Diner

A great hangout movie is hard to do well. You have to have a cast of memorable characters brought vividly to life by actors with quotable dialogue. All of these elements are crucial because they often distract from the fact that most hangout movies are about nothing and by that I mean they are largely plotless. The godfather of the genre is George Lucas’ American Graffiti (1973), which followed a bunch of teenagers driving around in cars and goofing off. It featured a cast of then unknown actors, some of whom would go on to be big-time movie stars (Harrison Ford). It also had a fantastic soundtrack of vintage 1950s rock ‘n’ roll music. This film established a template that many others would follow – most notably Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused (1993) and Superbad (2007).

Another great and hugely influential hangout movie is Barry Levinson’s Diner (1982), which was the first of his four “Baltimore Films.” This semi-autobiographical film depicts the reunion of six twentysomethings during the last week of 1959 for the upcoming wedding of one of their own with much of the action taking place at a local diner. It not only marked the directorial debut of Levinson (who also wrote the screenplay) but also featured an incredible cast of then up-and-coming actors: Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, and feature film debuts of Tim Daly, Ellen Barkin and Paul Reiser. The success of Diner would help launch their careers as well as that of Levinson’s.

Instead of adhering to a traditional narrative, Diner is comprised of a series of vignettes. We meet Modell (Reiser) at a local dance as he tells Robert “Boogie” Sheftell (Rourke) that Timothy “Fen” Fenwick (Bacon) is breaking windows in the basement of the building. We learn that Fen does crazy things as a goof and that Boogie is a smooth talker with the ladies, convincing Fen’s date to go back with him even though he ditched her. As they leave the dance for a local diner, Levinson introduces the funny, observational humor that comes out of Modell’s mouth when he tells Boogie, “You know what word I’m not comfortable with? Nuance. It’s not really a word. Gesture is a good word. At least you know where you stand with gesture.”

We are introduced to the pivotal location of the diner as Eddie Simmons (Guttenberg) argues that Frank Sinatra is better than Johnny Mathis because the former is better in every respect and this leads to a hilarious bit where Modell asks Eddie for the last half of his roast beef sandwich much to the latter’s chagrin. It is so funny to see Modell intentionally wind up Eddie only to feign innocence when his friend tries to call him on it. There’s a loose, spontaneous feel to this scene and Levinson even keeps in Kevin Bacon’s reaction to Eddie and Modell’s bickering. His laughter looks genuine – an unguarded moment of the actor breaking character.

The way the actors interact with each other suggests that these characters have been friends for most of their lives in the way they speak to each other. There is a familiarity and a short-hand that is believable. One imagines that they’ve had this same argument a hundred times before. The diner scene also establishes Boogie’s mounting gambling debt and his schemes to get inside information for his next bet while settling the Mathis/Sinatra debate by stating that Elvis Presley is better than both of them.

These guys still have a lot of growing up to do, like Boogie’s ever-increasing gambling debts or Eddie still living at home, driving his mother crazy, or Fen’s childish pranks, even going so far as to fake a bloody car accident. Only Laurence “Shrevie” Schreiber (Stern) is married but he’s hardly the epitome of maturity, obsessively collecting 45s and cruelly chastising his wife Beth (Barkin) for failing to understand his organizational system. In addition, Shrevie can’t tell Eddie if he’s happily married or not. He tries to articulate it in terms of having sex with his wife. Before they were married they talked a lot about it and spent time planning when to have it and then once they were married they talked about it less because it wasn’t a big of an issue. It basically boils down to not having much in common with her as he tells Eddie, “You know, I can come down here, we can bullshit the whole night away but I cannot hold a five minute conversation with Beth.” Male friendship is the most important thing in these guys’ lives and this is symbolized by the diner because it is the place where they get together regularly. Only William “Billy” Howard (Daly) seems to have any kind of maturity and this is a result of going to college and removing himself from his circle of immature friends.

The cast is uniformly excellent with Paul Reiser getting the bulk of the film’s funny, quotable dialogue. Tim Daly has the lion’s share of the film’s dramatic scenes as Billy reunites with an ex-girlfriend (Kathryn Dowling) and she tells him about being pregnant with his child. Over the course of the film Billy wrestles with the dilemma of what to do about it. The good-looking Mickey Rourke is well-cast as a persuasive Lothario. He’s always scheming, whether it’s placing sports bets or making moves on beautiful women. Fen is the black sheep of his family, dropping out of school, refusing to work and living off his trust fund. Kevin Bacon hints at a checkered family past and this is what fuels Fen’s unpredictable behavior. So long as he lives off a trust fund he will never grow up. The actor does a good job of portraying the prankster side of Fen and also the more troubling aspects as well.

Levinson doesn’t shy away from how badly women were treated back then, from Boogie’s womanizing tendencies to Eddie forcing his fiancée to take a quiz about football and his favorite team, the Baltimore Colts, which she must pass before he will marry her. The most troubling example of this behavior is how badly Shrevie treats Beth. He’s an obsessive record collector and freaks out at her inability to adhere to his organizational system. She is a casual music listener while it is very important to him. She can’t understand this and he doesn’t understand why she doesn’t appreciate it more. He has a very personal connection to music that she doesn’t but this argument is symptomatic of a larger problem – they don’t have much in common.

Levinson immerses us in the sights and sounds of the diner with insert shots of clean plates being stacked and ketchup bottles being refilled. There is also the fantastic attention to period detail, from the vintage cars to the occasional slang that the characters say to what they wear to the period music (a killer soundtrack featuring the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins among others). He also fills in the margins of the film with amusing bits like the guy who eats the entire left side of the diner’s menu causing Modell to quip, “It’s not human. He’s not a person. He’s like a building with feet.” There’s the guy who obsessively quotes dialogue from Sweet Smell of Success (1957). It is these moments that help flesh out this world and make it more real, more tangible, transporting us to ‘50s era Baltimore.

Barry Levinson worked on the Mel Brooks comedy High Anxiety (1977) and used to tell the filmmaker Diner-esque stories about growing up in Baltimore. Brooks told Levinson, “You should write that as a screenplay,” but he couldn’t figure out how to do it. Levinson went on to write several scripts with ex-wife Valerie Curtin and during a period where she was acting in a film he started writing Diner. It took him three weeks and during that time he figured out the framework – it takes place over a five-day period – and that it was “all about male-female relationships, lack of relationship, lack of communication.” He frequented the Hilltop Diner in Northwest Baltimore and some of the conversations in the film, like the Mathis or Sinatra debate, came out of actual conversations he had. In addition, the six guys in the film were composites of friends and family and things they did and said.

Producer Mark Johnson met Levinson on High Anxiety and originally they were going to work together on Toys (1992), which they made years later, but it didn’t happen. Johnson went on to work for producer Jerry Weintraub at MGM while Levinson wrote Diner. When he read the script he loved it and wanted to make it. Johnson gave Levinson’s script to Weintraub who set it up almost immediately at MGM. At the time, the studio had several other larger budget movies and because the one for Diner was so low ($5 million), he was left alone, able to shoot on location in Baltimore, and cast relatively unknown actors in the lead roles.

When it came to casting the film Levinson saw around 600 guys. Kevin Bacon had just quite television soap opera Guiding Light when he got the call to audition for Diner. He originally read for Billy and Boogie. He met with Levinson who asked him to read for Fenwick, a character the actor had difficulty relating to. When he came back to audition, he was quite sick with a 103 degree fever. “I had a kinda slowed down and out-of-it quality, just based on the illness, that sorta worked for the character.” He ended up using that approach in the film.

Tim Daly auditioned in New York and read for Levinson who liked him. The actor came back repeatedly and read as well as doing a couple of screen tests. The studio wanted another actor but that person didn’t want to do the film and Levinson liked Daly and cast him as Billy. Paul Reiser came in with a friend and had no intention of auditioning. The casting director saw him and thought he’d be good in the film and told Levinson who met him the next day and cast the Reiser. Levinson purposely under-wrote Modell because he knew that if he “put in more stream-of-consciousness stuff, I’d have gotten some resistance [from the studio].”

Levinson only saw one person for the role of Beth and that was Ellen Barkin. The studio didn’t want her because they felt that she wasn’t pretty enough. The filmmaker lied his way into casting Barkin anyway. According to the actress, her on-screen relationship with Daniel Stern mirrored their off-screen one: “We’ve since made amends to each other, but it was a little difficult.”

Levinson remembers that they shot the film mostly at night and this resulted in keeping an unusual schedule: “Coming back, daylight is coming up and you’re coming back to the hotel to go to sleep at the Holiday Inn. Everybody else is getting up to go to work.” One of the biggest challenges was finding the diner. He wanted to use the Double-T Diner but they wanted too much money. Fortunately, Johnson found one in a diner graveyard in New Jersey. They transported it on a flatbed truck and placed it where they wanted it, which was Fells Point.

Levinson shot all the diner scenes last so that the cast would have time to bond and “draw on the rapport they’d developed over seven weeks. By that time they had their edges, little things that bothered them about each other, and those unspoken tensions enriched the movie,” the filmmaker said at the time. This method paid off. Steve Guttenberg and Mickey Rourke became good friends during filming and at one point they told Levinson they wanted to do a scene together because they didn’t have one. The filmmaker went back to his trailer and a few minutes later came out with a scene where Eddie talks about being a virgin. They went ahead and filmed it that day.

Reiser was Levinson’s secret weapon and he allowed the comedian to improvise dialogue. For example, during the “nuance” scene, Reiser remembers Levinson telling him, “’You’re bothered by the word ‘nuance.’’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, it’s a strange word, just play with it.’” The “roast beef sandwich” scene was also completely ad-libbed and came out of the actors talking in-between takes, eating whatever they wanted.

During post-production, MGM executive David Chasman wanted Levinson to cut the roast beef sandwich scene from the film but the director refused because he “wanted the piece to be without any flourish, without anything other than basically saying, ‘This is all it was.’” The studio wanted a sex comedy like Porky’s (1981) and didn’t like what Levinson had done. As Johnson recalls, “They didn’t know what to make of it.” When it came to test screenings, audiences in Levinson’s hometown of Baltimore hated the film and even the local newspaper The Baltimore Sun gave it a negative review. It didn’t help that the studio advertised the film by putting an emphasis on the soundtrack of classic rock ‘n’ roll music (perhaps trying to ape what American Graffiti had done) but this did not appeal to test audiences. Levinson was not happy with this approach: “They were expecting Grease and they didn’t get it.”

MGM was hesitant to release Diner and didn’t set a date. One of Johnson’s mother’s best friends was influential film critic Pauline Kael. He snuck a print out and showed it to her. She loved it and called the studio telling them, “You guys are about to have a lot of egg on your face because I’m about to give this movie a rave review and it’s not going to be available.” The studio finally released it in one theater in Manhattan.

Diner started getting strong reviews and in each city the film played it broke house records but, according to Levinson, “it never went wide because they never had any belief that it could play to a broader audience.” Pauline Kael wrote, “It isn’t remarkable visually but it features some of the best young actors in the country.” Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, “Diner is often a very funny movie, although I laughed most freely not at the sexual pranks but at the movie's accurate ear, as it reproduced dialogue with great comic accuracy.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “These characters are individually well drawn, and they're played beautifully. Mr. Levinson has found a first-rate cast, most of them unknown but few to be unknown for long.” In his review for Newsweek magazine, David Ansen wrote, “But while seeming to traverse familiar ground, Levinson and his superb young cast are sprinkling it with sparkling insights.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “Rhythmically, Diner is uneven. The strong opening gives way to a somewhat lassitudinous half hour but, when the pace does pick up, it never wobbles – the film works slowly, but surely.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Gary Arnold felt it was “an oddly disappointing nice try.”

Diner failed to connect with audiences and quietly began disappearing from theaters. MGM was prepared to write it off but then strong reviews from influential New York critics gave it a second lease on life. The studio realized that they could possibly make money off the film and re-released it in seven theaters where it managed to gross approximately $1 million. The New York Times ran a favorable review and followed it up with an in-depth article on Levinson and the film, which generated word-of-mouth business.

Levinson does a nice job of juggling each character’s storyline, whether it’s Boogie’s gambling problems, Eddie getting ready for his wedding, or Fen’s increasing erratic behavior, and having them all dovetail nicely by the film’s conclusion. They’re not all entirely resolved but that’s the point: life’s problems are not easily solved within the confines of a film and one imagines these characters dealing with the fallout of the events depicted in Diner long after it ends.

The six guys in Diner come across as fully-fleshed out characters (with perhaps the exception of Modell) with rich backstories that are only hinted at and this adds to their authenticity and how the actors portray them that invites repeated viewings. This is why Levinson’s film still holds up after all these years. Diner feels like a very personal film and this is due in large part to all the personal touches and little details that populate it.

Diner is about a group of young men still acting like boys. They are on the cusp of being adults and either make the transition willingly or are forced to through marriage. The film depicts this transitional period in their lives when they have one foot in adolescence and one in adulthood. It is a film about male friendship and examines the dynamic between these six guys and why it is more important than their relationships with girlfriends and wives. Diner excels at presenting memorable characters that are funny and real, dealing with real problems. The film is full of quotable dialogue but also deals with serious issues that aren’t glossed over and aren’t all resolved by the end credits.

SOURCES

Farber, Stephen. “He Drew From His Boyhood to Make Diner.” The New York Times. April 18, 1982.

Harris, Will. “Ellen Barkin on Great Directors and Her Favorite Roles, from Diner to Buckaroo Banzai.” The A.V. Club. August 15, 2014.

Harris, Will. “Tim Daly on Madam Secretary, Voicing Superman, and Killing Stephen Weber.” The A.V. Club. September 19, 2014.

Price, S.L. “Much Ado About Nothing.” Vanity Fair. March 2012.

Serpick, Evan. “Diner: An Oral History.” Baltimore Magazine. April 2012.

Williams, Christian. “The Diner Opens.” Washington Post. May 14, 1982.

The Bay

Oren Peli has a lot to answer for. With Paranormal Activity (2007), he brought the found-footage horror film back into the mainstream much in the same way The Blair Witch Project (1999) did years before. He hasn’t looked back since, producing a slew of like-minded projects of varying degrees of quality. For better or for worse he’s responsible for an overabundance of found-footage horror films, which begs the question, has this sub-genre played itself out? There are signs that point to this being the case, like the Peli-produced found-footage horror television show The River, which was cancelled after only one season.

Along comes The Bay (2012), an ecological-themed horror film that features a lethal mutant breed of the parasite Cymothoa exigua wreaking havoc in Claridge, a seaside Chesapeake Bay town. Directed by BarryLevinson of all people, it invokes Steven Soderbergh’s like-minded disaster film Contagion (2011), but whereas the latter filmmaker never fully embraced the horror genre, the former embraces it in a chillingly effective way. Like Soderbergh, Levinson has dabbled in all kinds of genres, from comedy (Diner) to biopic (Bugsy) to science fiction (Sphere), and now he tackles horror with The Bay.

On July 4, 2009, the town of Claridge was ravaged by disaster that was quickly suppressed by the government. Three years later, Donna Thompson (Kether Donohue), a college student who was there when it all went down, has pieced together digital footage from various sources, thanks to a WikiLeaks-type website and narrates her experience over what we are watching. At the time, she was doing a story on the holiday festivities, working as an intern for a local T.V. station. Levinson does a nice job of juxtaposing the naïve and inexperienced Donna in 2009 with the haunted version of her in the present. It is a sobering reminder of how the horrible events of that day changed her life forever.

It all started several days earlier with two oceanographers that died mysteriously in the water. The autopsy footage looks like something burst out of their bodies. The official statement by authorities is that they died from a shark attack but it’s pretty obvious that something else killed these people. On July 4, people all over town start vomiting and experiencing outbreaks of boils, blisters and lesions on their bodies. There is a chilling shot of a woman covered in lesions walking around a crowded area pleading for help. Another unsettling scene involves two cops in a patrol car discovering a dead body lying on a front lawn in an otherwise typical tree-lined suburb.

As with these kinds of viral outbreak films, the epidemic starts off gradually with a few incidents and then quickly spreads. Soon, the hospitals are overcrowded, law enforcement is overwhelmed and social order eventually breaks down. Much like George Romero’s Diary of the Dead (2007), The Bay tells its story through a collage of footage taken from a variety of sources: cell phones, research footage, news coverage, and even the camera inside a police squad car.

Much like Romero, Levinson mistrusts authority: the mayor (Frank Deal) knew about the threat early on but failed to do anything about it, the Centers for Disease Control is too slow to react and the police initially view the first few deaths as murder cases. The big problem is lack of communication as these various groups either don’t share crucial information or are too slow in doing so. Not surprisingly, the government doesn’t react fast enough because of the byzantine bureaucracy inherent in the system. The initial incident report gets shuffled from agency to agency because no one is willing to take responsibility. As a result, thousands of people die in a situation that could’ve been avoided.

The horror comes in the form of seeing everyday townsfolk being ravaged by these aggressive parasites. As is the case with most found-footage horror films, we don’t really get to know these people but the fact that they look like you or I gives the situation an unsettling authenticity. Levinson has a real knack for bringing out the dread in simple shots, like a scene where Donna is shooting a spot on the now desolate fairgrounds and we hear anguished screams off in the distance. They sound slightly inhuman, almost liked wounded animals begging to be put out of their miseries. Another haunting image is a shot of the town’s main street at night littered with dead bodies. These images linger and it is almost a relief when the film finally ends and we are spared any more scenes of carnage.

Barry Levinson was originally asked to direct a documentary about environmental crises in the Chesapeake Bay. After he watched a 2009 episode of the PBS show Frontline on the topic, he realized that what they had done couldn’t be improved on. However, the information he discovered while doing research was so frightening that he felt the subject would be better served as a fictional film instead. The mutant parasites in The Bay were based on research Levinson and the film’s screenwriter Michael Wallach did on isopods, crustaceans that live on land and water. In fact, many of the isopods in the film are real with very little CGI trickery involved.

The Bay was shot in South Carolina over 18 days for approximately $2 million with a cast of unknown actors and utilizing over 20 camera types, like Skype, and iPhones. He avoided using high-end digital cameras because the footage looked too slick and in order to achieve the realistic look he wanted, Levinson opted to use consumer grade cameras. The director decided to go the found-footage route because he felt that with “all the technology, all the cellphones, we have an idea of how people would behave when faced with imminent danger. All this footage out there right now in my opinion will become archeological. Maybe even anthropological.”

The Bay was shown at several film festivals, including the Toronto International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival to positive audience reaction but Levinson was disappointed at how the film’s distributor handed its general release. He felt that they “didn’t really care about the movie, because it’s not a 100 percent horror film; it doesn’t fit the Saw mold. But I keep saying that that doesn’t mean there can’t be an audience.”

While the premise of The Bay is hardly original – it is basically a found-footage version of the little-known SyFy movie Larva (2005) but re-imagines it as a mockumentary. This approach gives the film an urgency and intensity as Levinson takes us through a nightmarish day of this beleaguered town, splicing in the occasional clips of events that occurred days and weeks before, offering up tantalizing hints of what started it all. Give credit to a filmmaker of his stature for eschewing a studio film populated with recognizable movie stars in favor of a low-budget, no frills horror film. The Bay is the latest in a recent trend of environmental apocalypse movies (see The Last Winter, The Happening, etc.) that act as a metaphoric warning for how we are destroying the planet through pollution, waste and many other methods. The Bay is a found-footage horror film with more on its mind than just scaring its audience as Levinson criticizes companies that destroy the environment in order to make a profit and how the government fails to react fast enough to disasters.

SOURCES

Creepy, Uncle. “Oscar Winning Director Barry Levinson Talks Horror on a Small Scale in The Bay.” DreadCentral. October 28, 2012.

Piepenburg, Erik. “Treacherous Mother Nature, Out to Get Us All.” The New York Times. October 24, 2012.

Taylor, Drew. “Barry Levinson Talks Going the Horror Route with Eco-Thriller The Bay.” The Playlist. October 31, 2012.

Good Morning, Vietnam

I’ve always had a soft spot for Good Morning, Vietnam (1987). It isn’t Robin Williams’ best film or his best performance for that matter but it marked a pivotal moment in his career. Up to that point he had done several comedies built around his manic comedic sensibilities that were mostly commercial failures. Only The World According to Garp (1982) hinted at his capacity for mixing comedy and drama and it also scored both with critics and audiences. With Good Morning, Vietnam, Williams gave it another try, teaming up with director Barry Levinson, hot off the comedy Tin Men (1987) and who wisely surrounded the comedian with a rock solid cast of character actors. The result was a bonafide blockbuster (it was #1 at the box office for 9 weeks!) and a genuine crowd pleaser that received several accolades. For me, Good Morning, Vietnam is a fun, engaging film that lets Williams cut loose and do his thing while also attempting to impart a bittersweet romance and a sobering reminder of the war that the United States was losing.

It is 1965 and Airman Adrian Cronauer (Robin Williams) arrives in Saigon to work as disc jockey for the Armed Forces Radio Service. He’s greeted at the airport by Private First Class Edward Garlick (Forest Whitaker) and right from the get-go Levinson does a nice job of evoking a sense of place by immersing us in the sights and sounds of this exotic city and its inhabitants. Once Cronauer and Garlick arrive at the base we are introduced to a colorful assortment of characters, starting with the strict commanding officers, Lt. Hauk (Bruno Kirby) and Sgt. Major Dickerson (J.T. Walsh). The former considers himself something of a comedian (“Readers Digest is considering publishing two of my jokes.”) but is hopelessly square when it comes to anything remotely funny. The latter is the film’s humorless antagonist who lays down the law with Cronauer early on in the film, shutting up the usually unflappable D.J. through intimidation and actually making him sweat (or is that just the heat?).

Cronauer’s first radio show is a dynamic debut as Williams gets to unleash his crazed stand-up routines with him voicing characters both based on actual people, like Gomer Pyle and Walter Cronkite, and ones that he makes up on the fly. Levinson breaks up the comedian’s whirlwind onslaught with a fantastic collection of period rock music by the likes of the Beach Boys, James Brown, Them, The Supremes and many others that plays over footage of soldiers toiling around Saigon or hanging out at their bases. It is an unorthodox radio show to say the least as Cronauer mercilessly parodies the United States military and the government with biting political humor that does little to endear him with Dickerson and Hauk, the latter of which reprimands him afterwards.

Of course it wouldn’t be a Barry Levinson film without a few scenes of guys sitting around talking (see Diner and Tin Men) and in Good Morning, Vietnam the place is Jimmy Wah’s, a local G.I. bar (“It’s real homey in an opium kind of way,” Cronauer deadpans upon first entering.) where Cronauer and the other D.J.s hang out. It is rather memorably owned by a man that calls everybody “Earl” and who is obsessed with actor Walter Brennan.

Cronauer finds himself attracted to a young Vietnamese woman named Trinh (Chintara Sukapatana) and becomes a teacher at an English-as-a-second language school in order to get closer to her. The introduction of this setting gives us a little insight into the Vietnamese people as Cronauer begins to interact with Trinh and her family, in particular her brother, Tuan (Tung Thanh Tran). The scene where Cronauer introduces himself to the class is particularly memorable because we see Williams the comedian playing to the hardest room of his career – a group that does not understand English. At first, they are unimpressed and confused but he eventually is able to communicate with them on a basic level. There is a spontaneous feel to these scenes as if what the Vietnamese actors (non-actors?) are saying was unscripted and Williams is simply reacting to whatever they say, eliciting genuine surprise and laughter from the gifted comic. This scene also continues Cronauer’s unorthodox yet effective way of communicating with others as he eschews stuffy text book phrases for common, every day sayings and, of course, curse words.

Director Barry Levinson successfully harnesses the comedian’s wild, manic energy in this film. Williams’ radio monologues (famously adlibbed by the comedian) are the highlights as he cuts loose with his trademark rapid-fire humor (“What’s the difference between the Army and the Cub Scouts? Cub Scouts don’t have heavy artillery.”). He is an actor who needs a strong director to rein him in. His best films are the ones where he collaborated with a director who had their own distinctive vision (Peter Weir, Terry Gilliam and Gus Van Sant) and this one is no different.

Even though Good Morning, Vietnam is essentially a vehicle for Williams, Levinson wisely surrounds him with a strong supporting cast of character actors, like Robert Wuhl, Bruno Kirby and J.T. Walsh. Kirby is excellent as the terminally unfunny and unhip Lt. Hauk. The scene where he temporarily takes over Cronauer’s show with his own brand of comedy is almost painful to watch. There is also an amusing running gag about how no one ever salutes him despite his rank. This film would mark the start of a memorable run of supporting roles in popular comedies like When Harry Met Sally… (1989), The Freshman (1990), and City Slickers (1991).

Walsh proved to be a very credible antagonist to Williams with his sober intensity and gravitas that he brings to the role. Williams is such a force of nature and a larger than life personality that he needs someone who is just as forceful and Walsh does an excellent job as his vindictive superior. Fresh from Oliver Stone’s gritty Vietnam War film Platoon (1986), Forest Whitaker is cast against type as Cronauer’s meek, by-the-book assistant and displays some nice comedic chops in various ways, like the nervous, high-pitched giggle he repeatedly emits upon first meeting Cronauer, or the way he always turns the ignition key when first getting into a jeep with the engine already running.

The first half of Good Morning, Vietnam is the light, entertaining stuff of an anarchic anti-authoritarian comedy as we see Cronauer gleefully breaking all the rules and having fun doing it. He gets into a bit of trouble but nothing major. The second half of the film sees the comedic elements take a back seat in favor of an unrequited romance between Cronauer and Trinh as well as the growing insurgency in Saigon. The tone of the film noticeably darkens when Cronauer narrowly escapes a bomb exploding at Jimmy Wah’s and Levinson doesn’t shy away from depicting the carnage and the ensuing chaos with shots of bloodied victims, both American soldiers and locals, as well as shots of dead bodies lying in the street. It is a shock not only to Cronauer but to us because nothing that came before prepared us for this.

To make matters worse, Cronauer goes on the air and gives his account of what happened without it being approved. Williams does a nice job here, first, in the aftermath of the bombing as he tries to make sense of the carnage, and secondly, when he tries to put on a funny face afterwards on his radio show. His jokes fall flat as the shock of what he saw and experienced sinks in. His defeated facial expression says it all. Mitch Markowitz’s screenplay makes a smooth transition between the two halves of the film by doing it gradually with elements of comedy and drama blending together naturally so that neither one is entirely abandoned in favor of the other. Levinson also shifts the emphasis on locales over the course of the film with most of it set in the army base for the first half and then opening things up in the second half as we see more of Saigon and the surrounding area. The focus also shifts to that of the Vietnamese as we see how Trinh and Tuan live when they take Cronauer to their village. At this point in the film he has gotten tired with being censored and told what to say, what news to report, and what songs he can play. He finds himself spending more time with Tuan and is soon rejected by Trinh, coming to the sobering realization that they never really had a chance to become romantically involved in the first place.

Adrian Cronauer got his start as a radio broadcaster when he helped start the University of Pittsburgh’s campus radio station. By 1962, he was majoring in broadcasting at the American University in Washington, D.C. He found himself eligible for the draft and decided to volunteer for the Air Force with his first choice being flight training. However, he didn’t want to make the kind of time commitment necessary and entered training for broadcasting and media operations. He successfully completed it and was transferred to an Armed Forces Radio station in Greece. He had one year left of his enlistment and was given a change of assignment with the option of either going back home to the United States, where he would work on training films, or broadcast live to American soldiers in either South Korea or South Vietnam. He chose Vietnam.

In 1979, Adrian Cronauer and one of his old military buddies Ben Moses were discussing the success of television shows M*A*S*H and WKRP in Cincinnati. They thought about creating a sitcom that fused the two shows together – a comedy based on U.S. armed forces radio. They wrote a treatment and pitched it to the networks but none of them were interested because Vietnam wasn’t considered very funny at the time. So, they put the treatment away until years later when they decided to change it from a sitcom to a movie of the week and sent it to Robin Williams’ manager.

Williams read the script and loved it. He suggested they make it into a feature film. He said in an interview, “It’s closer to me than anything I’ve ever done. It’s very close to home.” However, he couldn’t find a director to make it into a film. At some point, he met Barry Levinson who read it and liked the challenge of showcasing Williams’ acting abilities with his comedic sensibilities.

To capture Williams’ wild improvisations during the radio sequences Levinson used three cameras running at the same time. The only things scripting for these sequences was a line about cappuccino, an impression of Walter Cronkite, and a line about the Vietnam War being brought to us by the same people who brought us the Korean War – the rest was Williams riffing. As Levinson pointed out in an interview, “It’s one thing to do improvisation, it’s another thing to do period improvisation.” The comedian had done his homework, reading about the country, watching documentaries about the war and talking to people who had been there.

Good Morning, Vietnam was based very loosely on Adrian Cronauer’s experiences in Vietnam. He was not as funny or as wild as Williams, he butted heads with military censors once, and rebelled against the military’s “Polka Hour” programming with Top 40 music like Frank Sinatra. Unlike Williams’ version of Cronauer, the real one’s tour was significantly longer.

Good Morning, Vietnam received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “Good Morning, Vietnam works as straight comedy and as a Vietnam-era MASH, and even the movie's love story has its own bittersweet integrity.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby praised Williams’ performance: “Mr. Williams's performance, though it's full of uproarious comedy, is the work of an accomplished actor. Good Morning, Vietnam is one man's tour de force.” The Globe and Mail’s Jay Scott wrote, “The first comedy about that war, Good Morning, Vietnam manages to be uproariously funny without ignoring or trivializing the tragedy. It's awkwardly contrived here and there, especially during its recon patrols into Vietnamese life, but for the most part Mitch Markowitz's skeletal script is smart enough to dig in, hunker down and stay out of Robin Williams' line of fire.” However, in his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson felt that the film was “a peculiar hybrid – a Robin Williams concert movie welded clumsily onto the plot from an old Danny Kaye picture. And neither half works.”

The successful run Good Morning, Vietnam enjoyed and the accolades Williams received emboldened him to try several other comedy-drama hybrids, most notably Dead Poets Society (1989), The Fisher King (1991) and Good Will Hunting (1997), which resulted in an Academy Award. Often cited as the first Vietnam War comedy (soon followed by Air America in 1990), it is interesting to note that the film came out the same year as Stanley Kubrick’s nihilistic take on the conflict, Full Metal Jacket but the two films couldn’t be further apart in their approaches. Along with Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth (1993), Good Morning, Vietnam attempted to give a human dimension to the Vietnamese people. Unlike many other Vietnam War films of the 1980s, the Vietnamese are not portrayed as some anonymous enemy but real people with their own distinctive personalities. If anything, Levinson’s film personalizes the Vietnam War and questions, in its own way, what exactly the U.S. was doing there in the first place while delivering an entertaining story as well.

SOURCES

Hawthorn, Tom. “Voice of Vietnam Adjusted by Hollywood.” Globe and Mail. February 26, 1988.

Reese, Michael. “Radio was the Only Thing the GI’s Had.” Newsweek. January 4, 1988.

Scott, Jay. “Inventiveness That’s Boundless: Williams Finds Freedom in Vietnam.” Globe and Mail. December 12, 1987.

Zekas, Rita. “No Radio Work in Robin Williams’ Future.” Toronto Star. January 12, 1988.