Fandango
Post-grad road trip an ambitious, faulty mix of action and poetry
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
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