Pump Up the Volume

Allan Moyle and John Hughes both make escapist teen movies that feature fantasy stories populated by easily relatable characters that exist in an idealized world. The teenagers that inhabit their respective films are ones that are beautiful, funny and smart – in other words, what teens would like to be and not always what they really are. The crucial difference between the two filmmakers is that the characters in Moyle’s films are more flawed and fucked-up. There’s Nicky and Pamela – two runaways from a mental hospital in Times Square (1980); there’s the socially awkward and painfully shy Mark in Pump Up the Volume (1990); and finally, the suicidal Deb in Empire Records (1995). It is these last two films that are Moyle’s most well-known thanks to the casts of young, soon-to-be-successful actors and soundtracks featuring amazing collections of alternative rock music that was popular at the time.

Pump Up the Volume is Moyle’s best film to date. It is a freedom of speech tract subversively disguised as a teen movie. With this film, he goes after the shady practices of schools that will stop at nothing to maintain high SAT scores and champions kids having the rights to talk to each other openly and honestly about things that affect them on a daily basis. The film is also Moyle’s most uncompromising effort, concluding with a rather bittersweet ending that leaves the protagonist’s fate in question.

“You ever get the feeling that everything in America is completely fucked up? You know that feeling that the whole country is like one inch away from saying, ‘That’s it! Forget it!’” - Mark

By day, Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is a shy, socially awkward teenager who goes to school in a sterile Phoenix, Arizona suburb. By night, he is a witty and profane provocateur who vents his frustrations via an FM pirate radio station under the colorful moniker “Happy Harry Hard-On.” He broadcasts from his bedroom transmitter located in the basement of his parents’ house in the middle of anonymous suburb. Inspired by the subversive comedy of free speech martyr Lenny Bruce, Mark sounds off against all kinds of things (“Everything’s polluted – the environment, the government, the schools.”), talks about masturbating frequently and playing a diverse collection of music that includes Soundgarden, the Descedents, Beastie Boys and Pixies among others. Most interestingly, is his use of Leonard Cohen’s “Everybody Knows,” with its jaded, cynical lyrics (“Everybody knows the good guys lost … the poor stay poor, the rich get rich.”), as the show’s theme song. It’s a real masterstroke by Moyle as the lyrics and downbeat music reflect the moodiness of teenagers who feel like the world is against them.

Mark’s broadcasts are full of rude humor (“Tonight we have #12 of 100 things to do to your body when you’re all alone.”) and he delights in exposing the hypocrisy of the system by calling up the school’s guidance counselor at one point (Robert Schenkkan) and confronting him about his participation in expelling a student because she was pregnant. He answers fan mail that ranges from the ridiculous to the genuinely troubling, like a teen contemplating suicide, that helps give the initially irreverent film some much needed gravitas. Mark’s show provides the kids in white bread suburbia something subversive to check out in-between family dinners and homework. He is trying to provoke his listeners to think critically and to think for themselves. The pirate radio station is also a conduit for Mark to voice his own dissatisfaction with the state of things. As he puts it, “There’s nothing to do anymore, everything decent’s been done, all the great themes have been used up, turned into theme parks.” He finds himself “living in the middle of a totally exhausted decade where there’s nothing to look forward to and no one to look up to.”

He certainly can’t look up to his parents, former hippies that fought against the system during the 1960s and have now sold out and become part of it. His mom (Mimi Kennedy) even says to her husband (Scott Paulin) at one point, “The man I married loved his work not power and money,” to which he replies, “Well, that’s alright. I still love my work and I love power and money.” In this brief exchange, we get Moyle’s stinging indictment of the Baby Boomers and what’s wrong with them – they wanted to change the system and instead became absorbed by it.

Bootleg tapes of Mark’s broadcasts circulate among the students of his school with speculation rife about the true identity of “Hard Harry.” Chief among them is Nora Diniro (Samantha Mathis), a Goth chick that submits her sexy poetry to Harry under her own provocative moniker, the “Eat Me Beat Me Lady.” They’re attracted to each other’s fictional personas and she begins to suspect that Mark is Harry and eventually confronts him. As his audience increases, so do the risks of being caught and soon he gets the attention of Principal Creswood (Annie Ross), a disciplinarian who runs the school with an iron fist, spouting platitudes like, “The lesson of modern education is nothing comes easy; no pain, no gain.” It’s amazing that she is able to believe her own bullshit and Moyle makes her a simple, one-note villain whose only purpose is to give Mark someone he is determined to take down, a target at which to vent his angst.

Still fresh from his turn as an unhinged psychopath in Heathers (1989), Christian Slater is perfectly cast as a disillusioned teenager looking for a new voice to emerge and shake things up only to eventually realize (with Nora’s helps) that he’s that voice. Still sporting that Jack Nicholson-esque drawl, he puts a wonderfully dry, sarcastic spin on retorts to his father who warns him that, “One of these days you’re gonna outsmart yourself, young man,” with, “I love it when you call me young man.” Pump Up the Volume is definitely one of Slater’s strongest performances, if not his best as he gets to bounce back and forth between shy, introvert and lewd, crude purveyor of the truth. Not only does he get to spout classic one-liners but also deliver impassioned monologues, like when Mark addresses the suicide of a student and segues into an angry rant advocating living and bucking the system, inviting his audience to stage their own personal revolutions. The smartass nature of Hard Harry was ideally suited for Slater but we really hadn’t seen much vulnerability from him. He got a chance to expose that side a bit with Mark. The actor pulls it off and even anticipates his role in Untamed Heart (1993) where he really stripped away most of his acting tics, playing an extremely introverted character. However, he started to test the waters with Pump Up the Volume, showing a range that he hadn’t in previous films.

Samantha Mathis, in her feature film debut, is good as the alterna-girl that gradually brings Mark out of his shell. She has excellent chemistry with Slater (they were an item at the time of filming) and the sexual tension is almost tangible, especially during the scene where Mark and Nora finally kiss as Ivan Neville’s seductive “Why Can’t I Fall in Love?” plays on the soundtrack. Nora is the cool girl I always wished I knew in high school that was artistic and had great taste in music. I feel that this was probably large part of the appeal of Mathis’ character.

After his second directorial effort, the New Wave music comedy Times Square, was taken away from him and re-edited, resulting in a critical and commercial failure, Allan Moyle quit directing to focus on writing screenplays. One of them was about a teenager who runs his own pirate radio station for other people his age. When creating the character of Mark, Moyle wanted a fusion of his two favorite outsiders – Lenny Bruce and Holden Caulfield. Hubert Humphrey High, the school Mark goes to in the film, was inspired by a Montreal high school where Moyle’s sister used to teach. According to the director, the principal “had a pact with the staff to enhance the credibility of the school scholastically at the expense of the students who were immigrants or culturally disabled in some way or another.” With Pump Up the Volume, he wanted to make a film with an edge to it, one that was tougher than John Hughes’ films.

A Toronto-based company called SC Entertainment bought the script and put it into development where it was eventually was made by New Line Cinema. Moyle originally wanted to call his film, Talk Hard, but was overruled by producer Bob Shaye who changed it to Pump Up the Volume, after the hit song of the same name, much to the director’s chagrin. Even after Moyle wrote the script, he had to be persuaded to direct again and stipulated in his contract that he would only make the film if the right actor to play Mark were found. He had to be “ineffably sweet and at the same time demonic,” Moyle said in an interview. The director reasoned that he didn’t want to spend nine weeks making a film with a young actor he couldn’t stand being around. He met with Christian Slater over lunch and knew that he was the right person for the role. The young actor was drawn to the project because of the authenticity of the writing, which he found to be “so real.” At the time he was making Pump Up the Volume, Slater’s personal life was a mess. He was drinking heavily and had run-ins with the law. Moyle remembers that the actor drank every night but never on set and was not a problem.

Pump Up the Volume received mixed reviews from critics. In his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “It might be argued that writer-director Allan Moyle and his collaborators have simply concocted an intoxicating fantasy, and certainly the power of fantasy isn’t irrelevant to what gives the movie its lift. But the fantasy happens to be believable.” The New York Times’ Stephen Holden wrote, “Working within the confines of the teen-age genre film, however, Pump Up the Volume still succeeds in sounding a surprising number of honest, heartfelt notes.” USA Today praised the film’s ending, despite it being, “in part, contrived, doesn’t cop out.” The Washington Post’s Rita Kempley wrote, “It's a howl from the heart, a relentlessly involving movie that gives a kid every reason to believe that he or she can come of age. It appreciates the pimples and pitfalls of this frightening passage, the transit commonly known as adolescence.”

 

However, Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “C-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman compared Slater to that of “a ratty, self-involved Michael J. Fox, works hard to give his on-the-air rants a nihilistic charge, but most of them sound like bad Beat poetry; all that's missing is the bongos.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, “You can admire Moyle's ambitions — he's out to fashion a metaphor for these troubled times the way Eric Bogosian did in Talk Radio — but Moyle doesn't have a trace of Bogosian's keen intelligence or abrasive wit. What he does have is Slater. It's almost enough.”

Moyle uses the film to address serious issues like suicide, bullying, pregnancy and homosexuality in an honest and heartfelt way that so many other teen movies at the time either refused to address, or, if they did, in a superficial way. His well-written screenplay doesn’t talk down to his target audience and in a refreshing notion assumes that they are smart enough to absorb the many ideas that the film explores. At times, it may seem a bit heavy-handed, especially with the cardboard cut-out authority figures compromised of clueless parents, an evil principal and a hack politician cum FCC representative, but I feel that this is done on purpose because at that age teens tend to see authority figures on those terms and not as real people. Moyle wants to wake up a teen audience weaned on safe, predictable teen movies – something that Pump Up the Volume is definitely not.

Pump Up the Volume was an important film for me growing up. Like Mark, I was raised in white suburbia and was taught not to question authority. By the time I saw Moyle’s film I was just starting to get into alternative rock music and so its eclectic soundtrack was a welcome addition to my musical education and one I embraced fully. The film’s premise was also an enticing bit of wish fulfillment and a lot my enjoyment came out of living vicariously through Mark’s exploits. It was also a gateway into a wonderful world of subversive culture, like Lenny Bruce. Pump Up the Volume still holds up with only the pirate radio aspect coming off as dated, technology-wise. The ideas and themes that it explores are still relevant, maybe more now than ever before as people are deeply unhappy with our school systems and our government. Our pop culture landscape is also a wasteland thanks to the glut of reality shows starring people who have become famous (or rather infamous) for doing nothing. Now, more than ever, we need someone like Hard Harry – or, with the proliferation of the Internet, a bunch of Hard Harries to wake people up, like the film’s optimistic conclusion with Mark’s ideas spreading like a virus through not just his city but the entire country.

NOTE: Some of my fave writers on the blogosphere have also written about this film. Check out Ferdy on Films, House of Self-Indulgence and Junta Juleil's Culture Shock for excellent musings on it.

SOURCES

Goldstein, Patrick. “He’s Up, He’s Down, He’s Up Again.” Los Angeles Times. August 19, 1990.

Portman, Jamie. “Movie Views Cruel World of Today’s Teenage Angst.” Toronto Star. August 22, 1990.

Scott, Jay. “Festival of Festivals in Person.” Globe and Mail. September 12, 1990.

Untamed Heart

At first glance, Untamed Heart (1993) seems like nothing more than your standard chick flick destined for regular rotation on the Lifetime Channel. And to be fair, there are definitely elements of that much-maligned subgenre but what redeems the film is Marisa Tomei who delivers a wonderful performance that transcends the sometimes cliché-ridden story. There is also actor-director Tony Bill’s excellent casting against type of Christian Slater who, for a rare moment in time, dropped his cool guy shtick to play a shy, socially awkward character. Bill gets solid performances out of his entire cast, which almost makes you forget the predictable beats of the story. The end result is a bittersweet holiday treat.

As a child, Adam lived in an orphanage run by nuns. He was the recipient of a heart transplant and was fed a fairy tale story that he was given a baboon’s heart thanks to the heroic efforts of his adventurer father. A sickly boy, he (Christian Slater) grew up to be reserved bus boy at a local Minneapolis diner. Untamed Heart takes us back to the early 1990s as soon as we hear the DNA remix of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner.” Caroline (Marisa Tomei) is a plucky waitress at the same diner. She is unlucky in love and right from her first scene, where she’s dumped by her boyfriend (that he would reject someone that looks like Tomei strains credibility but I digress) right before Christmas no less, we are rooting for her. This is because Tomei comes across as instantly sympathetic. Breaking her heart is like kicking a puppy fer Chrissakes!

Caroline commiserates with her best friend and fellow waitress Cindy (Rosie Perez), the sassy and cynical counterpoint to her co-worker. Tony Bill does an excellent job of establishing the diner and the colorful characters that populate it in only a few minutes. His camera moves around just enough so we get a sense of the layout of the place and then juxtaposes it with the people that work there to create a warm, inviting place. The cozy atmosphere of the diner is created with the help of Christmas lights and music, like the Cowboy Junkies’ dreamy cover of “Blue Moon.” The song is used to great effect in a shot where both Caroline and Adam are isolated in the same frame together. She is on one side, sitting by herself, and he’s on the other side, sweeping up the floor. This isn’t some sterile set located on a soundstage but a place that looks lived in and that has probably existed for many years. Set during the holiday season, Bill really conveys a sense of place – not just the diner but also the many establishing shots of a cold, snowy Minneapolis that sets the right atmospheric tone.

We see what a kind, nurturing person Caroline is when she tends to a nasty cut on Adam’s hand. She is oblivious to the intense, longing looks he gives her while she fixes him up. The way Christian Slater plays this scene is quite something. He doesn’t say anything to her (until the very end of the scene when she’s left and he says a quiet, “Thanks.”) but the actor conveys everything through his expressive eyes. Caroline and Adam develop a special bond when, one night, he rescues here from two guys (a pre-Sex and the City Willie Garson and Homicide: Life on the Street’s Kyle Secor) from attacking and trying to rape her.

Bill does a nice job of gradually developing the romance between Caroline and Adam. It is a slow burn that is accelerated by her attack. Afterwards, they have now shared something intensely personal and maybe for the first time she really notices him. Caroline is obviously moved by his selfless act and one gets the impression that he’s the first guy to look out for her, to be there for her when she needed it and not ask for anything in return. It is these scenes of their budding romance where the film is at its very best. We have become emotionally invested in Caroline and Adam and care about what happens to them.

Marisa Tomei is so good in this film. Fresh from her Academy Award-winning turn in My Cousin Vinny (1992) (?!), she plays a much more realistic character. Caroline is a bit of mess (as she says at one point, “My life is like watching the Three Stooges in Spanish.”). She has lousy taste in men and just wants to be loved by someone. Her chatty behavior is contrasted with Adam’s near-mute conduct but once they get involved she gradually gets him to open up. Tomei conveys a touching vulnerability that is quite endearing. The haunted look she adopts after her attack is heartbreaking. Most importantly, she has fantastic chemistry with Christian Slater, which is absolutely vital for a film like this. Their burgeoning romance is completely believable.

Untamed Heart is easily the best performance of Slater’s career. He showed that he could dial everything down and deliver a surprisingly minimalist performance. Freed from pages of dialogue, he has to rely more on his body language and his eyes to convey what Adam is feeling. Even when he does speak it is simply and directly. I’d love to know what Bill saw in Slater’s past performances that inspired him to cast the young actor as Adam. He even looks and acts differently with long, unkempt, unwashed hair and an introverted vibe in the way he acts. Adam avoids contact with people whenever possible. He hinted at this kind of character with the shy side of his protagonist in Pump Up the Volume (1990) but nothing to the extent that we see on display in Untamed Heart. Like Tomei, he also conveys an astonishing vulnerability.

Bill manages to tone down the usually manic, motor-mouthed Rosie Perez but without completely neutralizing her energy. She still gets some good zingers in there, like when she tells her nagging boss, who always complains that her breaks are too long, “You are like wet sand in my underwear.” (his reaction is priceless, by the way)

It’s too bad that once Caroline and Adam become a couple Untamed Heart loses its way a bit and veers dangerously close to disease-of-the-week made-for-T.V. territory – something that we’ve seen a million times. Sadly, the film shifts gears into a doomed romance storyline as Adam’s medical condition threatens his romance with Caroline. We get the standard relationship montage where we see the happy couple buy a car together, go for walks with his dog and so on. This culminates in a cheesy scene where they attend a hockey game and Adam even plucks a stray puck from the air for Caroline. It’s something I could have done without but it really is the odd misstep in an otherwise engaging film. Slater and Tomei do the best they can with what they’re given. However, as their romance deepens, the looks of unconditional love they convey to one another seems so genuine and real. Again, it’s all in the eyes.

Tony Bill was looking for unknown talent for a potential project and asked an agent at William Morris to send over some screenplays done by new writers. The script for Untamed Heart had originally been submitted as a writer’s sample. Bill showed it to producer Helen Bartlett who was moved by its theme of “having someone, somebody you never would have expected, come into your life and really transform you, change you.” Two weeks from Tom Sierchio handing the script for Untamed Heart to his agent, Bill optioned it and MGM agreed to make it.

Bill cast Marisa Tomei based on her audition for his earlier film, Five Corners (1987). She was too young for that film but he had kept track of her career over the years. Tomei found herself drawn to this “very warm story.” In order to perfect a regional accent, she chose a driver from the area who ended up acting as a dialogue coach. Once she had the accent down, she spoke with it on and off the set. When Christian Slater was first offered the part of Adam, he had his doubts and needed to be convinced to do it. He was scared of the role because it was so different from anything he had done before. As he said, “this one was a very internal performance, and at first I wasn’t really sure if I understood that.”

The film was originally set in New Jersey but for logistical reasons the producers could not shoot there and so they began to look for a city that could double for the Garden State. As luck would have it the filmmakers were scouting locations in Minneapolis and realized that it was “architecturally interesting.” They decided to actually set the film in the city as opposed to having it double for New Jersey. The production went on to cast 35 of the film’s 40 roles from the local acting community and utilize an almost completely local crew.

Untamed Heart received generally positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert wrote that the film was "kind of sweet and kind of goofy, and works because its heart is in the right place.” The Washington Post’s Hal Hinson grudgingly admitted that it was “hopelessly syrupy, preposterous and more than a little bit lame, but, still, somehow it got to me.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Tomei's performance: "With her flashing dark eyes and libidinous overbite, Tomei is adorable — she looks like a flirtatious bunny rabbit — but what's astonishing is the range of expression that passes over those delectable features.” Rolling Stone magazine’s Peter Travers wrote, “The Rain Man-Dying Young elements in Tom Sierchio's script are pitfalls that Slater dodges with a wonderfully appealing performance. His love scenes with the dazzling Tomei have an uncommon delicacy.” In his review for The New Yorker, Anthony Lane praised Tomei for bringing "startling high spirits to a dullish role. She snatches moments of happiness out of the air and shares them out to anyone who’s around.” However, in his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby felt that the film was “to the mind what freshly discarded chewing gum is to the sole of a shoe: an irritant that slows movement without any real danger of stopping it.”

It has been said about another Tony Bill film, My Bodyguard (1980), that, “it’s a nice, sweet movie, which I mean in the best possible way, with a surprising amount of depth found in its simple story." These words could so easily apply to Untamed Heart. By the film’s end one really feels like you’ve gone on a journey with these characters, especially Caroline who’s changed dramatically from where we saw her at the beginning. She’s gone from an emotional doormat when it comes to relationships to having experienced true love – to give of one’s self and to be there for someone else in return.


SOURCES

Salem, Rob. “Slater Digs Deep for Shy-Guy Role.” Toronto Star. February 12, 1993.

Untamed Heart Production Notes. MGM. 1993.