Fandango
Best Texas road trip movie struggles to find its direction
FANDANGO (1985) is like a man who’s never worn a tuxedo, 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 coming-of-age elegy that goes on the road, it’s the work of a rookie feature film writer/director who was just trying to survive the experience. None of that gets in the way of the film qualifying as one of the best of many movies to be shot (mostly) in Texas, capturing and preserving 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 searching for what in 1974 was considered a vocation, 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 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 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 enrolled in film courses at UT in the evening. For the price of tuition and his own film stock, Reynolds was given equipment and editing facilities at the state school and in his non-billable hours began to develop his filmmaking craft. Among his instructors was a visiting film professor named Edward Dmytryk, the Academy Award-nominated director of Crossfire (1947) starring Robert Mitchum and Gloria Grahame, as well as The Caine Mutiny (1954) with Humphrey Bogart. Dmytryk had been blacklisted, along with the rest of the Hollywood Ten, for initially refusing to name Communists to the House Un-American Activities Committee (a decision he fatefully reversed after four and a half months in federal prison.) 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 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 permission, shot their student film, Reynolds operating the camera and Illsley stunt piloting the plane. No one died during the making of Proof, and no one had ever seen a student film like it. Reynolds’ good fortune continued when a guy from UT 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 Spielberg’s office was on the phone for him. Spielberg’s then-assistant Kathleen Kennedy told Reynolds that her boss had watched Proof and wanted to meet. In the spring of 1981, Spielberg had started production on Poltergeist (1982) as a writer/ producer. In a few weeks, he was scheduled to begin shooting a movie under the working title A Boy’s Life that had something to do with children and an alien. Meeting at Spielberg’s office at MGM for what Reynolds recalled being about an hour, the famed director of a student short titled Amblin’ (1968) asked the film student what he wanted to do next. Reynolds gave Spielberg the answer he’d given Edward Dmytryk: he wanted to direct. Within days, Reynolds received a call from Kennedy at his crummy apartment in Studio City with news that Spielberg was making arrangements for him to expand his student film into a feature. This would require Reynolds to write a screenplay from the inside-out, using the 20-minute skydiving sequence from Proof as a centerpiece and adding another hour and a half of character and world building to bookend it.
Reynolds recalled, “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.” To get Philip to the airfield, Reynolds hit on an idea that was so native to college students in Texas that it was practically a rite of passage: the road trip west. 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.’” During production of Poltergeist, Steven Spielberg, in his first role as a producer, had taken what at the time seemed like a necessary, hands-on role for a picture he’d written, cast, storyboarded and supervised in post-production. The extent of his creative involvement in Poltergeist led to conjecture in the press that Spielberg had essentially directed the movie, not its credited director Tobe Hooper. Having burnt his hand on the stove, Spielberg would spend less time in the kitchen as a producer helping other chefs cook, offering input but leaving decisions up to the filmmakers he’d hired. With this in mind, he co-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.
As eager as anyone to work with Spielberg, Warner Bros. Pictures sheepishly agreed to finance and distribute two Amblin projects whose commercial prospects looked so questionable the studio would have passed if anyone else had pitched them. 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 of $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 Kevin Costner. By the time he returned to audition for Fandango, he’d booked a small but pivotal role in The Big Chill (1983) that would be reduced to an uncredited cameo as a corpse, his body appearing in the funeral scene but not his face. 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 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 playing Lester Griffin 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 Illsley 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’ film career would climb steadily and in 1997, she appeared in the contemporary sections of Titanic as the granddaughter of Old Rose.
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 the Rock Hudson-Elizabeth Taylor-James Dean epic Giant (1956) had taken place outside the town of Marfa, was utilized, specifically the ruins of the “Reata Ranch” set, myth decaying in the brush. Marfa Cemetery hosted the scene where two local teenagers (Elizabeth Daily, Robyn Rose) lure the Groovers into a bottle rocket war. Reynolds had written the scene when the two cliques meet to take place at Dairy Queen — the car hop as specific to small town Texas as oil derricks or high school football — in Marfa. Denied, they used the Sonic Drive-In in Alpine as a backup. The terminus of the Groovers’ road trip, where their friend “Dom” is buried, was shot between the towns of Lajitas and Presidio off FM 170 among the most spectacular geological formations in the state. (Border residents refer to the stretch hugging the Rio Grande as the “River Road.”) The sequence in which Truman is dispatched to retrieve the Girl was drawn up to be filmed in the vicinity of Love Field in Dallas. Needing authorization for stunt flying this time, the filmmakers were refused permission to land an airplane on the freeways of North Texas. Tim Zinnemann had contacts in Oklahoma — having made Tex there — and the sequence was shot 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 returned to Texas to be filmed in the San Elizario Memorial Placita in the town of San Elizario.
To score Fandango, Kevin Reynolds wanted music that felt quirky and unhurried, ideal for small town America. His initial choice was Pat Metheny. The jazz guitarist didn’t have room in his schedule for an original film score, and Amblin must’ve been relieved, opening the door for the producers to hire a more conventional composer. Alan Silvestri, composing his first fully orchestrated film score, got the job, with Pat Metheny contributing guitar solos that the director worked into the picture. While 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. The studio hired John Milius to direct, granting the co-writer of Jeremiah Johnson (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979) runway to rewrite Reynolds’ script. Studio vice-chairman Frank Yablans settled 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. I just wanted to show, this is what war does to people, this is what it would do to you if it happened here.” The Writer’s Guild of America would award screenplay credit to John Milius and Kevin Reynolds, story by Reynolds.
Fandango was scheduled for release a few weeks after Red Dawn, in the fall of 1984. Piggybacking off the guerilla war movie he’d conceived might have generated buzz for Reynolds’ directorial debut. Instead, Fandango was placed on the shelf. When Steven Spielberg got a look at it, a sense of buyer’s remorse set in. Amblin’s production slate tracked with the movies he was directing, which were aligned with what audiences wanted: special effects extravaganzas loaded with wit. 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. Instead of supporting Reynolds, Spielberg opted to protect his brand and his audience credit. While Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall kept their executive producer credits, Spielberg removed his name from credits and advertisements. In 2025, on the Film Stories with Simon Brew podcast, Reynolds confided, “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.” Once Spielberg took his name off the picture, Fandango never had a chance with critics or audiences.
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 a notable debut. He brings a good deal of feeling to the moments in which the film’s twin specters—Vietnam and maturity—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 didn’t bother. Fandango debuted in 27 theaters in January and never troubled the top ten grossing films at the box office. Supergirl (1984) sold more tickets in its tenth weekend of release than Fandango did in its first. Kevin Reynolds later acknowledged that if Kevin Costner wasn’t the leading man, Fandango never would’ve aired on television. While not 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. Receiving permission to rewrite the script, titled “You Gotta Believe Me,” Reynolds accepted the job, directing Charles Durning as a man who has a premonition of an airplane, of all things, crashing into his home.
If anyone in Hollywood had pitched “Animal House meets Days of Heaven” and was taken seriously, the result would be Fandango. For that, filmgoers can be at least a little grateful. Fandango anticipated Dazed and Confused (1993), at a fraction of the scale. Both films are about young men in Austin 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 takes place over twenty-four hours in a completely natural way, Fandango is a shotgun marriage of outrageous action and poetic melancholy. It comes off as more forced. One detail about the Lone Star State that Kevin Reynolds captures well 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 realize that people, at least in small towns, are more compassionate than they’ve given them credit for. Their nihilism has been founded on their interactions with parents, and in some cases, girls, but abandoning the pursuit of any and all expectation, take a step closer to maturity. This closes the loop with Dazed and Confused, which Richard Linklater conceived in very spare terms: three or four guys cruising Texas in a Pontiac Le Mans and listening to ZZ Top on an 8-track cassette. That 8-track: Fandango!
Fandango isn’t confused about its genre so much as it’s confused about its own ambitions. It’s caught between two different directors: the student who made Proof as a calling card and the professional drawn to the visual poetry of Days of Heaven. Both directors are promising, but even in a state as big as Texas, there’s not enough room in one movie for them both to grow. This tension runs through everything: the casting of Kevin Costner in what was hoped would be a raucous college comedy, a story that seeks to connect to the Vietnam War despite feeling a world apart from it, and jester Marvin J. McIntyre flying away with a movie Reynolds wasn’t interested in remaking. This is a filmmaker who doesn’t RSVP to the party in Animal House, but reuniting with his fraternity brothers for a sober what-fer, struggles to relate to them either. Resourceful in his shoestring filmmaking, Reynolds is too self-conscious about criticizing his characters. He reveals that the Girl — who Gardner let get away and is still hung up on — is now engaged to his frat brother Waggener, yet that triangle isn’t explored. Reynolds the writer doesn’t seem to know who his characters are, something apparent by how much Costner is allowed to cackle or yahoo his way through his first leading man role for lack of anything else to do. The movie resists getting up close and personal, and too often remains at a stiff remove from the viewer.
Marvin J. McIntyre does commit 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. Music is the one area where the two directors Reynolds is caught between are simpatico, and no film he’d direct would have a richer soundtrack. Alan Silvestri’s rousing orchestral cues — the sort to be heard in his score for Back to the Future — are tempered with mellow compositions, “It’s For You” by Pat Metheny, Lyle Mays and Nana Vasconcelos, and capping the film in heartfelt fashion, the acoustic rock tune “Can’t Find My Way Home” by Blind Faith. Reynolds might have compromised his choices and been a cooperative factory director here, but it’s difficult to imagine him benefiting. Costner handpicked Reynolds to direct him in two more feature films and one television mini-series, and co-produced a film the duo made at their maximum career prestige, Rapa Nui (1993). The little movie that looked like it might sink Reynolds’ career in port turned out to be a terrific calling card after all.
Video rental category: Comedy
Special interest: On the Road
Three years after Fandango struggled to get off the shelf, Steven Spielberg would not only remove his name from another off-beat youth comedy — Three O’Clock High (1987), directed by UCLA Film School grad Phil Joanou in his feature film debut — but peel the Amblin label completely off it.
Production history supplemented by Lou Lumenick’s interview with Kevin Reynolds in the New York Post (January 27, 1985) and Robert Denenstein’s in the El Paso Herald-Post (February 7, 1985)
Hey Joe, once again, a movie I remember hearing about, but have never seen… And as always, your research and analysis is so entertaining… So much so, that now I wanna see the movie … I trust that you’re giving it your recommendation. Great job! Peace! CPZ