable leading man whose circumstance isolates him from his friends. The cinematography by master of light William A. Fraker is striking, ILM’s visual effects impeachable, and Shirley Walker, who’d work mostly in TV and reunite with Carpenter to compose the music for Escape From L.A. (1996), turns in a workmanlike score with shades of Hitchcock. Removing these technical elements, there’s as little left to hang a hat on as the invisible man’s head.

Video rental category: Science Fiction

Special interest: Man On the Run

BILL & TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989) is a comedy in which suburban teenagers are promoted to the unlikely role of diplomat when they travel through time, and though it’s not the same movie as Back to the Future (1985), it’s a better movie in many ways. One has funnier jokes, better performances, less repetition, depicts the bygone as something other than a television sitcom, teaches us about history, and is wrapped in a positive message. The film that does that isn’t the one that topped the box office for months, but nearly went straight to cable TV.

Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon met in January 1981 on the campus of the University of California Los Angeles. They were enrolled together in a playwriting course. Matheson was from L.A., the youngest of three children of Richard Matheson, author of I Am Legend and A Stir of Echoes who adapted several of his short stories into some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone, namely Little Girl Lost and Nightmare At 20,000 Feet. Solomon was from Boston. According to legend, at the age of 8, he wrote a letter to NBC, c/o Laugh-In, with his sketch comedy ideas and a suggestion for the show to air later so he could finish his homework before it was on. Solomon received a letter seeking permission to submit the boy’s jokes to the writing staff, but Solomon’s parents refused. Relocating to Southern California, he did morning announcements and hosted his high school variety show. Within a week of arriving at UCLA, Solomon participated in an open-mic night at the Comedy Store. The response to his joke repertoire was so ecstatic, Solomon considered dropping out of college to make a living as a stand-up comedian. Inviting friends to his set the following week, the response was so cold that Solomon not only stayed in school but chose economics as his major.

Matheson & Solomon discovered they shared a sense of humor and taste in movies, Blazing Saddles (1973) and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1974) representing their gold standard as far as writing: crude or hastily thrown together and very silly. They joined the UCLA Comedy Club, which hadn’t existed when they arrived on campus. Jim Birge, a theater arts guest lecturer, rented a theater on Sunset Boulevard to gather students once a week–no audience–to simply workshop material. Performing for a paying crowd, the troupe anchored their amateur bits with one professional headliner, like Bruce Baum or Garry Shandling, the latter of whom told Solomon he had two good jokes and asked the UCLA senior if he’d be interested in writing with him. Solomon graduated in 1982, and Shandling’s recommendation got him a job on the writing staff of the sitcom Laverne & Shirley. Matheson enrolled in graduate school in San Diego. The two remained active in the UCLA Comedy Club, and one night in 1983, Matheson suggested an improv about two teenagers discussing history despite knowing absolutely nothing about it. Matheson’s improv with Solomon had their characters cramming for an exam, while one of their dads kept coming in to ask them to turn down their stereo.

In their improv, Matheson & Solomon referred to each other as “Bill” and “Ted.” Still an econ major, Solomon hadn’t lost the comedy bug, writing jokes for Jimmie Walker, as well as plays. Matheson recalled, “After I went off to grad school, Ed and I were talking on the phone and cracking up about the idea that these guys had gone back in history, and through sheer bumbling, were responsible for everything bad that ever happened to mankind, including the Plague, world wars, the Titanic. The implications of that were a little dark, however, such as the Holocaust, but we got a big kick out of sending them back into history. We were going to write a sketch film, with this as one of the skits, but my dad said, ‘That sounds like a whole movie.’” Matheson & Solomon spent seven days in Lake Tahoe sketching an outline for their script, then returned to Los Angeles for four days of binge writing–much of it at a Ships Coffee Shop–where they completed a draft by hand. They’d fleshed out Bill and Ted somewhat, but the characters didn’t really have defined personalities, their education-challenged dialogue mostly interchangeable.

Dividing the manuscript, Matheson and Solomon each typed up their portion to produce a working draft. Solomon recalled, “[The first draft] was called Bill & Ted’s Time Van and had most of what the movie has, although there were some significant changes. Rufus was a twenty-seven year old high school sophomore and drove a van that traveled through time for no reason we cared to explain, probably because we didn’t know how. It seemed to blow a hole in the reality of the film, so to fix that we had an idea that made us laugh: What if seven hundred years from now, their music literally saves the world? We then switched the title to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.” Matheson & Solomon’s first draft would be dated September 15, 1984. Solomon’s agent so disliked the script that he refused to send it out for submission, and when Solomon proposed that maybe he should be working with someone who believed in him, the agency dropped him as a client. David Greenblatt, an agent at ICM who’d offered to represent Solomon out of UCLA, loved the script, and stepped in to rep Matheson & Solomon. Within two months, he had an offer for them.

Richard Matheson had gotten a copy of his son’s script to Stephen Deutsch, producer of the film adaptation of Matheson’s novel Bid Time Return, produced as Somewhere In Time (1980) with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour as the leads. Deutsch, who nearly five years later would retain a co-executive producer credit for his services, got the script to Robert W. Cort, a former executive vice-president at Twentieth Century Fox who’d accepted the job as president of Interscope Communications. Ted Field, founder of Interscope Racing, had expanded from Formula One to feature films, and with a watchful eye on the market, Interscope’s first production was a sleeper hit: Revenge of the Nerds (1984). Interscope took Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure off the market, optioning the script for $5,000, with $15,000 for a rewrite and $10,000 for a polish against $105,000 if the movie were made, all split between Matheson & Solomon after taxes and their agent’s ten-percent. An Interscope principal named Scott Kroopf was appointed the project’s producer, with Joel Soisson & Michael S. Murphey, neither much older than Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon, also aboard as producers.

Kroopf recalled, “The script was on the Black List. Everyone around town knew it and loved it, not only for its incredibly goofy, funny quality but for the way Chris and Ed used language to create a whole Bill & Ted speak and unique take on friendship.” Within twenty-four hours of Interscope optioning the script, Kroopf got a call from Warner Bros. Perhaps betting that a teenage time travel picture going into production with Steven Spielberg as its executive producer titled Back to the Future (1985) would be successful, the studio wanted to develop Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Speaking to Eric Goldman for an article in Cultured Pop published February 23, 2024, Ed Solomon recalled, “The first director we met with was this guy named Rick Rosenthal and he had just directed Halloween II (1981). I don’t know why they thought he’d be right for it. We had a meeting with him and he had some ideas. And I remember Chris and I saying we didn’t think those ideas worked. This was the first meeting we had on the script. And he goes, ‘Well, if you don’t like it, we’ll find other writers who do.’” Rosenthal didn’t stick around for long, but Matheson & Solomon discovered that Warner Bros. had plenty of ideas too.

Solomon continued, “We did a series of rewrites, continuously making the script worse, in my opinion. We didn’t know any better, it was our first deal. They kept saying, ‘This is a summer teen movie comedy which will only appeal to kids, so we have to emphasize that.’” Needing a director, Joel Soisson & Michael Murphey suggested an assistant editor on a picture they’d written titled Hambone and Hillie (1983). A graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, Stephen Herek had since broken into directing features with Critters (1986), a competently made Gremlins (1984) rip-off starring Dee Wallace that was better than it needed to be. Speaking to David Weiner for a retrospective in the Hollywood Reporter published February 15, 2019, Herek recalled Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon’s original draft of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. “The story was incredibly laugh-out-loud. They wrote such lovable characters, and their jokes are always a little off-center. I remember a couple of times just belly laughs, although after reading the script I’m going, ‘Wow, this is either going to be a huge hit or a huge flop.’ There was going to be nothing in between, because it was very acute in its jokes and a very specific audience.”

Stephen Herek’s suggestions for the script improved it. “[Originally] it was a van but visually all I could come up with was an image of Scooby Doo. I tried to put a certain believability to it. The idea that there’s these phone lines–the circuits of time–and you can dial a number, connect to a circuit, go through these wires and then boom! You’re spit out into this phone number in time. It felt like it could be a lot of fun but also had a certain logic to it.” [Matheson & Solomon and Herek would all plead ignorance of Doctor Who, the forever-running BBC science fiction series that sent its title character through space and time in an English phone booth. In the U.S., the program was considered more educational than commercial, reruns relegated to public television on weekends at practically midnight]. Herek thought so much of the material and its potential he campaigned Warner Bros. for the budget to make a quality version. This was a fatal misunderstanding of why the studio had hired him: everyone was expected to work cheap. Roughly one year after Back to the Future had opened to blockbuster business over the 1985 Fourth of July weekend, Warner Bros. made the decision to put Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure into turnaround.

Six months later, De Laurentiis Entertainment Group expressed interest in acquiring the project. Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis had taken advantage of labor regulations in North Carolina favorable to him striking ground on a production facility in the city of Wilmington. DEG also saved money on story development, letting major studios like Warner Bros. do that work for them, acquiring scripts in turnaround. De Laurentiis’ daughter Raffaella De Laurentiis, producer of Conan the Destroyer (1984) and Dune (1984) and president of production at DEG, liked Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and set up a meeting between the filmmakers and her father. According to Joel Soisson, they decided that the only way to pitch the European mogul–an age gap making it unlikely he’d relate to the material and a language gap prohibiting his understanding of it–was to frame their project as a comedy in which Napoleon Bonaparte travels through time. DEG greenlit Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure at a production budget of $8.5 million. (The producers would give a “special thanks” to Raffaella De Laurentiis in the end credits, indicating their debt to her).

During auditions in Los Angeles, Keanu Reeves, who’d been featured in the critically acclaimed River’s Edge (1986) and little else, stood apart with a lovable sort of goofiness that seemed perfect for Bill. Alex Winter, a film student at Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, developed the best rapport with Reeves in auditions, both showing up on motorcycles, both bass players. For Winter, it was just another gig, but also not. The actor recalled, “What struck me at the time was the language. It was very distinct for what was presented as a teen comedy. It wasn’t like other teen comedies–God knows you’d audition for a ton of those. If it wasn’t a John Hughes movie it was a knock-off John Hughes movie and the language was always the same: teens acting like forty-year-olds in therapy. Bill and Ted were very childlike and spoke in this ornate way. That stood out. It was more fun.” Solomon added, “[Alex and Keanu] are really charming, smart and good looking guys. When Chris and I initially wrote the characters we pictured spotty guys with low rider jeans with their boxers sticking out, heavy metal T‑shirts and long hair. What Alex and Keanu brought was a more winning and charming personality, and what they embody that’s crucial to who Bill and Ted are is a benevolence of spirit and positivity. As soon as it was them, it was them.”

To cast Rufus, an emissary from seven hundred years in the future, where Bill & Ted’s music has united the planet, the filmmakers started with the idea of Eddie Van Halen, given that Bill & Ted worshiped the guitarist. Van Halen frontman David Lee Roth was much more comfortable in front of a camera, but his antics didn’t mesh with Reeves and Winter. Ringo Starr got closer to being cast, until Scott Kroopf, who’d just worked with George Carlin as a producer of Outrageous Fortune (1987), reminded everyone how good the stand-up comedian had been in a small role. To play the Three Most Important People in the World in the 27th century, ZZ Top were discussed. In uncredited cameos, saxophonist Clarence Clemons of the E Street Band and vocalists Martha Davis of The Motels and Fee Waybill of The Tubes were cast. Continuing the rock ‘n roll theme, Jane Wiedlin, rhythm guitarist of The Go-Go’s, took the part of Joan of Arc. Filming for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure commenced on February 9, 1987 in the area of Phoenix, Arizona, which stood in for San Dimas, California. Coronado High School in Scottsdale was used for campus exteriors, while interiors were shot at East High School, in Phoenix, which had been shuttered at the time of filming and would be torn down in 2002.

7-Eleven declining to participate in the movie, Circle K stepped in, and for the scene where Bill & Ted meet Rufus, a convenience store in Tempe, at West Southern Avenue at South Hardy Drive served as a filming location. The wild west scenes were shot at now defunct Carefree Studios in Carefree, Arizona. A Chuck E. Cheese in Phoenix stood in for the ice cream parlor “Zyggie’s,” where Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon appeared as obnoxious servers who wait on Napoleon. Temple Village Lanes was used for the bowling alley scene, and “Waterloo,” the water park where Bill & Ted catch up with the conqueror, was shot at Golfland/ Sunsplash in Mesa. The Metrocenter in Phoenix was used to film the mall sequence, standing in for “San Dimas Mall.” Unexpectedly for a low budget film, Dino De Laurentiis had the connections to shoot most of the scenes set in the ancient world in Italy, where cast and crew were flown for the final two weeks of principal photography. The Piazza Venetia in central Rome stood in for ancient Athens, while the medieval sequence was filmed in and around Odescalchi Castle, on Lake Bracciano.

The woes for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure began in earnest when Dino De Laurentiis and executives at DEG were screened a rough cut. DEG was already in dire financial shape after virtually all of their productions–Raw Deal (1986), Maximum Overdrive (1986), Blue Velvet (1986), Tai-Pan (1986), King Kong Lives (1986), From the Hip (1987)--failed to hit at the box office and some landed among the worst reviewed films of the year. In the coming months, Million Dollar Mystery (1987), Near Dark (1987), Hiding Out (1987), Date with an Angel (1987), Illegally Yours (1988) and Pumpkinhead (1988) would bring worse news, each film appealing to fewer moviegoers than the last. The carefree silliness of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure did not land well in the anxious screening room, and in a case of buyer’s remorse, De Laurentiis put the teen comedy up for sale. None of the distributors who got a look at the rough cut thought any more of it than the Italian mogul had, and instead of arriving in theaters in the spring of 1988, the picture ended up in a vault in Wilmington. Cable television was mentioned as a potential destination.

Producer Scott Kroopf went to see Rick Finkelstein, a former executive vice-president at DEG who’d taken a job as president of Nelson Entertainment, a company that had bought the home video division of Embassy Pictures in 1985 and more recently entered into a co-financing deal with Castle Rock Entertainment in exchange for domestic video and foreign distribution rights on their pictures, an upcoming one titled When Harry Met Sally … (1989). Finkelstein had been a champion of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and with Kroopf selling the movie for virtually ten cents on the dollar–$1 million–found a buyer. Nelson was not only willing to provide completion costs for a musical score and visual effects, but through their relationship with Orion Pictures on films like Prancer (1988), arrange theatrical distribution. In post-production, Stephen Herek began to see why distributors may have treated Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure like it was the worst movie ever made. Neither the beginning or ending worked. As scripted and shot, Bill & Ted were introduced at a school bus stop, where they launch into a choreographed air guitar number that continues on their ride to school. Lopping the sequence entirely, Herek gained addition by subtraction. The rough cut concluded with Bill & Ted presenting their history report–Billy the Kid, Socrates, Beethoven, Sigmund Freud, Genghis Khan and Abraham Lincoln in tow with Napoleon and Joan of Arc–to their teacher (Bernie Casey) and a dozen peers in their small classroom. This was capped by the boys attending prom (in shorts) with the princesses (Diane Franklin, Kimberley LaBelle). With Nelson willing to kick in the funds, Herek reshot the ending in an auditorium, turning Bill & Ted’s report into a raucous sound and light show in front of what appears to be two hundred spectators. (The prom scene was dropped).

A test screening for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was booked in the best home field a teen comedy could have: the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Sherman Oaks, California. Ed Solomon claims he was visiting the mall and with no expectation of being recognized as the co-writer, was recruited to attend the screening, a free movie pitched to him as George Carlin helping some boys travel through time. Solomon passed, realizing later his participation in the focus group as a ringer might have helped his own movie get a release. This turned out to be unnecessary. To the surprise of everyone involved in the film, its test scores in Sherman Oaks went through the roof. Certain this was a fluke, Orion scheduled a second screening as far from Southern California as they could get: Secaucus, New Jersey. Those scores were even higher. Buoyed by the results, Orion set Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure for a release on President’s Day weekend, February 17, 1989, in 1,196 theaters. This was almost half the screens Universal Pictures was opening the Tom Hanks comedy The ‘Burbs in, but critics pinned both films with some of the worst reviews of the year. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert didn’t even bother attending a press screening of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

Johanna Steinmetz, Siskel’s substitute in the Chicago Tribune, wrote: “It helps if you think of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure as sort of a Sesame Street for teens. Beneath the self-aggrandizing plot, the rock music, the dudespeak and the humor lurks a smattering of knowledge.” She gave it two stars out of four. Writing for the New York Times, Vincent Canby could barely muster the energy to salvage the comedy. “The one dimly interesting thing about Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is the way the two teenage heroes communicate in superlatives. ‘We are about to fail most egregiously,’ says Ted to Bill, or maybe it’s Bill to Ted. They are also fond of odd words, such as bodacious. Other than that, they are inconsistent ciphers.” Filing a piece for the Los Angeles Times, bench critic Chris Willman chimed in: “Make no mistake. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is not a satire of mindlessness; it’s unabashed glorification of dumbness for dumbness’ sake.” Since John Hughes and all the cast members of the so-called Brat Pack had graduated to pictures aimed mostly at adults, teenagers hadn’t had a good movie that met them where they lived. The Naked Gun (1988), Twins (1988) and Rain Man (1988) were atop the box office, and none featured a teenage character with youthful preoccupations.

Even without Van Halen or ZZ Top, a zest for rock ‘n roll shot through Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and helped sell it, a trailer capped with the moment a medieval monarch instructs his minions to place Bill & Ted in the iron maiden (“Iron Maiden?! Excellent!”). The comedy was a sleeper hit, spending eight weekends among the top ten grossing pictures in the U.S., where Orion expanded the release to 1,321 theaters in its fifth weekend. If DEG had believed in the picture enough to open it in as many theaters as Orion did, it would’ve been the highest grossing film in the history of the company, which filed for bankruptcy in 1989. Bill & Ted launched an animated series (Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, Season 1 of 2 featuring the voices of Reeves, Winter, Carlin and Casey), a Nintendo video game, and with diminishing returns, a short-lived half-hour comedy on Fox also titled Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventures, and a breakfast cereal. Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991), written by Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon, directed by Peter Hewitt but reuniting the cast of the original, was a modest commercial hit, its decision to “kill” the franchise characters and send the boys to hell a creative gamble that didn’t amuse moviegoers as much as it did the cast. Amid speculation that dated back to the dawn of the Internet, a legacy sequel starring Keanu Reeves & Alex Winter and written by Matheson & Solomon, Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020), was finally produced, just in time for the COVID lockdown.

Based on material they developed in their improv club or at coffee shops, it’s not surprising that visual wit is not in abundant supply in Chris Matheson & Ed Solomon’s screenplay, and if it had been, there wouldn’t have been enough money in the budget to realize it. As a result, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure gets off to a middling start, like a bargain Back to the Future that takes the Jeff Spicoli (Sean Penn) character from Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and sands down his edges, leaving us language and attitude. The more time we spend with Bill & Ted, though, the more the movie shuffles in a direction that distinguishes it from the ‘80s movies that mixed teenagers and science. Rather than tech, the childlike yearning of Bill & Ted becomes the fuel that propels them on their journey through time, not unlike sexual lust sending the Christopher Reeve character into the past in Somewhere In Time. Chris Matheson’s take on time travel is more playful than his father’s, and the film is loaded with laughs (one nugget is Bill & Ted referring to Socrates as “So-Crates,” Bill quoting the Greek philosopher from their textbook, “The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing!” to which Ted replies, “That’s us, dude”).

While it’s easy to get their characters confused, Keanu Reeves brings an infectiously endearing, puppy quality to Bill, while as Ted, Alex Winter is jumpier, more like a cat, disgruntled over being reminded by his bosom buddy what a babe his stepmother Missy (Amy Stock-Poynton) is. They make a winning comic duo, ironic considering Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey would be the last time either actor was trusted in a comedy. Just as Matheson & Solomon improvise their way from scene to scene, Stephen Herek adapts to the limitations he was dealt, overcoming a shortage of substantial moments between Bill & Ted and the historical figures they stuff into their phone booth. What the comedy does is teach us things about each figure. This is a departure from Back to the Future, in which the lesson Marty McFly takes from the past is that he can steal Chuck Berry’s act. This movie, as unsophisticated it is, has a kinder, deeper message behind it. Instead of suggesting that time travel could help us acquire material goods or an upper middle class lifestyle, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure arrives on being excellent to each other as its major takeaway. Rather than settle for Abraham Lincoln telling us this, the characters of Bill & Ted embody this spirit of good will, refusing to blame anyone for their grades or failing to rock like Eddie Van Halen. While the sequel would give Bill & Ted the world building and supporting cast they warranted, the boys learn something in their first outing, and in a happy accident, so do we.

Video rental category: Comedy

Special interest: Weird Science

Thanks to Bill & Ted’s Excellent Online Adventure, a bodacious fan site that fills in much of the film’s production history

NINE ½ WEEKS (1986) is exquisitely lit and decorated theater with no show to put on. It’s photographed as well as a feature film can be, and under the circumstances–its depiction of a sadomasochistic relationship, with strong sexual content–is cast as well as it probably could’ve been, with two actors who felt they had a lot to prove, going for broke along with their director. The material so upset test audiences that the final version presented to American theatergoers is honed as if by a backhoe, leaving open graves where its story or characters should be.

In a time when a writer could publish anonymously and keep their personal life out of the public eye, much about Ingeborg Day remains unreported. An article by Sarah Weinman published November 2012 in the New Yorker fills in some details about her life. Day was born in Graz, the capital city of the southern Austrian province of Styria, in 1940. Two years earlier, her father, like the rest of his colleagues in the Austrian police, were inducted into the SS. At the age of seventeen, Day made her way to the States to participate in a one-year study abroad program in Syracuse, New York sponsored by the American Field Service. In 1960, she married an American studying to be an Episcopal priest. They settled in Indiana, where Day earned a B.A. in German studies from Goshen College and spent the next several years teaching. Their daughter was born in 1963, but the death of their infirm son at the age of seven took a heavy toll on Day. She met an artist named Tom Shannon who was also living in the Midwest and left her husband, relocating her daughter and herself to Manhattan with her lover.

Day spent four years as an editor at Ms., the magazine co-founded by Gloria Steinem, and it was during this period–whether she was still in a relationship with Shannon is unclear–that she met a man who exploited her desire to be dominated sexually. Their tryst lasted nine and a half weeks, and there is evidence Day admitted herself to a mental institution to seek treatment for what had led her to the arrangement in the first place. Day’s experience served as the basis for a book she published in 1978 titled Nine and a Half Weeks: A Memoir of a Love Affair. Rather than market it as fiction, Day and her publisher Henry Robbins/ Dutton maintained the story was real, and for the next five years, the author would be known by the name of her narrator, “Elizabeth McNeill.” She published a memoir, Ghost Waltz, under that pen name in 1980, but Day would never publicly address her pseudonym, or comment about the movie version of Nine and a Half Weeks. She remarried, to a man whose care she provided for late in his life, and struggling with her own health, took her life at age 70. Her husband passed away four days later.

Zalman King was a modestly successful American television actor, working his way up to a series regular on the short-lived ABC drama The Young Lawyers in 1970. Like many in Los Angeles, what King really wanted to do was direct, and his sculptor wife Patricia Louisianna Knop was willing to help. In an article by Pat Broeske published February 23, 1986 in the San Francisco Chronicle, Knop admitted she didn’t share her husband’s passion for Nine and a Half Weeks, not at first. “I found it frightening–what that woman went through. But we kept talking about it, and I became more fascinated. Also, I couldn’t believe all the excitement the book was causing. There was so much anger about it.” Not long after the book was published, Knop & King optioned the film rights to Nine and a Half Weeks and adapted a screenplay together. In an interview with Psychotronic magazine in the summer of 1992, King discussed his big break behind the camera. [The film would be referred to in print as 9 ½ Weeks, while its opening credits would bestow it Nine ½ Weeks.] King declared, “9 ½ Weeks was an obsession. I read the book and wrote the screenplay with Pat. I also intended to direct. Everybody loved it. At the risk of sounding conceited, it really was an excellent script, and everybody wanted to make it, but we’d get right down to the wire and they’d pull away. So getting it made was an obsession for me. I knew it would be successful. I was positive it was something people wanted to see. A lot of my friends put up a lot of money, and, at a certain point, I had to make a decision.”

King had lassoed a British producer of commercials and feature films named Antony Rufus-Isaacs to produce Nine ½ Weeks with him, and they got their script to Adrian Lyne. The director had spent the 1970s making commercials–for clients like Levi Strauss–that were more exciting than most of the television they were sponsoring and a lot of the movies. Lyne made his leap to feature film directing Jodie Foster, Cherrie Curie (lead vocalist of the punk band The Runaways), and Scott Baio in an American teen exploitation titled Foxes (1980). To the astonishment of many, audiences–young women mostly–propelled Lyne’s sophomore effort to blockbuster status. Starring an unknown named Jennifer Beals, Flashdance (1983) sold more tickets than any movie released that year not titled Return of the Jedi or Terms of Endearment. Its soundtrack album was an equally huge seller. Permitted to bring in Keith Barish, producer of Endless Love (1981) and Sophie’s Choice (1982), to advocate for him as an executive producer, Lyne turned down an offer to direct a film adaptation of the stage musical A Chorus Line in favor of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel. King continued, “After Flashdance, Adrian Lyne was very hot and he expressed interest in directing 9 ½ Weeks. I figured that if a director who’d just come off a mega-million dollar hit, people would probably be willing to take a chance on 9 ½ Weeks and I was right.”

When it came time to cast John, the investment banker who Elizabeth enters a sadomasochistic relationship with, King suggested to Lyne they consider Mickey Rourke. Impressed by the actor’s work in Rumble Fish (1983), Lyne agreed. This pairing of director and leading man snared the commitment of TriStar Pictures, a newly formed risk-sharing partnership between Columbia Pictures (then owned by Coca-Cola), CBS, and HBO. Director Sydney Pollock had been commissioned by the nascent studio as a production consultant and after championing their inaugural production The Natural (1984), did so again with Nine ½ Weeks. To fill the role of Elizabeth, both Teri Garr and Kathleen Turner interviewed with Lyne, while model/ actors Kim Basinger and Isabella Rossellini submitted auditions on tape. Basinger had popped on screen in Never Say Never Again (1983) and The Man Who Loved Women (1983) and was getting notice for a photoshoot she’d done for Playboy magazine in 1981 that hit newsstands in February 1983, with a golden-haired Basinger gracing the cover as well as the centerfold.

In a detailed account by Nina Darnton published in the New York Times on March 9, 1986 chronicling Basinger’s experiences on the show, the actor recounted leaving her audition for Nine ½ Weeks in tears, feeling humiliated rehearsing a scene for Lyne and Rourke in which Elizabeth is ordered by John to roleplay a prostitute, with John as her john. Basinger claimed she told her agent she wanted nothing more to do with the project and wouldn’t accept a role in it. When Lyne did pursue her to accept the role of Elizabeth, Basinger came to view the job as a challenge. “I knew if I got through this it would make me stronger, wiser. I was going against my total grain. I felt disgust, humiliation, but when you go against your grain you just know that emotions you never knew you had will surface.” One of Lyne’s instructions to Rourke and Basinger was that he didn’t want them speaking to each other again prior to the start of production. The director explained his methods to the New York Times. “She needed to be scared of him. If they went out and had coffee together, we’d lose that edge.” Lyne wanted to bottle the sexual energy and hostility he’d observed in rehearsals. “After that, I didn’t want them to meet again until they began work. I didn’t want them to have any relationship that would exclude me. I wanted to have the ten weeks of shooting of the movie be like the nine and a half weeks of the relationship.”

Patricia Knop & Zalman King no longer involved with Nine ½ Weeks as writers, Lyne and associate producer Steven Reuther had commissioned a male screenwriter to dial in changes Lyne wanted to incorporate. Turning in his draft three days before TriStar had deadlined them for a script, Lyne was distraught by the liberties their new screenwriter had taken with the material. Reuther contacted a writer he knew named Sarah Kernochan and offered her a weekend of work. Kernochan had written a highly regarded spec script titled The Psychic about a woman who utilizes her ESP ability to manipulate a client into loving her, and when that fails, resorts to stalking him. Kernochan was commissioned to take shreds that Lyne and Reuther were cutting from their scripts and write connective material that would allow them to paste together a coherent script. Lyne was so impressed with Kernochan’s work that he added her to the payroll, and her contributions led to a screen credit, her first: screenplay by Patricia Knop & Zalman King and Sarah Kernochan, based on the novel by Elizabeth McNeill. With cameras set to roll on April 16, 1984 in New York, TriStar sought relief for a serious case of buyer’s remorse, making the decision to place the project in turnaround. The studio took the risk of having to pay Lyne, Rourke and Basinger a sum of $4 million not to make Nine ½ Weeks, not for TriStar. The studio’s CEO, Victor Kaufman, made the decision to pull the plug.

In an article by Dale Pollock published in the Los Angeles Times on April 24, 1984, an anonymous senior executive at TriStar stated, “Part of our philosophy is to rely on the filmmaker and let him make his own picture. Rather than get into an adversary relationship with this director, we decided to put the film into turnaround.” Lyne clarified, “TriStar wanted to do a movie about two rare birds in paradise, which I never really understood. I wanted it to have more humanity and be less of an art movie. I wanted it to be something audiences in Ohio could really see in terms of themselves.” Keith Barish tried to allay concerns that Nine ½ Weeks was toxic material. “It’s not whips and chains and cigarette burns. It’s really a psychological love story between two obsessive people, one of whom is continually pushing the other to the limit. We think it could be a breakthrough movie.” To raise financing before they had to send their entire cast and crew home, Barish put in a call to producer Mark Damon, chairman of Producers Sales Organization, a company Damon had co-founded in 1977 to sell American films to international distributors. Looking to expand from distribution to production, PSO had merged with the Delphi limited partnership companies to launch a five-year, $350 million slate of their own films, which would get off to a disastrous start with The Clan of the Cave Bear (1986), Nine ½ Weeks (1986) and 8 Million Ways To Die (1986).

One of Damon’s financiers was Sidney Kimmel, who’d started as an inventory clerk in the garment industry before founding Jones New York, a clothing line catering to fashion-savvy professional women. Kimmel’s first roll of the dice as a movie producer would be Nine ½ Weeks, but Mark Damon–credited as one of the film’s four producers with Zalman King, Antony Rufus-Isaacs and Sidney Kimmel–had already been selling Nine ½ Weeks in Japan and other international markets, and would raise most of the budget overseas. Though MGM agreed to distribute the picture domestically, its financing tree would prompt Sarah Kernochan to point out that Nine ½ Weeks was more of a European film than American one. Impressively, principal photography was underway two weeks after the original start date, on April 30, 1984. Manhattan was mined for locations. Elizabeth (improbably) walks to work on the Lower East Side under the Williamsburg Bridge, on Delancey Street South. The art gallery where she works was found on the corner of Spring Street/ Mercer Street. The Chinese grocery store where Elizabeth first sees John was shot in a working Chinese market on Canal Street/ Bayard Street, while the flea market where they speak to each other for the first time was the Chelsea Market, then held in a parking lot between 25th Street and 26th Street in the Chelsea neighborhood.

Suerken’s Restaurant, a historic German bar in Lower Manhattan long since gone, was used to film Elizabeth and John’s lunch date. Also lost in the past was H. Kauffman & Sons Saddlery Co, where the couple shop, despite not being very interested in horses (the tack shop was founded in 1875 and held on until 1996). The houseboat John takes Elizabeth to was shot at the 79th Street Boat Basin on the Hudson River. The Subway Arcade, Wonder Wheel and Boardwalk West in Coney Island were all used as locations for the couple’s date. The film’s most memorable location was the Clock Tower Building, found in the Tribeca neighborhood. Seeking to capture a relationship as close to real time as he could, Lyne had insisted Nine ½ Weeks be filmed in continuity, at least roughly. Mickey Rourke’s decision to stay in character–an aloof Wall Street operator who wraps a gorgeous woman around his finger–for ten weeks might have qualified as more vacation than work, while Basinger’s decision to match Rourke by living with her character–a vulnerable divorcée who falls under the control of a powerful man–took a toll on her health, as well as the health of her marriage, to Ron Snyder-Britton, a painter she’d met while she was an actor and he was a makeup artist on the movie Hard Country (1981).

On the set, director Adrian Lyne often communicated to Kim Basinger through Mickey Rourke, leaving her in the dark and left to react to whatever Rourke did with her. Interviewed by Seth Abramovitch for an article in the Hollywood Reporter printed February 12, 2015, Lyne stated that to throw her off, Rourke would crank “Rebel Yell” by Billy Idol at full volume before cameras rolled. Basinger would not only survive the job, but later take home an Academy Award for her first and only nomination, winning the Oscar for Best Actress in L.A. Confidential (1997). Twelve years previous, American audiences were not spellbound by Nine ½ Weeks, not at test screenings. Zalman King joked, ”When the film was done, it got worse. We would have test screenings where there were a thousand people in the theater and a hundred when it was over. People were walking out in droves.” Speaking to the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Lyne added, “When we previewed it, people were absolutely enraged. Sometimes half the theater would empty, and they’d be yelling at the screen. There was one occasion when it was actually frightening–I was sitting there with a line of sweating executives and I went and hid in the projection box. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t want to be there at the end.’”

As scripted and shot, Nine ½ Weeks was to climax with Elizabeth entering what she believes is a suicide pact with John, popping pills with him, not being given a safe word or understanding the pills contain only sugar. The sick game is what finally motivates her to leave him. As for test audiences, Lyne told the New York Times in 1986, “It made them hate him too much. They hated John for doing it. They hated Elizabeth for accepting it. They hated me for making it. It made them hate the whole film.” The scene would be cut from both the American and European versions of Nine ½ Weeks. As of June 2, 1985, when Patrick Goldstein covered the film’s post-production woes for an article in the Los Angeles Times, MGM had yet to set a release date. Geffen Records had backed out of producing the soundtrack album, A&R rep John Kolodner set to assemble the artists. He was candid about his decision to quit the job. “Speaking just for myself, I found the movie to be offensive to women and I just didn’t want to be associated with the picture. I don’t care if the movie makes $100 million. I’ve washed my hands of the whole thing. I think Adrian is very talented and I respect his work, but I just couldn’t see having my name on this picture. Some people may find it titillating, but it made me nauseous.”

The more time the filmmakers took to trim and test versions of Nine ½ Weeks that would be palatable to theatergoers, the budget not only increased (to as much as $15 million), but music supervisor Becky Mancuso’s job became harder. Selecting and clearing the music for Footloose (1984), The Sure Thing (1985) and Real Genius (1985), her task now, as she explained to the Los Angeles Times, sounded more like triage. “A lot of the scenes that would have had logical places for music have been cut out, so it’s hard to say whether we have enough music slots left for an album. Originally, we had at least eight music slots and now we’re down to about five, and they’re still falling by the wayside.” Speaking to Pop Geeks in 2019, screenwriter Sarah Kernochan offered her appraisal of Nine ½ Weeks. “I never really liked it. I mean, I thought it was a bunch of wonderful set pieces, and was very erotic. I thought it achieved that aim, but I didn’t think, as a story, that it was strong … As a feminist also, I didn’t love it. It was quite demeaning, but on the other hand, I like that it was exploring this side of women who seem like they’ve got it together, but they have a side that wants to be dominated, and the book was very frank about that. I admired it, but it wasn’t a movie that I liked in particular.”

MGM settled on sneaking Nine ½ Weeks into limited release in the U.S. on February 21, 1986. February was a month in which distributors often dumped films with poor commercial prospects. January was regarded as a filmgoing graveyard, as moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas, students returned to school, and inclement weather depressed attendance in many markets, but February, August and September saw plenty of dumping too. Critical reaction to Nine ½ Weeks ran the gamut. In a review Roger Ebert filed for the Chicago Sun-Times, the journalist wrote, “Any story like 9 ½ Weeks risks becoming very ridiculous. The actors are taking a chance in appearing in it. Plots like this make audiences nervous, and if the movie doesn’t walk a fine line between the plausible and the bizarre, it will only find the absurd. A lot of the success of 9 ½ Weeks is because Rourke and Basinger make the characters and their relationship convincing.” Ebert, who interviewed Mickey Rourke for a piece nationally syndicated in March, gave the film three and a half stars out of four. Vincent Canby pulled no punches in his review for the New York Times. “Mr. Lyne may be onto something, though I doubt he has a clue as to what it is. Flashdance only scratched the surface of his singular vision. In 9 ½ Weeks, he has created a work that might well qualify as a truly nouveau film. Here is a movie in which actors impersonating characters are blended into the decor so completely that they take on the properties of animated products, no more or less important than exquisitely photographed strawberries. John and Elizabeth aren’t fictional creatures. They are those giant figures that model Calvin Klein underwear on Times Square billboards.”

Author/ critic F.X. Feeney chimed in for L.A. Weekly. “Kim Basinger has a gift (and a beauty) comparable to Liv Ullmann’s in her Persona prime–she projects a sense that she can survive anything precisely because she surrenders so vulnerably, so completely to the demands of a given moment. Alas, like Rourke’s, her performance here seems to have had its guts cut out. We never get a sense of what this woman’s real hungers and conflicts are–or for that matter, whether she’s conflicted about anything at all.” At the box office, Nine ½ Weeks opened quietly against a handful of crowd-pleasing hits: Down and Out In Beverly Hills, F/X, Hannah and Her Sisters. Its commercial prospects were killed the following weekend, when Pretty In Pink opened and held the #1 spot at the box office for two weekends, American audiences voting with their wallets how they preferred their movie romances. The R-rated, 113-minute version of Nine ½ Weeks that played in American theaters (and is now available for streaming) was supplemented by an unrated, 116-minute cut that played for European theatergoers with, in one scene, slightly more explicit sexual content. Europeans not only turned out for Nine ½ Weeks, but did so in enough numbers for the film to perform better commercially in Europe than in the States, at that time, a rarity for an English-language picture.

By 1992, Zalman King had not only carved out a niche for himself as a maker of erotic thrillers, but dominated that niche, as co-writer/ director of Two Moon Junction (1988), co-writer (with Patricia Knop)/ director of Wild Orchid (1989) starring Mickey Rourke, and co-writer (with Knop)/ director of a cable television movie for Showtime with an actor named David Duchovny in the lead titled Red Shoe Diaries (1992). The latter launched an anthology series airing after hours, when the prying eyes of America’s children were supposed to be shut. King observed that Americans who’d rejected a movie about sadomasochism in theaters could rent a copy on videocassette and enjoy it in the privacy of their own homes, which many did. Of Nine ½ Weeks, King told the magazine, “It was written off as a failure. But the film was harder, and better then [sic], for an American film it was really good. After the screenings it got progressively more and more watered down until it became another kind of film.” Wrapping production, Adrian Lyne spoke to Roderick Mann for an article published July 15, 1984 in the Los Angeles Times, and set the table for his film by stating, “In the original story, the woman would do absolutely everything for the man. And there was a lot of S&M with handcuffs, whips and the like. I didn’t want it like that; I didn’t want the woman to be a victim. I wanted these two people to behave as they do because of their overwhelming passion for each other. So much so that people leaving the theater will perhaps examine their own relationships and not just think, ‘I wouldn’t want to know them.’ After all, a lot of people do harbor the sneaking feeling that one day someone could come along who’d so overwhelm them that they’d drop everything. That’s what this film is all about.”

There were two doors Adrian Lyne could’ve opened with Nine ½ Weeks, and either might’ve revealed a story, perhaps even a compelling one. Door #1 would’ve been to fashion Elizabeth McNeill in the guise that author Elizabeth McNeill was presented to readers: a corporate executive, ten years removed from college, someone whose professional success has left her empty and susceptible to surrendering control to a dominant man, even in ways that become harmful. Given the strong sexual content, it’s unlikely a boss leading lady like Sigourney Weaver or Meryl Streep would’ve been interested if they were even available, which leads to Door #2. That would’ve been to depict Elizabeth as a post-graduate, whose drive to compete with men in the business world has been recently forged. She meets a man whose need to dominate women should repel her, but instead, she finds herself unable to live without him, leading two lives until one of them breaks. There are glimpses of that film in the one Lyne was allowed to make, but Nine ½ Weeks has been sharpened down to a pitiful nub where it matters most. It’s missing too many scenes, some of which were written, others shot.

One of those missing scenes needed Elizabeth to introduce John to her friends. Christine Baranski would’ve been good as a condescending mentor, and the end credits reveal that she’s actually in the movie, fifth billed (behind Margaret Whitton and David Marguiles as Elizabeth’s co-worker and boss, respectively). Baranski’s performance has been left almost entirely on the cutting room floor. For a movie about time, the chronology of Elizabeth and John’s relationship is confusing. They go from a casual lunch to holding hands to undressing in front of each other to having sex, as if reels had been loaded backwards. The casting doesn’t really fit the picture Lyne is trying to make. Mickey Rourke is sexually charismatic, but not in the way Zalman King or Lyne seem to think. The danger is your eighteen-year-old daughter staying out late with Mickey Rourke, not your boss. For a man a woman like Elizabeth would take a two and a half hour executive lunch to be thrown around by, Scott Glenn or James Remar would’ve been ideal, the courser, the better. In terms of location scouting and lighting, Nine ½ Weeks does look every bit as dazzling as Flashdance. This was a time in cinema when two other directors whose background was British commercials–Ridley Scott and Tony Scott–were in friendly competition with Lyne as to who could light a set more evocatively.

With Blade Runner (1982) and The Hunger (1983) as his visual comps, Nine ½ Weeks has Lyne making a case for having the best eye among his competition. Using Manhattan as a backlot, he has some of the most photogenic alleyways in North America at his disposal, and is determined to portray sexual activity anywhere but a bed. That’s commendable, and the U.S. needed an unapologetically kinky movie in the mid-eighties, but in an effort to cut everything that was distasteful to test audiences, the end product has been reduced to a sizzle reel. Kim Basinger’s goofiness was sporadically put to use in film, mostly in mediocre comedies by veteran directors, like Blind Date (1987), Nadine (1987) and My Stepmother Is An Alien (1988). Her performance in Nine ½ Weeks has been shrunken to a plastic doll, like Loni Anderson’s character on the sitcom WKRP In Cincinnati without any one-liners. We don’t learn Elizabeth is divorced until nearly 90 minutes into the film, when her co-worker reveals she slept with her ex-husband and the sad bastard shows up at Elizabeth’s office. Half of the curated soundtrack is terrific–”This City Never Sleeps” by The Eurythmics and “Slave To Love” by Bryan Ferry drip with modern desire and seem like they were written for the film–while the track played over the opening credits–”The Best Is Yet To Come” by Luba–frame the movie as a plucky urban female empowerment comedy, as if someone thought the music would prevent walkouts in the first ten minutes.

Video rental category: Drama

Special interest: Fatal Attraction

THE KING OF COMEDY (1983) towers over almost any other film about a fictional artist trying to bust into show business. The dark side of A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976 or 2018), this black comedy is palpable for two reasons. The filmmakers create an act for their entertainer that’s virtually good enough to be a real act. And they make us feel every pained, reality-challenged step he takes toward achieving his dream. Its commentary on the fanaticism that lurks around fame has grown more relevant in the years since the film escaped into theaters.

Paul D. Zimmerman graduated from Scarsdale High School in Westchester County, New York and (with a degree in journalism) from Amherst College. By the age of thirty, he was film critic for Newsweek magazine and a published author, co-writing a book on the Marx Brothers (The Marx Brothers at the Movies, with Burt Goldblatt) and two books about sports (The Year the Mets Lost Last Place and The Open Man, with Dick Schaap). The year the latter was on bookstands, Zimmerman had an idea for a screenplay. On NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross airing September 28, 1982, the author/ screenwriter explained, “Well, I got the idea in 1970. I got it in a combination of things. I read a piece in Esquire where a guy kept a diary of the talk show hosts, and he wrote about them as if they were his buddies. Then I saw on David Susskind’s show, he had autograph hunters, and I thought, ‘What if an autograph hunter thought one of these talk show hosts was a buddy?’ And I also had vague notions of assassination and other things that have held up, unfortunately too well over the period.”

In the late 1960s, Dick Cavett, Merv Griffin and Johnny Carson cast a long shadow over pop culture as hosts of television talk shows, programs which Zimmerman’s wife Barbara referred to as “cocktail parties without drinks.” Her husband crafted his fictional talk show host–which he named “Jerry Langford” from the start–with Dick Cavett as his model. In 1971, Newsweek promoted Zimmerman to general editor of their movie section. Between attending film screenings and rubbing elbows with those more conscious of Zimmerman’s influence than he was, the critic shared his story idea with David Picker, CEO of United Artists. Picker encouraged him to write the first five scenes. Zimmerman hammered out eighty-five pages of prose and dialogue instead. The material enticed Robert Evans, the young executive VP of worldwide production at Paramount Pictures, to develop what Zimmerman was calling The Autograph Hunter. Evans lassoed Miloš Forman, a Czechoslavakin director whose first American film, Taking Off (1971) had been well received, to work with Zimmerman on a script with an eye on directing it. With Zimmerman’s wife ready to give birth, Forman moved into their house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and spent eight to ten weeks there working with the screenwriter.

In conversation with Terry Gross, Paul Zimmerman continued, “And it didn’t work out at all. And I rewrote it. Actually we got some good ideas together, but the thing went in the wrong direction because–I’ll tell you a little about it–it’s about an anonymous comedian who meets a talk show host. The talk show host says ‘Call my office’, and he lives his life from there on as though he’s made it, because he’s paid his dues, he’s talented, and now this is his break, but he’s actually a total fantasist. And he goes living his life and he does call the office and the whole story follows from there, logically to its conclusion where he does get on the show, and I won’t say a lot more about it.” Forman saw The Autograph Hunter in more inspirational terms than Zimmerman, the director favoring a heroic tale about a normal guy going after his dreams. For Zimmerman, there was nothing “normal” about their protagonist Rupert Pupkin or the steps he takes to get what he wants. Forman spent nearly three years trying to get his gentler version of the script financed. He finally gave up, opting to direct a movie that looked like it would get made. This turned out to be One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), which swept all five major categories at the Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

Forman’s take on The Autograph Hunter dead on the vine, Zimmerman finished his own version, which he’d retitled The King of Comedy. In 1974, the film critic got his script to director Martin Scorsese, who was basking in the success of Mean Streets (1973), which had made Harvey Keitel and Robert DeNiro stars. Scorsese politely turned Zimmerman down by claiming that he was already working with a film critic–Jay Cocks of Time magazine–on a script about a stand-up comedian. Years later, Scorsese admitted that he didn’t cotton to The King of Comedy when he first read it, appraising the script as “a one-line gag”: a comedian abducts a television talk show host in order to break into show business. Zimmerman asked Scorsese to pass the script to Robert DeNiro. Returning from a vacation, Zimmerman had a message from DeNiro’s manager Harry Ufland saying that his client wanted to meet. DeNiro talked about Rupert Pupkin and about the script the way Zimmerman had dreamed someone would understand it. The hitch was that DeNiro was headed to Italy to spend a year shooting 1900 (1977) and had several commitments waiting for him when he returned. The King of Comedy was put on ice.

DeNiro eventually proposed that the director of one of his commitments–Michael Cimino of The Deer Hunter (1978) — rewrite and direct The King of Comedy. Rather than reunite with DeNiro for his follow-up to The Deer Hunter–which also won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director–Cimino fixated on a revisionist western he’d written titled The Johnson County War, which became an infamous commercial disaster under the title Heaven’s Gate (1980). By now, Martin Scorsese had directed Robert DeNiro in Mean Streets, Taxi Driver (1976) and New York, New York (1977), and recovering in a New York hospital from internal bleeding brought on by rampant cocaine use, Scorsese was willing to get back to work with DeNiro on a project the actor could wait no longer delay, playing boxer Jake LaMotta. Raging Bull (1980) was embraced by critics–Premiere magazine later ranked it the best film of the decade–and nominated for eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.

On the eve of the Academy Awards ceremony in March 1981, a man who’d mailed Scorsese an unhinged letter four years earlier–threatening the director’s life if Jodie Foster won an Oscar for her portrayal of a child prostitute in Taxi Driver–opened fire on Ronald Reagan with a handgun outside the Washington Hilton Hotel, wounding the president of the United States. Taken alive, the gunman would claim he’d committed his act to get the attention of Jodie Foster, which in a way, he did. The assassination attempt came less than four months after an autograph hunter shot and killed John Lennon near the musician’s apartment in New York. Not knowing if Reagan’s would-be assassin might inspire copycat attacks, the Oscar telecast hosted by Johnny Carson was delayed one night. Scorsese received FBI protection during his visit to Los Angeles, and for at least part of the Oscar ceremony, wore a bulletproof vest under his tuxedo. It was at this moment that the director might have developed a different take on The King of Comedy, now able to relate to an objectified celebrity as well as an obsessive fan living in fantasy. Scorsese also needed the work. Financing had proven so elusive for two projects near and dear to him–Gangs of New York (co-written with Jay Cocks) and an adaptation of the Nikos Kazantzakis novel The Last Temptation of Christ–that Scorsese was planning on going to Italy to make a documentary series for television on the lives of the saints. He figured his film career might be over.

Robert DeNiro, now carrying the prestige of Oscar winner for Best Actor in Raging Bull, had befriended Arnon Milchan, an Israeli entrepreneur who’d gotten his start with a small agricultural chemical company he’d inherited from his father. Milchan was appointed Israel’s sales agent to a variety of companies, including Bell Helicopter, Magnavox and Raytheon, and would neither distance himself from accusations of arms dealing, or be indicted for any such activities. What Milchan wanted to do was produce movies. He’d introduced himself to DeNiro to discuss the actor playing Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in a film. The project never got far, but Milchan’s approach to producing–signing the checks and empowering world class artists to make their films–apparently got DeNiro’s attention. The actor passed Paul Zimmerman’s script The King of Comedy to Milchan, who raised financing of $14.5 million. Twentieth Century Fox, where Sherry Lansing had been named president, agreed to provide distribution. Through his production company Embassy International, an early incarnation of what would become Regency Enterprises, Arnon Milchan’s first three English-language pictures as producer would be The King of Comedy (1983), Once Upon a Time In America (1984) and Brazil (1985), all with lavish budgets raised overseas, all artistic statements, all featuring DeNiro.

While Paul Zimmerman had written Jerry Langford with Dick Cavett in mind, Scorsese saw the character in terms of the program he’d based much of The Jerry Langford Show on: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Scorsese did his due diligence by offering Carson the role of Langford, but the king of late night wasn’t interested in a job where his first take would probably never be regarded as good enough, unlike his talk show. Orson Welles, a frequent Tonight Show guest, was rejected for not being “show business” (L.A. or Las Vegas) enough. Frank Sinatra was more like it, but unavailable. Considering the rest of the so-called Rat Pack–Joey Bishop, Sammy Davis Jr., Dean Martin–landed Scorsese on Jerry Lewis. Once a comedy superstar and director, lately known as the host of an annual Labor Day telethon raising money to fight muscular dystrophy, Lewis had climbed every rung on the show business ladder. DeNiro confided to Scorsese that Lewis, perhaps believing he was the king of comedy, might be tempted to ham it up. According to Lewis, he had five meetings with DeNiro over the course of six months, in which the actor pressed him for his thoughts on the script or celebrity. Lewis made it clear that he understood the material and his role in it, delivering a dramatic performance that Paul Zimmerman believed warranted Oscar consideration.

Scorsese and DeNiro huddled in Long Island dialing in a shooting script, and though Zimmerman admitted that the characters and scenes he wrote were in the film, something had changed. “Well, for one thing, there’s a girl who Rupert falls in love with … and once he gets his break he goes to the bar where his high school flame is working there, now having failed as an ice skating starlet. She wound up in the chorus and now she’s just trying to get through the day and the night and whatever, and I imagined her as a kind of Meryl Streep, Sally Struthers, fallen blonde cheerleader, angel, mainstream and is against his endless optimism and they cast Bobby DeNiro’s wife as Rita, and she’s a Black woman named Diahnne Abbott, who does a terrific job, but right away she’s–all the characters are even more fringe than what I wrote. They’re even less at the center of things. There’s a girl who’s a confederate of Rupert’s named Masha, who’s very strange, and I wrote her strange, but she’s even stranger. And so what you have here is a kind of shadow world of peripheral people who are kind of circling like satellites around the glamour of Jerry Langford, who is Jerry Lewis. Oddly enough, never thought of him for the part, yet his initials are exactly the same and the first name is the same. Jerry Langford was the name I wrote in 1970.”

DeNiro, eager to reunite with Meryl Streep after working together on The Deer Hunter, arranged a meeting between Scorsese and Streep to discuss the possibility of her playing Masha, but this didn’t come to pass. A standup comic from Los Angeles named Sandra Bernhard won the role, becoming a frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman following the release of The King of Comedy. Scorsese was planning on starting production no sooner than August 1981, when a strike by the Director’s Guild of America was expected to be resolved, but Arnon Milchan’s financing apparently came with certain strings attached, and with the work stoppage expected to lift on July 1, Scorsese was asked if he could start rolling sooner. Interviewed for the book Martin Scorsese: A Journey by author Mary Pat Kelly, the director lamented, “King of Comedy was an uphill battle for me. It was more Bob’s project than mine, and I wasn’t a big help at the time. The motives for making a film are very important to me. They have to be good motives. Mine weren’t very clear when I started out on this picture.” Reeves Sound Studio (on Broadway and 81st Street) was used to film exteriors and interiors of The Jerry Langford Show, while the Paramount Building on 1501 Broadway stood in for exteriors of Jerry’s office. The bar where Rita works and exteriors for Masha’s penthouse were filmed on the Upper East Side.

Lit by cinematographer Fred Schuler, a pro at shooting on the streets of New York in Gloria (1980) and Arthur (1981), the camera movement had none of the expression of a Martin Scorsese picture, scenes that progressed as figments of Rupert’s imagination filmed just as static as those set in reality. What Scorsese did do–as Johnny Carson had feared–was tax the cast through multiple takes of many scenes. This was done to not only give Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker options for striking the right tone in the editing, but also to wear Jerry Lewis’s patience down, as Jerry Langford comes out of his experience with Rupert and Masha like a pencil worn down to a nub. Principal photography stretched over twenty weeks. In the scenes taking place in Times Square, a marquee for the Richard Pryor comedy Bustin’ Loose, released Memorial Day weekend 1981, can be spotted, and in another scene, a marquee for Blade Runner, which opened thirteen months later, when Scorsese was conducting additional photography. By this time, his three-year marriage to model Isabella Rossellini had broken up, and Scorsese was in no mood to cut the film (Fox’s threat to confiscate the negative and edit the picture themselves got him through post-production).

Discussing the experience editing The King of Comedy for the Apple documentary Mr. Scorsese (2025), Scorsese tells director Rebecca Miller, “I was just basically alone. No one would come around me. Thelma was editing in a loft that I had. And my parents would come over to make sure we were okay. And that was it. Everyone else just stayed away, because I was behaving very erratic. Up to a point, then it all stopped. When everyone left.” Scorsese had chosen the Ray Charles version of “Come Rain or Come Shine” to play over the opening credits, and his assembly of The King of Comedy was loaded with recordings from the 1950s. The director felt this wasn’t working. In an interview with Robert Hillburn published February 27, 1983 in the Los Angeles Times, composer Robbie Robertson–principal guitarist and songwriter of The Band–was called on to record and curate a soundtrack that was new and unfamiliar, giving The King of Comedy a stronger contemporary feel than any movie Scorsese had directed. Robertson kept “Come Rain or Come Shine” and tossed everything else. “I tried to think who this guy would have on his show and I remembered that every time B.B. King goes on the Carson show, he just tears it up. Carson stands up and says, ‘Forget the commercial, let’s hear another song.’ That gave me something I could relate to. I mean, I couldn’t sleep at night and hear Wayne Newton on the album or the other Las Vegas-type people Carson has on, even the good ones.”

Robbie Robertson worked at the Village Recorders studio in West Los Angeles producing “T’Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” with King. Needing a closing credits track that would do anything but champion Rupert Pupkin, Robertson brought in Van Morrison to cook something up, their recording session producing “Wonderful Remark.” Jazz composer Bob James came in to perform two talk show themes he’d written and arranged, “Jerry Langford Theme” and “Rupert’s Theme.” Robertson contributed a tune he wrote and performed, “Between Trains,” and picked the rest of the soundtrack: “Back on the Chain Gang,” by The Pretenders, “Swamp” by Talking Heads, “Steal the Night” by Ric Ocasek, “Rainbow Sleeves” by Rickie Lee Jones, and “The Finer Things” by David Sanborn. Given the participation of Martin Scorsese and Robert DeNiro, Fox initially saw awards prestige for The King of Comedy and set a release of Christmas 1982. This would have put the film in competition with several star-studded comedies opening in December: Best Friends starring Burt Reynolds and Goldie Hawn, the hugely anticipated Dustin Hoffman comedy Tootsie, and a pairing of the biggest entertainer in the world (Richard Pryor) with a legend (Jackie Gleason) in The Toy.

Word on The King of Comedy, at its most generous, was that the picture was not funny. In September 1982, Fox made the decision to delay the release. The studio bumped up a “romantasy” titled Kiss Me Goodbye (1982) starring Sally Field, James Caan and Jeff Bridges to fill the slot left open by Mr. Scorsese’s not-funny The King of Comedy. In an article by Gene Siskel syndicated nationally on February 10, 1983, an unnamed publicist for Fox stated, “Our problem is that test audiences hate this picture. Our main hope is the critics. That’s the way we’re going to try to sell it on the publicity side. The most important thing we must do, though, is not mislead the public into thinking it’s a funny picture. ‘The King of Comedy Is No Laughing Matter’ is one of the advertising lines we’re thinking of.” Critical reaction was more lukewarm than the studio had been relying on. In a review published by the Chicago Tribune on March 18, 1983, Gene Siskel wrote, “In sneak previews, The King of Comedy has turned off mass audiences, and it’s easy to see how. Rupert Pupkin is a schnook who acts like a jerk … Yet I’d be lying if I didn’t say that until the ending I was totally caught up in the world of Rupert Pupkin. His yearning is genuine, even if he’s a pest. His life is a testament to the decline of quality and culture in this country, to the ease with which the TV set can become our best friend.” Siskel gave the film three stars out of four.

Roger Ebert, whose review didn’t run in the Chicago Sun-Times until he got to see the picture on the opening night of the Cannes Film Festival in May 1983, wrote: “Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy is one of the most arid, painful, wounded movies I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to believe Scorsese made it; instead of the big-city life, the violence and sexuality of his movies like Taxi Driver and Mean Streets, what we have here is an agonizing portrait of lonely, angry people with their emotions all tightly bottled up. This is a movie that seems ready to explode–but somehow it never does.” Ebert also gave the film three stars out of four. Vincent Canby’s review published February 18, 1983 in the New York Times was a rave. “It would be difficult to describe Martin Scorsese’s fine new film, The King of Comedy, as an absolute joy. It’s very funny, and it ends on a high note that was, for me, both a total surprise and completely satisfying. Yet it’s also bristly, sometimes manic to the edge of lunacy and, along the way, terrifying. It’s not an absolute joy by a long shot but, in the way of a film that uses all of its talents to their fullest, it’s exhilarating.”

Fox opened The King of Comedy in limited release on President’s Day weekend, February 18, 1983, in 14 theaters, hoping to build positive word of mouth. February was a month in which distributors often dumped surplus product with the least fanfare, or shame. January saw more orphaned films set loose on the market while moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas, students returned to school, and inclement weather often depressed attendance in many areas, but February, August and September saw plenty of dumping too. The King of Comedy failed to crack the top ten grossing films at the box office in any weekend of its domestic release. It was written off as a flop. In an interview with Dale Pollock published by the Los Angeles Times on March 15, 1983, Scorsese did his part to generate some interest in the film by commenting on whether his work or the work of any artist was to blame for acts of violence, like those by John Hinckley Jr. against the president. “I don’t believe that any one film or book forces a person’s hand to do an act that is so horrifying. I just don’t believe it. It’s good for the defense in the Hinckley case, because they can say the film made him do it. But how much power do we as filmmakers wield? If one person out of how many millions who sees a film reacts to it a certain way, are we responsible? We’re stuck in the middle. We made these pictures out of completely honest motivations, basically as a personal exploration of my feelings, my emotions, my psyche.”

Watching The King of Comedy isn’t unlike driving with sand stuck to us in uncomfortable places. This is a quality of art that tends to persist over time and has served this film, one of the best of the 1980s, well. Rupert Pupkin doesn’t really rant, or make off-color remarks, so much as he is unaware of how to act around people who don’t seem to realize how important he is. While Rupert dresses like a poseur–costume designer Richard Bruno would provide wardrobe consulting for Robert DeNiro on Once Upon A Time In America and The Untouchables (1987), outfitting Pupkin in ill-fitting and garishly outdated suits–it’s an indication of how good Paul Zimmerman’s writing is that we care about Rupert. If we couldn’t relate to his dreams, respect his ambition or care if he was crushed under the weight of his own delusions, the film wouldn’t be as uncomfortable as it is, we’d just be rooting for Rupert to be tagged and bagged like a rabid animal. The film generates empathy for him without digging into Rupert’s past. All we know about him is he works as a messenger and lives in his mother’s basement, where lifesize cutouts of Jerry Langford and (Scorsese’s ex-lover) Liza Minnelli allow him to pretend he’s on television, or craft crummy demo tapes. (Catherine Scorsese, a regular in her son’s films who steals every one, provides the voice of Mom). Just as hilarious are moments when Rupert explains to Masha that he is unlike her or the other fanatics because he actually has a relationship with Jerry, proving that class division exists even among the lunatic fringe.

The King of Comedy is my favorite Robert DeNiro performance. Along with his acting, the writing and directing make two especially strong choices. The kidnap plot isn’t very central to the film, unfolding one hour in without preamble and resolving itself without much slapstick. In this way, the movie avoids situation comedy. Even more rewarding is the decision not to reveal Rupert’s act until the climax, and then, only through the screen of a TV set. Based on every scene that precedes it, we assume that Pupkin is a chump, and that his television debut will be a complete disaster. That Rupert is revealed to have honed a professional, perfectly harmless facsimile of what he’s been studying on TV is not only exciting to the point of emotional overload, but forces us to reconsider the movie we thought we were watching. The King of Comedy isn’t about wingnuts who have fantasy mixed up with reality. It’s more of an indictment of TV, which has become so slick, so sanitized, so abused, that it makes superstardom look easy. The impact of The King of Comedy can be seen by the generation of actors who grew up worshiping DeNiro, with Matt Dillon, Mark Wahlberg, Joaquin Phoenix and Ryan Gosling doing their variations of Rupert Pupkin in their darker, more offbeat films. The film’s commentary on celebrity obsession and how hate gets confused with love, sometimes with tragic results, was not only as relevant after John Lennon’s murder as it was in the sixties, but has remained uncomfortably relevant with each generation.

Video rental category: Staff Picks

Special interest: Master and Apprentice

FANDANGO (1985) is like a man who’s never worn a tuxedo who gets dressed up and placed in a strange social environment. It’s awkward, quietly observant, and is faking its way through a big event. A case can be made for it being an underdog success, as well as the work of a rookie feature film writer/ director who was just trying to survive. It is one of the best movies shot (mostly) in Texas, capturing a Lone Star state of mind better than it does a story or characters.

Kevin Reynolds spent a good portion of his youth growing up in Waco, Texas. His father, a twenty-year veteran of the U.S. Air Force, began his career at Baylor University as an assistant professor of aerospace studies in 1956, and was later a teaching fellow in psychology. Kevin, a self-described Air Force brat, graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a degree in history, and grasping at what in 1974 was considered a respectable career for a man, entered law school at Baylor, where Reynolds’ father was now executive vice-president. Speaking to film journalist Leonard Klady for an article in the Los Angeles Times published September 18, 1988, Reynolds was asked about his legal experience. “I truly hated law school. Friends kept on assuring me that once I was out in the real world, things would be better. The truth, for me, was I became increasingly more miserable the longer I practiced.” Reynolds had returned to Austin to work in the state capitol for the then Secretary of State and future governor, Mark White (D), as a staff attorney specializing in election law. Not caring for politics any more than he did law, Reynolds loved movies, having discovered personal favorites such as Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Dr. Strangelove, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) and Days of Heaven (1978) at the Hogg Memorial Auditorium while attending UT.

Law did offer Reynolds a steady income and significant free time. He used them to enroll in film courses at UT in the evening, and with the cash to purchase his film, was given access to equipment and facilities the state school provided, developing his filmmaking craft in his non-billable hours. Reynolds had a visiting film professor named Edward Dmytryk, a studio director of films like Crossfire (1947) starring Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame, and The Caine Mutiny (1954) with Humphrey Bogart leading its cast. Dmytryk had been blacklisted, along with the rest of the Hollywood Ten, for refusing to name Communists to the House of Un-American Activities. When Reynolds told him that he wanted to be a film director, Dmytryk was in a better position than most to talk him out of it, calling his vocation the toughest job in the world. Reynolds persisted, and with a letter of introduction from Dmytryk, was accepted by the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California, alma mater of George Lucas and John Milius among others. For two and a half years, Reynolds lived and breathed writing and directing film. He assumed he’d return to Texas to carve out a career as an independent filmmaker, and set two goals for himself while studying in Los Angeles: write a screenplay he could sell and direct a short film he could circulate as a demo reel.

Alarmed by Cold War saber rattling among Americans who’d never known what it was like to fight a war on their own soil, Reynolds wrote a screenplay titled Ten Soldiers, which depicted rural teenagers mounting a guerrilla resistance campaign against the Soviets and Cubans occupying their land. MGM/UA bought the script. By the time he graduated in 1981, Reynolds had also written and directed a 22-minute short film. Titled Proof (1980), it concerned a college student named Philip pressured into proving his manhood by completing a skydiving course and jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft. Reynolds had a close friend nearly ten years younger than him named Mark Illsley who was a certified pilot. Serving as a production manager, Illsley would pile Reynolds and his cast into a Winnebago and drive them to an airfield in the desert near Lancaster, where they rented a plane for the weekend and without asking for permission, shot their student film, Reynolds operating the camera and Illsley flying the plane, with what could generously be termed stunt piloting. Amazingly, no one died, and no one had ever seen a student film like Proof. Reynolds’ good fortune continued when a guy he’d met at the University of Texas named Mike Simpson, who was working as an assistant at William Morris Agency, was promoted to agent. Simpson took Kevin Reynolds on as his first client, and they figured they had nothing to lose by sending Proof to Steven Spielberg.

Two weeks later, hanging out on the USC campus, Reynolds was flagged down by Mort Zarcoff, co-chairman of the Film & Television department, who told the film student that someone from Steven Spielberg’s office was on the phone for him. Spielberg’s then-assistant Kathleen Kennedy told Reynolds that her boss had watched Proof, wanted to meet and would tomorrow work? In the spring of 1981, Spielberg had commenced production on Poltergeist (1982) as a writer/ producer and was several weeks from shooting E.T. The Extra Terrestrial (1982) as director. In a chat at Spielberg’s office at MGM which Reynolds recalled lasting about an hour, the famed director of a student short titled Amblin’ (1968) asked Reynolds what he wanted to do next. He gave Spielberg the answer he’d given Edward Dmytryk: he wanted to direct. Within days, Reynolds received a call at his crummy apartment in Studio City from Kathleen Kennedy to be notified that Spielberg was making arrangements for him to expand his student film into a feature. Reynolds had the awkward task of writing a screenplay from the inside out, retaining the 20-minute skydiving sequence from Proof while coming up with another hour and a half of material to bookend it.

In an interview with Lou Lumenick for the New York Post published January 27, 1985, Reynolds would state, “Fandango is largely autobiographical, though some of the events actually didn’t happen. I had some fraternity buddies who called themselves the Groovers, like in the film, and I think our draft numbers together totaled 16. Fortunately the draft was abolished before we were called. I kind of mixed together their characters in my head.” In order to get Philip to the parachute school, Reynolds put his characters on a road trip. In an interview with Robert Denenstein for the El Paso Herald-Post printed February 7, 1985, Reynolds added, “I guess everybody in school went on road trips. These trips always turned out to be horrible. Later, you look back and laugh. We’d always do that. It’d be twelve at night and we’d pile into a car and say, ‘Let’s go to Mexico.’” Over the next year, Spielberg would publicly and sometimes painfully learn the role of a good producer, and after his experience on Poltergeist, founded Amblin Entertainment with Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall. Kennedy was ready to make the leap from Spielberg’s assistant to his producing partner, while Marshall had already done so, getting his start as an assistant to directors Peter Bogdanovich and Walter Hill before producing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).

As eager as anyone to work with Spielberg, Warner Bros. sheepishly agreed to finance and distribute two Amblin projects they would not have if anyone else had pitched them to the studio. One was a zany horror comedy to be directed by Joe Dante titled Gremlins (1984). The other was Fandango, to be written and directed by first-timer Kevin Reynolds, with a production budget that had grown to $6 million. Tim Zinnemann–a veteran first assistant director who had a strong track record as a producer coaching first-time directors Michael Mann on the TV-movie The Jericho Mile (1979) and Tim Hunter on Tex (1982)--was appointed producer. Preserving everything he felt had worked in his student short, Reynolds recast professional comic and actor Marvin J. McIntyre as the zoned-out bush pilot, Truman Sparks. One of the actors who’d auditioned for a role in Proof was a stage manager at Raleigh Studios named Kevin Costner, who by the time he returned to audition for Fandango had booked a small but pivotal role in The Big Chill (1983) that would be completely cut from the movie. An unknown Costner was cast as Gardner Barnes, the leader of a crew of five fraternity brothers at the University of Texas at Austin in 1971 who call themselves the Groovers.

Sam Robards, son of actors Jason Robards and Lauren Bacall, was cast as Kenneth Waggener, whose decision to cancel his wedding due to conscription into the armed services sends the Groovers on their road trip. Judd Nelson, who’d starred in a comedy titled Making the Grade (1984) that was a year from being released, was cast against type as Philip Hicks, the “weenie” who has to prove his manhood by diving out of a plane. Kevin Reynolds centered his search for the other two members of the Groovers in Austin. Brian Cesak was a finance major at UT who answered an ad in the Daily Texan that asked readers, “Do You Want To Be a Star?”. The actor needed to fit into small spaces and be carried from place to place, spending nearly the entire film comatose. With little more than a month to go before graduation, Cesak dropped out of college to make Fandango. Chuck Bush was discovered at a local 7-Eleven. At 6’7” and 365 pounds, Bush was working as a security guard at Dillard’s department store, but had aspirations to study osteopathic medicine. He’d stopped off at the convenience store at midnight for a soda and was walking out when Reynolds and his assistant Mark Illsley, who were days away from principal photography and had been out scouting bars on Sixth Street for fresh faces, were walking in. Bush recalled Illsey running out to ask him if he wanted to be in movies. Like Cesak, he dropped everything to go to West Texas for nine weeks to film his role in Fandango. Credited as “The Girl,” Suzy Amis was a model from Oklahoma City making her film debut. Amis’ movie career would climb steadily and in 1997, she appeared as Rose’s granddaughter in the contemporary sections of Titanic.

Fandango commenced shooting in April 1983 in West Texas. The auto garage where the Groovers take Philip’s ‘59 Cadillac for a front-end alignment was filmed in Marathon. The Evans Ryan Ranch, where exterior shooting for Giant (1956) had taken place outside the town of Marfa, was utilized as a location. Marfa Cemetery hosted the scene where two local teenagers (Elizabeth Daily, Robyn Rose) lure the Groovers into a bottle rocket war. Unable to film at the Dairy Queen in Marfa, the scene where the two cliques initially meet was filmed at the Sonic Drive-In in Alpine. The scenic terminus of the Groovers’ road trip, where their good friend “Dom” is buried, was shot between the towns of Lajitas and Presidio off FM 170, known to border residents as the “River Road” that hugs the Rio Grande. The sequence in which Truman goes to retrieve the Girl was supposed to be filmed in the vicinity of Love Field in Dallas, but when authorities were unable or unwilling to close the freeway, Tim Zinnemann went to Oklahoma, where traffic was easier to manage on a section of OK-64 west of Sand Springs. The exterior of the Girl’s house was also filmed in the Tulsa area. The wedding that climaxes the picture was shot in the San Elizario Memorial Placita in the town of San Elizario, TX. To score Fandango, Kevin Reynolds’ choice was sublime: Pat Metheny. The jazz guitarist and composer didn’t have the time to tackle a film score, and Amblin preferred to hire a conventional film composer anyway. Alan Silvestri, composing his first fully orchestrated film score, got the job, with Pat Metheny contributing guitar solos that Reynolds worked into Fandango.

While Kevin Reynolds and Tim Zinnemann had hoped Fandango would pave the way for Reynolds to direct his script for Ten Soldiers next, MGM/UA had neither the patience to wait for the director and producer, nor were they aligned with them on the movie they wanted. They hired writer/ director/ military historian John Milius to direct, granting the co-writer of Dirty Harry (1970), Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979) runway to rewrite Reynolds’ script, which he did, studio CEO/president Frank Yablans settling on the title Red Dawn (1984). Asked about the film in 2021, Reynolds was terse on the Indie Film Hustle podcast, stating, “John Milius took it and I think he made a little more jingoistic–I don’t think he did, he did–he made it more jingoistic than what I intended it to be. What I wrote was more like Lord of the Flies. And John was trying to make more of a political statement. And I just wanted to show, this is what war does to people, this is what it would do to you if it happened here.”

Fandango was set for release a few weeks after Red Dawn, in the fall of 1984. When Steven Spielberg got a look at Kevin Reynolds’ film, a sense of buyer’s remorse apparently set in. Amblin’s production slate at that time tracked with the movies Spielberg was directing, which were aligned with what audiences seemed to want: special effects extravaganzas with wit, visual or otherwise. Gremlins, The Goonies (1985), Back to the Future (1985) and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) all conformed to that model. Proof did as well, indicating that its writer/director could deliver an entire movie as outrageous as the skydiving sequence. In 2025, on the Film Stories with Simon Brew podcast, Reynolds confided, “And, I mean, unfortunately, I think Steven expected it to be more like Animal House, which is sort of the quality, a little bit of Proof. But I guess at the time, I wanted to do something a little more soulful. And like so many filmmakers, my first film was a sort of quintessential coming-of-age story that everybody has to get out of their system before they can move on to something else. And that’s sort of where I found myself as I sat down to write it. And I think it was more soulful, which I don’t think was a bad thing. But I think it was not necessarily what some people expected it to be.”

While Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall kept their executive producer credits, Steven Spielberg, by now a brand name like “Walt Disney,” elected to remove his from the credits and advertisements. When test screenings confirmed Fandango wasn’t what audiences expected either, Warner Bros. exiled its release to January. This was a month in which distributors typically dumped surplus product with the least fanfare, or shame. February, August and September saw their share of dumping as well, but not to the degree of January, which was considered a dismal month to release a movie without awards prestige. Moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas. Students were back in school. Inclement weather often depressed attendance in many markets. Opening in a handful of cities–including New York and Fort Worth–on January 25, 1985, reviews that started to trickle in were lukewarm. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “The note of hip nihilism on which Fandango begins is eventually balanced out by sentimentality … Mr. Reynolds isn’t adroit with this sort of thing, but he does have a way with the sight gags and off-the-wall humor that make this is a notable debut. He brings a good deal of feeling to the moments in which the film’s twin specters–Vietnam and morality–intrude upon the frantic festivities.”

By the time Warner Bros. opened the picture in L.A. on April 26, reviews were souring. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote: “ … Fandango overreaches badly and sinks under a heavy weight of symbolism, bathos and sheer preposterousness that no amount of humor and incident can redeem. Alas, Fandango sparks unwanted memories of Arthur Penn’s ill-fated, overheated Four Friends.” Praising Proof, Michael Dare in L.A. Weekly panned the feature length expansion. “It’s like Porky’s without any of the jokes. Reynolds’ direction is infinitely better than his writing (he also wrote Red Dawn — unforgivable!), but his characters have so little personality that most become indistinguishable. These are exceptions. Judd Nelson as the wimp who actually has to jump out of the airplane gives a wacky performance that’s a complete about-face from his streetwise tough in The Breakfast Club, and Marvin McIntyre is hysterical as the blissed-out owner of the parachute school with the attention span of a kitten on speed. I hate to say it, but the middle third of this film is really worth seeing. Just come in late and leave early.” Audiences never showed up for that much. Debuting in 27 theaters in January, Fandango didn’t get close to the top ten films at the U.S. box office. Supergirl (1984) sold more tickets in its tenth weekend of release than Fandango did in its first. Kevin Reynolds later admitted that if Kevin Costner–who became a superstar and would handpick Reynolds to direct him in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991) and Waterworld (1995) — wasn’t the leading man, Fandango would never have aired on television. While it may not have been the film he would’ve made, Steven Spielberg thought enough of Reynolds to send him a teleplay he’d co-written for an episode of Amazing Stories in 1986 and asked Reynolds to direct it, which granted permission for a rewrite, he did, casting Charles Durning as a man who has a premonition of an airplane–of all things–crashing into his home.

If someone pitched “Animal House meets Days of Heaven” and had it taken seriously in Hollywood, the result would be Fandango. For that, filmgoers can be at least a little grateful. At its best, it anticipated the spirit of Dazed and Confused (1993), at a fraction of the scale. Both films are about young men in Austin, Texas who have a full tank of gas, some groovy tunes and a lot of beer. We meet them on the last day of school in the 1970s, and with more energy than direction, they go forth in search of something to happen. While Dazed and Confused unwinds over twenty-four hours in a completely natural way, Fandango is a shotgun marriage of outrageous action and poetic melancholy. With sharper detail and a stronger voice, Kevin Reynolds might have pulled that union off. West Texas looked exactly the same in 1983 as it did in 1971, right down to the haircuts, and Reynolds doesn’t offer a compelling reason for his story to take place in the Vietnam War era. He doesn’t really know who his main characters are, which is apparent by how much Kevin Costner is allowed to cackle or yahoo his way through his first lead role for a lack of anything to say. Reynolds casually reveals that the Girl who Gardner Barnes let get away and is apparently still hung up on is now engaged to marry Waggener, yet that dynamic–which leaves room to explore what a derelict Gardner is–goes unexplored. It’s as if Reynolds didn’t want to cast aspersions on his fraternity brothers.

While the skydiving sequence is terrific, it reduces the Groovers to standing, laying or running around while Marvin J. McIntyre commits one of the greatest film steals ever, playing a legit groover the likes of which the self-described Groovers from the city have to stand back in fear and admiration of. While Kevin Reynolds was savvy enough to bring Truman Sparks and his aerial antics back for the climax, McIntyre is such a discovery, owning all of the laughs, that he warranted his own film. That Reynolds had zero interest in making that film (again) is commendable, even if the one he chose doesn’t work but in spurts. One detail about Texas he captures in Fandango is the tradition of boys heading west in the night and driving until they reach the end of the line. Once the boys get there, they take a step closer to manhood by realizing that people, at least in small towns, are more compassionate than they’ve given them credit for, basing their nihilism on interactions with parents or teachers, and in some cases, girls. The soundtrack is the best that Reynolds would ever have the luxury of putting together, with Alan Silvestri’s rousing orchestral cues–soon to be heard in Back to the Future–balanced with song, “It’s For You” (by Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays and Nana Vasconcelos) and “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith capping the film in a heartfelt fashion.

Video rental category: Comedy

Special interest: On the Road

THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BEAR (1986) is like a restaurant that opens without tables. It begs the question whether the minds behind this were smarter than their diners, or dumber. Based on the first of what would become a series of six hugely successful novels published in the 1980s and ‘90s, this tale of prehistoric feminism landed a talented cast and features some gorgeous locations and visual sheen, but comes off as a muddle. At its lower points, it’s a puzzling bore, jaunting along without drama, or creative decisions that seem very well thought out.

Jean Auel grew up on the north side of Chicago to parents who’d been raised on farms in northern Michigan. Intelligent and hard working, they didn’t stress education, and though Auel was a bookworm who graduated high school able to type and do shorthand, her family expected her to get married, which she did at 18. Auel’s husband was in the U.S. Air Force stationed in New Mexico, and when he was discharged in 1956, the couple moved west, with one child and the second of five on the way. Auel’s husband would go to work at Tektronix, a manufacturer of electronic testing and measuring equipment in Eugene, Oregon. Seeking intellectual stimulation while raising their children, Auel began to shift her reading from fiction to subjects like psychology, history and philosophy. By 1964, she discovered The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan and decided that it was her turn to get an education. Working at Tektronix–where she started as a keypunch operator–Auel applied for a graduate program at the University of Portland that enabled her and her husband to work toward master’s degrees in business administration. In 1976, Auel was a credit manager at Tektronix, but six months after earning her MBA, she quit.

While searching for a job, Auel had an idea for a story about a girl living in a primitive culture. She stayed up all night drafting a ten-page short story. With no inkling of how such a culture might function, Auel turned to the Portland Public Library. Ralph Solecki’s book Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man made an impact on her, particularly the anthropologist’s discovery of a fossil belonging to a male Neanderthal in northern Iraq had both arms amputated with no sign of trauma or infection. The question was, how? Research enabled Auel to expand her manuscript to 450,000 words, including an outline for an entire series. As her dramatization of life 35,000 years ago began to take shape on the page, Auel realized she didn’t really know how to write, turning to fiction and to books on the craft of writing to learn. Submitting her manuscript to four major publishing houses in New York, Auel was rejected by each. The author had met a New York literary agent at the Willamette Writers Conference named Jean Naggar, and when Naggar agreed to read Auel’s manuscript, she enthusiastically agreed to represent Auel. Submitting the manuscript for auction, Naggar found a buyer in Carole Baron, an editor at Crown Publishers. The Clan of the Cave Bear was taken off the market with what was then reported to be the largest offer to a debut novelist: $130,000.

The Clan of the Cave Bear debuted in hardcover print in September 1980. This was only two months after an exotic teenage love story titled The Blue Lagoon starring Brooke Shields hit theaters on the Fourth of July weekend and became a blockbuster, selling more tickets than Caddyshack or The Shining that summer. Though embedded in anthropology as opposed to young love, The Clan of the Cave Bear was divested of civilization, and like The Blue Lagoon, centered on a teenager seeking empowerment, as well as answers to questions about the human reproductive cycle. For teenage girls banned from R-rated movies in the eighties, The Clan of the Cave Bear and its sequel The Valley of the Horses (published in April 1982) were passed from locker to locker as viable alternatives to sex education. Hollywood was due to come calling. Gerald Isenberg and his associate Stan Rogow–among the producers of Fame when it jumped from the big screen to syndicated television in 1982–optioned film rights to The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Valley of the Horses. In the era of the TV mini-series–in which The Winds of War and The Thorn Birds would draw large audiences over multiple nights in February and March 1983–Isenberg and Rogow saw Jean Auel’s books as a television event.

To adapt a teleplay, the producers commissioned Clair Noto, author of the Marvel Comics book Red Sonja. Noto had written what would forever be considered one of the best spec scripts never made, a science fiction titled The Tourist, which chronicled an exiled extraterrestrial passing itself off in New York as a female business executive (production got as far as Brian Gibson being lined up to direct for Universal Pictures and H.R. Giger sketching aliens, but Noto’s unwieldy script would never be tamed, and Gibson and Giger would move on to Poltergeist II: The Other Side). In early 1984, John Sayles–who as a screenwriter-for-hire had penned a number of now classic genre pictures, like The Lady In Red (1979), Alligator (1980) and The Howling (1981)--was hired to adapt both of Auel’s novels for television in what would become his career model, using writing commissions to fund his own films as a writer/ director, his next dealing with an extraterrestrial passing for a man visiting Harlem, The Brother From Another Planet (1984). Lewis Teague, director of The Lady In Red and Alligator, was engaged to direct Sayles’ teleplay when it was intended as a mini-series, but cited the logistical obstacles of adapting both books, The Valley of the Horses failing to offer what he considered good film material.

When NBC finally balked at producing the books as a mini-series, Gerald Isenberg partnered with Peter Guber and Jon Peters, whose dealmaking had helped get Flashdance (1983) produced, though it was acknowledged in the industry that Guber & Peters hadn’t had much if anything creative to do with the blockbuster. What Guber & Peters did was propose a theatrical feature based on The Clan of the Cave Bear, with The Valley of the Horses waiting in the wings should the first prove successful. They initially set the project up at Universal Pictures, but studio regime change–Frank Price installed as chairman of MCA Motion Picture Group in November 1983, overseeing production and distribution at Universal–left The Clan of the Cave Bear without a home again. Within a handful of days, Guber had roped in producers Mark Damon and John W. Hyde, co-founders of Producers Sales Organization. PSO had transitioned from selling American films overseas to financing their own slate, which would include 8 Million Ways To Die (1986), Short Circuit (1986) and Flight of the Navigator (1986).

Damon & Hyde’s financier was Sidney Kimmel, who’d started as an inventory clerk in the garment industry before founding Jones New York, a clothing line catering to fashion-savvy professional women. Kimmel’s first roll of the dice as a movie producer–with Damon on the independently financed 9 ½ Weeks (1986)--was headed into production in the spring of 1984 with Adrian Lyne directing Mickey Rourke and Kim Basinger. A production budget of $16 million for The Clan of the Cave Bear was contingent on it going into production shortly thereafter. The producing corps for the film version of Jean Auel’s debut novel would credit Gerald Isenberg as the film’s producer, Mark Damon & John W. Hyde, Peter Guber & Jon Peters and Peters’ girlfriend Christne Peters as executive producers, Stan Rogow as co-producer and Sidney Kimmel as co-executive producer. To direct, Michael Chapman was hired. Chapman had an impressive CV, first as a camera operator on The Godfather (1972) and Jaws (1975), then director of photography on Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980). Chapman’s star kept rising with his directorial debut, the gritty high school football drama All The Right Moves (1983), Chapman coaching good performances from Tom Cruise, Craig T. Nelson and Lea Thompson.

The cast of The Clan of the Cave Bear was strong. Daryl Hannah, who played Pris in Blade Runner (1982) and the mermaid “Madison” in Splash (1984), took on another alien role as Ayla, the Cro-Magnon heroine of Auel’s books. As the Neanderthal tribe who adopts her, Pamela Reed, James Remar, Thomas G. Waites, Lycia Naff and Curtis Armstrong were among those cast. The producers didn’t reach far to assemble a crew familiar with prehistoric humans, retaining Michele Burke, who’d won an Academy Award for Best Makeup on Quest For Fire (1981) and created John Lone’s makeup on Iceman (1984). Michael Westmore, who’d done makeup for Iceman as well as the Rocky films, came aboard as Burke’s makeup department co-head. One of the larger logistical challenges on The Clan of the Cave Bear was how the actors were going to deliver their “dialogue.” In her books, Auel simply conveyed everything Ayla was thinking or feeling to the reader in prose easily translated to the language of whatever country it was published in. John Sayles (awarded sole screenwriting credit by the Writers Guild of America) had written his adaptation in colloquial English, assuming the filmmakers would put that through a prehistoric filter similar to the one in Quest For Fire, in which novelist Anthony Burgess had written special language and anthropologists had developed body movement and sign language for the characters.

According to Daryl Hannah, when rehearsals for The Clan of the Cave Bear commenced a month before shooting, there were no anthropologists on the payroll. It was assumed the actors could work out how to act prehistoric and deliver their “lines.” When the implausibility of this became apparent, a call was put in to another Quest For Fire alumni, body movement coach Peter Elliott, who worked with Reed, Remar and the other Neanderthal players (Hannah, playing a Cro-Magnon human, would move much like the actor did in modernity). In addition, Lou Fant, a pioneering interpreter of American Sign Language, was hired as a sign language coach. Fant developed a two-hundred word sign vocabulary for the cast and when shooting began in June 1984, the filmmakers floated doing the entire film in sign, with English subtitles. The monotony of this set in and after three or four days, the decision was made for the actors to incorporate vocal gestures or words, when Chapman or others felt they were necessary. Hannah compared it to speaking Italian in reverse: talking with her hands and gesturing with her vocal chords.

Shooting took place primarily in British Columbia. Cathedral Grove in MacMillan Park was used for the scenes set amid an old-growth forest. Cave interiors were filmed at Panorama Film Studios in Vancouver. The most daunting scenes required a fabricated cave facade being airlifted to a remote section of Nahanni Park Reserve, a series of 200-mile long gorges in the Northwest Territories, and airlifting cast and crew there as well, sheltering them in tents between setups. Weather proved formidable, fog rendering the exotic location indistinguishable from a studio backlot on some days and requiring the crew to wait for the bad weather to lift. Bad luck continued when Jean Auel filed a lawsuit against The Jozak Companies/ Decade Productions (which was producer Gerald Isenberg) in May 1985 for failure to grant her contractual right of story approval or to pay her according to the terms of her contract. The author also took offense to inconsistencies — ”historical and otherwise” — in the cut of the movie she’d been screened. Penciled for a release in the summer of 1985, then fall, dialing in a film deemed palatable to American tastes persisted for months.

In spite of the massive popularity of Jean Auel’s novels–a third installment, The Mammoth Hunters, was set for publication in December 1985–there were few if any American films produced in a language other than English. Though its cast had included Americans like Everett McGill, Ron Perlman and Rae Dawn Chong, Quest For Fire had been a French-Canadian production distributed by Twentieth Century Fox in the U.S. The only recent comparable to The Clan of the Cave Bear was Windwalker (1981), which featured James Remar as the title character and was filmed in Native Indian (Cheyenne and Crow) languages, English subtitles added so everyone else could understand it. For The Clan of the Cave Bear, veteran American stage and television actor Salomé Jens was employed to provide voiceover narration at critical junctures. The film tested so poorly with recruited audiences who were unfamiliar with Jean Auel’s books that Warner Bros. made the decision to unceremoniously exile The Clan of the Cave Bear to a limited release in January. This was a month in which distributors typically dumped surplus product with the least fanfare, or shame. February, August and September saw their share of dumping as well, but not to the degree of January, which was considered a dismal month to release a movie without awards prestige, for several reasons. Moviegoers were watching their wallets following Christmas. Students were back in school. Inclement weather often depressed attendance in many markets. The Clan of the Cave Bear ran 98 minutes, suggesting a longer and more complex picture had been left on the cutting room floor, something Curtis Armstrong–featured in Risky Business (1983), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Better Off Dead (1985) and unrecognizable in The Clan of the Cave Bear–later confirmed.

As if they thought the footage would only repel audiences further, Warner Bros. did not provide the media with clips from the film, supplying television programs a mere 57 second trailer to share with viewers. Critical response was abominable. On At the Movies, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert not only turned two thumbs down but delighted in ridiculing the film. Ebert joked, “I did not for one moment believe that I was actually looking at prehistoric men or women in this movie. What I saw on the screen were recycled stunts from old Tarzan movies and a lot of pseudo-scientific anthropology in which the early Neanderthals develop into a caveman version of Eagle Scouts. First they invent facepainting, then they invent sitting in caves. It’s really thrilling.” Siskel added, “One of the shockers to me was this could’ve been a film which young men and young women–girls, teenage boys and girls–actually got involved in. Will this young warrior, this blonde young blonde warrior played by Daryl Hannah triumph and all that kind of thing. Then suddenly there’s this very explicit and brutal sexual scene, then another scene with bearbaiting and a bear-killing that is absolutely cruel and horrible. And suddenly, we’ve got an R-rated movie. Where was the mentality to make this picture?” Writing for the New York Times, Janet Maslin added: “One of the attractions of this sort of story ought to be its sense of how primitive culture anticipated the modern world, but Miss Auel’s book has more of this than the film does. Much of what happens on screen seems all too current and familiar, as when the young Ayla clutches at a Neanderthal woman and the camera glimpses a nicely manicured adult hand.” Opening January 17, 1986, Warner Bros. limited The Clan of the Cave Bear to a release in 106 theaters in the U.S., where it vanished without cracking the top ten grossing films of the week.

Michael Chapman and his director of photography, the illustrious Jan de Bont–who’d light Die Hard (1988) and The Hunt For Red October (1990) and direct double the number of movies Chapman would be allowed to–location scout and light The Clan of the Cave Bear so well that their film demands a more deliberate pace, one that might have used the prehistoric ecology as an asset. The final cut of the film doesn’t spend nearly as much time as The Blue Lagoon, in all its tawdriness, dramatizing how women and men cut off from modern conveniences would survive or what worlds they might create. The movie isn’t inquisitive. Moments such as one in which the holy man played by James Remar suffers from a toothache have quick and relatively painless remedies, while the inherent dangers of child birth are also skipped over, begging the question why scenes like this were included in the first place. The filmmakers place their faith in adapting Jean Auel’s bestseller as faithfully as possible, and her debut novel does at least two things well. The story defies categorization, an action/ adventure by default, it involves an interior quest for self-identity, not an exterior pursuit for objects. And it does offer an antagonist in the character of Broud, heir to the clan’s leadership who holds Ayla in fear and contempt. He represents tradition, which Ayla challenges by her very appearance, a blue-eyed and blonde-haired Cro-Magnon whose strange people the Neanderthal tolerate because they can only process threats to their existence by the number of days their fingers allow them to.

What Auel’s source material doesn’t provide outside of a few scenes in which Broud menaces Ayla is much conflict. The clan isn’t going anywhere or searching for anything. Beasts like the lion that mauls young Ayla pose no threat to adults. Ayla overcomes obstacles with ease. Auel does spare the viewer a romance, and the best scenes of the film are those in which Ayla teaches herself how to operate a sling, without a barbarian love interest to help her. Daryl Hannah, an athlete and performing artist gifted at crafting otherworldly characters, plays Ayla with grace, intelligence and feminine power, and with less flattering makeup, might have passed for a prehistoric woman. The female empowerment which made the novel compelling comes off as superficial on camera, as if surviving the elements and getting a film in the can was the ceiling the filmmakers were operating under. No one makes a strong case–other than money–for why The Clan of the Cave Bear needed to be a film. It’s unclear who the narrator is or what vantage she has to provide color commentary on the clan, while their communication comes down to a Tarzan-like hodgepodge. James Remar, who played hot-tempered warriors in The Warriors (1979) and–opposite Pamela Reed–The Long Riders (1980), is miscast as a wizened old man. Reed is an asset as Ayla’s adopted mother who, as in most of her performances, beautifully soothes the roughness of the story’s action. None of the actors are in the position to pull the film from the muddle it is stuck in.

Video rental category: Action/ Adventure

Special interest: East Meets West

THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI: ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION (1984) is like a big plastic jack-o’lantern stuffed with so much candy the handle bends to the point of breaking. The definitive “cult movie,” it was orphaned by its distributor and taken in by sophisticated viewers, inspiring fanzines, revival screenings, and pleas for a sequel. Its legacy is its inventive world building and deadpan humor wrapped in a slick package, something many movies have since aspired to but rarely achieve at this fever pitch.

Earl Mac Rauch grew up in Abilene, Texas. A National Merit Scholarship winner in 1967, he wrote his first novel in high school. It was published two years later, while Rauch was attending Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Titled Dirty Pictures From the Prom, the book was a teenaged author’s shot at The Catcher In the Rye, but broke a few norms by incorporating sketches, a chapter in outline form, and dialogue between Raunch and his editor. Uninterested in getting a job, Rauch enrolled at University of Texas Law School in order for his parents to subsidize the completion of his second novel, Arkansas Adios. A Dartmouth alum named Walter Dutch Richter spotted a review of Arkansas Adios in his alumni magazine, and hooked by the writing, bought a copy, which Richter and his wife Susan read at the same time. Richter–attending the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts and working as a script reader for Warner Bros.--wrote Rauch a fan letter, encouraging him to come to Los Angeles, his writing far superior to the junk being submitted to the studios.

By 1973, W.D. Richter (as he’d choose to be credited) had authored an original screenplay titled Slither produced with two big stars–James Caan and Sally Kellerman–in the leads. Rauch had dropped out of law school and, according to Richter, was selling mobile home loans in Texas. He took Richter up on his offer, phoning from a freewayside motel in L.A. he’d checked into with his typewriter. Rauch became a regular dinner guest at a cottage the Richters’ rented in the Alvarado District. He’d appear with his guitar to workshop songs he was noodling on. He also told his hosts about a story he wanted to write, inspired by a Spanish language professor in college who’d told him her favorite country western band was Buck Owens and the Buckaroos. A fan of Saturday matinee serials, Rauch’s brainstorm was to fuse singing cowboys and science fiction into a character named Buckaroo Bandy, who’d have a band of compadres accompanying him on out-of-this-world adventures. Wanting to read this as a screenplay, Richter gave Rauch $1,500 to cover rent and groceries while he wrote, effectively optioning the pitch.

In December 1974, Rauch delivered fourteen pages of a screenplay. Titled The Strange Case of Mr. Cigars: A Buckaroo Bandy Mystery, the story concerned archvillains plotting to assassinate world leaders at a summit conference with explosive cigars. Adolf Hitler was revealed to be hiding in Ecuador, having survived World War II by disguising himself as a woman. Richter thought this was hysterical and encouraged Rauch to finish a script. The fledgling screenwriter completed a 57-page treatment for a completely new story, titled Lepers From Saturn: A Buckaroo Banzai Adventure. Rauch had not only changed his hero’s name, but introduced his band, the Hopalongs. Rauch’s next milestone was plowing through 67 pages of a screenplay. This was titled Find the Jetcar, Said the President: A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller. Rauch employed the pseudonym “John Texas” for this draft. He was by this time a working screenwriter with something of a reputation, earning a shared screenplay credit (with Mardik Martin) and story credit for a highly anticipated musical directed by Martin Scorsese, New York, New York (1977).

Rauch kept carving away on his singing science fiction comedy and in 1980, completed a screenplay. Shields Against the Devil: A Buckaroo Banzai Thriller ran an industry standard 109 pages and concerned an arms race for a jet car between Rauch’s hero–now a rock ‘n roller instead of a cowboy–and the World Crime League. Buckaroo’s volunteer network, Knights of the Blue Shield, would be an early version of the Blue Blaze Irregulars. By now, W.D. Richter was in demand as a screenwriter, receiving sole credit for adapting Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Dracula (1979) and Brubaker (1980), the latter of which Robert Redford starred in. Richter formed a business partnership with producer Neil Canton, who’d worked as an assistant for director Peter Bogdanovich beginning with The Last Picture Show (1971), and later, Walter Hill during the production of The Driver (1978) and The Warriors (1979). Canton/ Richter Productions deemed Buckaroo Banzai the most promising material they had access to. Rauch had yet to tame a script that might sell, totting around 300 pages of odds and sods. Canton and Richter compiled a dozen or so pages into what they called The Buckaroo Banzai Sampler, teasing the universe that was there to explore. Attaching themselves as producers, Canton and Richter set up meetings with studio executives who were fellow Baby Boomers, thinking this was the demographic who’d be hip to contemporary adventure serial loaded with wit.

Executives at Disney, Fox, the Ladd Company, Paramount and Warner Bros. who met with Canton and Richter all got around to the same question: How do I sell this to my bosses? They passed. Canton had worked as a VP of production for producer Sidney Beckerman and shared The Buckaroo Banzai Sampler with his former boss. Beckerman put in a call to the president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, David Begelman, who agreed to a meeting. Of all the directions Rauch had signaled in the sampler, Begelman responded to Lizards From Saturn (formerly Lepers From Saturn) most. This story involved sinister aliens passing themselves off as residents of New Jersey. In a chain of ownership which the U.S. District Court of Southern California would eventually be called upon to sort out, Begelman passed on purchasing intellectual property rights to Buckaroo Banzai, preferring to produce one movie and see how it performed. Begelman sold MGM on developing a script. When the studio acquired United Artists in 1981, Begelman was promoted to chairman/CEO of MGM/UA and this became the temporary home of Buckaroo Banzai.

Barred from work during the 1981 Writers Guild of America strike, Rauch turned in a first draft around the same time David Begelman would lose his job, in July 1982, the studio executive dismissed after several films produced by his regime flopped for MGM/UA: Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981), Pennies From Heaven (1981), Cannery Row (1982). Three more–Diner (1982), Victor/ Victoria (1982), Poltergeist (1982)--would be much better received, but not soon enough for Begelman to keep his job. MGM/UA put Buckaroo Banzai into turnaround. Now operating as an independent producer, Begelman arranged to set Buckaroo Banzai up at his new company, Sherwood Productions. He struck a distribution deal with Twentieth Century Fox, and electing to start production on Mr. Mom (1983) and Blame It On Rio (1984) immediately, secured the financing to move ahead with Buckaroo Banzai next. Making his directorial debut. W.D. Richter had a stacked cast without one actor who could be considered a star, not at the time. Peter Weller, who’d been featured in Shoot the Moon (1982) and taken a step down in prestige to star in the Canadian horror film Of Unknown Origin (1983), accepted the role of Buckaroo Banzai. His character had evolved into quite a renaissance man: neurosurgeon, explorer, rock star, martial artist, and head of a scientific research facility (the Banzai Institute) who’s licensed his likeness for a line of popular comic books.

As Buckaroo’s band, now named the Hong Kong Cavaliers, Clancy Brown, Jeff Goldblum, Lewis Smith and Pepe Serna were cast. John Lithgow found an open spot in his schedule to play the villain, Dr. Emilio Lizardo, an Italian physicist whose experiments in interdimensional travel led to his possession by Lord John Whorfin, a Red Lectroid from Planet 10. After escaping imprisonment in the 8th dimension, Whorfin seeks to exploit the Banzai Institute’s technology to conquer Planet 10, something the benevolent Black Lectroids are willing to destroy Earth to stop. Christopher Lloyd, Vincent Schiavelli, and Dan Hedaya were cast as Red Lectroids who’ve assumed human form. Like all Lectroids, good or evil, they’ve taken the name “John”: John Bigbooté, John O’Connor, John Gomez. The intrigue didn’t stop there, Ellen Barkin cast as Penny Priddy, a splitting image of Buckaroo’s deceased wife. Cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, a master of light who’d lit Rolling Thunder (1977) and Cutter’s Way (1981), was hired, and with a budget of roughly $17 million, filming commenced July 1983 in Los Angeles.

Jordan Cronenweth was tasked with giving the picture an otherworldly grittiness, and his contributions can be found in the set piece he lit: the nightclub scene, shot in downtown L.A. at 440 Seaton Street in what was once a lumber warehouse. David Begelman is said to have given the director of photography marching orders that he didn’t want Buckaroo Banzai to look like Blade Runner (1982), which Cronenweth had cloaked in darkness and detail for director Ridley Scott, but had underperformed at the box office. Unsatisfied with either the lighting or the pace of production, Begelman fired Cronenweth, and journeyman Fred J. Koenekamp was brought in to finish the picture. Begelman further alienated cast and crew by fussing about details he disliked or didn’t understand, like a pair of red-framed eyeglasses Buckaroo wears in the press conference scene. This may have motivated Richter to double down on the irreverence, the director placing a watermelon between clamps in a laboratory scene. Never hearing a complaint, Richter kept it in the movie (Jeff Goldblum’s character, New Jersey, asks Pepe Serna’s character Reno what the watermelon is for, and is notified, “I’ll tell you later.” Viewers are left to draw our own conclusions).

The jetcar test was shot at El Mirage Dry Lake and Rabbit Dry Lake in the Mojave Desert of California. The front gate for the Banzai Institute was filmed in Santa Monica, interiors in an estate in Pacific Palisades. The Lectoid launch hangar was at the ARMCO Steel Plant in Torrance, the “shock tower” inside a DWP plant in Wilmington, and “the pit” under a Firestone rubber plant in South Gate. Twentieth Century Fox might have taken “banzai” literally, scheduling what was finally titled The Adventures of the Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension for release on June 8, 1984, slating their eclectic science fiction comedy to open the same weekend as a hugely anticipated science fiction comedy bankrolled by Columbia Pictures called Ghostbusters (1984). Then Warner Bros., buoyed by enthusiastic test screenings of their own, scheduled Gremlins (1984) for release on June 8 as well. Buzz for Buckaroo Banzai was quietly being built through advertisements in comic books, as well as at science fiction conventions, which in the 20th century were often held on college campuses.

Fox not only blinked on an early summer release, but backed off supporting the picture considerably, rescheduling Buckaroo Banzai for August 10, a graveyard for film distribution as families took vacations and students returned to school. The studio devoted more resources to promoting a movie they knew how to sell, Revenge of the Nerds (1984), expanding the college comedy to 958 theaters in its fourth weekend of release. This was the weekend Buckaroo Banzai stumbled into 236 theaters and from there, its release would diminish with each passing weekend. Critics tried to get audiences to notice. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert reviewed the film for an episode of At the Movies that aired in the dog days of summer, August 18. Though the country’s two most recognizable film critics split their votes, they enjoyed the film. Ebert offered, “A lot of the individual moments in Buckaroo Banzai are very funny, and the movie is filled with so many little jokes in the background that you probably have to watch it two or three times to figure them all out, but it’s impossible to figure out where you stand with this movie. It’s all over the map, and finally, I had no real idea who half the characters were or what they wanted or why I was supposed to be interested in them.” Ebert voted thumbs down, “with admiration for its little flashes of genius in between.”

Siskel retorted, “And I liked it because of all of what it was trying to do and because there were a lot of jokes. You and I see so many outer space adventures, or on-this-planet adventures, that are so routine and so predictable and all they’re trying to do is dazzle us with the same old special effects that are five years old. To me, I just laughed a lot in this picture, and that was enough for me.” In a moment of divine foresight, the film critic added, “I think this is a film that could get cult status, I think it’s going to be thrown away by its film company, but I think that people ought to try to find this picture. I think they’ll have a weird, funny time at the movies.” The Chicago Tribune wouldn’t print Siskel’s rave review (3 stars out of 4) until October 1, while Vincent Canby didn’t get an opportunity to herald the movie for readers of the New York Times until October 5. Canby’s opening paragraph read: “Watching The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai from beginning to end is like coming into the middle chapters of some hilariously overplotted, spaced-out 1930’s adventure serial, neither the beginning nor the end of which ever comes into sight. At its best, which it frequently is, it’s a lunatic ball, an extremely genial, witty example of what is becoming a movie genre all its own. That is, the science-fiction farce, which includes the current Repo Man and the virtually seminal Liquid Sky.” Though Fox kept Buckaroo Banzai in distribution, upping it to 194 theaters the post-Thanksgiving weekend, the film never caught on with a wider audience, failing to crack the box office top ten in any of its weekends in release. It should have been forgotten. But in December 1985, when John Lithgow hosted Saturday Night Live, he was asked to reprise Dr. Lizardo for the show’s cold open, in costume, warning viewers about Halley’s Comet (with cast members Robert Downey Jr. as a lab tech and Randy Quaid as President Reagan). By this time, the movie’s target audience–SNL writers and some SNL fans–were hip to Buckaroo Banzai, and thanks to videocassette and cable television, many more would discover it.

If the Coen brothers embarked on a science fiction film, it might play a lot like Buckaroo Banzai does. As with The Big Lebowski (1998) or O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and the Saturday matinee serials as well, it moves the viewer through a singularly goofy ecosystem that existed prior to the start of the picture and promises to keep going after the end credits run. Intrigue comes in hot, piling interdimensional travel, the reincarnation of a dead wife, evil aliens (who pass as white men) running amok in New Jersey, good aliens (who in a contrast that is never explained, are Jamaican) orbiting the earth in what looks like giant coral, and World War III on the shoulders of a hero who just wants to rock and roll. There’s unique patois (Buckaroo, perhaps mindful of his young fans, utters “Oh, the deuce you say!” instead of “Get the fuck outta here!”) There’s a conspiracy: Orson Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds broadcast of Halloween 1938 was real and the invaders brainwashed him into claiming it was a hoax. But where the Coens frame their movies meticulously, each shot a commentary, W.D. Richter is casual, refusing to impose a strong sense of style because as a first-time director, he didn’t have one. It’s not accurate to label the film a satire. To do that, the filmmakers would have to think that comic books, mad scientists, and spaceships are junk, and they don’t. They treat the junk like jewels.

The performances, and by extension, Richter’s direction, are inspired. Peter Weller, playing Buckaroo with a combination of innocence and virtue, like Forrest Gump operating with a 200 IQ, was a superb choice. Whereas Clancy Brown wouldn’t have been very believable as a surgeon, or Jeff Goldblum convincing as a jet car driver, Weller does both, and plays the bugle. John Lithgow is operating on another plane, fusing Dr. Frankenstein with Mussolini. Unburdened by exposition, his character gets the best lines. John Whorfin isn’t a strong enough adversary–his right hand man, John Bigbooté is more formidable–and his defeat comes too easy, but by this point in the movie, how things happen is more important than what happens. Michael Boddicker, who had a prolific career as a synthesizer artist for film and much shorter career as a composer, plays over his head and delivers a minimal but rousing electronic score. The film looks as good as any released the summer of 1984, better than most, with Peter Kuran and his company VCE handling the live action blue screen work, while Dream Quest Images, under the supervision of Hoyt Yeatman, photographing the motion-control models of the spaceships. Plenty of visual and intellectual stimulation is to be had in a first viewing, but those who return to Buckaroo Banzai are rewarded by its extraordinary deadpan, the filmmakers and their characters rarely pausing to take credit for how bizarre anything is, but rolling with it.

Video rental category: Staff Picks

Special interest: Could’ve Been Comic Books

Now that virtually any movie can be streamed in airports or aboard planes, that doesn’t mean that any movie should be. Using our portable devices or the airline’s seatback screen, not every film condenses well, and TV often adapts better to small screens. Noise-cancelling headphones can’t drown out aircraft clamor, and interruptions are a guarantee. Seat-neighbor etiquette should rule out movies with strong sexual content or graphic violence. And for short domestic hops — Los Angeles to San Francisco, Houston to Austin, New York to Washington D.C. — a running time of 100 or less minutes is ideal.

I flew from L.A. to Houston for the holidays, and most of these criteria weighed against Sinners (2025), rated R for strong bloody violence, sexual content, and language, portions shot with IMAX 70mm cameras (also, vampires are many things, but “soothing” generally isn’t one of them). So, which ’80s movies travel by air? Here are five suggestions most likely to be included in an airline library that do what baggage checks and TSA probes can’t: soothe the travel experience. As a bonus, each even includes a scene or scenes aboard an airplane.

Click the links to take a dive into each film with an article offering a complete historical retrospective.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY … (1989). Romantic comedy thrives at 35,000 feet, and this one — written by Nora Ephron in collaboration with director Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andrew Scheinman — is well-tailored for the sky. At 96 minutes, it fits most flight windows, and its thesis that men and women can click as friends first makes it a soothing fantasy for smart people. Music by the Harry Connick Jr. Trio is utilized much the way the Vince Guaraldi Trio were for the Peanuts specials, giving the film a comforting familiarity.

Read the full article → When Harry Met Sally ...

PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES (1987). Mining the pitfalls of travel, the first film released by writer/ producer/ director John Hughes starring adults pairs two masters of situation comedy — Steve Martin and John Candy. Predating contemporary identity politics by at least ten years, this comedy is a reminder that people who vote differently can coexist when working together on a problem. The supporting performances pop, and the movie — one of the funniest ever made — still lands every gag thirty years later.

Read the full article → Planes, Trains and Automobiles

MIDNIGHT RUN (1988). Produced and directed by Martin Brest as his follow-up to Beverly Hills Cop, this action-comedy features jeopardy that’s benevolent instead of brutal, and leans heavily into road-trip laughs. Robert DeNiro’s temperamental bounty hunter must transport Charles Grodin’s fussy accountant from New York to L.A. in a week, and George Gallo’s script finds ways to satisfy both of these well-drawn characters. DeNiro and Grodin were revelations in a buddy comedy, and their chemistry remains something to cherish. Given how few movies focus on male friendship, this one ends on an especially poignant note.

Read the full article → Midnight Run

POINT BREAK (1991). You don’t need a Jack & Coke to enjoy this Keanu Reeves-Patrick Swayze action thriller as a bromance. Righteously silly at turns, its surfing bank robber premise is pretty believable for L.A., and Reeves was cast as a credible surfer first, FBI agent second. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow with script polish from then-husband James Cameron, the surfing and skydiving scenes convey the thrill of an adrenaline-fueled lifestyle for those of us who don’t live it. Bigelow and second-unit director/stunt coordinator Glenn Wilder give the sports sequences a tranquil quality that contrasts with the chaos of the heists.

Read the full article → Point Break

THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER (1990). Tom Clancy’s consummate airport novel is improved by Hollywood as an action adventure about men who control war machinery rather than the other way around. With billion-dollar hardware loaned by the U.S. Navy, its high seas action scenes astound, but this blockbuster is comforting in its meeting of East and West, showing how adversaries can resolve their differences through strategic trust instead of warfare. Alec Baldwin, the first actor to play CIA analyst Jack Ryan in film or TV, presents a novel remedy for his character’s air sickness.

Read the full article → The Hunt For Red October

Whether you’re in the mood for a romantic comedy, buddy comedy, action with buddies, bromance with action, or military adventure, these ’80s films can help soothe air travel and get you to your destination a little less worse for the wear. For a non–jet-lagged explanation of why I consider the eighties to span 1982–1992, check the About section. For a deeper dive into each film, click on the links above.

WHEN HARRY MET SALLY … (1989) might be the best movie at 35,000 feet. Romantic comedy is tailored for treating the stresses of air travel, and the film is one of the funniest, coziest, most satisfying of its era. Powered by words, there’s no nudity, violence or flashing lights, nothing on our screen to disturb other passengers. At 96 minutes, it can be finished while most flights are in progress. Two scenes even take place at an airport, and the scene between them aboard a plane. And like friends or family we’re on our way to visit, its title characters remain as consistent in their neuroses or quirks as they were when we first met them.

Nora Ephron was born and raised in Beverly Hills, the first of four children, all daughters, to Harry & Phoebe Ephron, a writing duo who named Nora after the protagonist in Henrik Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House. Her birth and its impact on her parents would be dramatized by them in a play they authored: Three’s A Family. Harry & Phoebe Ephron would most famously adapt the plays of others to film: Daddy Long Legs (1955) starring Fred Astaire and Leslie Caron, Carousel (1956) from the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, and Desk Set (1957) starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Nora would go east, graduating from Wellesley College, a private women’s liberal arts school in Massachusetts, and moving to New York City in 1962, as soon as she graduated. Ephron started her career at Newsweek, in the mailroom, practically the only department of the magazine where there were women. In her 2010 memoir I Remember Nothing: and Other Reflections, Ephron admitted that she didn’t even know how to write when she applied for a job as reporter for the New York Post. As a tryout, she was sent to an aquarium in Coney Island to write about two seals who were supposed to mate and refused to. Her second day, she interviewed actor Tippi Hedren, her third day an Italian film director named Nanni Loy. Her fourth day she was sent to the Upper West Side to get background on a businessman who’d apparently killed his wife. On her fifth day, she was hired.

Five years later, Ephron’s work for the daily tabloid merited a call from Esquire magazine, which offered her a job as film critic. Turning the position down, Ephron was asked if she’d be interested in reviewing books. She again demurred, not because Ephron disliked movies or books, but because she didn’t want to write about them. Asked what she did want to write, Ephron asked Esquire for a column, and in 1970, began incorporating her opinions into her work. Believing she lacked the natural talent of someone like Joan Didion, when most of her peers started taking work in the film business, Ephron began taking commissions to write screenplays. All went unproduced until Meryl Streep, who like Ephron was represented by International Creative Management in New York, asked for a qualified woman to take over screenwriting duties on a film being developed for her. To chronicle the life and death of lab tech and labor activist Karen Silkwood, Ephron worked with a friend, freelance journalist Alice Arlen. Along with Meryl Streep, Cher and director Mike Nichols. Ephron & Arlen would be nominated for an Academy Award for their work on Silkwood (1983). That same year, Ephron published Heartburn, a comic novel loosely based on the breakup of her marriage to famed journalist Carl Bernstein. (The 1986 film adaptation from Ephron’s script was directed by Nichols and starred Streep as a New York-based food writer who uncovers her journalist husband’s infidelity while pregnant. Many jokes ensued, but reviews and word of mouth were dismal).

In 1984, director Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andrew Scheinman were in New York and arranged a meeting with Ephron. Son of television and film writer/ performer/ director Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner had cemented his own feet in pop culture, as Archie Bunker’s son-in-law Mike “Meathead” Stivic on the sitcom All In The Family from 1971-1979. More interested in directing than acting, Reiner struck gold in his debut as a feature film director with This Is Spinal Tap (1984), joining Christopher Guest, Michael McKean and Harry Shearer in the mockumentary, which hadn’t been booked into enough theaters to be a hit, but was one of the best reviewed comedies of its day. Reiner had wrapped his next film, a road trip romantic comedy starring John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga titled The Sure Thing (1985) that distributed by MGM, would be better attended and almost as well reviewed as his debut. Meeting with Ephron in between the release of those films, Reiner pitched the screenwriter an idea he wanted to collaborate with her on. Before they could order lunch, Ephron expressed her lack of enthusiasm for it. Having wrapped up business, Reiner and Scheinman started talking to Ephron about their social lives, the director having divorced actor Penny Marshall in 1981 and returning to the singles scene after ten years of marriage. Ephron, twice divorced, was in a relationship with journalist Nicholas Pileggi, whose focus on organized crime would produce the book Wiseguy: Life In a Mafia Family, which Pileggi would adapt with director Martin Scorsese as GoodFellas (1990).

Her ear attuned for material, Ephron let the men share their dating experiences, neither having much to say about them that was positive. A year or so later, Reiner was back in New York with another idea he met with Ephron to pitch. Once again, the screenwriter wasn’t interested. On Ephron’s way to the door, Reiner mentioned that he’d always wanted to do a movie about the friendship between a man and a woman, which they sustain by never having sex, until they do have sex and ruin their friendship. This got Ephron’s attention. On the cab ride home, she saw a beginning (couple meet, but never at the right time to be anything more than friends), middle (couple enjoy their friendship, which ultimately leads to sex) and end (sex kills the friendship). While Reiner decamped to Oregon in the summer of 1985 to shoot his third film in three years–Stand By Me (1986)–Ephron sketched out a draft of their romantic comedy. Reiner read it upon his return and gave Ephron notes, and as Reiner and Scheinman headed to England in the summer of 1986 to begin work on their next picture, The Princess Bride (1987), Ephron worked on a second draft. Once Reiner was back in the States and ready to focus on his fifth film, he huddled with Ephron to dial in the script for what would have many titles, How They Met and Boy Meets Girl among them.

By this time, Reiner had co-founded a film and television production company with Andrew Scheinman and three film executives they branded Castle Rock Entertainment, a nod to the town in Stand By Me. With Reiner and his partners owning 60% of the company and Columbia Pictures 40%, they struck a deal with Nelson Entertainment, exchanging domestic video and foreign distribution rights for co-financing on what Castle Rock anticipated would be eighteen pictures over the next five years, plus television, with an emphasis on half-hour comedy. Castle Rock bowed in 1989 with an adaptation of the John Ehle novel The Winter People starring Kurt Russell and Kelly McGillis. Starting with Reiner & Ephron’s romantic comedy, Castle Rock’s track record would become the envy of Hollywood, producing Misery (1990), City Slickers (1991), Honeymoon In Vegas (1992), A Few Good Men (1992), In The Line of Fire (1993), The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and Before Sunrise (1995) among many others in its first five years. Castle Rock’s foray into TV began with a pilot for NBC starring Morris Day titled Heart and Soul that wasn’t picked up for series. Castle Rock’s next effort was one of the greatest sitcoms ever produced: Seinfeld. With distribution by Columbia, Reiner & Ephron’s romantic comedy would be co-financed on a production budget of $14 million.

Through the start of principal photography, the screenplay was credited to Nora Ephron, Rob Reiner & Andrew Scheinman, but the producers would surrender their claims of authorship, clearing the way for the WGA to award Ephron sole writing credit. Her script did grow out of a close collaboration with Reiner and the actors he’d cast. Ephron favored the title Harry, This Is Sally and that stuck for a while. Reiner proposed When Harry Met Sally, which Ephron didn’t like as much, but Reiner did after he added an ellipsis. He offered a case of champagne to anyone among cast or crew who could come up with a better title than When Harry Met Sally …, but no one did. For Ephron, there was no debate where a smart movie in which characters who lived by their words and wits should take place, which as a resident of New York, she was prejudiced for. Ephron had modeled the character of Harry Burns on Rob Reiner, particularly his neuroses and tendency to think they were front page news (Ephron actually pined for Reiner to play Harry, but the director’s inability at age 40 to pass himself off as a college student likely precluded him from considering the part).

Reiner leaned toward casting Richard Dreyfuss, a friend from Beverly Hills High School who’d played the adult Gordie Lachance in Stand By Me and narrated the film. Dreyfuss was of the opinion that Harry needed to be fleshed out more than he was in the script. Reiner & Ephron disagreed, not wanting to force a work subplot into their romance the way other movies forced a romance into the action. While Sally writes for a newspaper she refers to as “the News” and Harry states that he works as a political consultant, other than two brief shots of them sitting alone at their desks–looking more tired than they do content–no one mentions their work. Reiner had observed how particular Ephron was when ordering food, making menus better than they were, and this became a defining characteristic of Sally Albright. Ephron didn’t base Sally on anyone in particular, writing a woman who would be the opposite of Harry: prim, polite and optimistic. After considering several possibilities–Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins from Big (1988) were discussed–Reiner chose Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. Crystal had been a good friend of Reiner’s since Norman Lear cast him as Mike Stivic’s buddy Al Bender on two episodes of All In the Family. A veteran writer and performer, Crystal emerged as the star of Saturday Night Live in its 1984-85 season before Lorne Michaels returned to produce the show and Crystal departed to make movies–appearing as a caterer in This Is Spinal Tap and the wizard in The Princess Bride–none of which he’d carried as a leading man.

As they continued to work on the script, Reiner challenged Ephron to reveal something men would be shocked to learn about women, the way they’d peppered the script with insights into the mind of the single man. Ephron did shock Reiner by telling him that most women had faked orgasms. After an office poll convinced Reiner that this was indeed the case, Ephron wrote a scene in which Sally demonstrates it to Harry. Proving Ephron’s thesis, Ryan stated she’d have no problem faking an orgasm, but suggested the scene be set in the least likely place a woman would, like a crowded restaurant. Crystal added a punchline, a female diner telling her server, “I’ll have what she’s having,” and to deliver the line, Reiner cast his mother, Estelle. To serve as a framing device, Reiner had Ephron write six vignettes of couples who’d been together for fifty years talking to an off-camera interviewer about how they’d met. The ending wasn’t agreed upon until late in the script’s development, Reiner using anecdotal experience to assume that Harry and Sally would go their separate ways. Ephron may have turned Reiner away from the dark side, their shooting script dated 8/23/88 including the final scenes as seen in the film. Billy Crystal threw in an extra line for Harry about how he loves the crinkle that forms above Sally’s nose whenever he says something crazy, Crystal having noticed this on Ryan’s face.

With Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby as Sally and Harry’s friends Marie and Jess, shooting commenced August 1988 in New York. Wary of the film playing out in apartments or diners, Reiner and director of photography Barry Sonnenfeld filmed college-age Harry and Sally parting ways in Washington Square, while Harry and Jess have conversations among the crowd at Giants Stadium and the batting cages at Coney Island. Sally’s brunch with Marie and their friend Alice (Lisa Jane Persky) was filmed at the Loeb Boathouse in Central Park, where the autumn foliage would be incorporated for a scene of Harry and Sally walking in the park. The couple’s second reunion was shot in a bookshop on the Upper West Side called Shakespeare and Co., a location that closed in 1996. Marie & Jess’ wedding and both New Year’s Eve parties were shot in penthouses of the historic Puck Building in SoHo. A number of scenes were filmed in Los Angeles. The diner where Harry and Sally stop on their college trip was the Port Cafe, in the industrial neighborhood of Wilmington. A number of interiors were filmed at Hollywood Center Studios, formerly American Zoetrope Studios, formerly General Service Studios.

When it came to the music, Reiner reached out to a friend named Bobby Colomby, former drummer for the brass-heavy rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears, whose early incarnation performed at Woodstock. Colomby had gone on to a career as a record executive, ultimately a VP of creative development at Columbia Records. He knew many artists on the label and suggested one of them to Reiner. Barely old enough to enter a bar, pianist Harry Connick Jr. had already released two LPs, one of instrumental arrangements from the American songbook, followed by 20, with several tracks featuring his vocals. Commissioned to arrange and perform songs for When Harry Met Sally …, the Harry Connick Jr. Trio (Connick Jr. on piano, Ben Wolfe on bass, Jeff “Tain” Watts on drums) put their spin on “It Had To Be You,” “But Not For Me,” “Autumn In New York” and “Stompin’ At the Savoy,” while Connick Jr. performed vocals with big band backing for two songs heard during New Year’s Eve celebrations: “I Could Write a Book” and “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” Reiner also picked Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald (“Our Love Is Here To Stay” and “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”), Ella Fitzgerald (“Where or When”) and Ray Charles (“Winter Wonderland”) for the film. Connick Jr. would play piano or croon or both on all 11 tracks for the soundtrack album, which went double platinum, won a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Male Vocal Performance, and launched Connick Jr’s career, which would segue into acting roles in Copycat (1995), Hope Floats (1998) and The Iron Giant (1999).

When Harry Met Sally … opened in limited release on July 14, 1989 in nine cities: New York, Los Angeles, Toronto, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Washington D.C., Boston, Seattle and Denver. Reviews tipped positive. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert gave the film two marginal thumbs up. Siskel was adamant that the movie was not in the same class as Annie Hall (1977) in spite of a framing device, locations and music reminiscent of Woody Allen, but acknowledged it had cute moments, working more as a comedy than a social commentary. Ebert singled out Meg Ryan, and especially Billy Crystal for how tender the comedian was with his co-star. His bone to pick with the film concerned the deli scene, which Ebert admitted was funny, but went straight for a joke instead of anything resembling reality, undercutting the film’s believability. Writing for the New York Times, Caryn James pointed out that the opening credits–white letters on a black background–were similar to certain romantic comedies set in New York, calling it “a perfectly pleasant Woody Allen wannabe, full of canned romance.” James concluded that When Harry Met Sally … was missing the sly edge and sardonic tone of This Is Spinal Tap and The Sure Thing, Reiner shifting into the softer, more nostalgic rendering of Stand By Me and The Princess Bride. Audiences didn’t seem to mind, Columbia expanding When Harry Met Sally … to 775 theaters its second weekend and 1,133 theaters by its fourth weekend. It opened wide against two other comedies–Parenthood and Uncle Buck–and all were hits, When Harry Met Sally … spending thirteen weekends in the middle of the top ten grossing films in the U.S.

The major flaw in When Harry Met Sally … is the conclusion that Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner arrive at. While friendships can lead to marriage and in some cases happy marriages, more often than not, the absence of sexual attraction is a warning that something is missing, either below the waistline or above it. In spite of this fallacy, the film’s ending feels honest, Ephron in what seems to have been a healthy relationship with Nicholas Pileggi, who she’d marry in 1987 and remain married to until her passing in 2012. The New Year’s resolution was neither reshot to appease test audiences, nor a concession to comfort future generations of air travelers, but is the only ending the filmmakers were capable of delivering. The first half hour of the movie is so candid and so funny in terms of what make Harry and Sally incompatible–Harry has no utility for a woman who’s not going to sleep with him, while Sally simply has no space for someone like him in her plans–that by the third time they cross paths, we’re invested in seeing their relationship stick no matter how improbable it might be. The Harry Connick Jr. Trio are slipped into the picture much in the way the Vince Guaraldi Trio were for the Peanuts holiday specials, giving the film a simple and subtle jazz accompaniment.

Ephron & Reiner suggest that sexual chemistry doesn’t necessarily lead to a healthy relationship, and intellectual stimulation as well as mutual respect may be more important. In this way, the movie is a comforting fantasy for smart people. Excellent music and atmosphere setting the table–Harry and Sally carrying a Christmas tree down a sidewalk on the Upper West Side and Sally struggling home with a tree by herself one year later all the film needs to feel thoroughly New York–watching When Harry Met Sally … is like hanging out with old friends. It’s not only comfortable, but unlike classics in other genres, plays well at a low volume. Instead of using music for an emotional jolt, Reiner actually lets most of the movie play without any, Ephron’s dialogue like music. Crystal’s character takes precedence over Ryan’s, but this reserves Harry the most criticism. The film implies that women are better equipped emotionally to recover from a breakup and how “good timing” is simply finding someone we can actually relate to, Harry and Sally only connecting when they realize they have failed love lives in common. The famed diner scene requires surprise to work and doesn’t play well on repeat viewings, but the leads are funny throughout, and Billy Crystal is a revelation. Rather than simply perform for her, he has to listen to Ryan’s character, discover things about her and remember them. Crystal’s transformation into a leading man mirrors what it takes for men to go from sleeping with women to building a lasting relationship with one.

Video rental category: Romantic Comedy

Special interest: On the Road

MISERY (1990) consists of two game pieces, limited space on the board, and a stack of chance cards that keep the gameplay taut. Based on the novel by Stephen King, and made by the people who brought us Stand By Me (1986) and would bring us The Shawshank Redemption (1994), Misery is one of the good movies adapted from King’s work, laced with humor and filtered of its horror to come out as more of a comic thriller. While King’s bibliography teems with humor and suspense, the film version of Misery boasts something most of King’s work lacks: merciless editing.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Stephen King and his wife Tabitha were on their way to visit London, when the bestselling author had a dream, or inspiration, or perhaps both in midair. Scribbling a note on an American Airlines cocktail napkin, King pondered what would happen if an injured author was held captive by a psychotic fan. Under great duress, King’s abducted author, Paul Sheldon, is forced to write a novel for his captor, a murderous nurse named Annie Wilkes, livid that he has killed off her favorite literary character, Misery Chastain, heroine of a series of popular bodice-rippers. Completely off her feed, Annie plans to sacrifice her pig Misery and print her limited edition novel on pigskin, but with a joker’s grin, King imagined his macabre tale would reveal that the author’s skin has been used for parchment instead. As documented in his 2000 memoir On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, King was sleepless in London, and asked the concierge for a quiet place to write. He was shown to a second-floor stairwell landing where a desk he was told had belonged to author Rudyard Kipling was stored.

Running on tea his first night in London, King sketched sixteen pages of notes for what he’d titled The Annie Wilkes Edition, anticipating a novella of roughly 30,000 words. He ultimately chose to title the piece Misery, ignoring the advice of his wife that critics would roast a novel titled that. Interviewed by Andy Greene for an article in Rolling Stone magazine published October 31, 2014, King continued to be candid about abusing alcohol and drugs early in his career, admitting to being a heavy cocaine user from 1978 to 1986. “I was usually pretty good about it. I was able to get up and make the kids’ breakfast and get them off to school. And I was strong; I had a lot of energy. I would’ve killed myself otherwise. But the books start to show it after a while. Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number one fan.” Along these lines, Paul Sheldon turned out to be more redeemable than King had anticipated, while Annie Wilkes–his stand-in for narcotics torturing an addict–was more complex. Reaching a novel length of 110,000 words, Misery would arrive at bookstores in June 1987.

Recollections vary on who at Castle Rock Entertainment inquired about obtaining the movie rights to Misery. The film production company was co-founded in 1987 by Alan Horn (former CEO of Embassy Communications), Martin Shafer (former president of production for Embassy Pictures), Glenn Padnick (former president of Embassy Television), Rob Reiner and his producing partner Andrew Scheinman. Before it was acquired by Coca-Cola, Embassy Pictures had financed two movies Reiner directed and Scheinman produced–The Sure Thing (1985) and Stand By Me (1986)--and it was Reiner’s idea to name their new enterprise after the town in the Stephen King novella which Stand By Me had been based. With Reiner and his partners owning 60% of Castle Rock and Columbia Pictures 40%, they struck a deal with Nelson Entertainment, exchanging domestic video and foreign distribution rights for co-financing on what Castle Rock anticipated would be eighteen pictures over the next five years, plus television, with an emphasis on half-hour comedy. Patrick Goldstein in an article for the Los Angeles Times published April 29, 1990 gave Martin Shafer credit for following up on the film rights to Misery, while Reiner credited Andrew Scheinman, who apparently read Misery in paperback on a flight and thought it would make a terrific movie.

Castle Rock assumed that someone would’ve snapped up the film rights to a Stephen King thriller, but to their surprise, no one had. King had watched a cavalcade of movies based on his work–Carrie (1976), ‘Salem’s Lot (1979), The Shining (1980), The Dead Zone (1983), Christine (1983), Firestarter (1984)--play on the big or small screen, and he’d been satisfied with nearly none of them, including one King had adapted and directed himself: Maximum Overdrive (1986). One exception had been Stand By Me, based on his novella The Body, published in 1982 with three other King novellas in the collection Different Seasons. When asked by Rolling Stone in 2014 to name his favorite movie based on one of his books, King stated: “Probably Stand By Me. I thought it was true to the book, because it had the emotional gradient of the story. It was moving. I think I scared the shit out of Rob Reiner. He showed it to me in the screening room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was out there for something else and he said, ‘Can I come over and show you this movie?’ And you have to remember that the movie was made on a shoestring. It was supposed to be one of these things that opened in six theaters and then maybe disappeared. And instead it went viral. When the movie was over I hugged him because I was moved to tears, because it was so autobiographical.”

Not wanting to watch one of his more personal books hollowed out by Hollywood, King had not made the film rights to Misery available, but assured that Rob Reiner wanted to produce if not also direct, optioned it to Reiner and Scheinman for $1. Reiner was unsure if he was best suited to direct the material, but did agree to develop a script. He settled on commissioning screenwriter William Goldman, whose adaptation of his novel The Princess Bride (1987) had just opened with Reiner directing and Reiner and Scheinman producing. Goldman, who’d also adapted the thriller Marathon Man (1976) from his novel, knew a good torture scene when he read one, and when he reached the point in King’s novel in which Annie hobbles Paul by cleaving off his feet with an axe and cauterizing his wounds with a blowtorch, he knew he wanted to write the script. Reiner and Goldman’s first choice to direct was George Roy Hill, the prestigious director of Goldman’s original screenplay Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969). Hill, who twenty years later was a long way from a hit, boarded Misery for a while, but couldn’t reconcile shooting a picture which pivoted on a character getting his feet lopped off. Reiner briefly considered offering the job to Barry Levinson before deciding he could direct Misery himself.

Speaking to Betsy Sharkey for a New York Times article published June 17, 1990, Reiner stated, “I don’t like horror movies. What was intriguing to me was not the horror aspect so much as the torture, the turmoil, the angst that any creative person goes through in order to try to create, in order to try to grow. It’s exactly what I’ve been through in my life–being successful at one thing and wanting to do something else and being terrified that you won’t be accepted at that.” After William Goldman turned in his first draft, Rob Reiner & Andrew Scheinman, who’d demurred taking a screen credit for co-writing When Harry Met Sally …with Nora Ephron, started fine tuning Goldman’s script. When Reiner had asked Goldman who he pictured playing Annie Wilkes, the screenwriter had responded “Kathy Bates.” Goldman had never met the actor but knew her work, Bates a Tony Award nominee in ‘Night Mother and an Obie Award winner for Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, the former of which Reiner had seen performed on Broadway. The director agreed immediately that Bates was ideal for the part.

Castle Rock was an independent producer sheltered from studio notes or casting approval, but Reiner did his due diligence by meeting a star and discussing with Bette Midler the possibility of her playing Annie Wilkes. Midler apparently confided she couldn’t see herself playing someone so “ugly” and Reiner didn’t try to change her mind. Kathy Bates had relocated to Los Angeles, where instead of movies, she was working on stage, in the L.A. tours of ‘Night Mother and later, Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune, both at the Mark Taper Forum. Meeting with Reiner to read for the part of Annie Wilkes, Bates was interrupted by the director-producer early in her reading to be notified that the part was hers. Casting Paul Sheldon would be nowhere near as neat. Reiner’s first choice for the role was William Hurt. He turned it down. Goldman went as far to address some of Hurt’s concerns in a rewrite, which Hurt also turned down. Kevin Kline turned it down. Michael Douglas met with Reiner and turned it down. Harrison Ford turned it down months after passing on Ghost (1990), incredulous at playing scenes with actors whose characters were not able to see him. Ford’s objections to Misery are unclear.

Dustin Hoffman was reached by phone, and according to Goldman, the two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actor liked Reiner and liked Castle Rock, but turned Misery down. Robert DeNiro turned it down. Al Pacino turned it down. Richard Dreyfuss, a classmate and longtime friend of Rob Reiner’s from Beverly Hills High School, had come close to starring in When Harry Met Sally … before raising concerns about the script, which he thought had given its characters short shrift and needed work. Reiner chose the script over star, and later realizing he’d screwed up, Dreyfuss told Reiner he’d work on whatever Reiner was directing next. Dreyfuss read Misery and turned it down. Gene Hackman turned it down. Robert Redford took a meeting with Reiner, acknowledged that Misery would be a very commercial movie, and turned it down. Warren Beatty, who had a reputation of flirting with more acting jobs than he committed to, operated in similar fashion when it came to playing Paul Sheldon. In November 1989, Daily Variety reported that Beatty was in “serious negotiations” to take the part. According to Reiner, the actor came in every day for at least two months to work with him and Scheinman on the script.

Warren Beatty’s mission statement for Misery was that it wasn’t a horror or thriller, but a prison movie. Imprisonment was everything, and it was incumbent on them to make Paul Sheldon smart enough to escape his captivity. King’s novel, an addiction parable, dealt with Paul laying in bed and overcoming his dependence on the painkillers Annie was plying him with, but Beatty was adamant the character move around and fight for his freedom. It was also Beatty’s suggestion that the hobbling scene as King had devised it would not play to viewers the way it played to readers and needed to be rethought. Based on Beatty’s script input, Reiner and Scheinman equipped Annie Wilkes with a new set of tools to perform a different operation, and William Goldman, in his 2000 memoir Which Lie Did I Tell? admitted to being so upset over revisions to the hobbling scene that he called Reiner and yelled at him over the phone. Goldman’s tirade appeared to be academic, because after Reiner and Scheinman dialed in a script, Warren Beatty lost interest, telling the director that if he couldn’t get anyone else to play Paul, he could come back to him. Rather than conclude that no film leading man with prestige would do the part, Andrew Scheinman proposed they try James Caan.

For every good movie that James Caan had worked on–The Godfather (1972), Freebie and the Bean (1974), Thief (1981)--many more–Slither (1973), Comes a Horseman (1978), Kiss Me Goodbye (1982)--had not been good, and Caan had disappeared from film between 1983 and 1987 while seeking treatment for depression and cocaine addiction. Sober and needing work, Caan jumped through hoops to win the part of Paul Sheldon and in December 1989, Daily Variety announced that he’d been cast. Bates and Caan were joined by Richard Farnsworth as the sheriff investigating Sheldon’s disappearance and Frances Sternhagen as his deputy and wife. Lauren Bacall, credited for “special appearance,” was cast as Sheldon’s literary agent in three scenes. On a budget Rob Reiner tabbed at $18-20 million, Misery commenced filming February 1990. The town of Genoa, Nevada stood in for “Silver Creek,” Colorado. Four buildings were constructed as both exterior and interior filming locations in Genoa: a sheriff’s office, a café, an auto garage, and a general store. A gas station facade and a pay phone were also installed to fill in the fictional town’s infrastructure. A facade of Annie Wilkes’ home was constructed outside the town of Clear Creek, near Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Most of the interiors, including all those in Annie’s house, were filmed at Hollywood Center Studios in Los Angeles, formerly General Service Studios and for a brief period, Zoetrope Studios, with Francis Coppola filming One From the Heart (1982) there in its entirety. The crash site was filmed in Donner Pass, in the northern California county of Placer, while the restaurant scene which ends the picture was filmed outside and inside the Biltmore Los Angeles.

Misery opened November 30, 1990 on a modest 1,244 screens in the U.S. Reviews leaned positive. On their syndicated television program, Gene Siskel & Roger Ebert gave the film two thumbs up. Filing his review in the Chicago Tribune, Siskel wrote: “This obviously could have been been routine thriller material, but it is enlivened by a wonderful performance by Kathy Bates as the crazed fan who alternates between compassion and violent kookiness–all while smiling beautifully and with a little gold cross hanging from her neck. Thrillers are defined by the freshness of their villains, and this one is unique. James Caan, who has had an erratic career, is very good here, playing the writer in a no-nonsense fashion. Explicit violence is kept to a minimum, yet I found myself covering my eyes out of tension more than once.” Siskel gave the film 3 stars out of 4. Writing in the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert stated, “It is a good story, a natural, and it grabs us. But just as there is almost no way to screw it up, so there’s hardly any way to bring it above a certain level of inspiration. Many competent directors could have done what Reiner does here, and perhaps many other actors could have done what Caan does, although the Kathy Bates performance is trickier and more special. The result is good craftsmanship, and a movie that works. It does not illuminate, challenge or inspire, but it works.” Ebert also gave the film 3 stars out of 4.

At the box office, Misery was in competition with a bevy of holiday films: The Rescuers Down Under, Rocky V, Three Men and a Little Lady (a sequel to Three Men and a Baby), Predator 2, Clint Eastwood-Charlie Sheen in The Rookie and a new fantasy film from Tim Burton titled Edward Scissorhands. Misery opened post-Thanksgiving head-to-head against Look Who’s Talking Too (a sequel to Look Who’s Talking) and Cher-Winona Ryder in Mermaids. A family comedy written by John Hughes titled Home Alone and a three-hour western directed by Kevin Costner titled Dances With Wolves defied expectations to become the season’s blockbusters, but Misery spent six, nearly seven weekends among the top ten grossing films in the U.S. It received an Academy Award nomination, for Best Actress (Kathy Bates) and despite being counseled by Reiner that industry voters rarely rewarded thrillers, Bates won the Oscar. Lead roles in several feature films followed: Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), A Home of Our Own (1993), Dolores Claiborne (1995), as did supporting roles in Titanic (1997) and The Waterboy (1999).

Misery is not a flawless movie. It feels like a flawless movie. The characters–none of whom realize they’re in a Stephen King story–take time to catch up with the viewer. Annie’s anger boils from foul temper (furious at Paul when she discovers that he knocked off Misery Chastain in the freshly published Misery’s Child) to emotional torture (compelling him to cast the match to incinerate the manuscript she’s recovered from his car, which she deems “filth”). This slower build is necessary to lure us in and it’s at the 41-minute mark when Misery takes off. This is when Annie lugs an antique Royal typewriter and glossy Corrasable paper into the guest room and Paul realizes that to live a while longer, he has to write the book of his life. Misery isn’t simply about being held hostage by a murderous nurse, it’s about being held hostage by the creative process. His legs smashed, his right arm nursed in a sling, the world believing he’s dead (all of which could be filed under “resistance”), if Paul is unable to resurrect his heroine for Misery’s Return, his host will have no further use for him. Sort of like, readers for a writer who won’t write. This scenario is not only a delight for book lovers–with King, William Goldman and Rob Reiner making sport of the sort of disposable romance novel that sells more copies a year than every other type of book combined, Annie Wilkes their critique of the reader addicted to them–but also introduces a good deal more levity into the story that the horror show that is King’s novel, which includes more torture.

The film adaptation turns mostly on suspense. Like a rat in a maze, Paul Sheldon realizes that he can’t outmuscle or outrun Annie, can’t outsmart her because she knows everything about him ever printed, and can’t out reason a psychopath with several victims to her credit. Kathy Bates offers no tells, hints at no exploitable weaknesses with Annie, until Paul discovers one that should bring joy to the heart of any book lover: the power of fiction. James Caan is equally potent. His casting brings certain qualities that Warren Beatty might’ve–his situation rendering his athletic prowess or way with women useless–but unlike Beatty, Caan makes Paul relatable, a guy from our neighborhood who goes step by step trying to escape his predicament just like we would. Barry Sonnenfeld, who’d photographed Raising Arizona (1987), Throw Momma From the Train (1987), When Harry Met Sally … and Miller’s Crossing (1990) before making the rare leap from cinematographer to director, does a yeoman’s job pushing the camera into Bates’ or Caan’s face at moments of anxiety, or exploiting detail—like a keyhole, a ceramic penguin, or a match—unlike King’s novels, which are often overloaded with stuff that can be easily tossed. As directed by Reiner, there’s not an ounce of fat on Misery, and he matches King’s sense of humor by using Annie’s favorite musical artist, Liberace, throughout the soundtrack.

Video rental category: Mystery/ Suspense

Special interest: Prison Break

THE COLOR PURPLE (1985) is one of the most emotionally cathartic prison movies ever made, overlooked as such because its walls and bars and guards are invisible. Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Alice Walker, Hollywood remained faithful by retaining the humor and universality of her story, both book and movie discerning on sorrow and naturalism. Filled with discoveries in its cast and in the range of its director, the film is sumptuous entertainment that moving forward, helped make a huge impact on opportunities for Black filmmakers to tell their stories.

Alice Walker was born in 1944 the youngest of eight children to a sharecropping family near Eatonton, Georgia. Her mother worked as a maid, and picked cotton for their landlord. At the age of eight, Alice was playing with her siblings when one of her brothers accidentally shot her with a BB gun. Losing sight in her left eye, Walker grew up a loner, immersed in books like Jane Eyre. Her injury qualified her for a partial scholarship to Spelman College in Atlanta and later, to Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers. Between universities, she spent the summer of 1964 as an exchange student in Uganda, starting what became her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland (the following summer, Walker would live with a host family in Kenya). Graduating from Sarah Lawrence, Walker accepted a grant to move to Jackson, Mississippi, collecting depositions from sharecroppers, teaching at Jackson State University and Tougaloo College, and writing. She met her husband, a Brooklyn-raised attorney and civil rights organizer, and their union would be the first (legal) interracial marriage in the Magnolia State. Her novel was published in 1970, which Walker followed with a collection of poetry titled Revolutionary Petunias in 1974, which was nominated for a National Book Award.

The following year, Walker took a job as a contributing editor to Ms. magazine, co-founded by Gloria Steinem, who’d become one of her mentors. Walker published her second novel, Meridian, in 1976, but living in Brooklyn with her husband and daughter, tension had pushed her to consider taking her own life. Walker’s environment had not only ground down her mental and spiritual health, but her creativity, and the grandparents whose stories she wanted to tell in her next novel were inaudible to her living in New York. Walker divorced her husband and headed west looking for a place similar to the one she’d grown up in. Settling in San Francisco, Walker discovered a town in Mendocino County named Boonville and surrounded by nature, she spent nine months writing The Color Purple. She named the character of Celie after her paternal great-grandmother and Celie’s sister Nettie for her maternal grandmother. The real Celie had been a slave, raped and sired two children by the man who’d legally owned her, babies she never saw again. Nettie had wanted to travel but never did.