Review by THE ONION
THAT SECRET SUCCESS:
Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye?/A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon
by Nathan Rabin
November 29th
I usually select My Year Of Flops candidates through a rigorous and scientific process. Basically, I think up a bunch of bad jokes and facile observations, then scour the streets of Chicago looking for a movie to hang them on. But today’s entry seems to have chosen me rather than the other way around. A few days ago, I got a mysterious package from cult filmmaker William Richert (Winter Kills). It contained a homemade dub of his director’s cut of a film he made with River Phoenix that played in theaters as A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon but that Richert had re-re-titled Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? after the semiautobiographical novel he wrote as a 19-year-old.
But the most fascinating part of the package was a 17-page letter from Richert detailing Fox’s long and agonizing desecration of a project that seems to have been ripped from the innermost recesses of its creator’s soul. In a letter alternately angry, bitter, pretentious, arrogant, melancholy, and sentimental, Richert maps out a tale of executive chicanery and studio sabotage so intricate and far-reaching it makes the conspiracy at the heart of Winter Kills look positively benign by comparison.
In an audacious move, Richert was asking me—and to be fair, the entire Chicago Film Critics Association—to re-evaluate his labor of love with fresh eyes and a generous spirit nearly 20 years after it was eviscerated by critics. As you can imagine, this flattered my professional vanity. I would love for it to set a precedent. What’s that, Jerry Lewis, you want to screen The Day The Clown Cried for me personally at the Music Box, then have a long, candid conversation about it at that Brazilian steakhouse down the street that serves cuts of meat that somehow manage to be larger than the cows they’re taken from? Well, if you absolutely insist. What’s that Peter Bogdanovich? You’d like to do the same thing with 1975’s At Long Last Love? Again, I suppose I could grudgingly acquiesce.
If these entries weren’t already roughly the size of War And Peace, I would reprint the entire letter for your edification. It’s a fascinating document that says more than it probably intends to, as when it boasts that “Better than any special effect, we even had that Lower East Side Sizzler Ann Magnuson giving a performance so funny—and intimate and raw—that even today she’s reluctant to talk about it.” Well, that’s certainly one explanation. I know there are certainly all sorts of things in my past I consider too funny, intimate, and raw to discuss publicly. Incidentally I think I contracted some sort of food-borne illness back at the Lower East Side Sizzler. It’s that kind of place.
The problems for Richert began when Fox picked up his plucky little coming-of-age comedy-drama about the sexual misadventures of an aspiring beatnik in 1962 Evanston and Chicago. Then the president of Fox looked at the film and found it too depressing. He wanted a sexy teen comedy for Phoenix’s army of teenybopper fans, not a class-conscious satire about a young man’s rocky path to adulthood.
So Fox had legendary composer Elmer Bernstein’s “heavy” score thrown out, along with an opening original song sung by Johnny Mathis and a closing song sung by River Phoenix. They also excised Richert’s wry narration, which they insisted “sounds like a grandfather.” To my ears, it compares favorably with Jean Sheperd’s much-loved narration in A Christmas Story. It’s the voice of experience reflecting back on youthful folly with nostalgia, regret, humor, and a palpable sense of loss.
Phoenix’s mother, meanwhile, worried that the line “Jimmy, I want to fuck you”—delivered by that Lower East Side Sizzler Ann Magnuson to Phoenix amidst a sly seduction—would offend Phoenix’s teenaged fanbase, many of whom hoped that the desire to fuck Phoenix belonged to them and them alone.
In his letter, Richert says that he considered it “the most powerful line in the movie because it still rang in my ears from the night I heard it from the lips of my mother’s best friend, just as River heard it in the movie, only in my case it was ‘Billy I want to fuck you’ and that besides, the word “fuck” was one of the single most used/abused words in the English language and that no English language film today could possible be considered authentic without it.”
The strong-willed Richert probably didn’t help his case by writing a six-page letter to relevant parties that referred to a powerful executive as a “traitor” and the Fox marketing department as “knaves.” I’m surprised Richert didn’t bite his thumb at Fox and challenge its executive pool to a duel in full view of the press.
Fox replaced Bernstein’s score with one by Bill Conti, added a soundtrack of “hot oldies,” and threatened to give the film a direct-to-video burial unless Richert became complicit in the destruction of his dream project. Fox finally released the bastardized version of Reardon two years after filming wrapped.
Here’s Richert’s take on his meeting with Fox publicity people: “I’ll not forget their grins and insulting innuendoes as the Fox publicists talked about the sexy parts of my film, which their marketing department insisted on calling A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon. They gleefully pointed out that the R rating would go against River Phoenix’s fans, who were only 14 or so at the time, as if that problem were not also their own problem. They seemed hell bent on ridiculing a picture they themselves were distributing.”
Fox didn’t screen the movie for critics, and according to Richert, used furtive measures to ensure it didn’t receive any positive publicity. After reading Richert’s letter, I was skeptical. Heck, I was more than skeptical: I scoffed. Long and hard. And I kept on scoffing. I vaguely remembered seeing Reardon when it came out due to an adolescent crush on Meredith Salenger (mmm… Meredith Salenger). I believe my overall reaction was “Meh.”
Could such seemingly minor changes dramatically effect a film’s overall quality? Could an Elmer Bernstein score transform a forgettable mediocrity into a little gem? I had my doubts. Yet when I popped in the DVD, I made a surprising and wholly unexpected discovery: Richert was right.
In his first starring performance, Phoenix plays Richert’s alter-ego, a middle-class dreamer in an upper-middle-class suburban world of mansions and country clubs and keeping-up appearances. Goodbye centers on Phoenix’s hapless attempts to scrounge up enough money to travel to Hawaii with blueblood girlfriend Salenger instead of following in his dad’s dispiriting footsteps and attending modest McKinley college in the heart of downtown Chicago.
Goodbye belongs to the curious literary subset of fictions concerned with what young men do with their penises. I am, as a rule, not a fan of movies or books about brooding young hunks whose overpowering sexuality renders them irresistible to beautiful women. Yet I found it entirely plausible that every woman Phoenix encounters wants to fuck his brains out.
There is a sweetness and a vulnerability to Phoenix’s performance that nicely undercuts the locker-room machismo of a guy making a movie about what a stud he was as a young man. Phoenix makes his character’s serial womanizing—in short order, he lapses into romantic clinches with a coffeehouse pick-up, Baxteresque buddy Matthew Perry’s bitchy girlfriend (Ione Skye), Salenger, and lonely older woman Ann Magnuson—seem like part of a noble search for experience and truth rather than a sleazy bid to score as much tail as possible.
Phoenix wants desperately to do the right thing yet constantly does wrong. As a very strange, enchanted boy, he makes this disconnect both funny and sad. There is a wonderful scene where Phoenix offers to sell information to his employer’s meddling mother about her photographer son’s supposed secret life. It’s a measure of Phoenix’s personal magnetism and wounded-little-boy quality that he makes such a desperate maneuver seem strangely charming rather than loathsome.
In the same scene, the mother asks Phoenix how old he is and she repeats his age (17) over and over again, as if she can no longer even conceive what it must be like to be a beautiful 17-year-old boy with his entire future ahead of him. Goodbye captures with off-handed poignancy the glory and horror and sadness and comedy of being 17 and a slave to your hormones and ambitions and pretensions.
Goodbye is a wonderful vehicle for Phoenix, who seemed prime to make a Johnny Depp-like leap from teen heartthrob to great actor. When he died I felt both angry and sad: sad because such a promising life was snuffed out needlessly and angry because the world was instantly robbed of decades upon decades of River Phoenix performances. We as an audience could have grown old with Phoenix. We could have collectively watched him change and mature and grow and lose his boyish beauty and become something older and wiser and worse for wear. But that all ended on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room. At least he left behind a brother to continue his legacy. Watching the dead brother subplot in Walk The Line, I couldn’t help but think about River and how deeply his death must have affected those he touched.
I can understand Fox finding Richert to be a colossal pain in the ass, but the choices he fought for in that losing battle are uniformly correct. Bernstein’s score is a wonder, lush and evocative and wistful. And the “Jimmy, I want to fuck you”—more mouthed than spoken—is delivered softly and sadly, with enormous emotional resonance. It’s less a chest-beating declaration of lust than a desperate bid for human connection in an uncaring world. I’m similarly a fan of a previously deleted six-minute scene involving Phoenix and his female best friend that has a very funny, very dark, After Hours sensibility about it.
Goodbye isn’t a lost masterpiece, but it’s a nifty little sleeper— funny, sad, heartfelt and true, with an adolescent angst that lingers. Richert plans to show it on his website (williamrichert.com) beginning December 15th and is apparently looking to book it in theaters as well. In his letter, Richert asks that critics “review it as a brand new film,” so I’m going to admonish everyone to check out this swell new film and keep an eye out for this Phoenix kid. Oh and Mssrs. Lewis and Bogdanovich, I patiently await your calls.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
THAT SECRET SUCCESS:
Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye?/A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon
by Nathan Rabin
November 29th
I usually select My Year Of Flops candidates through a rigorous and scientific process. Basically, I think up a bunch of bad jokes and facile observations, then scour the streets of Chicago looking for a movie to hang them on. But today’s entry seems to have chosen me rather than the other way around. A few days ago, I got a mysterious package from cult filmmaker William Richert (Winter Kills). It contained a homemade dub of his director’s cut of a film he made with River Phoenix that played in theaters as A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon but that Richert had re-re-titled Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? after the semiautobiographical novel he wrote as a 19-year-old.
But the most fascinating part of the package was a 17-page letter from Richert detailing Fox’s long and agonizing desecration of a project that seems to have been ripped from the innermost recesses of its creator’s soul. In a letter alternately angry, bitter, pretentious, arrogant, melancholy, and sentimental, Richert maps out a tale of executive chicanery and studio sabotage so intricate and far-reaching it makes the conspiracy at the heart of Winter Kills look positively benign by comparison.
In an audacious move, Richert was asking me—and to be fair, the entire Chicago Film Critics Association—to re-evaluate his labor of love with fresh eyes and a generous spirit nearly 20 years after it was eviscerated by critics. As you can imagine, this flattered my professional vanity. I would love for it to set a precedent. What’s that, Jerry Lewis, you want to screen The Day The Clown Cried for me personally at the Music Box, then have a long, candid conversation about it at that Brazilian steakhouse down the street that serves cuts of meat that somehow manage to be larger than the cows they’re taken from? Well, if you absolutely insist. What’s that Peter Bogdanovich? You’d like to do the same thing with 1975’s At Long Last Love? Again, I suppose I could grudgingly acquiesce.
If these entries weren’t already roughly the size of War And Peace, I would reprint the entire letter for your edification. It’s a fascinating document that says more than it probably intends to, as when it boasts that “Better than any special effect, we even had that Lower East Side Sizzler Ann Magnuson giving a performance so funny—and intimate and raw—that even today she’s reluctant to talk about it.” Well, that’s certainly one explanation. I know there are certainly all sorts of things in my past I consider too funny, intimate, and raw to discuss publicly. Incidentally I think I contracted some sort of food-borne illness back at the Lower East Side Sizzler. It’s that kind of place.
The problems for Richert began when Fox picked up his plucky little coming-of-age comedy-drama about the sexual misadventures of an aspiring beatnik in 1962 Evanston and Chicago. Then the president of Fox looked at the film and found it too depressing. He wanted a sexy teen comedy for Phoenix’s army of teenybopper fans, not a class-conscious satire about a young man’s rocky path to adulthood.
So Fox had legendary composer Elmer Bernstein’s “heavy” score thrown out, along with an opening original song sung by Johnny Mathis and a closing song sung by River Phoenix. They also excised Richert’s wry narration, which they insisted “sounds like a grandfather.” To my ears, it compares favorably with Jean Sheperd’s much-loved narration in A Christmas Story. It’s the voice of experience reflecting back on youthful folly with nostalgia, regret, humor, and a palpable sense of loss.
Phoenix’s mother, meanwhile, worried that the line “Jimmy, I want to fuck you”—delivered by that Lower East Side Sizzler Ann Magnuson to Phoenix amidst a sly seduction—would offend Phoenix’s teenaged fanbase, many of whom hoped that the desire to fuck Phoenix belonged to them and them alone.
In his letter, Richert says that he considered it “the most powerful line in the movie because it still rang in my ears from the night I heard it from the lips of my mother’s best friend, just as River heard it in the movie, only in my case it was ‘Billy I want to fuck you’ and that besides, the word “fuck” was one of the single most used/abused words in the English language and that no English language film today could possible be considered authentic without it.”
The strong-willed Richert probably didn’t help his case by writing a six-page letter to relevant parties that referred to a powerful executive as a “traitor” and the Fox marketing department as “knaves.” I’m surprised Richert didn’t bite his thumb at Fox and challenge its executive pool to a duel in full view of the press.
Fox replaced Bernstein’s score with one by Bill Conti, added a soundtrack of “hot oldies,” and threatened to give the film a direct-to-video burial unless Richert became complicit in the destruction of his dream project. Fox finally released the bastardized version of Reardon two years after filming wrapped.
Here’s Richert’s take on his meeting with Fox publicity people: “I’ll not forget their grins and insulting innuendoes as the Fox publicists talked about the sexy parts of my film, which their marketing department insisted on calling A Night In The Life Of Jimmy Reardon. They gleefully pointed out that the R rating would go against River Phoenix’s fans, who were only 14 or so at the time, as if that problem were not also their own problem. They seemed hell bent on ridiculing a picture they themselves were distributing.”
Fox didn’t screen the movie for critics, and according to Richert, used furtive measures to ensure it didn’t receive any positive publicity. After reading Richert’s letter, I was skeptical. Heck, I was more than skeptical: I scoffed. Long and hard. And I kept on scoffing. I vaguely remembered seeing Reardon when it came out due to an adolescent crush on Meredith Salenger (mmm… Meredith Salenger). I believe my overall reaction was “Meh.”
Could such seemingly minor changes dramatically effect a film’s overall quality? Could an Elmer Bernstein score transform a forgettable mediocrity into a little gem? I had my doubts. Yet when I popped in the DVD, I made a surprising and wholly unexpected discovery: Richert was right.
In his first starring performance, Phoenix plays Richert’s alter-ego, a middle-class dreamer in an upper-middle-class suburban world of mansions and country clubs and keeping-up appearances. Goodbye centers on Phoenix’s hapless attempts to scrounge up enough money to travel to Hawaii with blueblood girlfriend Salenger instead of following in his dad’s dispiriting footsteps and attending modest McKinley college in the heart of downtown Chicago.
Goodbye belongs to the curious literary subset of fictions concerned with what young men do with their penises. I am, as a rule, not a fan of movies or books about brooding young hunks whose overpowering sexuality renders them irresistible to beautiful women. Yet I found it entirely plausible that every woman Phoenix encounters wants to fuck his brains out.
There is a sweetness and a vulnerability to Phoenix’s performance that nicely undercuts the locker-room machismo of a guy making a movie about what a stud he was as a young man. Phoenix makes his character’s serial womanizing—in short order, he lapses into romantic clinches with a coffeehouse pick-up, Baxteresque buddy Matthew Perry’s bitchy girlfriend (Ione Skye), Salenger, and lonely older woman Ann Magnuson—seem like part of a noble search for experience and truth rather than a sleazy bid to score as much tail as possible.
Phoenix wants desperately to do the right thing yet constantly does wrong. As a very strange, enchanted boy, he makes this disconnect both funny and sad. There is a wonderful scene where Phoenix offers to sell information to his employer’s meddling mother about her photographer son’s supposed secret life. It’s a measure of Phoenix’s personal magnetism and wounded-little-boy quality that he makes such a desperate maneuver seem strangely charming rather than loathsome.
In the same scene, the mother asks Phoenix how old he is and she repeats his age (17) over and over again, as if she can no longer even conceive what it must be like to be a beautiful 17-year-old boy with his entire future ahead of him. Goodbye captures with off-handed poignancy the glory and horror and sadness and comedy of being 17 and a slave to your hormones and ambitions and pretensions.
Goodbye is a wonderful vehicle for Phoenix, who seemed prime to make a Johnny Depp-like leap from teen heartthrob to great actor. When he died I felt both angry and sad: sad because such a promising life was snuffed out needlessly and angry because the world was instantly robbed of decades upon decades of River Phoenix performances. We as an audience could have grown old with Phoenix. We could have collectively watched him change and mature and grow and lose his boyish beauty and become something older and wiser and worse for wear. But that all ended on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room. At least he left behind a brother to continue his legacy. Watching the dead brother subplot in Walk The Line, I couldn’t help but think about River and how deeply his death must have affected those he touched.
I can understand Fox finding Richert to be a colossal pain in the ass, but the choices he fought for in that losing battle are uniformly correct. Bernstein’s score is a wonder, lush and evocative and wistful. And the “Jimmy, I want to fuck you”—more mouthed than spoken—is delivered softly and sadly, with enormous emotional resonance. It’s less a chest-beating declaration of lust than a desperate bid for human connection in an uncaring world. I’m similarly a fan of a previously deleted six-minute scene involving Phoenix and his female best friend that has a very funny, very dark, After Hours sensibility about it.
Goodbye isn’t a lost masterpiece, but it’s a nifty little sleeper— funny, sad, heartfelt and true, with an adolescent angst that lingers. Richert plans to show it on his website (williamrichert.com) beginning December 15th and is apparently looking to book it in theaters as well. In his letter, Richert asks that critics “review it as a brand new film,” so I’m going to admonish everyone to check out this swell new film and keep an eye out for this Phoenix kid. Oh and Mssrs. Lewis and Bogdanovich, I patiently await your calls.
Failure, Fiasco or Secret Success: Secret Success
The interview BELOW is "Part 3" from Axel Vendel's March 29 cell phone interview from Paris...
BILL AND RIVER
ON THE SET
OF
JIMMY REARDON
ON THE SET
OF
JIMMY REARDON
j.d. lafrance review
Cinematic Pleasures: Aren't You Even Going to Kiss Me Goodbye?
by j.d. lafrance
Every once in awhile you hearbabout how a Hollywood studio tried to sabotage one of their
big budget efforts when it came in conflict with the film’s director and their vision. Case in point: Dune (1984) and Brazil (1985). However, studios also mess with small, independent films
because they have much more leverage in which to bully the filmmaker. This is exactly what happened to William Richert’s adaptation of his autobiographical novel, Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye?, first published in 1963 when the author was 19-years-old. It was subsequently manipulated by 20th Century Fox from a serious film for adults into a sex comedy for teenagers and called A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988). Richert has resurrected his original cut and is releasing it through his own personal website to finally set the record straight, letting people decide which version of the film they prefer.
The 1980s saw several nostalgic stories of adult protagonists looking back at their misspent youth. Some, like Stand By Me (1986), were well-received. Others, like Stealing Home (1988), were not. Richert’s original film is definitely in the same vein as these motion pictures with a voiceover narration by the protagonist as an adult, reminiscing about a pivotal moment in his life spent in Evanston, Illinois. Johnny Mathis’ original song, “I’m Not Afraid to Say Goodbye,” plays hauntingly over the opening credits with a shot of a lonely janitor sweeping an elevated train platform. The film is set in 1962 Chicago and concerns a 17-year-old teenager named Jimmy Reardon (River Phoenix) who is trying to get money for college. He enlists the help of his best friend Fred (Matthew Perry).
Jimmy fancies himself a poet of the beatnik variety and is something of a shrewd-ish Lothario, making the moves on a college girl intended for Fred. Jimmy hangs out with wealthy teenagers definitely on the snobby side with too much time on their hands. He is also in conflict with his parents who want him to either go to an all-boys business school or stay at home – not a great choice for a teenager with a raging libido.
Jimmy has a girlfriend (sort of) named Lisa (Meredith Salenger) who likes to make-out with him but doesn’t like it to go much beyond that. They see other people but are obviously strongly attracted to each other. She is scared of losing control of herself around him and succumbing to his charms. Meredith Salenger is adorable as Lisa and I remember having a big crush on her character as a teen watching the film when it first came out. She has an innocent vulnerability that is endearing and sexy. She also has genuine chemistry with her co-star, River Phoenix. Their first scene together has a playful, sexual tension to it that has a ring of honesty for anyone who’s tried to make it with a girl like that. There’s an adolescent awkwardness that is authentic. Unfortunately, the studio version of the film played the sexual episodes for laughs and cheapened them with hit tunes from the ‘60s but this new cut has Elmer Bernstein’s original, elegant score playing over Jimmy and Lisa’s first encounter.
When Jimmy finds out that Lisa is going to college in Hawaii, he sees this as his way out of Evanston. All he needs is $88 for a plane ticket. Jimmy meets one of his mother’s friends, a sophisticated woman named Joyce (a surprisingly sexy Ann Magnuson) and she invites him for a drink at her place. She’s a seductive, independent woman who turns the tables on Jimmy, making all the first moves instead of him being the aggressor and this obviously appeals to him after having to do all the work with Lisa. It’s amazing what a difference music makes to a scene as Bernstein’s smoky jazz that plays over the seduction scene between Jimmy and Joyce gives it genuine heat where the studio cut played it much lighter in tone. Ann Magnuson, with her sexy, long legs and short red hair, resembles a young Shirley MacLaine except more alluring – she’s infinitely more interesting than the bland Lisa and you can see why Jimmy is attracted to her.
The omission of Richert’s narration in the studio cut makes Jimmy a more unlikable character. Its presence in this new version
not only gives the film a more literary feel, but also puts us inside Jimmy’s head, providing motivation for what he does in the film and how he feels about it now, after all these years. His fatal character flaw is that he’s controlled by his libido and it gets him into all kinds of trouble. Lisa has romantic aspirations while all he wants to do is have sex with her. This was Phoenix’s first starring role and he is excellent as the contradictory Jimmy. His character writes poetry and yet he lacks sensitivity and empathy towards others. Phoenix expertly conveys Jimmy’s conflicted nature: the intelligent poet and the self-destructive womanizer.
A new scene included in this director’s cut has Jimmy showing compassion for his friend Suzie (Louanne) and also lost in a nightmarish part of Chicago that plays out like a condensed version of After Hours (1985). Louanne plays Suzie, the sarcastic best friend role, and the most interesting woman in Jimmy’s life. She’s funny, honest and not afraid to tell it like it is. If Jimmy was smart, he would go out with her. Louanne has little screen-time but she makes every moment count.
William Richert finished principal photography on his film in 1986 and after editing it, he screened the motion picture for Island Pictures, the financial backers. According to Richert, they liked it so much that it was felt that the film could succeed beyond the art house circuit. While filming, Phoenix had become a popular teen idol with the success of Stand By Me, which definitely played a factor in the decision to go for a wider release. Cary Brokaw was the original producer and financier of the film at Island only to be replaced by Russell Schwartz who took away Brokaw’s executive producer credit while simultaneously selling the distribution rights to 20th Century Fox. The film had a score composed by the great Elmer Bernstein, a new song performed by Johnny Mathis, and an original, end-credit song written and performed by River Phoenix – all of which were removed and replaced by the studio.
Fox decided to do a new advertising campaign. Richert says that he liked the existing campaign and did not want to delay the film’s release. Richert also claims that Schwartz told him that Island was filing for bankruptcy and had to sell the rights to Fox. Studio President Leonard Goldberg screened a copy of the film and felt that it had the wrong “tone” and was a “downer.” According to Richert, Goldberg told him that he was going to screen it for the publicity and marketing team to get their recommendations. Marketing Chief Cynthia Wick, the publicists and Goldberg called Schwartz and told him to get rid of Richert’s narration, Bernstein’s score, and turn it into what Richert cites as a “teen exploitation picture.” He says that they told him that Bernstein’s score was old- fashioned and would be a turn-off to audiences. They replaced it with a new score by Bill Conti and bunch of songs from the ‘60s.
According to Richert, the publicity division spent two years making changes and during this time, Phoenix had garnered great acclaim in films like Stand By Me and The Mosquito Coast (1986) The director claims that the young actor’s agent and mother told him not to talk to much about Jimmy Reardon to the press. For example, at the time of the film’s release, Phoenix told the Globe and Mail newspaper that, “morally, I have problems with it,” and that the motion picture, “wasn’t meant to be a teenage film.” His parents also wanted Richert to remove the line, “Jimmy, I want to fuck you,” that Joyce says to Jimmy as she seduces him. According to the director, they were worried that it would offend their son’s fans. Richert argued that his fans wouldn’t be allowed in theaters because of the film’s rating and that the line was integral to the film. Phoenix’s parents said that they would not allow their son to promote the film with the line in it and Richert finally agreed to silence the line but not remove it. He thought that this would appease them but the actor’s mother still refused to have her son do interviews for the film.
Schwartz wanted to replace Richert’s narration with the actor son of Phoenix’s agent, but after hearing his voice on the phone, Richert asked Phoenix to do it and he agreed. The director defends his narration as being “designed to sound like the older novelist I was, remembering his youth...having an older voice provided a frame for River’s performance.” Richert remembers being invited, along with Island executives, to a screening room at Fox where a movie soundtrack expert presented various songs from the ‘60s that would be used in the film. Richert says that he was shocked and angered. Afterwards, he wrote an angry letter to executives at Fox. Richert claims that Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Pictures, called and told him not to protest in public or write any more letters as the studio would cancel the theatrical release and send it straight to video. However, if Richert played ball, Blackwell would keep the director’s version out of the Fox contract and he could release it after five years. Richert agreed and worked with the studio in an attempt to salvage his vision for two agonizing years.
The marketing department changed the name of the film to A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon because they claimed that nobody had ever heard of anyone named, “Jimmy Reardon.” Fox decided not to screen the film for critics in advance, which is generally perceived as a lack of faith the studio has in the film. According to Richert, Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times called the studio and insisted on seeing the film. When she was denied, she got a copy from someone at Island and gave it a positive review. Richert claims that Fox tried to discredit Benson and in response, she wrote an even more positive article. After the opening weekend, a Times reporter interviewed Richert and Fox delayed the article and then killed it.
Jimmy Reardon was not well-received by several mainstream critics, including the Washington Post which wrote, “This is a case where the voice of the writer and the unexpectedness of the details he’s collected allow you to overlook the shoddy mechanics – even to consider them as part of the movie’s odd appeal.” Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, wrote that Richert “has done what he can to make this a more or less conventional coming-of-age story. In that he fails miserably, since conventionality is not his strong suit.” However, Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail praised Richert’s casting choices as “subtle as everything else in this intricate picture...Phoenix seems like a pint-sized Mickey Rourke, aping his elders.”
Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? exposes the class struggle that exists in the United States. Jimmy comes from a blue collar family and hangs out with teenagers from an affluent neighborhood in Chicago. Lisa thinks its “cute” when Jimmy takes her to the No Exit, a Beatnik café, because she is slumming. For him, it’s a place where he can recite his poetry. She is going to a rich college in an exotic place (Hawaii) while he is going to a mundane business school that his father also went to. Jimmy’s rich friends never have to worry about money and don’t have a care in the world while Jimmy spends the entire film hustling for $88. Initially, he fits seamlessly with this crowd but as the film progresses, he gradually drifts away from them until his big
confrontation with Lisa where he exposes her as a hypocrite and a phony right out of a J.D. Salinger story while also reconnecting with his hard-working father.
In the end, Richert went along with all of the studio’s changes so that his film would at least receive a theatrical release but in doing so gave the world a compromised version of his film that was very different than the one he had originally made. Fortunately, his version has now seen the light of the day and is available for anyone to see. Bernstein’s score and Richert’s original voiceover narration completely changes the tone and feel of the film, giving it a much more wistful, melancholic tone instead of the annoying teen sex romp vibe of the studio cut. Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? is a smart, engaging film filled with excellent performances by the entire cast under the rock solid direction of Richert who has crafted an excellent ode to a specific period in his past.
For more on the film, check out Richert’s official website:
http://www.williamrichert.com
Copyright (c) 2008 erasing clouds
by j.d. lafrance
Every once in awhile you hearbabout how a Hollywood studio tried to sabotage one of their
big budget efforts when it came in conflict with the film’s director and their vision. Case in point: Dune (1984) and Brazil (1985). However, studios also mess with small, independent films
because they have much more leverage in which to bully the filmmaker. This is exactly what happened to William Richert’s adaptation of his autobiographical novel, Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye?, first published in 1963 when the author was 19-years-old. It was subsequently manipulated by 20th Century Fox from a serious film for adults into a sex comedy for teenagers and called A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon (1988). Richert has resurrected his original cut and is releasing it through his own personal website to finally set the record straight, letting people decide which version of the film they prefer.
The 1980s saw several nostalgic stories of adult protagonists looking back at their misspent youth. Some, like Stand By Me (1986), were well-received. Others, like Stealing Home (1988), were not. Richert’s original film is definitely in the same vein as these motion pictures with a voiceover narration by the protagonist as an adult, reminiscing about a pivotal moment in his life spent in Evanston, Illinois. Johnny Mathis’ original song, “I’m Not Afraid to Say Goodbye,” plays hauntingly over the opening credits with a shot of a lonely janitor sweeping an elevated train platform. The film is set in 1962 Chicago and concerns a 17-year-old teenager named Jimmy Reardon (River Phoenix) who is trying to get money for college. He enlists the help of his best friend Fred (Matthew Perry).
Jimmy fancies himself a poet of the beatnik variety and is something of a shrewd-ish Lothario, making the moves on a college girl intended for Fred. Jimmy hangs out with wealthy teenagers definitely on the snobby side with too much time on their hands. He is also in conflict with his parents who want him to either go to an all-boys business school or stay at home – not a great choice for a teenager with a raging libido.
Jimmy has a girlfriend (sort of) named Lisa (Meredith Salenger) who likes to make-out with him but doesn’t like it to go much beyond that. They see other people but are obviously strongly attracted to each other. She is scared of losing control of herself around him and succumbing to his charms. Meredith Salenger is adorable as Lisa and I remember having a big crush on her character as a teen watching the film when it first came out. She has an innocent vulnerability that is endearing and sexy. She also has genuine chemistry with her co-star, River Phoenix. Their first scene together has a playful, sexual tension to it that has a ring of honesty for anyone who’s tried to make it with a girl like that. There’s an adolescent awkwardness that is authentic. Unfortunately, the studio version of the film played the sexual episodes for laughs and cheapened them with hit tunes from the ‘60s but this new cut has Elmer Bernstein’s original, elegant score playing over Jimmy and Lisa’s first encounter.
When Jimmy finds out that Lisa is going to college in Hawaii, he sees this as his way out of Evanston. All he needs is $88 for a plane ticket. Jimmy meets one of his mother’s friends, a sophisticated woman named Joyce (a surprisingly sexy Ann Magnuson) and she invites him for a drink at her place. She’s a seductive, independent woman who turns the tables on Jimmy, making all the first moves instead of him being the aggressor and this obviously appeals to him after having to do all the work with Lisa. It’s amazing what a difference music makes to a scene as Bernstein’s smoky jazz that plays over the seduction scene between Jimmy and Joyce gives it genuine heat where the studio cut played it much lighter in tone. Ann Magnuson, with her sexy, long legs and short red hair, resembles a young Shirley MacLaine except more alluring – she’s infinitely more interesting than the bland Lisa and you can see why Jimmy is attracted to her.
The omission of Richert’s narration in the studio cut makes Jimmy a more unlikable character. Its presence in this new version
not only gives the film a more literary feel, but also puts us inside Jimmy’s head, providing motivation for what he does in the film and how he feels about it now, after all these years. His fatal character flaw is that he’s controlled by his libido and it gets him into all kinds of trouble. Lisa has romantic aspirations while all he wants to do is have sex with her. This was Phoenix’s first starring role and he is excellent as the contradictory Jimmy. His character writes poetry and yet he lacks sensitivity and empathy towards others. Phoenix expertly conveys Jimmy’s conflicted nature: the intelligent poet and the self-destructive womanizer.
A new scene included in this director’s cut has Jimmy showing compassion for his friend Suzie (Louanne) and also lost in a nightmarish part of Chicago that plays out like a condensed version of After Hours (1985). Louanne plays Suzie, the sarcastic best friend role, and the most interesting woman in Jimmy’s life. She’s funny, honest and not afraid to tell it like it is. If Jimmy was smart, he would go out with her. Louanne has little screen-time but she makes every moment count.
William Richert finished principal photography on his film in 1986 and after editing it, he screened the motion picture for Island Pictures, the financial backers. According to Richert, they liked it so much that it was felt that the film could succeed beyond the art house circuit. While filming, Phoenix had become a popular teen idol with the success of Stand By Me, which definitely played a factor in the decision to go for a wider release. Cary Brokaw was the original producer and financier of the film at Island only to be replaced by Russell Schwartz who took away Brokaw’s executive producer credit while simultaneously selling the distribution rights to 20th Century Fox. The film had a score composed by the great Elmer Bernstein, a new song performed by Johnny Mathis, and an original, end-credit song written and performed by River Phoenix – all of which were removed and replaced by the studio.
Fox decided to do a new advertising campaign. Richert says that he liked the existing campaign and did not want to delay the film’s release. Richert also claims that Schwartz told him that Island was filing for bankruptcy and had to sell the rights to Fox. Studio President Leonard Goldberg screened a copy of the film and felt that it had the wrong “tone” and was a “downer.” According to Richert, Goldberg told him that he was going to screen it for the publicity and marketing team to get their recommendations. Marketing Chief Cynthia Wick, the publicists and Goldberg called Schwartz and told him to get rid of Richert’s narration, Bernstein’s score, and turn it into what Richert cites as a “teen exploitation picture.” He says that they told him that Bernstein’s score was old- fashioned and would be a turn-off to audiences. They replaced it with a new score by Bill Conti and bunch of songs from the ‘60s.
According to Richert, the publicity division spent two years making changes and during this time, Phoenix had garnered great acclaim in films like Stand By Me and The Mosquito Coast (1986) The director claims that the young actor’s agent and mother told him not to talk to much about Jimmy Reardon to the press. For example, at the time of the film’s release, Phoenix told the Globe and Mail newspaper that, “morally, I have problems with it,” and that the motion picture, “wasn’t meant to be a teenage film.” His parents also wanted Richert to remove the line, “Jimmy, I want to fuck you,” that Joyce says to Jimmy as she seduces him. According to the director, they were worried that it would offend their son’s fans. Richert argued that his fans wouldn’t be allowed in theaters because of the film’s rating and that the line was integral to the film. Phoenix’s parents said that they would not allow their son to promote the film with the line in it and Richert finally agreed to silence the line but not remove it. He thought that this would appease them but the actor’s mother still refused to have her son do interviews for the film.
Schwartz wanted to replace Richert’s narration with the actor son of Phoenix’s agent, but after hearing his voice on the phone, Richert asked Phoenix to do it and he agreed. The director defends his narration as being “designed to sound like the older novelist I was, remembering his youth...having an older voice provided a frame for River’s performance.” Richert remembers being invited, along with Island executives, to a screening room at Fox where a movie soundtrack expert presented various songs from the ‘60s that would be used in the film. Richert says that he was shocked and angered. Afterwards, he wrote an angry letter to executives at Fox. Richert claims that Chris Blackwell, owner of Island Pictures, called and told him not to protest in public or write any more letters as the studio would cancel the theatrical release and send it straight to video. However, if Richert played ball, Blackwell would keep the director’s version out of the Fox contract and he could release it after five years. Richert agreed and worked with the studio in an attempt to salvage his vision for two agonizing years.
The marketing department changed the name of the film to A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon because they claimed that nobody had ever heard of anyone named, “Jimmy Reardon.” Fox decided not to screen the film for critics in advance, which is generally perceived as a lack of faith the studio has in the film. According to Richert, Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times called the studio and insisted on seeing the film. When she was denied, she got a copy from someone at Island and gave it a positive review. Richert claims that Fox tried to discredit Benson and in response, she wrote an even more positive article. After the opening weekend, a Times reporter interviewed Richert and Fox delayed the article and then killed it.
Jimmy Reardon was not well-received by several mainstream critics, including the Washington Post which wrote, “This is a case where the voice of the writer and the unexpectedness of the details he’s collected allow you to overlook the shoddy mechanics – even to consider them as part of the movie’s odd appeal.” Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, wrote that Richert “has done what he can to make this a more or less conventional coming-of-age story. In that he fails miserably, since conventionality is not his strong suit.” However, Rick Groen in the Globe and Mail praised Richert’s casting choices as “subtle as everything else in this intricate picture...Phoenix seems like a pint-sized Mickey Rourke, aping his elders.”
Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? exposes the class struggle that exists in the United States. Jimmy comes from a blue collar family and hangs out with teenagers from an affluent neighborhood in Chicago. Lisa thinks its “cute” when Jimmy takes her to the No Exit, a Beatnik café, because she is slumming. For him, it’s a place where he can recite his poetry. She is going to a rich college in an exotic place (Hawaii) while he is going to a mundane business school that his father also went to. Jimmy’s rich friends never have to worry about money and don’t have a care in the world while Jimmy spends the entire film hustling for $88. Initially, he fits seamlessly with this crowd but as the film progresses, he gradually drifts away from them until his big
confrontation with Lisa where he exposes her as a hypocrite and a phony right out of a J.D. Salinger story while also reconnecting with his hard-working father.
In the end, Richert went along with all of the studio’s changes so that his film would at least receive a theatrical release but in doing so gave the world a compromised version of his film that was very different than the one he had originally made. Fortunately, his version has now seen the light of the day and is available for anyone to see. Bernstein’s score and Richert’s original voiceover narration completely changes the tone and feel of the film, giving it a much more wistful, melancholic tone instead of the annoying teen sex romp vibe of the studio cut. Aren’t You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? is a smart, engaging film filled with excellent performances by the entire cast under the rock solid direction of Richert who has crafted an excellent ode to a specific period in his past.
For more on the film, check out Richert’s official website:
http://www.williamrichert.com
Copyright (c) 2008 erasing clouds
A NOVELIST AND FILM DIRECTOR FROM CHICAGO SENDS A LETTER TO HIS HOMETOWN FILM CRITICS
William Richert
1223 Broadway Suite 101 Santa Monica, California 90404 williamrichert.com
November 13, 2007
Dear Bruce Ingram,
And Members of the Chicago Film Critics Association,
Recently I read that some of you objected to the treatment you received from the Fox publicity department earlier this year.
While you and your colleagues have apparently settled your grievances, I have not, and my rage against the machine of the Fox publicity and marketing department has lasted 20 years, beginning with the changes they and Fox studio bosses forced upon my 1986 film which you may know under the title “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON,” released in 1988.
I am writing this letter to tell you my experience with Fox and Fox publicity, and how my original movie was prevented from being seen by critics and audi- ences until now.
As evidence of events past, I am sending that film on DVD, now called by its original title, “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOODBYE.”
Roughly twenty years ago, when Fox bought the distribution rights to my inde- pendent film, the title was “JIMMY REARDON” and we had a score by academy- award winning Elmer Bernstein, a new song performed by Johnny Mathis, and an original end-credit song written and sung by River Phoenix. I provided narration.
Most notable of all was that our movie was to be the first starring role for young River Phoenix and introduce Matthew Perry in a co-starring
role. The picture was based entirely on my semi-
autobiographical novel “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA
KISS ME GOODBYE,” which I wrote at 19.
When we finished principal photography in Chicago in 1986
my young stars and I were totally enthralled with the footage
we’d shot, and after the usual period of editing, our first (and
only) screening at Island Pictures of what we all thought was
the final cut was so successful that everyone involved felt the movie was destined to break out from the indie world into the very big time.
A breakout from the art house circuit, that smaller segment of devoted filmgoers that Island Pictures had captured in that period, seemed a genuine possibility be- cause while we were filming in Chicago and Evanston, River Phoenix had become a national teen idol from his performance in STAND BY ME.
Not only that, we had terrific performances from other sensational young actors from Disney films like co-star Meredith Salenger (recently named Maxim’s “hot- test teen of the 80’s”) and indie favorites like Ione Skye and Louanne. I should add that I discovered the droll comic talents of Matthew Perry, casting him from seeing him in a restaurant, as he tells on Oprah.
And better than any special effect, we even had that Lower East Side sizzler Ann Magnuson giving a performance so funny --and intimate and raw –that even today she’s reluctant to talk about it.
The great and powerful mostly jazz score by Elmer Bernstein and the London Philharmonic embodied, I thought, the portentous scope of teenage travails and ob- sessions, showing the epochal behind the silly and profane and almost uncontrolla- ble acts of teeangehood.
From what dizzy heights our flights of fancy fall.
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Almost immediately the movie got snapped up by Fox and then it was changed with input from Fox publicity. The changes took almost two years. By the time the revised movie came out in theaters River had done two other starring roles and was being advised by his agents and his mother not to talk too much about the Fox movie, now altered by studio hacks, which by this time Fox had decided was not worthy to be shown to critics like those of you at the Chicago Film Critics Associa- tion.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that.
I found out at lunch one day that newly installed Island President Russell Schwartz had sold the distribution rights to Fox and that Fox was going to do a new cam- paign. I said I liked the present campaign and didn’t want to delay the release of the picture. He said that Island was filing for bankruptcy and had no choice and anyway the deal was done. I thought something like: how bad could this be? Our low budget on-location indie gets a wide release by a major studio. How bad could this be?
At first the front page Variety article about the “Fox pick up” of our Island Pictures independent film seemed good luck. But then the anguish set in. Russell Schwartz said that Fox President Leonard Goldberg had screened the
movie at home in Malibu and felt that the whole film had the
wrong “tone” and that it was a “downer” and he was going to screen it for his publicity and marketing team to see what could be done.
After screening the movie for marketing chief Cynthia Wick
and the Fox publicists, Goldberg called Schwartz and told him to get rid of my nar- ration, Elmer Bernstein’s ‘heavy’ score, and as much of the voice over as possible. He said they had decided to make it a “teen exploitation picture.”
As the author of the original novel, who actually became a film director to assure the rightful passage of book to screen – which took 20 years to accomplish -- I was after suburban class satire and adolescent insight, not exploitation. (Very few nov- elists manage to direct their novels into movies. I happened to meet Norman Mailer when he was filming his book, but there are not many others.)
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But the studio marketers revealed their true intention, that they bought the picture to sell teen sex and hot oldies from the sixties on a sound track, end of story. They did this, as the system allows, to make more bucks at the box office.
I still dispute that the movie I’m sending you would have fared worse at the box office, but even so, the justification for the delay of the movie and its effects have to be included as human and artistic toll. If this were a cinema homicide, and they killed Jimmy Reardon, and the murder was for money, then these were “Special Circumstances.”
They said my film was more serious than funny – which I don’t deny – and that my voice-over narration, which later caused River and
Keanu Reeves to cast me in Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” as the Falstaff character, “sounds like a grandfather.”
They said Elmer Bernstein’s music was old-fashioned and a “turn off” to “today’s audiences.”
The movie I’m sending is my challenge to that bottom line vapidity, so you can judge for yourself. In my view, Mr. Bernstein’s score is
electrically alive, and you can hear it, as Nietzsche said, in your muscles.
As for the voice over: I shall repeat today as I asserted then: my narration was de- signed to sound like the older novelist I was, remembering his youth, which hap- pened to be something like my own.
Having an older voice provided a frame for River’s performance, so the voice over didn’t compete with the dialogue.
More importantly, the narration supplied, you might say, the “conscience” of the movie, without which the inner life of the character is unknown. Since some events were fact, this was truth colliding with fiction, a fission of layers within lay- ers, I thought, mirrors reflecting backwards and forwards; heady chimerical con- cepts, maybe, but I thought achievable on film.
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The movie’s structure was a man looking back on his wildly misspent youth – a method also employed to some degree in River’s “Stand By Me.” Like the novel, which was very well reviewed I must say, and a selection of the Library Journal, the movie wasn’t intended to portray a teenage braggart, which a kid’s narration implied.
Much to my fury and dismay, the studio also removed a six minute scene where River showed compassion for his friend Suzie Middleburg, the scene where the protagonist’s character was revealed as caring; the only moment like it in the film, as it clearly showed River’s love. But it was cut. (I have restored it in this new DVD.)
Even so, as Fox had bought the picture, I agreed to give the studio a “shot” at mak- ing it “more accessible.”
Desperately looking for an answer for “different” narration, Schwartz first hired the actor son of River’s agent, but after hearing his voice on the telephone, a voice that had nothing to do with the movie, I called River and asked if he would narrate the picture himself and he agreed.
(Earlier, as Island was preparing to sell the picture to Fox, I recall a meeting with River’s mother Arlen and father John at the Island offices on Sunset Blvd. where they asked me to take out the line “Jimmy, I want to fuck you,” delivered by Ann Magnuson in what I call the Shakespeare scene, if only because the bard turned up in the shot, which is one of the longest single-take seduction scenes ever, according to a cinema pundit. On this occasion, sitting across from me in the Island Pictures office, were the same parents who were so keen on the movie 8 months earlier, now genuinely worried that the line would offend River’s fans. I explained as best I could that River’s fans wouldn’t be al-
lowed into the theaters since they were only 12-14; that this was an adult picture for the Island “She’s Gotta Have It” sort of crowd, and that “I want to fuck you” is a memora- ble line, especially when so well delivered by Ann. They said what “worked” a little while ago no longer “worked” for them, and
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that they would not allow River to promote a movie with that line in it. Finally I said that this was maybe the most powerful line in the movie because it still rang in my ears from the night I heard it from the lips of my mother’s best friend, just as River heard it in the movie, only in my case it was “Billy, I want to fuck you” and that besides, the word “fuck” was one of the single most used/abused words in the English language and that no English language film today could possibly be con- sidered authentic without it. But after around an hour or more I realized that the keeping the whole-hearted acceptance of my star and young friend and his parents was an okay reason to break my veracity/authenticity rule and I agreed to silence the line, but not remove it, as I had silenced the lines of Elizabeth Taylor in “Win- ter Kills” years ago. This seemed to mollify them, but it turned out River’s mother never got over my not taking it out completely, and refused interviews about the movie, adding to the ultimate fate of the picture as described below.)
SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES: MURDER FOR A SOUND TRACK
One morning the Island Executives and I were invited to a screening room at Fox so that the Fox movie-sound-track expert could present his new musical selection of “hot Oldies” for our movie. I was astounded. They’d managed to make all our past effort and intentions suddenly appear trashy and exploitive. Naturally, I got very angry, and told Schwartz and the others what I thought.
I remember saying: “You won’t get away with this! I can think, I can fast, I can wait – and I can write!” Never did I think that 20 years later I would be writing, and it would be this letter. Nor did I discover until just recently that River was named from the book I quoted that day, SIDDHARTHA.
In fact I felt that my movie had been assassinated and replaced by an impostor. If I later came to peace with that impostor, and even helped create it, I always grieved for the true work that went unseen.
RIGHT AFTER THAT AWFUL SCREENING I composed (written in blood, my lawyer said) a six-page letter delivered to the likes of Barry Diller and Goldberg and Scott Rudin and Cynthia Wick which called the Island President a traitor and referred to Fox marketing as knaves. I felt especially betrayed by Schwartz, a fella I brought into Island from his desk in the bullpen at Landmark. I helped him get
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the job of producing my film, the success of which led to his ousting the original financier and producer at Island, Cary Brokaw. He removed Brokaw’s Executive Producer credit while simultaneously selling the picture to Fox. (Later I discov- ered that Fox also paid Island 750k for his “new” sound track and “new” narra- tion.)
The letter closed with a quote from legend Sue Mengers: “In Hollywood you never know who your enemies are.”
I added that I knew who my enemies were.
Shortly afterward I got a call from Chris
Blackwell, the actual owner of Island Pictures.
In an extraordinary meeting at the Mondrian
Hotel (now gone) on Sunset Blvd. the Island CEO said he was truly sorry that they were forced to agree to Fox’s changes, but Island was going bankrupt and had no money for the release of the movie, and besides, the movie was bigger now that River was becoming a star. He added that if I protested publicly or wrote any more letters, Fox was prepared to shelve the theatrical release immediately and send the film straight to video, as they now owned the movie and thought my letter was “confrontational.”
On the other hand, if I agreed to work with Fox, Island would keep my version out of the Fox contract and see to it that I could release my original cut of the film after 5 years.
So I should keep quiet about the original version, he said, adding that River’s agent agreed that River would not talk about any other version but Fox’s.
It was a Malthusian Trap – I’d made a movie good enough to attract a major studio with an actor becoming a superstar, only now if I protested their “marketing changes” I was facing years of litigation I couldn’t afford plus a straight-to-video release. The studio now owned the movie 100 per cent and couldn’t be bothered if they had to write it off.
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After a meeting with Fox’s replacement composer Bill Conti, himself an academy award winner who promised to slant his music in a classical direction whenever he was able to, there followed a full year’s struggle for every new piece of music and narration, saving what I could of what I felt was the “conscience” of the movie. I never could stomach hearing the oldie “You’ve got to shop around” in place of our Johnny Mathis original title song “I’m not afraid to say goodbye” (to one night stands.)
I was not happy they had decided to open the movie with musical merchandising advice from Fox that kids should “shop around” – maybe at their record stores? This was just the opposite message found in Johnny Mathis’ “I’m not afraid to say goodbye.” Because the film had veracity and authenticity based in the literature of my own life that kind of propagandistic corporate sales advice bothered me, espe- cially coming at the very first moment of the movie, and when it plays contrary to the content of the movie itself.
Besides, this was the Eighties. I protested to Fox that the whole country was petrified of AIDS; was this what they really wanted to communicate to the young? -- Yes it was, apparently.
While this re-editing occurred along with a slow preparation for the new Fox release, nearly two
long years went by in dismal limbo. Our young
stars seemed to age dramatically -- especially
River, our youngest lead actor. Going from age six- teen to eighteen is a massive evolution in adolescence.
I remember a touching call from River from the Fox sound stage, after laying down new tracks in his own voice, telling me that he was listening to my original narra- tion before doing his own, and saying he was sorry that he didn’t sound “old enough.”
The Malthusian Trap turned to a Faustian bargain during that long, painful period, when River began to hear the rumors that the movie we made was almost shelved, which accounted for the delayed showing of the movie in theaters.
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River had experienced a lot of life before we met on the set of “JIMMY REAR- DON,” but it was not until Fox marketing executives and Fox publicity decided to change our movie, saying it was basically an embarrassment, that River felt shame.
I was branded a difficult director who had delivered an “un-releasable” movie that had to be “fixed” by the newly installed Island President Schwartz affably working with the Fox publicity department.
“On the street,” as the Hollywood saying goes, Schwartz and Goldberg were known to be “saving” the movie. They sure weren’t saving my career. They made
sure that was “over.” (Of course it wasn’t. Here I am.)
By the time Fox finally distributed our movie in 1988, it wasn’t the same film, and our star River was appearing as a different – and older – character in movies like “Running on Empty,” which was made for a much more sophisticated audience. This kind of audience -- and the critics who communicate to this audience -- were completely ignored by Fox publicity when our movie came out.
Because of the long slow redo at Fox, River now had two other well-reviewed movies in the marketplace, and in each of those he appeared older, which of course he was. His agent, whose son we didn’t hire, was no longer friendly to our film. She advised River not to discuss his earlier picture, saying he was now giving “adult” performances in “serious” productions. Making it worse, River’s mother Arlen still objected to the “fuck you” line.
So River gave almost no interviews, a hardship when trying to promote a film. Be- fore long River’s fans came to believe he didn’t like the movie, or was somehow ashamed of it.
But that wasn’t it, as the poet says, that wasn’t it at all. He was proud of our movie when we finished it. This shame came from Fox publicity.
River took it hard when it became known that Fox was delaying the release of our movie because it was his first starring role, and Hollywood being itself, we won- dered if it might even be shelved, and this could bring harm to his future career. As his friend as well as director, it wasn’t easy to watch him struggling to remain op-
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timistic. Even more disheartening for me was that I could see he felt that as the star, he should somehow be able to rescue the situation. At 17, he was so young; he thought that could be possible.
Instead he got more and more discouraged as we waited month after month for the new music to be chosen, the narration to be finished. In his book IN SEARCH OF RIVER PHOENIX, author Barry Lawrence writes that this period of waiting had a profound and powerful effect on the young actor’s life.
YOU MAY IMAGINE the constant and thrilling joy when I returned to Evanston and Chicago after so many years to direct the novel I’d written about these places. I was returning to the city I’d left at 17 on a Greyhound bus heading West to Hol- lywood, and I was making a movie.
Since the screenplay was taken verbatim from the novel, not a word was changed from the novel, I was actually directing the script of a nineteen year old, astonish- ing myself that it worked at all.
It was a marvel to me to see our crew and actors walk and film on the streets where I walked and lived when I went to Evanston Township High School.
I even got to cast Bill Ditton, my former acting teacher at Evanston Township High School, who danced in the scene at the prom.
The greatest reward of all was the company of that brilliant young actor River Phoenix, who was playing the role of me as a kid, and in the back and forth of our discussions about almost everything in the universe, a kind of education took place; about the movies, about each other. I was in constant fascination that the teenage actor playing me as a teenager came from a background so totally different from mine, and yet, though we had grown up in literal worlds apart, the film brought us together, as films do.
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We also found ourselves in Evanston at about the same age. I moved there when I was 16, and each of us had already spent a childhood about as itinerant and strangely religious as the other.
River, who once sang songs on LA streets to send his siblings to school, read the very poems I had written as a kid in the same North Side coffee house where I once read my poems almost 20 years earlier.
The passage of time since 1986 cannot overstate the literal poetic rush, the thrill my much older self experienced during those weeks of filming, living life and art and movies, all of it fiction, and all of it true.
As a 40-something man, I was able to reencounter my young teenage self at my own family dinner table, faithfully reconstructed by our art director, Norm New- berry, as it had been so long before.
I even got the same sinking feelings I got years back in “real” life, listening to Paul Koslo playing my own father, shouting at River Phoenix using my father’s own words to me, in what seemed a lifetime ago, suddenly re-materializing in front of my eyes; and not only that, I could say “action” and “cut,” which one cannot do in real life.
Not counting the meeting with his parents, there were only two dialogue changes River ever asked for. In a scene where he meets Ann Magnuson for the first time, he wanted to add the line “I am a firm believer in fate. Everything happens for a reason.”
I thought this was a pretty interesting line change from a kid at age 16, and asked why. River said he just wanted his character to say that in the movie, that he just thought it was important, is all, and that he thought it was true. I agreed to the change.
The second dialogue change was when he runs off from the nightclub in his fa- ther’s car with Louanne, telling her he could use a couple of drinks. He said he didn’t want to say anything about alcohol; he didn’t.
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Today, knowing some of his story, what a wit and thoughtful power he was, you can imagine what it was like to hang with River Phoenix, work with him on dia- logue and scenes, and have him playing a role like the one you yourself played for real – sort of -- a long time ago. And as well as you might imagine that, it was even better.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN early January, 1988, when the publicity department at Fox gathered in a room to mockingly interview me about any thoughts I had on promoting my film after they and their studio bosses had changed the title, tossed out academy-award winning Elmer Bernstein’s score, my author’s narration, River's Song, and that six-minute scene which reveals the protagonist’s true feel- ings for his friend Suzie, the classic revelatory scene, slashed to enable more show- ings in the theaters.
I’ll not forget their grins and insulting innuendoes as the Fox publicists talked about the sexy parts of my film, which their marketing department insisted on call- ing “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON.” They gleefully pointed out that the R rating would go against River Phoenix’s fans, who were only 14 or so at the time, as if that problem were not also their own problem. They seemed hell bent on ridiculing a picture they themselves were distributing.
My thoughts were that they should never have taken the movie on for release if they so openly disliked it.
(In my single hurried meeting with Fox marketing chief Cynthia Wick I asked that she please not change the title to “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF” because it smacked of playboy-ism; she said nobody every heard of anybody named “Jimmy Reardon.” I said what about TOM SAWYER or HUCKLEBERRY FINN or even DR. ZHIVAGO. Her response was that these were famous names and Jimmy Re- ardon was not. Eh, what?)
I pleaded with her/them to present the picture to critics as a movie made for grownups, that it was directed and written for adults, some of whom were looking back on adolescence as I myself did; at the intensity of it, the comic delirium of it. It was a movie drenched in the angst of the young, which, paradoxically, the young would largely watch without a clue as to why adults were laughing. Yeah it was
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sexy. The protagonist is an adolescent whose “pecker leads him around like a mule chasing a carrot.” This certain testosterone takeover cannot be a secret about teen- age boys. Therefore it was raw, and funny as hell (if you asked me) but there was a bite to it and a hard-won lesson in it and River’s character almost gets killed.
Shortly before the theatrical release of the movie, Fox informed critics from all media that the film would not be screened for any critics anywhere before it opened, “for reasons you’ll understand when you see it,” was their warning line.
“A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON” has grown in time to have a lot of fans, as I’ve discovered on the internet. I don’t dislike the movie; Bill Conti wrote some excellent music and I worked on both versions with equal care. How- ever, the changes made to the DNA of my movie by Fox remind me of the 1 per cent genetic difference that makes humans different from chimps, for example.
I felt that both my movie and I got cheated out of our true destiny, however big or small it was. I didn’t get to roll my own dice.
Fox publicity and marketing departments withheld facts about the making of the movie, and gave out misleading information, which cast a taint across the entire release. They took the heart and breath out of our excellent adventure, enshroud- ing in their stratagems the very reasons River and I were so proud of the movie, making it hurtful for us to talk about it or watch it.
Years later I was told by an Oregon video store owner that the studio sent an un- precedented notice that only one VHS “A
Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” would be allowed per store.
Was this part of some kind of promotional anti-movie-campaign, hoping the critics would so trash the movie it would become an overnight sensation? Or was this refusal to screen for critics before release the vengeance of studio executives intent on burying the work of a director who fought
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them? Would they sacrifice a whole movie for a show of power? Oh, in a heart- beat; the beat of their hearts, anyway.
And the game was not played fairly. When I took Chris Blackwell’s offer to work with the studio as best I could, nobody mentioned that the studio would refuse to have any press screenings for critics, an industry signal of a movie in trouble. Sheila Benson was the exception; she called Fox from the LA TIMES and insisted on seeing the picture. When they refused, she got the picture from somebody at Island and screened it herself. When she gave it a rave, Fox put out the word that
Ms. Benson’s daughter was somehow involved in the production and that Ms. Benson’s review was a ringer. In response, Ms. Benson wrote an article even more laudatory of the movie; a brave person.
When the movie grossed nearly 3 million the first weekend, the LA TIMES reporter came to my house in Venice and interviewed
me for a Sunday magazine piece. Fox and Schwartz had the article delayed and then killed, fearful of what I had told the reporter.
Soon afterward, all of the filmed interviews with River and Meredith and Matthew and Ione and Ann about making the movie disappeared.
After the LA Times article was killed, I don’t remember giving any press or other interviews of any kind at all about this movie, come to think of it, in all these 20 years.
On the night Fox’s edit opened in Westwood I watched little kid after little kid walk out in bewilderment at what they were seeing on the screen.
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In their cockamamie strategy, Fox set out to market exclusively to teenagers who couldn’t even get into the theater without sneaking out of other movies at the mul- tiplex. In fact, this is what they did, in droves. Even with this lack of box office accountability, the movie grossed 6 million domestic theatrical, a sizeable number for a low budget film, even today, out grossing River’s two other excellent films that were released that year, and did get press screenings, including “RUNNING ON EMPTY,” which got River an academy award nomination.
The reviews across America from those critics who went to see it, except for Sheila Benson and a few others, were uniformly humiliating and embarrassing for my young stars and me. “DIRECTOR IN DECLINE,” was a typical headline from someplace in Indiana.
Thoughtfully, Fox publicity sent the negative reviews to my house by messenger. A friend and I performed a Mexican beer ceremony, and burned them in the fire- place.
Here’s my question: suppose you – or your predecessors, since we’re talking 20 years ago – had been supplied with a press kid laden with the facts about the mak- ing of that original movie, with photos of River Phoenix and Meredith Salenger and Ann Magnuson, Ione Skye, Louanne and the newcomer Matthew Perry – all actors of interest – would you have come to a screening? I think you might have attended, especially if you were familiar with my earlier
movies, like “WINTER KILLS” and “SUCCESS,” “LAW AND DISORDER” or my documentaries “Derby” and “A Dancer’s Life,” – even “The Happy Hooker.”
Let’s further imagine you were told by the publicity de-
partment that the movie boasted an original score by
academy-award winner Elmer Bernstein, performed by
the London Philharmonic Orchestra; cinematography by John Connor; that Johnny Mathis sang a song written for the movie; that the seventeen-year-old star of the movie had written and performed the end-title song; that the screenplay was writ- ten by a nineteen year-old Midwesterner, who grew up in and around Chicago, and that it was taken verbatim from the novel published when he was 23; that the
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movie was filmed on location in Evanston and Chicago where certain true events actually occurred in ’61 – might you have taken a serious look at the picture? (I should note that one Internet site refers to A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON as “historical fiction,” an interesting oxymoron when referring to one’s own past.)
Well, if you were a critic back then, Fox and Schwartz prevented you from know- ing many of these things.
All of this happened 20 years ago. River died in 1993. Neither he nor Elmer Bernstein lived to see our movie with an audience.
I don’t know what happened to Cynthia Wick and the Fox publicity people who so afflicted our work with their self-interest.
My old pal, the “affable” Russell Schwartz went on to become President at Gra- mercy, then New Line. Leonard Goldberg produced the hugely popular “Charlie’s Angels” series. Sheila Benson left the LA TIMES and few remember “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON.” It never gets included in those collec- tions of teen films they show at festivals, hardly ever
gets mentioned in round-ups of River’s movies, either.
However, I was named “Outstanding Graduate” at Evanston Township High School the year the book was published, and I owe my alma mater the fight to keep the record straight. I also want to show a new genera- tion River’s truly great performance in its original set- ting.
Besides, even today, there may be some High School Senior moved up from the South Side of Chicago having adventures like Jimmy Reardon’s, and the movie could be instructive. It also shows how a high school grad can say “Fuck you” to his entire graduation class in book and film and print and still remain friends with them.
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Thus, herewith: for the members of the Chicago Film Critics Association, a special preview DVD screening copy of “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOODBYE?” a never-seen-before movie starring some wonderful and legendary actors. It contains original music by one of cinema’s greatest composers, the com- plete original narration, 6 minutes of crucial unseen footage, a new Johnny Mathis single and – finally --the original song River Phoenix wrote and sang for the film, “Heart to Get.”
I ask that you please review it as a brand new film about to “open” two decades af- ter completion. It is opening in a venue that was non-existing back then -- cyber- space. [If it’s true that ghosts can inhabit electronic devices, then perhaps River and Elmer will get to see it there.]
On or before opening night, December 15, the full feature will be presented on my web- site www.williamrichert.com.
With only one theatrical print, and no real money for ads, the movie will remain in cy- berspace – for now. However, friends of mine are presently looking for a Chicago theater to “four wall” the picture.
We are hoping that in 2008 the movie will open in selected theaters throughout the country.
I left Chicago on a Greyhound bus, with only my story to tell, using my life to jump-start my art, and now I’m doing it again.
Thanks for your kind attention. Sincerely,
William Richert aka Jimmy Reardon
William Richert
1223 Broadway Suite 101 Santa Monica, California 90404 williamrichert.com
November 13, 2007
Dear Bruce Ingram,
And Members of the Chicago Film Critics Association,
Recently I read that some of you objected to the treatment you received from the Fox publicity department earlier this year.
While you and your colleagues have apparently settled your grievances, I have not, and my rage against the machine of the Fox publicity and marketing department has lasted 20 years, beginning with the changes they and Fox studio bosses forced upon my 1986 film which you may know under the title “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON,” released in 1988.
I am writing this letter to tell you my experience with Fox and Fox publicity, and how my original movie was prevented from being seen by critics and audi- ences until now.
As evidence of events past, I am sending that film on DVD, now called by its original title, “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOODBYE.”
Roughly twenty years ago, when Fox bought the distribution rights to my inde- pendent film, the title was “JIMMY REARDON” and we had a score by academy- award winning Elmer Bernstein, a new song performed by Johnny Mathis, and an original end-credit song written and sung by River Phoenix. I provided narration.
Most notable of all was that our movie was to be the first starring role for young River Phoenix and introduce Matthew Perry in a co-starring
role. The picture was based entirely on my semi-
autobiographical novel “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA
KISS ME GOODBYE,” which I wrote at 19.
When we finished principal photography in Chicago in 1986
my young stars and I were totally enthralled with the footage
we’d shot, and after the usual period of editing, our first (and
only) screening at Island Pictures of what we all thought was
the final cut was so successful that everyone involved felt the movie was destined to break out from the indie world into the very big time.
A breakout from the art house circuit, that smaller segment of devoted filmgoers that Island Pictures had captured in that period, seemed a genuine possibility be- cause while we were filming in Chicago and Evanston, River Phoenix had become a national teen idol from his performance in STAND BY ME.
Not only that, we had terrific performances from other sensational young actors from Disney films like co-star Meredith Salenger (recently named Maxim’s “hot- test teen of the 80’s”) and indie favorites like Ione Skye and Louanne. I should add that I discovered the droll comic talents of Matthew Perry, casting him from seeing him in a restaurant, as he tells on Oprah.
And better than any special effect, we even had that Lower East Side sizzler Ann Magnuson giving a performance so funny --and intimate and raw –that even today she’s reluctant to talk about it.
The great and powerful mostly jazz score by Elmer Bernstein and the London Philharmonic embodied, I thought, the portentous scope of teenage travails and ob- sessions, showing the epochal behind the silly and profane and almost uncontrolla- ble acts of teeangehood.
From what dizzy heights our flights of fancy fall.
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Almost immediately the movie got snapped up by Fox and then it was changed with input from Fox publicity. The changes took almost two years. By the time the revised movie came out in theaters River had done two other starring roles and was being advised by his agents and his mother not to talk too much about the Fox movie, now altered by studio hacks, which by this time Fox had decided was not worthy to be shown to critics like those of you at the Chicago Film Critics Associa- tion.
It wasn’t supposed to be like that.
I found out at lunch one day that newly installed Island President Russell Schwartz had sold the distribution rights to Fox and that Fox was going to do a new cam- paign. I said I liked the present campaign and didn’t want to delay the release of the picture. He said that Island was filing for bankruptcy and had no choice and anyway the deal was done. I thought something like: how bad could this be? Our low budget on-location indie gets a wide release by a major studio. How bad could this be?
At first the front page Variety article about the “Fox pick up” of our Island Pictures independent film seemed good luck. But then the anguish set in. Russell Schwartz said that Fox President Leonard Goldberg had screened the
movie at home in Malibu and felt that the whole film had the
wrong “tone” and that it was a “downer” and he was going to screen it for his publicity and marketing team to see what could be done.
After screening the movie for marketing chief Cynthia Wick
and the Fox publicists, Goldberg called Schwartz and told him to get rid of my nar- ration, Elmer Bernstein’s ‘heavy’ score, and as much of the voice over as possible. He said they had decided to make it a “teen exploitation picture.”
As the author of the original novel, who actually became a film director to assure the rightful passage of book to screen – which took 20 years to accomplish -- I was after suburban class satire and adolescent insight, not exploitation. (Very few nov- elists manage to direct their novels into movies. I happened to meet Norman Mailer when he was filming his book, but there are not many others.)
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But the studio marketers revealed their true intention, that they bought the picture to sell teen sex and hot oldies from the sixties on a sound track, end of story. They did this, as the system allows, to make more bucks at the box office.
I still dispute that the movie I’m sending you would have fared worse at the box office, but even so, the justification for the delay of the movie and its effects have to be included as human and artistic toll. If this were a cinema homicide, and they killed Jimmy Reardon, and the murder was for money, then these were “Special Circumstances.”
They said my film was more serious than funny – which I don’t deny – and that my voice-over narration, which later caused River and
Keanu Reeves to cast me in Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho” as the Falstaff character, “sounds like a grandfather.”
They said Elmer Bernstein’s music was old-fashioned and a “turn off” to “today’s audiences.”
The movie I’m sending is my challenge to that bottom line vapidity, so you can judge for yourself. In my view, Mr. Bernstein’s score is
electrically alive, and you can hear it, as Nietzsche said, in your muscles.
As for the voice over: I shall repeat today as I asserted then: my narration was de- signed to sound like the older novelist I was, remembering his youth, which hap- pened to be something like my own.
Having an older voice provided a frame for River’s performance, so the voice over didn’t compete with the dialogue.
More importantly, the narration supplied, you might say, the “conscience” of the movie, without which the inner life of the character is unknown. Since some events were fact, this was truth colliding with fiction, a fission of layers within lay- ers, I thought, mirrors reflecting backwards and forwards; heady chimerical con- cepts, maybe, but I thought achievable on film.
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The movie’s structure was a man looking back on his wildly misspent youth – a method also employed to some degree in River’s “Stand By Me.” Like the novel, which was very well reviewed I must say, and a selection of the Library Journal, the movie wasn’t intended to portray a teenage braggart, which a kid’s narration implied.
Much to my fury and dismay, the studio also removed a six minute scene where River showed compassion for his friend Suzie Middleburg, the scene where the protagonist’s character was revealed as caring; the only moment like it in the film, as it clearly showed River’s love. But it was cut. (I have restored it in this new DVD.)
Even so, as Fox had bought the picture, I agreed to give the studio a “shot” at mak- ing it “more accessible.”
Desperately looking for an answer for “different” narration, Schwartz first hired the actor son of River’s agent, but after hearing his voice on the telephone, a voice that had nothing to do with the movie, I called River and asked if he would narrate the picture himself and he agreed.
(Earlier, as Island was preparing to sell the picture to Fox, I recall a meeting with River’s mother Arlen and father John at the Island offices on Sunset Blvd. where they asked me to take out the line “Jimmy, I want to fuck you,” delivered by Ann Magnuson in what I call the Shakespeare scene, if only because the bard turned up in the shot, which is one of the longest single-take seduction scenes ever, according to a cinema pundit. On this occasion, sitting across from me in the Island Pictures office, were the same parents who were so keen on the movie 8 months earlier, now genuinely worried that the line would offend River’s fans. I explained as best I could that River’s fans wouldn’t be al-
lowed into the theaters since they were only 12-14; that this was an adult picture for the Island “She’s Gotta Have It” sort of crowd, and that “I want to fuck you” is a memora- ble line, especially when so well delivered by Ann. They said what “worked” a little while ago no longer “worked” for them, and
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that they would not allow River to promote a movie with that line in it. Finally I said that this was maybe the most powerful line in the movie because it still rang in my ears from the night I heard it from the lips of my mother’s best friend, just as River heard it in the movie, only in my case it was “Billy, I want to fuck you” and that besides, the word “fuck” was one of the single most used/abused words in the English language and that no English language film today could possibly be con- sidered authentic without it. But after around an hour or more I realized that the keeping the whole-hearted acceptance of my star and young friend and his parents was an okay reason to break my veracity/authenticity rule and I agreed to silence the line, but not remove it, as I had silenced the lines of Elizabeth Taylor in “Win- ter Kills” years ago. This seemed to mollify them, but it turned out River’s mother never got over my not taking it out completely, and refused interviews about the movie, adding to the ultimate fate of the picture as described below.)
SPECIAL CIRCUMSTANCES: MURDER FOR A SOUND TRACK
One morning the Island Executives and I were invited to a screening room at Fox so that the Fox movie-sound-track expert could present his new musical selection of “hot Oldies” for our movie. I was astounded. They’d managed to make all our past effort and intentions suddenly appear trashy and exploitive. Naturally, I got very angry, and told Schwartz and the others what I thought.
I remember saying: “You won’t get away with this! I can think, I can fast, I can wait – and I can write!” Never did I think that 20 years later I would be writing, and it would be this letter. Nor did I discover until just recently that River was named from the book I quoted that day, SIDDHARTHA.
In fact I felt that my movie had been assassinated and replaced by an impostor. If I later came to peace with that impostor, and even helped create it, I always grieved for the true work that went unseen.
RIGHT AFTER THAT AWFUL SCREENING I composed (written in blood, my lawyer said) a six-page letter delivered to the likes of Barry Diller and Goldberg and Scott Rudin and Cynthia Wick which called the Island President a traitor and referred to Fox marketing as knaves. I felt especially betrayed by Schwartz, a fella I brought into Island from his desk in the bullpen at Landmark. I helped him get
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the job of producing my film, the success of which led to his ousting the original financier and producer at Island, Cary Brokaw. He removed Brokaw’s Executive Producer credit while simultaneously selling the picture to Fox. (Later I discov- ered that Fox also paid Island 750k for his “new” sound track and “new” narra- tion.)
The letter closed with a quote from legend Sue Mengers: “In Hollywood you never know who your enemies are.”
I added that I knew who my enemies were.
Shortly afterward I got a call from Chris
Blackwell, the actual owner of Island Pictures.
In an extraordinary meeting at the Mondrian
Hotel (now gone) on Sunset Blvd. the Island CEO said he was truly sorry that they were forced to agree to Fox’s changes, but Island was going bankrupt and had no money for the release of the movie, and besides, the movie was bigger now that River was becoming a star. He added that if I protested publicly or wrote any more letters, Fox was prepared to shelve the theatrical release immediately and send the film straight to video, as they now owned the movie and thought my letter was “confrontational.”
On the other hand, if I agreed to work with Fox, Island would keep my version out of the Fox contract and see to it that I could release my original cut of the film after 5 years.
So I should keep quiet about the original version, he said, adding that River’s agent agreed that River would not talk about any other version but Fox’s.
It was a Malthusian Trap – I’d made a movie good enough to attract a major studio with an actor becoming a superstar, only now if I protested their “marketing changes” I was facing years of litigation I couldn’t afford plus a straight-to-video release. The studio now owned the movie 100 per cent and couldn’t be bothered if they had to write it off.
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After a meeting with Fox’s replacement composer Bill Conti, himself an academy award winner who promised to slant his music in a classical direction whenever he was able to, there followed a full year’s struggle for every new piece of music and narration, saving what I could of what I felt was the “conscience” of the movie. I never could stomach hearing the oldie “You’ve got to shop around” in place of our Johnny Mathis original title song “I’m not afraid to say goodbye” (to one night stands.)
I was not happy they had decided to open the movie with musical merchandising advice from Fox that kids should “shop around” – maybe at their record stores? This was just the opposite message found in Johnny Mathis’ “I’m not afraid to say goodbye.” Because the film had veracity and authenticity based in the literature of my own life that kind of propagandistic corporate sales advice bothered me, espe- cially coming at the very first moment of the movie, and when it plays contrary to the content of the movie itself.
Besides, this was the Eighties. I protested to Fox that the whole country was petrified of AIDS; was this what they really wanted to communicate to the young? -- Yes it was, apparently.
While this re-editing occurred along with a slow preparation for the new Fox release, nearly two
long years went by in dismal limbo. Our young
stars seemed to age dramatically -- especially
River, our youngest lead actor. Going from age six- teen to eighteen is a massive evolution in adolescence.
I remember a touching call from River from the Fox sound stage, after laying down new tracks in his own voice, telling me that he was listening to my original narra- tion before doing his own, and saying he was sorry that he didn’t sound “old enough.”
The Malthusian Trap turned to a Faustian bargain during that long, painful period, when River began to hear the rumors that the movie we made was almost shelved, which accounted for the delayed showing of the movie in theaters.
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River had experienced a lot of life before we met on the set of “JIMMY REAR- DON,” but it was not until Fox marketing executives and Fox publicity decided to change our movie, saying it was basically an embarrassment, that River felt shame.
I was branded a difficult director who had delivered an “un-releasable” movie that had to be “fixed” by the newly installed Island President Schwartz affably working with the Fox publicity department.
“On the street,” as the Hollywood saying goes, Schwartz and Goldberg were known to be “saving” the movie. They sure weren’t saving my career. They made
sure that was “over.” (Of course it wasn’t. Here I am.)
By the time Fox finally distributed our movie in 1988, it wasn’t the same film, and our star River was appearing as a different – and older – character in movies like “Running on Empty,” which was made for a much more sophisticated audience. This kind of audience -- and the critics who communicate to this audience -- were completely ignored by Fox publicity when our movie came out.
Because of the long slow redo at Fox, River now had two other well-reviewed movies in the marketplace, and in each of those he appeared older, which of course he was. His agent, whose son we didn’t hire, was no longer friendly to our film. She advised River not to discuss his earlier picture, saying he was now giving “adult” performances in “serious” productions. Making it worse, River’s mother Arlen still objected to the “fuck you” line.
So River gave almost no interviews, a hardship when trying to promote a film. Be- fore long River’s fans came to believe he didn’t like the movie, or was somehow ashamed of it.
But that wasn’t it, as the poet says, that wasn’t it at all. He was proud of our movie when we finished it. This shame came from Fox publicity.
River took it hard when it became known that Fox was delaying the release of our movie because it was his first starring role, and Hollywood being itself, we won- dered if it might even be shelved, and this could bring harm to his future career. As his friend as well as director, it wasn’t easy to watch him struggling to remain op-
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timistic. Even more disheartening for me was that I could see he felt that as the star, he should somehow be able to rescue the situation. At 17, he was so young; he thought that could be possible.
Instead he got more and more discouraged as we waited month after month for the new music to be chosen, the narration to be finished. In his book IN SEARCH OF RIVER PHOENIX, author Barry Lawrence writes that this period of waiting had a profound and powerful effect on the young actor’s life.
YOU MAY IMAGINE the constant and thrilling joy when I returned to Evanston and Chicago after so many years to direct the novel I’d written about these places. I was returning to the city I’d left at 17 on a Greyhound bus heading West to Hol- lywood, and I was making a movie.
Since the screenplay was taken verbatim from the novel, not a word was changed from the novel, I was actually directing the script of a nineteen year old, astonish- ing myself that it worked at all.
It was a marvel to me to see our crew and actors walk and film on the streets where I walked and lived when I went to Evanston Township High School.
I even got to cast Bill Ditton, my former acting teacher at Evanston Township High School, who danced in the scene at the prom.
The greatest reward of all was the company of that brilliant young actor River Phoenix, who was playing the role of me as a kid, and in the back and forth of our discussions about almost everything in the universe, a kind of education took place; about the movies, about each other. I was in constant fascination that the teenage actor playing me as a teenager came from a background so totally different from mine, and yet, though we had grown up in literal worlds apart, the film brought us together, as films do.
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We also found ourselves in Evanston at about the same age. I moved there when I was 16, and each of us had already spent a childhood about as itinerant and strangely religious as the other.
River, who once sang songs on LA streets to send his siblings to school, read the very poems I had written as a kid in the same North Side coffee house where I once read my poems almost 20 years earlier.
The passage of time since 1986 cannot overstate the literal poetic rush, the thrill my much older self experienced during those weeks of filming, living life and art and movies, all of it fiction, and all of it true.
As a 40-something man, I was able to reencounter my young teenage self at my own family dinner table, faithfully reconstructed by our art director, Norm New- berry, as it had been so long before.
I even got the same sinking feelings I got years back in “real” life, listening to Paul Koslo playing my own father, shouting at River Phoenix using my father’s own words to me, in what seemed a lifetime ago, suddenly re-materializing in front of my eyes; and not only that, I could say “action” and “cut,” which one cannot do in real life.
Not counting the meeting with his parents, there were only two dialogue changes River ever asked for. In a scene where he meets Ann Magnuson for the first time, he wanted to add the line “I am a firm believer in fate. Everything happens for a reason.”
I thought this was a pretty interesting line change from a kid at age 16, and asked why. River said he just wanted his character to say that in the movie, that he just thought it was important, is all, and that he thought it was true. I agreed to the change.
The second dialogue change was when he runs off from the nightclub in his fa- ther’s car with Louanne, telling her he could use a couple of drinks. He said he didn’t want to say anything about alcohol; he didn’t.
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Today, knowing some of his story, what a wit and thoughtful power he was, you can imagine what it was like to hang with River Phoenix, work with him on dia- logue and scenes, and have him playing a role like the one you yourself played for real – sort of -- a long time ago. And as well as you might imagine that, it was even better.
IT MUST HAVE BEEN early January, 1988, when the publicity department at Fox gathered in a room to mockingly interview me about any thoughts I had on promoting my film after they and their studio bosses had changed the title, tossed out academy-award winning Elmer Bernstein’s score, my author’s narration, River's Song, and that six-minute scene which reveals the protagonist’s true feel- ings for his friend Suzie, the classic revelatory scene, slashed to enable more show- ings in the theaters.
I’ll not forget their grins and insulting innuendoes as the Fox publicists talked about the sexy parts of my film, which their marketing department insisted on call- ing “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON.” They gleefully pointed out that the R rating would go against River Phoenix’s fans, who were only 14 or so at the time, as if that problem were not also their own problem. They seemed hell bent on ridiculing a picture they themselves were distributing.
My thoughts were that they should never have taken the movie on for release if they so openly disliked it.
(In my single hurried meeting with Fox marketing chief Cynthia Wick I asked that she please not change the title to “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF” because it smacked of playboy-ism; she said nobody every heard of anybody named “Jimmy Reardon.” I said what about TOM SAWYER or HUCKLEBERRY FINN or even DR. ZHIVAGO. Her response was that these were famous names and Jimmy Re- ardon was not. Eh, what?)
I pleaded with her/them to present the picture to critics as a movie made for grownups, that it was directed and written for adults, some of whom were looking back on adolescence as I myself did; at the intensity of it, the comic delirium of it. It was a movie drenched in the angst of the young, which, paradoxically, the young would largely watch without a clue as to why adults were laughing. Yeah it was
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sexy. The protagonist is an adolescent whose “pecker leads him around like a mule chasing a carrot.” This certain testosterone takeover cannot be a secret about teen- age boys. Therefore it was raw, and funny as hell (if you asked me) but there was a bite to it and a hard-won lesson in it and River’s character almost gets killed.
Shortly before the theatrical release of the movie, Fox informed critics from all media that the film would not be screened for any critics anywhere before it opened, “for reasons you’ll understand when you see it,” was their warning line.
“A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON” has grown in time to have a lot of fans, as I’ve discovered on the internet. I don’t dislike the movie; Bill Conti wrote some excellent music and I worked on both versions with equal care. How- ever, the changes made to the DNA of my movie by Fox remind me of the 1 per cent genetic difference that makes humans different from chimps, for example.
I felt that both my movie and I got cheated out of our true destiny, however big or small it was. I didn’t get to roll my own dice.
Fox publicity and marketing departments withheld facts about the making of the movie, and gave out misleading information, which cast a taint across the entire release. They took the heart and breath out of our excellent adventure, enshroud- ing in their stratagems the very reasons River and I were so proud of the movie, making it hurtful for us to talk about it or watch it.
Years later I was told by an Oregon video store owner that the studio sent an un- precedented notice that only one VHS “A
Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon” would be allowed per store.
Was this part of some kind of promotional anti-movie-campaign, hoping the critics would so trash the movie it would become an overnight sensation? Or was this refusal to screen for critics before release the vengeance of studio executives intent on burying the work of a director who fought
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them? Would they sacrifice a whole movie for a show of power? Oh, in a heart- beat; the beat of their hearts, anyway.
And the game was not played fairly. When I took Chris Blackwell’s offer to work with the studio as best I could, nobody mentioned that the studio would refuse to have any press screenings for critics, an industry signal of a movie in trouble. Sheila Benson was the exception; she called Fox from the LA TIMES and insisted on seeing the picture. When they refused, she got the picture from somebody at Island and screened it herself. When she gave it a rave, Fox put out the word that
Ms. Benson’s daughter was somehow involved in the production and that Ms. Benson’s review was a ringer. In response, Ms. Benson wrote an article even more laudatory of the movie; a brave person.
When the movie grossed nearly 3 million the first weekend, the LA TIMES reporter came to my house in Venice and interviewed
me for a Sunday magazine piece. Fox and Schwartz had the article delayed and then killed, fearful of what I had told the reporter.
Soon afterward, all of the filmed interviews with River and Meredith and Matthew and Ione and Ann about making the movie disappeared.
After the LA Times article was killed, I don’t remember giving any press or other interviews of any kind at all about this movie, come to think of it, in all these 20 years.
On the night Fox’s edit opened in Westwood I watched little kid after little kid walk out in bewilderment at what they were seeing on the screen.
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In their cockamamie strategy, Fox set out to market exclusively to teenagers who couldn’t even get into the theater without sneaking out of other movies at the mul- tiplex. In fact, this is what they did, in droves. Even with this lack of box office accountability, the movie grossed 6 million domestic theatrical, a sizeable number for a low budget film, even today, out grossing River’s two other excellent films that were released that year, and did get press screenings, including “RUNNING ON EMPTY,” which got River an academy award nomination.
The reviews across America from those critics who went to see it, except for Sheila Benson and a few others, were uniformly humiliating and embarrassing for my young stars and me. “DIRECTOR IN DECLINE,” was a typical headline from someplace in Indiana.
Thoughtfully, Fox publicity sent the negative reviews to my house by messenger. A friend and I performed a Mexican beer ceremony, and burned them in the fire- place.
Here’s my question: suppose you – or your predecessors, since we’re talking 20 years ago – had been supplied with a press kid laden with the facts about the mak- ing of that original movie, with photos of River Phoenix and Meredith Salenger and Ann Magnuson, Ione Skye, Louanne and the newcomer Matthew Perry – all actors of interest – would you have come to a screening? I think you might have attended, especially if you were familiar with my earlier
movies, like “WINTER KILLS” and “SUCCESS,” “LAW AND DISORDER” or my documentaries “Derby” and “A Dancer’s Life,” – even “The Happy Hooker.”
Let’s further imagine you were told by the publicity de-
partment that the movie boasted an original score by
academy-award winner Elmer Bernstein, performed by
the London Philharmonic Orchestra; cinematography by John Connor; that Johnny Mathis sang a song written for the movie; that the seventeen-year-old star of the movie had written and performed the end-title song; that the screenplay was writ- ten by a nineteen year-old Midwesterner, who grew up in and around Chicago, and that it was taken verbatim from the novel published when he was 23; that the
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movie was filmed on location in Evanston and Chicago where certain true events actually occurred in ’61 – might you have taken a serious look at the picture? (I should note that one Internet site refers to A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON as “historical fiction,” an interesting oxymoron when referring to one’s own past.)
Well, if you were a critic back then, Fox and Schwartz prevented you from know- ing many of these things.
All of this happened 20 years ago. River died in 1993. Neither he nor Elmer Bernstein lived to see our movie with an audience.
I don’t know what happened to Cynthia Wick and the Fox publicity people who so afflicted our work with their self-interest.
My old pal, the “affable” Russell Schwartz went on to become President at Gra- mercy, then New Line. Leonard Goldberg produced the hugely popular “Charlie’s Angels” series. Sheila Benson left the LA TIMES and few remember “A NIGHT IN THE LIFE OF JIMMY REARDON.” It never gets included in those collec- tions of teen films they show at festivals, hardly ever
gets mentioned in round-ups of River’s movies, either.
However, I was named “Outstanding Graduate” at Evanston Township High School the year the book was published, and I owe my alma mater the fight to keep the record straight. I also want to show a new genera- tion River’s truly great performance in its original set- ting.
Besides, even today, there may be some High School Senior moved up from the South Side of Chicago having adventures like Jimmy Reardon’s, and the movie could be instructive. It also shows how a high school grad can say “Fuck you” to his entire graduation class in book and film and print and still remain friends with them.
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Thus, herewith: for the members of the Chicago Film Critics Association, a special preview DVD screening copy of “AREN’T YOU EVEN GONNA KISS ME GOODBYE?” a never-seen-before movie starring some wonderful and legendary actors. It contains original music by one of cinema’s greatest composers, the com- plete original narration, 6 minutes of crucial unseen footage, a new Johnny Mathis single and – finally --the original song River Phoenix wrote and sang for the film, “Heart to Get.”
I ask that you please review it as a brand new film about to “open” two decades af- ter completion. It is opening in a venue that was non-existing back then -- cyber- space. [If it’s true that ghosts can inhabit electronic devices, then perhaps River and Elmer will get to see it there.]
On or before opening night, December 15, the full feature will be presented on my web- site www.williamrichert.com.
With only one theatrical print, and no real money for ads, the movie will remain in cy- berspace – for now. However, friends of mine are presently looking for a Chicago theater to “four wall” the picture.
We are hoping that in 2008 the movie will open in selected theaters throughout the country.
I left Chicago on a Greyhound bus, with only my story to tell, using my life to jump-start my art, and now I’m doing it again.
Thanks for your kind attention. Sincerely,
William Richert aka Jimmy Reardon