Crossroads
Inventive blend of Delta blues and fantasy anchored by dazzling music
CROSSROADS (1986) is the movie that one of the decade’s most popular young actors–Ralph Macchio–picked at his moment of maximum career prestige, between starring roles in one blockbuster (The Karate Kid, 1984) and an imminent one (The Karate Kid Part II, 1986). Crossroads is the better film than either because its creators love blues music, value blues artists, and find magic in the myths of American blues in a way that neither The Karate Kid or its extended universe love, value or are enamored by martial arts. Not this much.
John Fusco grew up in Mattatuck, Connecticut, writing short stories and shooting them on his mother’s 8mm film camera. Looking for a more practical creative outlet, he wrote lyrics for local garage bands. In addition to playing keyboards, Fusco realized he was a decent vocalist. At age sixteen, he left home to tour with a country/ blues band, spending six years visiting places in the American South he’d only read about, hanging out in the Mississippi Delta with the remnants of the hobo generation, and ending up in New Orleans. Fusco had to earn his GED from night school in order to apply to New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, where he was accepted into the Dramatic Writing Program. Fusco’s first screenplay won first place in the 1983 FOCUS (Films of College and University Students) competition funded by Nissan, landing Fusco a literary agent at William Morris Agency. Convinced his days of tending bar in New York were over, Fusco’s student script didn’t sell.
For his next script, his bachelor’s thesis, Fusco returned to an idea he’d been nurturing since the summer before he entered college. Fusco’s girlfriend (and future wife) Richela Renkun, a performing arts major at NYU, worked as a certified recreation director at an assisted living home. Renkun had phoned to tell Fusco that an elderly Black man with a harmonica and lots of stories had been admitted. On his drive to meet him, Fusco pondered whether the man could be a blues legend, like the cryptic Willie Brown mentioned by Robert Johnson in the song “Crossroads.” If he was Willie Brown, Fusco imagined the man busting out of the facility to conclude unfinished business at the crossroads where he’d sold his soul to the Devil. Titled Crossroads, Fusco’s script notched him another first place finish in the FOCUS competition and was optioned by producer Mark Carliner, who served as a faculty advisor at NYU. The year was 1984, and Carliner was able to sell the script to Columbia Pictures for $250,000.
According to Fusco, Sean Penn and Tom Cruise were both interested in playing Eugene “Lightnin’ Boy” Martone, but the success of The Karate Kid moved Ralph Macchio to the front of the line. Swedish filmmaker Lasse Hallström was among those interested in directing. So was Walter Hill, who Fusco was an admirer of and became the consensus choice to direct, Carliner and Columbia agreeing that the director of The Long Riders (1980) and Southern Comfort (1981) had the best grasp of rural America. Hill turned to his frequent musical composer Ry Cooder to help prep the film. A master of the slide guitar, Cooder advised on the script, helped scout locations, and assembled the musicians to not only record the soundtrack, but jam on screen. For the juke joint scene, Cooder would pluck Mississippi locals The Wonders, fronted by Frank Frost. Ralph Macchio was determined to actually learn guitar, but Cooder knew this would be impossible and for a crash course, suggested guitarist Arlen Roth coach the actor. For four days a week, two hours a day, for four months, Roth drilled Macchio on how to handle the axe and pantomime the notes for each of his numbers.
With Joe Seneca joining the cast as Willie Brown and Jami Gertz as a teenage runaway the boys meet up with in their trek to the crossroads, shooting commenced in April 1985 in the first of four towns in Mississippi. The crossroads were found fifty miles north of Greenville. After a few days on location in New York City, the production returned to Los Angeles to shoot interiors at Burbank Studios. These included the musical performances. Ry Cooder and Arlen Roth would dub Lightnin’ Boy’s slide guitar play, while classical guitarist William Kanengiser played for Eugene at Julliard. Crossroads would open March 1986 in the U.S. Reviews were decidedly negative. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert split, with Siskel coming close to recommending the picture for its otherwise thin characters, while Ebert was enthusiastic in his ardor for it, crediting the film’s supernatural elements as being daring and original. Both loved the music. Audiences chose the new Michael Keaton comedy Gung Ho and in its third week of release, Pretty In Pink, both of which were playing in 150 more theaters nationwide than Crossroads.
Crossroads might have suffered for being a movie that to younger audiences sounded like it was for their grandparents, while Macchio might have signaled to adults that the movie was for kids. Rated R by the MPAA for the colorful insults Willie throws around, teenagers couldn’t buy tickets anyway, and after one weekend among the top ten grossing films, Crossroads disappeared. It's worthy of rediscovery. Stories about recording stars–ill-fated or not–bargaining with the Devil for their talent have perpetuated every genre from ragtime jazz to rock ‘n roll, but in none of these tales does the debtor try to rescind the deal. The picture isn’t at all coy about whether Willie is simply senile or he did meet the Devil at the crossroads, but underneath its flights of fantasy, the script by John Fusco dramatizes the hard times a bluesman was known to encounter making his way across the land of cotton, the screenwriter having traveled the same circuit as a white musician and played in some of the same dives. Even if they’d tried, the filmmakers wouldn’t have been able to scrub the dirt from under the story’s fingernails.
The curation of blues music–in an era ruled by Prince and the pop artists chasing him–is commendable, while the musical sequences, even Macchio’s character improvising in class, are a delight. Macchio, whose character in The Karate Kid is a punk who learns composure from his mentor, starts off as a snot here too–trying to con Willie into teaching him a fabled song that Robert Johnson was said to have written and never recorded–but doesn’t grow kinder so much as he endures hardships that expand his talent. Macchio is well cast, as was Joe Seneca, an R&B artist and songwriter whose appearance opposite Paul Newman in The Verdict (1982) launched an acting career in the last fifteen years of his life. After the success of 48 HRS. (1982), director Walter Hill seemed to be on a runaway train of bigger and emptier pictures, but got his groove back with Crossroads, a quirky B-movie with A-class music. Not enough can be said of Ry Cooder, for whom this script seems written for. While the film does tread water between musical sequences, the climactic headcuttin’ duel between Lightnin’ Boy and the Devil’s own Jack Butler (Steve Vai) is enthralling. Directed by a western aficionado, Crossroads is nonetheless a film where two men settle their differences with guitars, not guns. That’s different, and so is much of this movie.
Video rental category: Music Drama
Special interest: On the Road