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.

Ocean's Thirteen

Despite its impressive box office returns, Ocean’s Twelve (2004) was considered something of a disappointment by its director Steven Soderbergh who felt that the plot was too complicated. While not quite as fun as Ocean’s Eleven (2001), it was a fine film in its own right – one that had a more satisfying emotional pay-off and doesn’t deserve the lousy reputation that it seems to have. Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) was seen as a return to the fun, breezy vibe of the first film by bringing it back to Las Vegas with style. The result was a very satisfying conclusion to the Ocean’s films.

As the revenge picture cliché goes, this time it’s personal. When Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould) is muscled out of a business deal by slick businessman Willy Bank (Al Pacino), resulting in a heart attack, Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew reunite for one last job: to ruin the opening night of Bank’s casino, The Bank, by making sure he loses a huge amount of money, which involves rigging all the games and slot machines. Bank wants the Five Diamond Award – the top accolade for hotels and will do anything to get it. Danny and the boys use this as a way to get at Bank. To this end, they devise an elaborate plan with the help of their arch-nemesis Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) who bankrolls the operation. They also bring in Roman Nagel (Eddie Izzard) from Ocean’s Twelve to crack a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence security system.

Soderbergh kicks things off rather stylishly as we get a beautiful shot of Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) walking across a runaway tarmac to an awaiting plane at dusk with the sky an impossibly deep dark blue that, accompanied by David Holmes’ groovy score, is absolutely breathtaking. Once again, the director shoots the hell out of the film by employing all sorts of zoom ins and outs, pans and split-screens that, along with a saturated color scheme, keeps things visually interesting.

This time out, Matt Damon gets a juicy subplot where he goes undercover as Lenny Pepperidge, the assistant to a Mr. Weng (Shaobo Qin as The Amazing Yen, also undercover), a very high roller, in order to get close to Bank’s lovely assistant, Abigail Sponder (Ellen Barkin). Part of his disguise involves wearing a ridiculous fake long nose – a sly fuck you to Harvey Weinstein who wouldn’t let Damon wear said nose for his character in Terry Gilliam’s The Brother’s Grimm (2005) because he felt it would obscure the actor’s good looks and hurt the film’s box office potential. Well, it didn’t hurt Ocean’s Thirteen box office as the film went on to gross a very respectable $311 million worldwide.

It is also a lot of fun to see Ellen Barkin reunited with her Sea of Love (1989) co-star Al Pacino. She appears to be having a good time playing a confident businesswoman succumbing to Damon’s “seductive” charms. It is also fun to see Pacino go off autopilot for a change and sink his teeth into a juicy bad guy role. Who else could Soderbergh get to pose as a credible threat to the likes of George Clooney and Brad Pitt but someone of the legendary star caliber like Pacino? He plays Bank like the offspring of his take on Ricky Roma from Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) and Gordon Gekko from Wall Street (1987) – a smooth-talking unscrupulous bastard. In another nice bit of casting, the inventor of the artificial intelligence security system is played by none other than Julian Sands, an actor whose big break through came in A Room with A View (1985) but whose career settled into mostly direct-to-home video fare so it was a pleasant surprise to see him appear in a big mainstream film like Ocean’s Thirteen.

Another amusing subplot involves Virgil Malloy (Casey Affleck, sporting a ridiculous-looking mustache) organizing a revolution/strike among the workers at a dice-making factory in Mexico. He goes from complaining about a lack of air conditioning to tossing Molotov cocktails on the strike lines. At one point, he and his fellow co-workers drown their sorrows at a local bar and Virgil asks them, “Have all of you forgotten Zapata?” He goes on to offer inspirational words that fire them up. How this whole subplot plays out is quite funny. In another nice twist, Terry Benedict is helping Danny out albeit with all kinds of conditions. After all, he resents Bank’s lack of taste and the competition he represents. There can only be on top dog in Vegas and Benedict clearly feels that he is the one. Andy Garcia looks like he relished the opportunity to be in on the joke instead of being the target as he was in the last two films.

While working on Ocean’s Twelve, Steven Soderbergh began thinking about Ocean’s Thirteen. He thought about how fun it would be to set it back in Las Vegas. The motivation to make the film was a desire to work with everyone again but all eleven cast members had to want to do it. Producer Jerry Weintraub contacted them 18 months before hand and told them filming would take place during the summer of 2006 and to clear their schedules. He was able to find a way to juggle all these movie stars’ busy lives and add Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin into the mix.

For the film’s story, Soderbergh felt that Danny and his crew weren’t driven entirely by money and that they would reunite for friendship and revenge. The director came up with the notion of Reuben being betrayed and his friends helping him out. Weintraub hired Brian Koppelman and David Levien to write the screenplay. They had written the script for Rounders (1998) and created the gambling television cable show Tilt, and so they were familiar with the world of con men and gamblers. Soderbergh and Weintraub were both big admirers of Rounders and the director met with the screenwriters in New York City over lunch. They talked about great con movies, the nature of heists, and how the characters had evolved since Ocean’s Eleven. Within minutes, Soderbergh knew they were who he wanted to write the script and were working on it within minutes: “There was not a long list of people that we thought could step into this specific universe and pick up the language and the sense of humor.”

Koppelman and Levien had spent years exploring Vegas culture and the gambling lifestyle. They had every book they could find about con artists and thieves. Early on, Soderbergh told them that he wanted the film’s focus to be on the friendship between Danny and his crew. They understood that getting revenge on Willy Bank was what drove the entire story of Ocean’s Thirteen. They also wanted to “’flip’ the casino so that the patrons would win every time, which would spell disaster for Bank.” Soderbergh also told them that the bad guy should be a casino owner and they imagined Al Pacino and wrote Bank with him in mind. George Clooney also offered some ideas, mostly things to do with the revenge scheme that reunited the crew.

Some exterior scenes were shot in Las Vegas, but the casino interiors were mostly shot on one of the largest soundstages on the Warner Bros. lot in Los Angeles because it would have taken too long to film in actual casinos as they had done with Ocean’s Eleven. Soderbergh said, “In order to get the shots that I wanted, I needed to completely control the environment.” He instructed production designer Philip Messina to build a hotel and casino that would reflect Bank and his huge ego. Messina decided to go with a quasi-Asian theme and make it visually overwhelming. He purposely broke the rules in Vegas by designing a multi-level gaming floor because the production didn’t have a lot of horizontal space to work with.

Much like with Ocean’s Twelve, Ocean’s Thirteen received mixed reviews from critics. In her review for The New York Times, Manohla Dargis praised Soderbergh’s direction: “Playing inside the box and out, he has learned to go against the grain while also going with the flow. In Ocean’s Thirteen he proves that in spades by using color like Kandinsky and hanging a funny mustache on Mr. Clooney’s luscious mug, having become a genius of the system he so often resists.” USA Today gave the film three out of four stars and Claudia Puig wrote, “As escapist entertainments go, Thirteen is far from unlucky: It's breezy, clever fun and ridiculously easy on the eyes.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “Predictably adolescent and smarmy, with the mix of sentimentality and cynical flippancy that's becoming Steven Soderbergh's specialty (even when he's pretending to make art films), this is chewing gum for the eyes and ears, and not bad as such.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Turn felt that it was better than Ocean’s Twelve but not as good as Eleven: “Though it's certainly serviceable as the second sequel to a remake, it lacks the brio and élan that made the 2001 film such a treat.”

On the other hand, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, “Ocean's Thirteen proceeds with insouciant dialogue, studied casualness, and a lotta stuff happening, none of which I cared much about because the movie doesn't pause to develop the characters, who are forced to make do with their movie-star personas.” In his review for The New York Observer, Andrew Sarris wrote, “for long stretches of the proceedings, Mr. Soderbergh seems to be trying to distract us from the suspenseless inevitability of the plot with semi-abstract rainbowish splashes of color.” Finally, the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter wrote, “It's maybe halfway between okay and not bad. If being about average were a sin, it'd be headed straight to Hell on a bobsled.”

Like Ocean’s Eleven, Ocean’s Thirteen pays tribute to the classic era of Vegas as Danny and co. restore Reuben’s honor. He’s an old school player who still believes in following a code and prides himself in being part of a select group of insiders that got to shake Frank Sinatra’s hand back in the day. Like Benedict, Bank represents the current corporate mentality of making money over the personal touch that the Mob-run casinos used to provide. If the first two films were about Danny and Rusty’s respective relationships with the loves of their lives, then Ocean’s Thirteen is about their friendship with Reuben. He mentored them when they were just starting out and taught them about respecting history as well as those who came before them. Like with the previous films, going after the bad guy is a matter of personal honor and hitting them where it hurts – in Bank’s case it’s his monster ego. Ocean’s Thirteen ends much like Ocean’s Eleven did thus bringing the trilogy full circle and with a truly satisfying conclusion as the bad guy gets what’s coming to him and Reuben’s honor is restored. Likewise, the film did very well at the box office and garnered fairly positive reviews going out on a well-deserved high note. It serves as an example of a star-studded big budget Hollywood film that entertains without insulting your intelligence.

SOURCES

Ocean’s 13 Production Notes. 2007.

Eddie and the Cruisers

When Eddie and the Cruisers came out in 1983 it was either ignored or received negatively by critics and performed poorly at the box office. However, over the years it has quietly cultivated a small but dedicated cult following. The film is primarily a mystery – what happened to musician Eddie Wilson? – and it also an unabashed love letter to rock ‘n’ roll and the New Jersey shore in the 1960s. It has been over 35 years since the film was released and it is high time for a re-evaluation of this under-appreciated gem.

Maggie Foley (Ellen Barkin) is a journalist for Media magazine and is doing a retrospective piece on Eddie and the Cruisers, a New Jersey bar band that was a minor sensation in the 1960s with one hit record and the top song in country during the summer of 1963. The band were working on an ambitious follow-up when lead singer Eddie Wilson (Michael Pare) drove his car off a pier and met with a watery demise on March 15, 1964. Or did he? No body was found. Maggie’s hook is that maybe Eddie didn’t die. She draws a parallel between him and French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who like Eddie, pulled a disappearing act at the height of his popularity while striving for perfection in his art. Now, everyone is looking for the master tapes of A Season in Hell, the album that was to be Eddie’s magnum opus, and which also disappeared only a day after Eddie vanished.

Through a series of flashbacks from the surviving band members, we see the rise and fall of Eddie and the Cruisers. The film is told predominantly from the point-of-view of Frank “The Wordman” Ridgeway (Tom Berenger), the band’s piano player and lyricist. He teaches English in high school now but Maggie’s questions bring all the old memories flooding back. The first flashback takes us back to 1962, while President John F. Kennedy was still in the White House, and when the United States was still a relatively innocent and hopeful country. Eddie and the Cruisers meet Frank at a bar in the Jersey Shore. Sal Amato (Matthew Laurance), their bass player, has been writing their songs but they aren’t enough for Eddie who tells him, “It just ain’t what I was looking for.” Eddie spots Frank and asks him what he thinks. Frank impresses Eddie with his knowledge of writing when he points out that Sal’s song needs a caesura, “a timely pause, a kind of strategic silence.” This is pretty high-falootin’ stuff for a rock ‘n’ roll movie and an indicator that this film aspires to be something different.

Eddie dreams of creating music that endures and director Martin Davidson juxtaposes these almost wistful sentiments with Sal’s contemporary Cruisers revival that is pure Las Vegas cheese, bastardizing the music as a lame lounge act where he finally gets to front the band. He embodies the very thing that Eddie was against – prostituting yourself instead of remaining true to the music. Sal’s version of the Cruisers, complete with an Eddie wannabe, is like when you see Lynyrd Skynyrd with only one original member of the band left – a pale imitation of its former self.

Davidson has said that the inspiration for the film came from a desire to "get all my feelings about the music of the last 30 years of rock music into it.” He optioned P.F. Kluge’s novel of the same name with his own money and at great financial risk. He wrote the screenplay with Arlene Davidson and decided to use a Citizen Kane-style story structure. He said in an interview, “That was in my head: the search.” Along came Joe Brooks, who penned the Debby Boone hit, “You Light Up My Life,” and offered $125,000 to help produce the film but he wanted Rick Springfield to star as Eddie. The filmmaker met the rock star but he wanted to cast an unknown. “People want to believe it really existed. It can’t be Rick Springfield and the Cruisers.”

Davidson eventually made a deal with Time-Life, a company that was going into the moviemaking business. However, they quickly exited the business after making two films that were not financially successful and Davidson’s project was left high and dry. He was understandably upset and a couple days later he went out to dinner and ran into a secretary who worked on the first film he had made. Davidson told her what had happened to his film and she gave his script for Eddie and the Cruisers to her business partners. In a relatively short time a deal was struck with a company called Aurora and Davidson was given a $6 million budget. Aurora made only three films – The Secret of NIMH (1982), Heart Like a Wheel (1983), and his film.

For the real-life band that would create the music Eddie and the Cruisers would play in the film, Davidson talked to George Thorogood and the J. Geils Band. To get a credible looking and sounding band for the film, Davidson hired Kenny Vance, one of the original members of Jay and the Americans, and music supervisor for Animal House (1978). He showed Davidson his scrapbook, the places they performed, the car they drove in, and things like how they transported their instruments. Vance also told Davidson stories about his band, some of which he incorporated into the script. Vance asked Davidson to describe his fictious band and what their music sounded like. Initially, he said that the Cruisers’ sound resembled Dion and the Belmonts but when they meet Frank they had elements of Jim Morrison and The Doors.

Davidson, however, did not want to lose sight of the fact that the Cruisers were essentially a Jersey bar band and he thought of Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Davidson told Vance to find him someone that could produce music that contained elements of those three bands. Davidson was getting close to rehearsals when Vance called him and told him that he had found the band – John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band from Providence, Rhode Island. Davidson met them and realized that they closely resembled the band as described in the script, right down to a black saxophone player, whom he actually cast in the film. Initially Cafferty was hired to write a few songs for the film but he did such a good job of capturing the feeling of the 1960s and the 1980s that Davidson asked him to score the film.

Tom Berenger did not try to learn how to play the piano for the film but did practice keyboards for hours in his trailer to at least create the illusion that he could play. Matthew Laurance actually learned how to play the bass through rehearsals. Michael Pare said of his role in the film that it was "a thrill I've never experienced. It's a really weird high. For a few moments, you feel like a king, a god. It's scary, a dangerous feeling. If you take it too seriously." Davidson had the actors who played in Eddie's band rehearse as if they were getting ready for a real concert. Pare remembers, "The first time we played together – as a band – was a college concert. An odd thing happened. At first, the extras simply did what they were told. Then, as the music heated up, so did the audience. They weren't play-acting anymore. The screaming, stomping and applause became spontaneous.” Davidson recalls, "One by one, kids began standing up in their seats, screaming and raising their hands in rhythmic applause. A few girls made a dash for the stage, tearing at Michael's shirt. We certainly hadn't told them to do that. But we kept the cameras rolling.”

The filmmakers do a decent job recreating the period details on a modest budget at best. There’s the cool cars, the clothes, and so on, but more importantly there is a tangible atmosphere of simpler times and nostalgia. This is encapsulated in the straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll music of the Cruisers that sounds a lot like early Springsteen. There is also a little bit of period music, most notably Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” that is used to immediately transport you back to that time. As soon you hear that distinctive song it instantly invokes that period and there is no question where we are.

What Eddie and the Cruisers nails so well is the dynamic between the members in the band, like how Sal gets on Eddie’s nerves, or how a romance develops between Frank and Joann Carlino (Helen Schneider), the band’s back-up singer. Davidson’s film shows how the band members bicker among each other but come together when it counts – playing live, where they know how to energize an audience. The film presents several band archetypes – the charismatic lead singer, the junkie band mate, the arrogant one, the laid back one, and the thoughtful one – but without being too obvious about it. Joann is the Patti Scialfa to Eddie’s Bruce Springsteen but Frank falls for her the first time they meet in ’62. There are certainly sparks between them but as anyone who’s been in a band knows, the fastest way to break one up is getting romantically involved with a fellow bandmate.

One of the best scenes in the film that illustrates the band’s dynamic is the flashback showing how their biggest hit, “On the Dark Side,” evolved. Eddie takes Frank’s slow ballad and spruces it up with a catchy up-tempo keyboard melody. Pretty soon the rest of the band joins and a hit is born. This scene shows what a great team Eddie and Frank are – the former supplies the music and the latter supplies the words. It also shows Eddie’s uncanny ear for what works in a song.

Michael Pare really sells the music well and delivers just the right amount of energy and charisma. It helps that the vocals he’s lip-synching to fit him well. You almost believe that he’s really singing. Pare also portrays Eddie as tantalizingly elusive and enigmatic. You are never quite sure what he’s thinking and he’s a man of few words but clearly has ambitions above and beyond entertaining an audience. With the album A Season in Hell, Eddie wanted to create something different and when the powers that be tried to deny him, he disappeared. According to both Davidson and Pare, the former was tough on the latter during rehearsals. Pare remembers him saying, “If you fuck up tomorrow, you’re fired.” If the actor didn’t do a good job, Davidson wouldn’t have a film. This treatment continued during filming. When it came to film the scene where Eddie takes the stage after learning a bandmate has died, he had to break down. Davidson remembers:

“We had 500 extras standing around, and Michael was having a hard time finding it. I used the situation to bring him to tears. I battered him to the point I’ve never battered an actor in my life. To the point it was almost too unkind. But when it was over, we hugged, and I knew I had a scene which would work in the movie.”

Along with Streets of Fire (1984), Eddie and the Cruisers was supposed to make Pare a big movie star but both films tanked commercially and critically. Now, he’s relegated mostly to direct-to-home-video fare.

Tom Berenger conveys a slightly sad, wistful vibe as Frank clearly misses the times he had with the band. He has made peace with his lot in life. He’s no longer a musician and his ambitions died alongside Eddie. I always liked Berenger and he’s wonderfully understated in this film. He would go on to the role of a lifetime in Platoon (1986), which was the antithesis to his role in Eddie and the Cruisers and showcased his versatility as an actor. Prior to this film, he also had a memorable turn in The Big Chill (1983). For a while it looked like he would be leading man material but he has settled rather nicely into character actor roles.

A young Ellen Barkin plays the persistent reporter who tries to unravel the mystery of Eddie’s death. She looks so young and beautiful in this film but isn’t given too much screen time. Looking back, she had a pretty fantastic run in the 1980s with this film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), The Big Easy (1987), and ended the decade in style with Sea of Love (1989). Unfortunately, she did not have a good experience making the film, remarking in an interview, "I think people were all fucked-up on drugs. I don't know. I was a little removed, because I wasn't on the movie the whole time, but it seemed like it was just a mess." Joe Pantoliano plays the Cruisers’ manager with the same kind of enthusiasm that he would display in other memorable roles in the 1980s, like Risky Business (1983), The Mean Season (1985), and Midnight Run (1988).

Eddie and the Cruisers was originally intended to open during the summer but a scheduling error resulted in a September release when its target audience – teenagers – were back in school. It was released on September 23, 1983 and grossed $1.4 million on its opening weekend. The film was pulled from theaters after three weeks and the ads were pulled after one week. It would go on to make a disappointing $4.7 million in North America.

Eddie and the Cruisers received largely mixed to negative reviews. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two out of four stars and found the ending “so frustrating, so dumb, so unsatisfactory, that it gives a bad reputation to the whole movie.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, "Some of the details ring uncannily true, like the slick oldies nightclub act that one of the Cruisers is still doing nearly 20 years after Eddie's supposed death. Other aspects of the movie are inexplicably wrong. Eddie's music sounds good, but it also sounds a lot like Bruce Springsteen’s, and it would not have been the rage in 1963.” However, she did praise Pare's performance: "Mr. Pare makes a fine debut; he captures the manner of a hot-blooded young rocker with great conviction, and his lip-synching is almost perfect.” Gary Arnold, in the Washington Post, wrote, "At any rate, it seemed to me that what Eddie and the Cruisers aspired to do was certainly worth doing. The problem is that it finally lacks the storytelling resources to tell enough of an intriguing story about a musical mystery man.”

In 1984, Eddie and the Cruisers found new life on HBO. After the soundtrack album suddenly climbed the charts, the studio re-released it in the fall of 1984. During its play dates on HBO, the album sold three million copies. Nine months after the film opened, “On the Dark Side,” the Cruisers big hit in the film, was the number one song in the country. Embassy Pictures re-released the film for one-week based on successful summer cable screenings and popular radio single but it failed to perform at the box office. The film and the album eventually did well enough to make way for a sequel – Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives (1989) – that saw Eddie as a construction worker in Montreal (?!). Davidson was offered the sequel but was not crazy about the idea and wanted no part of it. With the exception of Pare, Laurance and Cafferty, nobody from the first film had anything to do with it and the less said about this awful film the better. After the commercial failure of the first film, Davidson has continued to work steadily, mostly in television, directing episodes of Law & Order, Picket Fences, Chicago Hope and Judging Amy but has been inactive since 2002.

It’s interesting that the initial rise and fall of Eddie and the Cruisers mirrors the arc of President Kennedy. The band peaks during his presidency and Eddie disappears and his band breaks up after Kennedy is assassinated and the country was thrown into turmoil and disillusionment. This parallel seems more than just a coincidence so I’m sure Davidson had it mind when he wrote the screenplay. What is so endearing about Eddie and the Cruisers is the idealism that permeates the film as embodied by Eddie’s desire to create songs that will allow him “to fold ourselves up in them forever,” as he tells Frank at one point. The film has an internal conscience and celebrates the notion that music can take you to another place and make you forget about your daily problems for a few minutes. This is tempered by a melancholic tone that permeates the scenes that take place in the present. Eddie’s death and the end of the Cruisers hangs like a heavy cloud over the surviving members and all the old feelings and memories are dredged up thanks to Maggie’s inquiries.

Eddie and the Cruisers celebrates getting lost in the music and how it makes you feel. This is ambitious stuff for a little a film about a reclusive singer for a bar band. For the most part, the film pulls it off. Along with Almost Famous (2000) and Hard Core Logo (1996), it is definitely one of my favorite films about a fictious band. Davidson is still proud of his film but is bitter about how it was handled. “That picture should have been a theatrical success. There was an audience for it. People still watch it and still tell me about it.” Eddie and the Cruisers has aged surprisingly well and over time all the good notes are intact.

SOURCES

Edgers, Jeff. “Eddie and the Cruisers was a massive ‘80s Flop. How did it become a beloved cult film?” Washington Post. April 24, 2015.

Fragoso, Sam. "Ellen Barkin on Great Directors and Her Favorite Roles, from Diner to Buckaroo Banzai." The A.V. Club. March 14, 2015.

Muir, John Kenneth. The Rock and Roll Film Encyclopedia. Applause Theatre & Cinema Books. 2007.