Shooting Off My Mouth About “Young Guns”

Recently I’ve been catching up on classic films about young men in trouble. Perhaps I’ve been inspired by the spectacular new TV production of Lord of the Flies. In any case, I’ve now seen  Stand by Me (1985), River’s Edge (1986), and The Lost Boys (1987), the last of which has just become a Broadway musical hit.  Each of these flicks features young and mostly white males who are still children—or barely out of childhood—cut off from the adults in their lives and learning to cope with their world on the most violent terms.

  In 1988 along came Young Guns, which is often rather sneeringly referred to as a Brat Pack western. The designation of course refers mostly to a cluster of young actors (among them Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, and Demi Moore) who starred in the teen angst movies written and directed by John Hughes in this era. The young actors reportedly hated the “brat pack” designation, which came out of David Blum’s 1985 story in New York magazine in the wake of Hughes’ St. Elmo’s Fire. Emilio Estevez, who had figured prominently in the Blum piece, is the central figure in Young Guns, playing an embellished version of the Old West’s William Bonney, aka Billy the Kid.

 To be honest, this is not a story that can easily be tracked. But it apparently takes off from actual historic events: a young Englishman named John Tunstall came to Santa Fe in 1876 to get into the cattle business. His success as a rancher and store-owner put him at odds with local interests, and he was eventually murdered. In the film Tunstall (played by the always interesting Terence Stamp) is an older man, serving as a father figure to a number of wayward teenagers who work for him and are tutored by him in reading and social graces. After his sudden death, they dub themselves The Regulators, and are briefly deputized to take down his killers. But corrupt forces in the vicinity soon have them on the run.

 Estevez’s film role as Billy the Kid is the most interesting: he’s smart, brash, and always itching for a fight. Also memorable is Kiefer Sutherland, who—though scary indeed in Stand by Me and The Lost Boys—here plays a character with a sentimental side. (As “Doc,” he’s a gunslinger who’s also a would-be poet. Eventually he rescues a pretty Chinese concubine who’s being kept in thrall by the evil Jack Palance. Yes, it’s that kind of movie.) Smaller roles are filled by Estevez’s real-life brother Charlie Sheen, by Lou Diamond Phillips (as the all-purpose Native American in the gang), by Dermot Mulroney as the slob of the group, and by Casey Siemaszko as a love-sick gang member who makes some unfortunate choices. Some veteran actors, including Brian Keith, Terry O’Quinn, and Patrick Wayne (yes, he’s John’s son), also have key roles in the proceedings.

 As action movies go, this one has much to recommend it. There are a lot of horses, a lot of bad guys, and a lot of blood to be shed in picturesque outdoor surroundings. The climactic siege of a house to which Billy and the gang have been lured contains some dramatic moments, though it doesn’t fully match up with the actual historical episode. I was rather taken, in fact, by the filming of this episode: the up-close and slo-mo camera work here serves, I’m convinced, to glamorize violence, and to make us eager for more. Which is why there was a lucrative 1990 sequel, and talk of other sequels to come.  

 

 

“The Limey”: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

I’ve been aware of Terence Stamp since 1962, when he played the title role in a film adaptation of a Herman Melville novella, Billy Budd. The part, Stamp’s first in an American film, is that of a young 19^th century sailor whose optimism and blond beauty have tragic consequences. For Stamp himself the consequences were excellent, including an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe award. But he certainly didn’t confine himself to playing innocents, as his dangerous allure in The Collector (1965) made quite clear.

 Personally I associate Stamp, who died this past August at age 87, with two widely different roles. In 1967’s Far from the Madding Crowd, a lavish period film based on a novel by Thomas Hardy, he played a dashing military man who woos and weds the tempestuous Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie), only to squander her holdings and break her heart. In 1994, he was unrecognizable in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, a riotous flick about drag queens gallivanting through the Australian outback in a colorful tour bus. In this cult favorite, Stamp’s role was that of a transgender woman. It’s been revealed since his death that he had recently completed all of his scenes for Priscilla, Queen of the Desert 2, a film about the challenges of old age that’s currently still in production.

 In reading obits for Stamp, I came across reference to a Steven Soderbergh thriller I’d never seen. I’ve been a great admirer of Soderbergh’s diverse body of work ever since I saw his poignant breakthrough indie, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989). Nine years later, he was widely recognized for Out of Sight, a Florida-set crime comedy. Based on an Elmore Leonard novel, it elicited sexy, stellar performances from George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez. One year later, Soderbergh was still working in the crime genre. Stamp was the star of his The Limey, a film about a British Cockney crook who’s also a bereaved father. Fresh out of prison for the umpteenth time, he hightails it to L.A. to investigate his daughter’s sudden death somewhere off Mulholland Drive.  

 I’d hardly call The Limey a comedy, but there’s humor (of the fish-out-of-water variety) to be found in this rough and tumble crook experiencing the glitz of Hollywood, a place where no one seems to understand a word he says. His first contact is a down-to-earth Latino (Luis Guzman) who knew his pretty young daughter from (natch!) an acting class.  Various deadly escapades in the warehouses of Downtown L.A. lead him eventually to a slick music producer with a fabulous home in the hills. He’s played by a toothy Peter Fonda, who looks like an updated version of his hipster role in Roger Corman’s L.S.D.-laced The Trip (1967). He’s fabulously wealthy, he likes keeping beautiful young women on hand, he throws lavish parties, and it’s quite clear he’s up to no good. Somehow Stamp’s Wilson, while eluding both Fonda’s goons and some not-entirely-on-the-up-and-up drug agents, manages to accomplish his personal mission without ever getting his clothes mussed.

 Soderbergh has always been big on experimentation, and The Limey is shot and edited in a flashy style that some might find distracting. Nor is this film sexy in the way Out of Sight proved to be. (Who can forget Clooney and Lopez, on opposite sides of the law, trapped together in very close quarters in the trunk of a car?) But I enjoyed seeing Terence Stamp in a different phase of his long career, playing a man taciturn and tough, but a loving father all the same.

 

 

 

 

The Fire Next Time: Roger Corman and Disaster Movies

I haven’t wanted to write about the terrible conflagrations in my part of the world because it just makes me too sad. Life in West Los Angeles right now seems, in bizarre and tragic ways, to be mirroring the climactic Burning of Los Angeles as depicted in The Day of the Locust. (This 1939 novella was made into a 1975 John Schlesinger film, but for me its on-screen finale doesn’t match in any way the power of Nathanael West’s original prose.)

 I’m lucky, at least, to be in a Santa Monica neighborhood that’s currently not being threatened, though of course anything’s possible. But friends (some of them elderly) have lost everything, and the heartbreak around here is overwhelming. Still, with stiff upper lip I’m turning away from the tragedy here to write about my late boss, low-budget filmmaker Roger Corman, and how he tried to turn disasters to his advantage.

 While I was Roger’s story editor at Concorde-New Horizons, in 1989,  there was a major earthquake in the vicinity of San Francisco. It’s almost impossible to photograph an earthquake, since (believe me!) quakes happen without warning, so capturing the actual shaking on film wasn’t a consideration. Still, Roger dispatched a small film crew, which came back to L.A. with some unimpressive footage of cracks and rubble. Then there was the matter of a script. At first Roger got caught up with the issue of shoddy infrastructure, and wanted to make the villain of his piece a bureaucrat beholden to private interests who ignored safety protocols when issuing building permits. For this (with my encouragement) he hired a very good writer of prose fiction, Madison Smartt Bell, in hopes that he would become the next John Sayles, a man who could graduate from page to screen.

  Unfortunately Roger’s concept was too thorny for what was intended as an action flick larded with sex and violence. So the thoroughly-baffled Madison was canned, and Quake was ultimately written in-house by my colleague Rob Kerchner, along with Concorde regular Mark Evan Schwartz. Someone (probably Rob) had the good idea of using the post-quake chaos as a backdrop for a variation on a popular John Fowles novel called The Collector. In 1965 it had become a film starring Terence Stamp as a warped young man who abducts a beautiful woman (Samantha Eggar) and keeps her as a specimen for his “collection.” Our film, directed by Louis Morneau, starred Steve Railsback as a warped young man who abducts a young woman in the aftermath of the so-called Loma Prieta quake.  And what about that rubble footage that Roger had sent his minions to shoot? Quake (aka Aftershock)  was advertised as capturing the actual earthquake on film for the audience’s viewing pleasure.

 It didn’t always take a natural disaster to inspire Roger. The Los Angeles riots of 1992, sparked by the beating of Rodney King, led him to propose another “ripped from the headlines” film, to be called (prophetically, I now realize) Night of a Thousand Fires. He quickly gathered three eager young screenwriters (at least one of them brand-new to L.A.) to create a hard-hitting story that would take in the disparate perspectives of Black rioters, Korean shop-keepers, and the entrenched white hierarchy. With great fanfare, he held a press conference to announce the project. But then, in typical Roger fashion. he quickly lost interest . . . because he realized that with Spielberg shooting a cinematic version of Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park it was high time for a quickie dinosaur movie, one that would beat Spielberg’s film into theatres.  And so 1993’s Carnosaur was born.