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A escaped fugitive takes refuge on a movie set, replacing a stuntman who has been killed in an on-set accident.
I was lucky enough to get to interview the director of 'The Stunt Man' about the ten-year saga of making his ‘dream project’ back at the 2001 Cannes Film festival. We also chatted about his career and his hope to make more films.
Richard Rush - “I was lecturing at a university film school to a bunch of potential film students and I asked them if any of them had seen my films. I started with ‘Color of Night’ and I’d say about 80 hands went up out of a room of 200 kids. Then I asked if anyone had seen ‘The Stunt man’, the film I actually wanted to talk to them about and only two hands went up. Two hands in a room of 200! I thought, Oh Boy, my film is totally lost to this generation…”
It was the realisation that his greatest film may be ‘lost’ to a whole generation that started the cogs to turn in Rush’ mind. He began thinking of an idea for a warts-and-all ‘making of’ documentary as a way to introduce a new audience to his work. And so the seed was sown for what would finally grow into ‘The Sinister Saga of Making the Stunt Man’ (2000). His realisation coincided neatly with a telephone call from a film company that had recently acquired the rights to his film, ‘The Stunt Man’ (1980), and wandered if he would like to supply a commentary and supervise the making of a documentary for a laserdisc re-issue of the film. “Are you kidding…?” exclaimed Rush to the voice on the other end of the telephone, “What the hell took you so long..?
This was way back in 1995 and Rush set to work with the new fledgling DV cameras that had recently become widely available in the U.S. Through early investigation, Rush was bizarrely pleased to discover that there was no actual ‘making of’ footage from the original 1978/9 shoot, the lack of any such material also meant that he could start afresh, with a nineties perspective and twenty one years worth of hindsight. The last thing he wanted to do was sift through “old memories with fresh faces”…
Notes on the documentary ‘The Sinister Saga of…’ –
Initially only intended as supplementary material for a deluxe laser disc release, this 112minute documentary film (almost as long as the ‘The Stunt Man’ itself) is now finding it’s legs on DVD as a companion to the re-mastered film (for the first time available with a re-mastered stereo soundtrack and cleaned print).
Viewed as a singular entity, the film comes across as an ambitious attempt by Rush to embrace the emerging digital technologies of the late twentieth century; but, looking at it in 2001, with DV features now enjoying theatrical releases (‘The Blair Witch Project’ (1999) and ‘Center Of The World’ (2001)), it does seem to have been executed with the stock-in-trade experience of a celluloid craftsmen. Rush employs certain techniques that have been much-improved upon or rendered largely obsolete by modern digital filmmaking (there is some particularly dubious blue screen and picture in picture work for example) though this does seem to be intended more as a nod to the themes and techniques that were used to shoot the original film, than being down to bad filmmaking. But, unfortunately, in some sequences, it does come across as naive digital filmmaking. But perhaps I am being unfair in viewing the piece in it’s own right. When viewed as a companion-piece to the film, the documentary is second to none for aficionados of the film or film makers, it covers a lot of ground in telling you the ten year struggle Rush had in making the film and proves to be one of the most interesting DVD-umentaries ever committed to the medium in terms of spoken content. As Rush himself says, “It is weird that what originally started out as a home movie about the making of a movie, has become a film in it’s own right and has been reviewed as one. It was never intended to be.” It could be argued that the ‘home-movie’ feel is also perhaps it’s greatest strength. The whole thing feels so damned personal and Rush is, first and foremost, a fine storyteller. It is an immense pleasure to spend two hours with him as he gradually exorcises the demons and removes a whole sack of potatoes from his weighted shoulder. And so on to the film itself…
Brief production background –
’The Stunt Man’ was first announced to the trades as an intended 1971 release directed by indie-film veteran, Richard Rush; however, the film didn’t actually lens until 1978 and then, upon it’s completion, took a further two years to secure distribution. Considered unmarketable by its potential distributor and producers due to its (allegedly) audacious subject matter (daring to offer audiences behind the scenes look at filmmaking, as if that would ever catch on). Rush has also heavily implied that a single producer within the Melvin company (a person he christens D.B. - for DUMBO in the documentary - so as not to do anything as crass as name names) set about to sabotage the movie from its inception.
Apparently hating the original script, ‘D.B.’ then allegedly sought to keep the finished film from its audience to prove that his instincts about the film had been right all along. It took Rush’ own interference to secure the film a screening; finally opening onto a single screen in Seattle without a distributor attached. It played to record breaking crowds for forty consecutive weeks and, in the process, commanded enough rave reviews from critics to make a Los Angeles screening an actuality. Booked into a tight six week slot, it was the period's top-grossing film. This impressive feat finally managed to attract a major distributor, Twentieth Century-Fox, who then released the film… in Canada and at two theatres in New York City. The Manhattan openings weren’t given any television or press advertising and when, as a result, the film drew disappointing crowds, it was farmed out to back street theatres and away from it’s potential audience.
Finally, in an attempt to reach a wider audience and protect it’s investment, Twentieth Century-Fox released the film in other cities; but, paradoxically, tampered with the film's promotion, cancelling television advertisements and juggling the designs of poster and newspaper ads, with the result that the film again failed to draw in the crowds. To further highlight the studio’s lack of faith and total mishandling of the picture – the studio promised to increase the number of screens the film was showing on if it garnered any Oscar nominations… When the nominations were released, ‘The Stunt Man’ received three nods from the Academy (for best director, best screenplay, and best actor).
The studio made good on their promise, ‘The Stunt Man’ did open on more screens… three. A single screen for each nomination. The studio also decided to hold up distribution, with a view to releasing it with greater fanfare if it won a gong, but as the film happened to be the only film in contention that initially had no screening venue at hand for members of the academy to view the film (a problem rectified by Rush himself after a huge battle with various public ordinance committees), the chances of it picking up any were slim, it didn’t and the film quietly disappeared.
Unavailable in the U.K. since it’s original video release through (now-defunct) Guild Home Video in 1981, it was aired most recently at 12.30am on Channel 4 two years ago. So what is the film about, who made it and why has nobody been afforded the opportunity to see it until now?
A brief synopsis of the Film -
Escaped convict Cameron (Steve Railsback), a Vietnam veteran and fugitive, is chased onto a film location whilst attempting to allude a police task force. In the process, he may or may not be responsible for the tragic death of stuntman ‘Iron Balls Burt’ in a complicated car-crash sequence gone wrong. The director Eli Cross (Peter O’Toole) hires Cameron to replace (or rather pretend to be) the dead stuntman, thus helping out each of them, “Now don’t be hasty, and remember your arse, it’s just like mine, maybe I can save them both!” Cameron from being sent to jail and Eli from a potential manslaughter charge which would prevent him from finishing his message-heavy anti-war movie.
From the outset, the film plays against the backdrop of a busy film set… gaffers wire up cables, lights crop up in shot, grips lumber around with equipment; all of which helps create the central theme of the film - that of ‘illusion’. A stage on which nothing is what it seems. The illusion is propagated through the use a narrative seen solely from Cameron’s restricted POV. We are kept in the dark about what is and isn’t real; add to that, the fact that we are sharing the perception of a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran (we may or may not be privy to some of his more elaborate delusions and paranoia from the war;“You gotta figure that the guy coming at ya’ is gonna kill ya”) and we can’t be sure that any of it is real. From the outset, Eli’s ‘chopper’ hovers over the proceedings with it’s camera running, so it could also be possible that the story does in actuality concern a film within a film, within a film. Eli also makes myriad references to ‘Alice in Wonderland’ (pre-dating ‘The Matrix’ (1999) by to clear two decades and ‘Zardoz’ (1974) - in it’s first draft - by three years) during the course of the film and constantly challenges those around him to consider multiple points of view, setting up the constant (yet ambiguous) shifts between the illusory world and the real world of filmmaking. This is illustrated in his first spoken words (heard off camera), as his pilot narrowly manages to avoid crashing the helicopter when it is hit by a kamikazee buzzard,
Pilot - “That crazy bird just tried to kill us”
Eli - “That’s your point of view, should we stop and ask the bird what his is?”,
These constant allusions are delivered along with the tongue-in-cheek nature of Eli and Cameron’s other verbal jousts, which seems to imply that the statements are more referential to the movie they are in opposed to the one they are making.
A bizarre symbiosis develops between Cameron and Eli and, latterly, a mutual respect. Initially Eli needs ‘Burt’ to be alive in order to finish his film and realise his ‘vision’. Cameron needs to hide from the cops and seems willing to risk his life performing stunts to that end alone, feeling that there must almost be some kind of karmic punishment coming to him because of his (actually quite insignificant) crime. This gives rise to our central concerns in the film… Is Eli willing to sacrifice this foot soldier to get his film made?
Cameron - “If he (Eli) had his way, there wouldn’t be a solider alive by morning... but I’m the only soldier he’s got on hand”
But we are also left to consider the fact that Cameron may deserve his fate to make up for his past misdoings? We aren’t allowed to learn of his crime until well into the final reel. He is a veteran, a ‘baby killer’, after all. But we could also be forgiven for empathising with Cameron. He has been in a jungle for a two year tour of duty, in which everyone was trying to kill him, it can’t be too difficult for him to assume that the crazed Eli, like a general with a platoon of hundreds (his loyal film crew – willing to lie to the police for him), may indeed be readying to command him to his death. This central paranoia aside, Cameron’s past does seem to supply him with the credentials for his new line of work… “I got out of Nam in one piece, that was a hell of stunt”.
This ‘soldier’ also helps re-invigorate Eli and infuse in him a newfound creativity, giving rise to new scripted stunt scenes that has Cameron perform a jig on the wing of an aeroplane and re-attempt ‘Iron Balls Burt’s’ fatal car stunt. The later takes place after ‘Burt’ has revealed his ‘crime’ to Nina (Barbera Hershey), the lead actress of ‘the film within the film’ and absolved himself in both her and our own eyes. At this point we are with him 100% and start to really fear for him.
The movie that Eli is making is an over the top first world war epic of the worst kind, with syrup-spread melodrama that would probably be one of the all time flops of it’s era… but what this hackneyed film-within-the-film does allow, is for Rush to use Eli’s script as a sounding board for his own political statements without fear of recrimination, and ultimately, ‘The Stunt Man’ does impart a strong anti-war message. Let’s not forget that, although it was released in 1980, it was written way back in the early-seventies, going through nine drafts. Had this been financed earlier it may well have been the first mainstream (though left of field) film to openly decry the Vietnam War. As it is, it followed close on the heals of the, more literal, Apocalypse Now (1979).
Rush was also keen to infuse his film with as much authenticity as possible. To this end, he cast real-life movie stunt veteran Chuck Bail to play himself. In one masterstroke, Rush imbued the film’s stunt work with a huge amount of butch stunt credibility, (which also contributed to the final film unsettling the studios – revealing the other side of the camera)... Bail delivers a mini stunt master-class for the audience, an angel-of-death rundown of every death-defying feat that Cameron must perform… Chuck is the tension-builder. Bail is so convincing in his delivery we believe that he himself may only just be able to pull off each stunt, Cameron hasn’t been doing this all of his life like Chuck has and ‘jumping out of a banana tree into the back of a cart full of elephant shit’ (Cameron’s other brief Vietnam-based stunt resume quip) isn’t quite the same as leaping across rooftops dodging bullets or escaping from a sinking car…
Also integral to the films success, although not essential to the story, is the ‘self-perpetuating macguffin’ that Rush creates for us. Eli introduces the idea of ‘the disease’ to the plot; the essential ingredient for which there must be a remedy in order for Cross to make the film (and by definition Cameron) work smoothly. The idea is introduced when Eli try’s to elicit a new scene from his writer, Sam, who try’s to counter Eli and name the disease to avoid having to write him a new scene. He thinks the disease is war…
Eli “… war isn’t the disease, it’s merely one of the symptoms… define the disease, write me a new scene; the egg will drop from my face and we will have a relevant screenplay… maybe.”
‘The Disease’ itself begins to spread when Lucky ‘Burt’ meets up with Eli’s drunk D.O.P. who reveals that Eli refused to let him stop shooting when ‘Iron Balls’ Burt drowned in the back of the crashed car… he just wanted to get the shot.
We are invited by Eli (and Rush) to try and figure out what ‘the disease’ is, Cross playfully suggests that only then will we be watching a truly great movie, but we are given no more information. At the end of ‘The Stunt Man’ ‘the disease’ is revealed to be (our) paranoia… the very thing that had kept us searching for ‘the disease’ in the first place… We have created ‘the disease’ in our own minds eye by searching for it, as does Cameron within the film. Cameron has been haunting himself. It becomes apparent that Eli hasn’t been trying to kill him, rather release him from the demons that have haunted him since Vietnam. He realises this with Eli’s parting remark… “How tall is King Kong (3 and a half feet)?” It’s only a movie and nothing is ever what it seems… What has Cameron (and we as an audience) been worrying about? We were always in the safe guiding hands of the director.
The film mainly succeeds in spreading ‘the disease’ by keeping us closely tied yet disassociated with Cameron, we may well experience the story through his eyes but, as we are initially unsure of his crime (finally revealed to be the freezing off of a security guards ears – it’s a long story) and don’t feel that we can really trust him or ourselves as the paranoia spreads. As a device, this helps create a huge amount of tension for Cameron’s ultimate stunt, taking place, as it does, after he has received our absolution. We feel for Cameron as we have misjudged him; a man who must now face an impossible task, to cheat death itself. Cameron (re-christened ‘Lucky Burt’ after his alleged miracle escape so as to throw the local police chief off the scent) becomes increasingly paranoid and susceptible to the idea that Cross is trying to kill him in order to capture his death on film.
The Director, Richard Rush -
Born in New York City on April 5th 1929, Richard Rush began his career as a stills photographer and sound recordist before setting up his own company to produce low budget commercial films. Rush, like many of his contemporaries ended up working in the unchecked and highly inventive filmmaking environment of the Roger Corman stable; three of his earlier genre exploitation films starring a young Jack Nicholson ‘Too Soon to Love’ (1960), ‘Hell’s Angels on Wheels’ (1967) and ‘Psych-out(1968)’, all have subsequently been heralded cult classics of a type (and been re-issued in the U.K. on video). Rush also spent some time as a staff writer in his early days, one of his many assignments saw him working with a young Francis Ford Coppola on adaptations of Tennessee Williams plays.
His films and filmmaking style continued to grow in form and content along the much vaunted ‘learning curve’; Rush and his (then regular) cameraman, Hungarian born László Kovács (whose credits include; ‘Easy Rider’ (1969), ‘Freebie and the Bean’ (1974), ‘Shampoo’ (1975), ‘Ghostbusers’ (1984) and most recently ‘Miss Congeniality’ (2000) though, due to prior commitments, he was unable to shoot ‘The Stunt Man’) even found time to pioneer the technique of ‘rack-focus’ - that denoted the two specific focal points that, when re-focusing from one point to the other (usually from one object to another), would result in the de-focussed object disappearing, through an optical illusion caused by the refraction of light through the lens.
Rush’ obvious adeption with the form coupled with his prolific early output (6 films between 1967-6 began to attract a great deal of attention from the major studios, which culminated in the Elliot Gould and Katherine Ross starrer, ‘Getting Straight’ (1970). For this, his first studio picture (made for Columbia) Rush managed to secure a (then largely anomalous) deal that allowed him to transfer his entire independent film making crew into the studio as union members, which was practically unheard of. Maybe from time to time a director would bring over a cameraman, a favourite grip or production assistant, but an entire crew?
RR – “I got very lucky. I had, during my low-budget filmmaking, developed – without question – the best crew in town…( László) Kovács was my cameraman and we had the best combination of killer-fast-running operators and at the same time had developed a stock-company of actors which I was using in those exploitation films like Jack Nicholson, Sabrina Sharpe and several others that were appearing in all of my films and so when I went to my first studio job at Columbia, I told them that I wanted to bring all of my entire crew into the union and they just happened to have a labour relations guy there who loved the idea and couldn’t wait to fight that battle... So the battle was fought and won. So I actually did my first studio picture with my own crew. The only problem was, László Kovács – a great cameraman, and at that point probably the best hand-held cameraman in the business, never touched his camera again once he got in the union – his operator touched it.”
Though Kovács did return to operating his own camera years later, Rush offers this possible explanation for Kovács abandoning his post,
RR – “…I think it’s one of the young cameraman’s dreams to get somebody else to do the heavy work when they start to make big pictures and this was his chance.”
Rush really does deserve some kudos for this move, not only does it show his confidence in his workmates, but also his inherent instinct to stick to his guns, an instinct that would lead him into trouble later on. ‘Getting Straight’ turned out to be Columbia’s the highest grosser that year, brought in with skill and expertise on the low-end studio budget he had to make the picture (Rush feels this is largely because he had such a competent and tight crew to work with) and understandably the studio wanted Rush to make them another film having become convinced that, not only was he able to handle the transition from off-the-lot pictures to studio based fair, but that he was now also a bankable director, two enviable combinations.
The studio had recently acquired the rights to Paul Brodeur’s recently released novel ‘The Stunt Man’ (1970). A somewhat bleak existential indictment of the Vietnam war set against the back drop of movie making. The studio, intrigued to see what Rush could do with the material, gave him a copy.
“…They were inclined to offer me another picture and among the things they offered me was a book called ‘The Stunt Man’ by Paul Brodeur, who was a magazine writer and critic, I think he was with the New Yorker, and he’d just done this existentialist novel which was reviewed pretty well and was getting a run in 4 or 5 countries abroad. They gave it to me with the advance billing that there were already a couple of hot directors interested in it, Francois Truffaut and Arthur Penn. I read the book and I was very troubled with it… and I basically turned it down.”
In fact both Francóis Truffaut and Arthur Penn explored themes that appeared in book ‘The Stunt Man’ in their own films, Truffaut’s “Day For Night (La Nuit Americaine, 1973)”; a dry look at relationships and film making, contains a principal character who has an affair with a stunt man and in Arthur Penn’s “Night Moves” (1975) A Former footballer and private detective is employed by an aging Hollywood actress to find her missing daughter, a journey which takes him to Florida where he finds a connection between the missing girl, an unsolved murder, a mysterious mechanic and, wait for it, Hollywood Stunt Men.
Rush himself found that he kept thinking about the book in relation to his own career as a director and finally something clicked,
“…there was an irresistible metaphor in the book that kept haunting me and I kept going back to it in my head and finally decided that I would do a little work on it and I did a treatment that was a radical departure from the novel…”
It was perhaps not so much an ‘irresistible metaphor’ as Rush’ identification with it’s central character, not escaped convict Cameron (in the book an AWOL draftee who witnesses an accidental drowning), rather the maniacal director ‘Gottschalk’ (which translates literally to mean ‘God’s Servant’) a man ruthless in his quest for perfection and blessed with a god-like omnipotence around his set. Rush set about turning in his own interpretation of the book and worked on adapting the screenplay with Lawrence B Marcus to make, what Rush calls, “a radical departure” from the source text,
“In terms of bare plot, it was the same – a motion picture company shooting on location that puts a fugitive to work as a stunt man… but the thing is, in the book, the central characters were crazy…the director was more of an Eric Von Stroheim character; … and it always seemed a literary crutch, to me, to make your central characters crazy so you can get away with anything you want to and you not have to justify anything…”
Rush also had problems with the way (Paul) Broduer had detailed the actual production of the film-within-the-book and depicted the crew during the filmmakng process,
“…I wanted to do filmmaking as I knew it All of the movies I had seen that dealt with moviemaking used as a model ‘Sunset Boulevard’… Grand old dinosaur like companies, y’know? And there was a kind of a guerrilla filmmaking that I grew up in as I worked in exploitation pictures that was very ambitious, but poverty stricken and I sort of wanted to show a combination… I had just done my first studio picture, which was bringing my style of filmmaking into a studio genre…”
Rush took the central premise from the book and span it on it’s head, deciding to use as a central theme, one that would also run through his other main preoccupation of the seventies, ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’. Rather than have his characters be crazy people in a crazy world, he decided to make the main characters sane. Rush had acquired the rights to the novel ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ in the early seventies, again drawn to a recurring theme that permeates all of his work to varying degrees; that of a sane man in a crazy situation. Rush still holds a great deal of affection for ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’,
“I had wanted to do the film much more like the book. The book is seen from two points of view, from the (Jack) Nicholson character and from the Indian chief. Now, Nicholson was sane and when he looked around, he saw the white walls of the hospital. When the chief looked around, he was crazy… he saw slime oozing out of the walls, all this kind of stuff and I wanted to make my version like that, with a duality in the story telling.”
Rush immediately thought of Jack Nicholson for the role of MacMurphy and wasted no time in bringing him on board as they had remained close friends from their low-budget days and both director and star were committed to making Rush’ version of the film. But Rush found that he couldn’t raise finance. The studio didn’t want to do a film that they called ‘A lobotomy picture’. So eventually Rush sold on the rights to the material, which wound up with Michael Douglas (through his father, Kirk), who himself ran into financing difficulties and had to eventually go outside the industry to raise the money. Douglas was lucky enough to inherit an Oscar worthy property with it’s star. Rush doesn’t hold any grudges, especially against Nicholson, who ultimately committed to a radically altered draft from Rush’ original ideas for the film…
“Nicholson was in love with the material and was desperate to play the part any which way, I think.”
His first draft of The Stunt Man took nine months to complete, but the studio didn’t like it, or perhaps simply couldn’t understand it. They had problems with the story and found it nearly impossible to place into a specific genre. In a studio executives mind, a film without a definable genre wont, by definition, have a easily definable audience and that’s bad. How can you market a film if you don’t know who you’re marketing at?
“They (the studios) couldn’t figure out if it was a comedy, a drama, if it was a social satire, if it was an action adventure and of course the answer was ‘yes, it’s all of those things’, But that isn’t a satisfactory answer to a studio executive… They kept telling me that I couldn’t take the audience back stage like that and reveal all the secrets.”
Rush was undeterred by the initial studio response and was spurred on by his agent David Beedleman,
“…He said to me ‘Richard, with this screenplay and your heat, we can make a deal with any studio in town.’
Buoyed with self-belief, Rush took the screenplay to other studios,
“He (Beedleman) was wrong. It was to unusual a concept, dealing with film making, illusion and reality… there really was no genre for it.”
There was a huge amount of resistance to the screenplay. It must be noted that during this period, Rush did receive other film offers, but, perhaps banking on the burn of his ‘heat’, followed his instincts and stuck to his guns; at least until 1973...
“Every time a studio would offer me a picture I’d say ‘Let’s so The Stunt Man instead’… that didn’t go over too well. But I would get offers… people who had liked my earlier work and then finally, having to pay the mortgage, I took a picture from Warner Brothers called ‘Freebie and the Bean’ with Alan Arkin and Jimmy Caan.”
Freebie and the Bean (1974) was, arguably, the first true buddy-cop action movie. The film itself was helped greatly by the decade from which it sprang, the seventies. Both of the cops of the title were wholly corrupt, with massively dysfunctional private lives and, at the end of the picture, the bad guy (whom they have been pursuing for the whole film) gets away. Rush himself describes the picture as a “relationship movie” about,
“…an old married couple in a police car, quarrelling, not knowing which one is the husband and which was the wife…”
The film was Warner’s highest grosser that year. A timely event as it had been four years since his last ‘hit’, several lifetimes by Hollywood standards. It put ‘the heat’ well and truly back on Rush,
“…the offers started coming in heavy again and I was still staying ‘Well, hey, let’s do the Stunt Man’ and to some extent they had changed their mood. They said ‘okay, we’ll do the stunt man if you do it as a straight action picture’ but I’d waited around for five years at this point and wasn’t ready to do that…”
Warner’s were particularly interested to that end and, when Rush refused their offer, went ahead and commissioned a fresh action-orientated screenplay based loosely on the book. They came back to Rush with the finished article and wanted to use the title. Rush, obviously, was somewhat reluctant to relinquish it and the first of his many court battles ensued. Rush won; his first draft was more faithful to the source novel from which it took the name as was therefore awarded the title. Warner’s went into production with the film with a different name, ‘Hooper’ (1978), the Burt Reynolds vehicle. The first few drafts of the film still carried over scenes and character names from Rush’ original ‘Stunt Man’ script.
Ironically, it took the release of ‘Hooper’ to tip the balance in favour of Rush’ film. Looking at ‘Hooper’ and ‘The Stunt Man’ side by side, the two films couldn’t be more different (like comparing ‘Police Academy’ to ‘Serpico’) and it was this central fact, the intelligence of the screenplay, that finally got Rush his money, ‘Hooper’ had been followed by a slew of no-brainer stunt action movies and Rush seemed to have the intelligent distillation of all of them. ‘Hooper’ had created a river up which Rush could sail ‘The Stunt Man’ – well, perhaps more of a stream up which he could paddle it. Rush pitched the idea to Melvin Simon (then president of appropriately titled ‘Melvin Simon Productions Inc.’) as they took off on Simon’s private jet for a short cross-state flight. The deal had been made by the time the plane came in to land. So far, this process had taken Rush eight years, the cast had already been on board for around two years awaiting the funds that would enable the production to green-light. That light had just been lit. To get the money Rush had taken the film to an independent source and, in doing so, had come full circle. He would make the film, then sell it in a buyers market. What better way to show the studios how wrong they were not to finance the picture. They would be begging to buy it off of him. At least that was the plan.
O’Toole – “ Everyone who signed up for it hung on for years, that’s how much we all believed in it… he (Richard) expects one to walk down a razor;s edge as though it were a three lane highway, but it was worth it.”
Rush was actually working on another original screenplay project at Universal, with his frequent collaborator, Robert Kaufman, when he finally secured the money to make the film. Luckily, Rush had had the foresight to ensure that he had a clause written into his Universal contract that if the money for ‘The Stunt Man’ came through while he was on the assignment, he had the right to walk away and leave it…
“…well it did and I did… and I felt bad about leaving my collaborator, Bobby Kaufman in the lurch, so I said to I said to him ‘look, if you have something in your trunk that you want to get made, show it to me and I’ll see if I can help you.’ And he came up with the screenplay which was ‘Love at First Bite’. So I said, ‘okay, I’ll take it to Simon and see if I can get him to do it for you.’ I gave it to Simon and said ‘Don’t bother reading it, just make it.’ And he did. And that was his only other real money maker besides ‘The Stunt Man’ out of his twenty pictures.”
So now we know that it’s Rush we have to thank for that George Hamilton / Richard Benjamin comedy. View this fact as you may, what it does demonstrate, is Rush’ continued commitment to his friends. This left Rush obligation free to embark on his pet project of the last eight years, but one thing had continued to create a problem as time dragged on and the weeks turned to months and the months became years… As more and more time passed, so did the relevance of the screenplay. As Rush puts it,
“Time was eroding the screenplay and we felt the needed to keep updating it, making it more relevant, until we realised that we could work that into the story. It was an Eli problem, not a Richard Rush problem, so we worked it into the script. Sam, Eli’s writer talks with him about the relevance of his screenplay. We felt that as long as Eli addressed these problems head on, we wouldn’t have to and we were right”.
And Rush also pre-empted any criticism that may have been levied at him about the relevance of ‘The Stunt Mans’ anti-war sentiment by having Eli Cross come under that exact same criticism on-screen from his writer, Sam…
“The problem is Eli, way back when you were all so charged up about making a great antiwar statement they wouldn’t let you, well now they’ll let you but you haven’t got a war… what you do have my friend is a great deal of egg on your face”
In fact it could be argued that Rush allowed Eli to become the author of both the film within the film and ‘The Stunt Man’ itself. It certainly meant that Rush could use Eli as a fall guy for his heavy handed political statements, thus avoiding anything but good press for ‘The Stunt Man’ by letting Cross’ film take all of the critical flak. It is inherently difficult to criticise a film that invites you to criticise it, especially if it does your job for you and paints a giant target on it’s own back. This is the innate genius of the film; it is almost impervious to a critical attack. And if anything does give rise to a critical murmur it can be explained away as one of the many ‘illusory aspects’ of the film and thus imply that a critic has somehow misunderstood it. The only chink in the armour (and one that no one seemed to spot or take umbrage with - thanks largely to the fact that the film is simply very good), was the fact that it’s central character, was so obviously Richard Rush.
Eli Cross was the pseudonym that Rush worked under during his early low-budget moviemaking days. Clearly Rush sought to put at least one facet of himself on-screen, perhaps seeing Eli as an opportunity to explore the more extreme sides of his own personality. But the similarities don’t stop there. In the film, Peter O’Toole even wore the same clothes as Rush… O’Toole would come in ever day during production wearing different outfits for the perusal of his director, in the hope of finding the perfect costume… and every day he would find a small problem with what O’Toole had on, until one day when he was presented with a costume that, as he put it was “the perfect Americanisation of Peter O’Toole”. It just so happened to be the exact same outfit that Rush was wearing that day, even down to the Neutral Density Lens he had hung around his neck. And so the design for Eli’s costume was set. But O’Toole quickly made the character his own, adapting quickly to the best role he had had in years and one in which Rush Had envisaged him from the beginning…
“ I always saw him (O’Toole) as by far, the first choice. But he was at that point my favourite actor and one wants ones favourite actor to do parts in their movie. A friend said ‘I know you want O’Toole to do The Stunt Man, well he’s going to be at this party… would you like me to get you invited. Of course I said yes, so he did. So I met OTtoole and we spent a good deal of time during the evening chatting, but I never mentioned The Stunt Man to him because it seemed like such a tacky thing to do at the party, and fate, obviously being highly amused by that - when he left I was kicking myself saying ‘you chicken shit, how could you not make a move on him about the film’, but a the guy who he was with, an old friend of his (Phillip Brunell), was a big fan of Freebie and the Bean. He said to him on the way out, that guy Rush has done some really interesting pictures, including one called ‘Freebie and the Bean’. And the coincidence gets deeper because O’Toole was in the middle of a divorce, and his wife had left him a goodbye note, ad in the note she said, there’s a picture made just for you… it starts with a cat pissing in a dustbin, then two crooked policemen rummage through it and there’s a lot of tomato sauce… and obviously she meant thins as some kind of disparagement of him and the movie, but O’Toole came back in to the party to see me and said ‘You made Freebie and the Bean? I loved that bloody film’ and I said ‘Yes I did and, by the way, I have a screenplay for you.’ By that time I had time to lament not having mentioned it earlier...”
As O’Toole eloquently puts it in the documentary ‘The Sinister Saga of Making The Stunt Man’, “I had been given the sack by a woman and she had left me a note, in it she described the opening of what turned out to be ‘Freebie and the Bean…’
Rush continues, “So he took the screenplay to London and read it and then called me in couple of weeks and said ‘I am an articulate, intelligent man. I read the screenplay and If you don’t give me the part I will Kill you!’ Which made me very happy.”
The next time O’Toole saw Rush was at his Bel Air home, where O’Toole was to experience first hand his new directors eccentricities… when he walked in he was greeted by a leopard walking up to him on the carpet, Rush’ pet at the time.
O’Toole proved to be an inspired choice and he brings a certain English elegance to a part that, in some terms, may be considered a representation of Rush’ burgeoning God complex as a director, who seems to enjoy a limitless omnipotence around his set. In fact the whole idea of Eli’s ever-present camera crane was based around the notion of ‘God from a machine’. Which would allow him to appear anywhere around the location in the blink of an eye. He sees all, but can be seen by others only when he reveals himself to them.
The casting of Steve Railsback proved to be equally as inspired and fruitful, even if initially Rush was put off by his scruffy appearance.
“I got Steve, actually from an agent who I ran into here (Cannes) two nights ago in a bar. A guy named Mark Harris. Who is now one of the principles in… god, what was the name of that company? I can’t think of it… a big production company In LA… anyway, he did a brilliant job, he was the best agent I had ever met… he actually worked for his client. He tuned in to what my weaknesses were and sold Steve brilliantly. Steve was a protégé of Illya Kazan and I was a great Illya Kazan fan because he had basically done the definitive Broadway plays and movies for the proceeding couple of decades and when I met Steve (at Rush’ house) and he read for me, I was tremendously impressed and gave him the job at that first meeting… told him that he was going to be in it. There was something about him that was just right for the character… it was such a demanding role in that the audience had to climb into his shoes and see the picture through his eyes and he had to communicate a lot of information without talking and he ?(Railsback) takes a lot of chances and works at a depth that makes that possible. He was a rough west-texas kid you just expect that from. And I discovered what a lot of other people hadn’t figured out about Steve, was that he was such a good comedian, in that scene where he rescues that old lady from the water* (Barbera Hershey in old-age makeup) ‘I’ve seen you on television…’ he gave it a kind of a natural hick hillbilly comedy that was wonderful. But when he first walked into the room to read for me, I thought someone had let the gardeners son in.
Railsback –“One thing I’ll never forget is what he said to me when I had finished reading for him. Two word’s, ‘Your Cameron’”
Which must have been inspiring for the relatively inexperienced Railsback, though there may have been times that he wished he had missed out on the role because of the physical expectations of his role, especially one that demanded he appear in virtually every scene .
“I got 3 days off in a 17 week schedule, working 6 days a week, but I couldn’t wait to get to the set each day”
Rush also relied on his Eli persona to get around other problems he encountered during the production; when choosing his main location the hotel Del Coronado near San Diego, incidentally the same hotel was used in Billy Wilder's ‘Some Like it Hot’ (1959), (it offered the ideal location to Rush - what ostensibly appeared to be a European chateau, but somehow magically relocated to San Diego) it had one distinct problem… it was surrounded by palm trees. He spent a long time figuring out how he was going to shoot around them, but then he realised, as O’Toole fondly recounts…
“I went up to Richard and asked him what he was going to do about all the bloody palm trees everywhere outside the Coronado hotel… he looked at me and said ‘They’re not my problem anymore… they’re your (Eli Cross’) problem”
So it was worked into the script, in lines that were half-scripted / half improvised by O’Toole (an improvisation that gave rise to the famous ‘Eli’s Killer Crane’ dialogue) “Palm trees, yet more palm trees? Who had the audacity to put palm trees there, they will be in every shot! And what are palm trees doing waving around on a battlefield in Europe during the first world war, answer me that...”
In a film that explicitly dealt with the filmmaking process, why not show the problems with location shooting ? In fact the more production hassles that could be placed in front of Eli Cross, the better. ‘The Stunt Man’ was also the first great film that was as much about the process of making film, as the story contained within. In much the same way as ‘The Player’ (1995) allows characters to discuss the longest ever opening shot whilst at the same time surpassing it, so ‘The Stunt Man’ informs us of the logistical difficulties in filming the intricate stunts, whilst pulling them off effortlessly. Rush himself also found that there were obstacles to be overcome and he was equally as inventive as his filmic creation in overcoming them and again his low budget background came into play…
“…I decided at one point that I needed world war one aircraft flying over the hotel in combat with the soldiers on the roof – and I felt that I had to have it – but the FAA (Federal Aviation Authority) had said no. My stunt coordinator (Chuck Bail, who plays himself in the movie) said ‘It’s okay, I’ll fly the plane…’ because our pilot had refused to do it. I said ‘the hell you will, I’ll fly the plane!’ and another of the stunt men who was a pilot volunteered also, so we were all fighting ‘cause we all wanted a chance at flying that Tiger Moth illegally over the roof! And somehow we got the name of the Admiral of the near by Navy base… the hotel was on final approach to the Navy base, about a mile and a half out on final and we knew that if we could get permission to land at the base while in the final approach pattern, we would pass over the hotel. So we told the tower operator that we had gotten the Admirals permission to land a world war one plane on the base. On the appointed day I was on the roof with five cameras shooting the action when Chuck Bail came over in the Tiger Moth on ‘final approach’ when he conveniently developed radio trouble while he was over the hotel and managed to stall around for five and ten minutes doing diving runs and machine gun passes to get me the critical tie-in footage I needed and I was sure that all hell would break loose the next day… the hotel was a national monument, the FAA had said no and you know what? We never heard anything more about it and after a while my recurring nightmare disappeared… the one with the headline that read ‘ Rush destroys national monument’ But I bring that up, not to tell you the story so much as to explain that if it was a studio picture, I couldn’t have done that because the studio has to come back to the city of San Diego and shoot again… it has to deal with the FAA on any subsequent picture and maybe even with the Coranado Hotel. I didn’t and I only ever have one end, and that is to get the film I want… it is (low budget film making) a completely different philosophy where you will go all out to get the shot”
Though highly adept at filming the complicated action sequences in Eli’s film (some shots utilising as many as five camera shooting simultaneously) ironically, Rush considers himself to be first and foremost an actors director “I believe that a critical part of film making is the performance of the actors… the visual aspect is fun, it’s the salad dressing.” Which may explain the well rounded balance between visual flair and excellent, flamboyant performances.
The shoot wrapped in mid-1979 and Rush set about the task of selling the, as yet distributerless film. But it was here that the sabotage and underhand tactics really began to come into play.
“…once I’d made the picture and it came out how I wanted to, I was thrilled with it, delighted with it… but the studios hadn’t changed there minds, they said ‘is it a comedy… is it a drama?’ And they were still scared to death of it. The internal conflicts in their company had put out bad word on it in the press calling it ‘their trouble picture’ which doesn’t exactly encourage studio heads to be adventurous and so it took 8 years to get financing an two years to get distribution, it was a ten year adventure…”
O’Toole – “This film wasn’t released, it escaped!” The head of MGM saw the finished film and said “Dick, I love the movie, I think it’s a masterpiece, but I’ve got to make my own pictures work in the market place!” He didn’t pick it up.
With the film finished, but still no studio willing to gamble on picking it up, Rush set about setting up test screenings to prove the films metal to the executives. The first out of town premiere was in Seattle. It went down a storm, but still the execs (and in particular D.B. who was out to stop the film from the beginning and wished to save face now it had been so successfully made) weren’t interested, calling for more screenings. So in a ballsy move, Rush arranged a private screening for the influential critic William Arnold, Rush called him and explained the situation with the studio and invited him to get the scope on either A) the hottest film no one could see or B) the worst film no one would ever hear from again. A risky proposition as his would be the only review of the film so far. Unsurprisingly, he gave the film a rave review and was so enthusiastic that looking back Rush says that, “I consider Bill Arnold the saviour of ‘The Stunt man’”.
The Arnold review was enough to secure more sneak previews, these took place in L.A. and Phoenix and although the film still hadn’t received any bad notices, the studio still had no idea how to sell it (and D.B. seemed more determined than ever to make sure Rush wouldn’t have the opportunity to prove him wrong). It fell to Rush himself to try and get the film an audience and he cooked up a deal with Seattle theatre owner Randy Finley. As the studio offered no money for advertising, Finley and Rush decided to gamble with potential box office receipts. They figured that the local Seattle press had a 30 day in-lou-of-payment period in which they could get people into the theatre to cover the cost of the adds. The gamble paid off. The ad consisted of the infamous O’Toole-as-the-devil poster art work that Rush had commission himself from a young female artist for $3,000. Rush sent a copy of the poster to O’Toole for proof reading ad upon seeing himself with devil’s horns, tight butt and his own evil tail thrust forward between his legs like a three foot phallus, he simply replied “My god, how did you know?” The picture was doing solid business at Finley’s theatre (it broke box office records that year), but still the studio and D.B. were creating hassle and refusing to put up any money for marketing so Rush himself paid for a two page marketing add in Variety announcing the film, accompanied with it’s many good notices (now including Todd Macarthy from Variety). Unfortunately this threw him into breach of contract with the studio and D.B. descended on the film, intent on a re-edit. This infuriated Rush who threatened to go to the press and reveal the underhand tricks that D.B had been trying to pull on him from the start and how he was trying to kill a critically acclaimed picture. And with that, Rush suffered a heart attack.
It is strange to note that Richards’s first heart attack nearly killed him, but actually probably saved ‘The Stunt Man’. The mythic D.B had told Richard that if he got his hands on the film he was going to have it ‘cut down to a trailer’, but his timely heart attack created enough industry and media attention to keep his reels intact. No producer would have dared destroy a potentially dying mans ten year labour of love. Richard had managed to ‘save the baby’ as he calls it, again referring to O’Toole’s line of Eli’s about cutting off the hands of his child in relation to a hypothesised re-edit of his movie.
But the good word of mouth on the film had achieved critical mass, and not wanting Rush to martyr himself for the film, D.B. relented. The film was eventually released to a few more screens and went on to win a number of awards, including three Oscar’s. In the run up to the Oscar’s the only film not to have a screening venue available to the academy members was the stunt man, a crying shame for a film that Pauline Kael called “a virtuoso piece of moviemaking”
Peter O’Toole agrees and feels that Eli was one of his finest performances, “I felt then as I felt now, that Richard had created a whole new syntax of moviemaking…”
As well as ‘The Stunt Mans’ three Academy Awards nominations (Best Director - Richard Rush, Best Actor - Peter O'Toole and Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium - Lawrence B. Marcus and Richard Rush), the film also received a half-dozen Golden Globe nominations. It garnered the Montréaux world film festival Grand Prix des Amériques prize, won Peter O’Toole the National Society of Film Critics Best Actor award and the film itself appeared over sixty individual "top ten" lists across the country in 1980. Yet, still The Stunt Man, as a result of what Rush terms either a "mishandling" of distribution or “sabotage” depending on his mood, has been seen by very few members of the movie-going public. All of which seems a tragic shame for a film that Francois Truffaut called ‘The Citizen Kane of the eighties’ and named it’s director his favourite of the current American director’s.
Following the critical success of the film and his own recovery from a near critical heart attack, Rush diverted his attentions to a new screenplay which again, (though more explicitly) referenced the conflict in Vietnam, without actually being a war movie at all. And so began the next great saga in Rush career, he went into production as the writer and director of ‘Air America’.
Rush - “That’s a whole other documentary by itself. Air America was the best screenplay I ever wrote, actually in my mind better that The Stunt Man… obviously it wasn’t what you ended up seeing on the screen … It got so far along that I was sent off to set up production… I went to South East Asia. I had Sean Connery committed to the central role, with Kevin Costner begging to do the second role. I’d set up a dream production in South East Asia, spectacular locations and I literally had the head of the airforce in Thailand ready to bomb any country I wanted him to so that I could get it on film. It was that kind of a situation. And when I came back I found that a man named Danny Melnick, former head of MGM, now a producer in his own right had taken over Carolco as head of production… he had gone through all of their product, read the Air America screenplay and had apparently fallen in love with it and wanted it for himself. Now there are a couple of axioms in that world… 1) If you take over a project you need to get rid of anybody connected with it, because they will inevitably be your enemy and 2) you’ve got to territorially urinate on it to make it your own. So he had a new screenplay written, and it was so bad that Connery immediately left and Costner lost interest and they couldn’t cast it for love nor money and for good reason, it just didn’t work and finally ended up offering Mel Gibson twice his normal price to play the role and they said to him ‘you can play either role’ and he said ‘I picked the wrong one’ which is tragic, I usually have great faith in actors you know. So I got stuck with the embarrassment of it. Apparently if you get paid more than $250,000 dollars for a screenplay you can’t take your name of it, so I was stuck with half the credit for that new screenplay and my name on screen, receiving the tomatoes along with everybody else. But it was a tragic story for me because it was a serious loss, that was a good good project, the screenplay that I had written would have made a great film, with the cast I had assembled”
One can only speculate what Rush’ version of the film may have been like; with the combination of Connery, Costner and what Rush himself cites as his ‘finest ever screenplay, even better that The Stunt Man’.
What is clear is the fact that Rush never really ever got over the wound that was inflicted to his back by firing from ‘Air America’, made all the harder to stomach because of his continued on-screen association with the soulless Mel Gibson ‘wacky-comedy’ version of the film.
Upset, Rush decided to undertake the writing of a new screenplay, as a catharsis to the loss… His new script was called ‘The Fat Lady’,
“…Which is kind of a sour grapes for Air America, in the sense that it deals with similar subject matter. But whereas Air America dealt with the CIA being dope dealers is South East Asia during the Vietnam War, when the war ended the same people who were the principles of Air America, at least those who weren’t in Washington, went down to Central America and participated in the dope trade there. That is the main thrust of ‘The Fat Lady’.
…And it was this project that would occupy him in the early nineties and run-up to his next (and to date his last) film assignment, this time as director for hire (bringing his usual flare for visual metaphor) on a film that would explore themes that were familiar to Rush, those of illusion and reality, personal conflict and fractured personality. Psychological thriller ‘The Color of Night’ (1994).
“…Not having learned my lesson, I made a deal with the same people, this time Andrew Vajna at Cinergi, no longer with Carolco, that company had folded. His new company had a deal with Disney…
Andrew Vajna somehow managed to convince Rush that he had taken no part in what he calls ‘The Air America conspiracy’ and distanced himself from any blame in what Carolco had done to Rush and his much-loved screenplay. So, in what could be seen as another mortgage paying exercise, a deal was made for Rush to direct the property that was in pre-production, but conspicuously director-less.
“…We didn’t have ‘The Fat Lady’ ready to go, so Andy came up with the script for ‘Color of Night’ which is not too surprising as when he deals with directors regularly he tries out his current projects with them. Bruce Willis was already very much built into this and film was pretty much ready to go. The idea intrigued me, my brother is a psychiatrist by the way, and the idea of a therapy group wherein they’re all fucking the same girl but nobody knows it. I did a re-write polish on it which basically does two things, it fills in your own ideas, and in a mechanical sense, makes the dialogue drip off you own tongue more easily… which means that you can sell it to the actors that much more easily.”
Rush was also aware that his coming to the project this late in the day harked back to his old ‘urination of the territory’ axiom, but he made sure that he stepped on as few feet as possible; he is not a believer in doing to others what has been done to himself,
“…my idea is not to replace the writer or to take credit or anything like that, more to get a handle on the material, so after doing that I felt ready to make the film.”
Rush also became quickly aware that he had not only acquired a lead actor, but also an actress, the British tabloid daubed ‘Sinner from Pinner’ – ‘The Lover’, Jane March.
“Jane came to me, already best friends with Bruce Willis, and unbeknownst to me at that time, the producers girlfriend. But I think Bruce very much wanted her to do the film, as they were friends it would make the difficult scenes easier to do – because this was a sexy movie – and his wife was friends with her too so there was no friction between her and Jane. It wasn’t until two weeks into shooting when Jane got married that I started to get really suspicious.”
The film came-off largely without incident and Rush worked well with ‘idea’s prone’ Willis. It wasn’t until well into post-production that Rush came up against an all-to-familiar studio problem… Andrew Vajna wanted to re-edit the film, but he had already promised Rush final cut. Paradoxically, he had allegedly also promised Disney final cut (in fact, he wanted to cut the film himself), so there was immediately going to be some friction. Rush’ cut of the film was screened for critics to mixed reviews, some raves, some neutral, but never a bad notice. The studio’s (or Vajna’s) cut however, was panned. “It made no sense, they had cut out vital plot points in favour of nudity and their version of the story was baffling”
“I compromised with Andy by suggesting that we preview both cuts of the film when it was finished and I agreed, as did he, to go with the cut that got the best test scores. When previewed it, mine won but he still wouldn’t release my version. I said ‘Andy, you can’t do that, we had an agreement’ and he had said to me, ‘sue me… it’ll take you five years and even if you win, the film will have been out for four’. Around this time I had two heart attacks at the same moment and was rushed to hospital for a double by-pass. It’s impossible to win a law suit from your hospital bed, and it was then I knew that he was going to kill the baby”… Rush often to refers to his films as his ‘babies’ “…but I had come to realise that the only final cut that really matters is the one the surgeon makes with his knife’
It is a great shame for modern cinema that Rush has not yet found the time to make any more movies, or been able to realise the projects that were, for however brief a time, held in his hands. The length between the release of the films he has made is almost Kubrickian in time scale; an idea that amuses him, though Rush himself seems unsure where all of the time has gone, as he always seems to be working on something. The truth of the matter is that Rush has actually only made three films in the last 21 years of his directorial career (a far cry, for example, from the annual output of Woody Allen) and the last film he made was far from a masterpiece; ultimately flawed by its need to hinge a huge amount of narrative credibility on passing off the films stunning lead actress as a convincing teenage boy. She wasn’t, thus making would-be dramatic scenes stray from tongue-in-cheek to near farce. That said, the film is an enjoyable watch and it does boast the first on-screen airing of the (flaccid) Willis phallus (approx: 59 minutes in for those who care to know).
Now in his 70’s, Rush is currently still trying to find finance for ‘The Fat Lady’, his bitter retort to the ‘Air America’ debacle, whilst also acting as a producer on other projects. Let us hope that he secures the necessary funds as it would be nice to see what Rush could do when given control over a project as both writer and director again. He lives in Bel Air with his wife, Claude. No Leopards.
