I was just the right age for S.E. Hinton’s young adult
novels in the early 1980s. It was at an impressionable age that I read and
re-read The Outsiders, Rumble Fish and Tex (for some reason I never warmed up to That Was Then, This Is Now). I loved getting lost in the worlds she
created, often about teenagers from the wrong side of the tracks facing real
problems. I liked that she didn’t sugarcoat things or talked down to her
readers. There was an authenticity to her work that deeply affected me,
especially The Outsiders, the novel
of hers I read the most.
As luck would have it, the ‘80s would see film adaptations
of her first four novels, starting with Tex
(1982), but the one I really looked forward to the most was The Outsiders (1983). At that young age
I had no idea who Francis Ford Coppola was or the mostly unknown cast of young
actors but I knew that they brilliantly brought Hinton’s novel to the life on
the big screen almost exactly how I imagined it when I read it. The film
affected me so strongly that the characters in the novel and the actors that
portrayed him became indistinguishable.
“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the
darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and
a ride home.” And so begins Hinton’s classic story about troubled youths in 1960s
Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ponyboy Curtis (C. Thomas Howell) is a young teenager from the
wrong side of the tracks. He’s a Greaser, Hinton’s romanticized version of
poor, white trash. He and his best friend Johnny Cade (Ralph Macchio) go to a
drive-in movie theater with fellow Greaser Dallas Winston (Matt Dillon).
What is so striking about these early scenes is how much
Matt Dillon commands the screen with his cocky swagger and mischievous attitude
as he half-heartedly chases a trio of little kids across a vacant lot while
“Gloria” by Them plays on the soundtrack. The actor portrays his character like
a playful variation of Marlon Brando’s biker in The Wild One (1953). He really gets to have some fun when Dallas,
Johnny and Ponyboy arrive at the drive-in and decide to sit behind two
beautiful girls – Cherry (Diane Lane) and her friend Marcia (Michelle Meyrink)
– who left their drunk Soc (rich white kids) boyfriends. He starts hitting on
Cherry and initially it’s funny and we see genuine chemistry between Dillon and
Diane Lane (that would continue in two more films they made together) but
things go south quickly when he gets nasty and she tells him to get lost. It’s
an enjoyable bit of acting on Dillon’s part as we see how easily Dallas can go
from rascally to crude in a few moments. Lane is also decent as Cherry goes
from playfully flirting to angrily offended, telling off the nasty punk.
After leaving the drive-in, the focus shifts to Ponyboy and
Johnny who take refuge in vacant lot when the latter discovers his parents
fighting at home. This scene shows the close bond these two boys have and how
tough life is for them, especially when they have to deal with Socs. Ralph
Macchio is particularly moving in this scene as Johnny breaks down and laments,
“Seems like there’s got to be some place without Greasers, Socs. Must be some
place with just plain, ordinary people.” He says these words with a
heartbreaking vulnerability reminiscent of Sal Mineo’s doomed teen in A Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
Their lives are changed forever when they hang out at a
local playground and cross paths with a carload of Socs – the same ones that
are boyfriends to Cherry and Marcia and that beat Johnny pretty badly awhile
back. They attack Ponyboy and Johnny, trying to drown the former until the
latter kills one of them with a switchblade. Fearing that they’ll get in
trouble with the law (because Ponyboy’s parents are dead, he’ll be taken away
from his brothers) even though it was self-defense, they have Dallas get them
out of town. He sends them out to an abandoned church in the country and for a spell
the film becomes a two-hander as Ponyboy and Johnny spend the days playing
cards and reading Gone with the Wind
to each other. This is The Outsiders
at its most romantic as they watch sunrises and remark at the stunning colors
as Ponyboy quotes a Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Over the course
of the film, Coppola extends the metaphor to the friendship between the two
boys.
Coppola gets truly wonderful performances out of his young
cast, in particular C. Thomas Howell and Macchio, as evident in the portion of
the film where their characters are hiding out in the country. There’s one
scene where Ponyboy gets upset when the realization of how much trouble they’re
in sinks in. Their friendship is the heart and soul of The Outsiders with the sensitive Johnny being the Greasers’
unofficial mascot that everyone looks out for – even the jaded tough guy
Dallas. Watching this film more than 30 years later it is amazing to see how
many actors got their start or that this was their first major role. Matt
Dillon, Diane Lane, Rob Lowe, Emilio Estevez, Patrick Swayze, and Tom Cruise
were all relative unknowns and went on to greater fame after the success of
this movie.
Coppola has always had an uncanny eye for casting and this
is readily apparent with The Outsiders,
which features an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the cast. Lowe and
Swayze play Ponyboy’s older brothers, both of whom had to drop out of school to
get jobs to make ends meet with the former playing the disciplinarian and the
latter, the easy-going peacemaker. They, along with Howell, are believable as
brothers, given little screen-time to convey a tight bond between their
respective characters.
Howell delivers a thoughtful performance, capturing the
dreamer quality that is essential to Ponyboy, a character who reads Gone with the Wind and enjoys sunsets. Estevez
is a funny scene-stealer as Two-Bit Matthews, always cracking jokes. Initially,
Dallas appears to be the toughest, most cynical of the Greasers, but by the end
of the film it is revealed that under that hard exterior is someone with a big
heart and when the one thing that keeps him in check is taken away, he spirals
out of control, which allows Dillon to go full-on Method scenery-chewing in a
powerful, show-stopping, operatic exit that is worthy of the 1950s melodramas
Coppola is celebrating.
With the help of cinematographer Stephen H. Burum, Coppola
creates a richly textured world shot in glorious widescreen with a look that
evokes another epic about troubled youth, A
Rebel Without a Cause. The Outsiders
is also drenched in the golden hues of warm sunrises and sunsets like something
right out of Gone with the Wind
(1939). The Outsiders is clearly
Coppola’s homage to Rebel and other
melodramatic teen movies of the ‘50s. The screenplay is peppered with the
occasional grandiose statement like when Dallas dedicates the upcoming rumble
with the Socs, “We’ll do it for Johnny,” like a declaration of war that seems
anachronistic and cheesy by today’s standards but would not seem out of place
in a James Dean film.
One of the themes that drives The Outsiders is a loss of innocence. Despite his poor upbringing,
Ponyboy is an idealist who believes in the basic decency of people – even Socs.
It is Johnny who keeps him hopeful, to “Stay Gold,” to paraphrase the Robert
Frost poem they both love. Ultimately, the film is about looking beyond one’s
socio-economic class and judging people by their actions. Although, it is
pretty obvious that Coppola’s sympathies lie with the Greasers as opposed to
the selfish Socs.
That being said, there’s a nice scene late in the film when
Ponyboy has a private conversation with Randy (Darren Dalton), the Soc that was
friends with the boy that Johnny killed. He lets his guard down and tells
Ponyboy in a moment of rare candor, “You can’t win, you know that, don’t you?
It doesn’t matter if you whip us, you’ll still be where you were before – at
the bottom and we’ll still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks. It
doesn’t matter. Greasers’ll still be Greasers and Socs will still be Socs.” It
is an important scene in that it not only humanizes Randy but also underlines
the fundamental truth about this world – the characters will forever be defined
by their socio-economical class. It is this realization that makes the
Greasers’ victory over the Socs in the film’s climactic battle ultimately a
hollow one. This is compounded further by the tragic demise of two people close
to Ponyboy.
S.E. Hinton wrote The
Outsiders when she was 15-years-old, based on the social differences she
witnessed at her high school. Viking Press published it two years later in 1967
and it quickly became a cultural phenomenon, kickstarting the Young Adult
genre. It immediately struck a chord with young readers who identified with its
honest depiction of teenagers and became a staple at school classrooms around
the country. In 1980, Francis Ford Coppola received a paperback copy of the
novel accompanied by a letter written by Jo Ellen Misakian, a librarian at Lone
Star School, Fresno County. Apparently, a petition had been started at school
to get the book made into a film and they selected Coppola as the best director
for the job.
In her letter, she wrote, “I feel our students are
representative of the youth of America. Everyone who has read the book,
regardless of ethnic or economic background, has enthusiastically endorsed this
project.” Coppola asked his producer Fred Roos to read the book and let him
know if it was suitable for cinematic treatment. He read it from cover to cover
and recommended Coppola make it. In addition, the novel had sold four million
copies since 1970 and this convinced Coppola of its potential for box office success
– something that he needed at the time. Roos met with Hinton in the summer of
’80 and found out that she wasn’t a fan of Coppola’s Godfather films or Apocalypse
Now (1979) but being an admirer of horses loved The Black Stallion (1979), which he produced, and felt that it
demonstrated he and Roos “had some affinity for young adult fiction,” according
to the latter.
Hinton asked $5,000 for the rights but at the time Zoetrope,
Coppola’s production company, was struggling with massive bank debt when his
passion project, the ambitious One from
the Heart’s (1982) budget ballooned to $25 million. She agreed to a $500
down payment. He was able to get a distribution contract from Warner Bros. and
on the strength of that, Chemical Banks gave Zoetrope a loan and a completion
guarantee from Britain’s National Film Finance Corporation, which resulted in a
$10 million budget.
Coppola hired young writer Kathleen Rowell to adapt the
novel but the filmmaker felt that their screenplay was “too much soap opera”
and shelved the project. He would soon return to it, reading the book and
feeling that making it would be a way to escape his trouble with Zoetrope: “I
used to be a great camp counselor, and the idea of being with half a dozen kids
in the country and making a movie seemed like being a camp counselor again. It
would be a breath of fresh air. I’d forget my troubles and have some laughs
again.” He would end up writing 14 drafts with Hinton. The Writers Guild of
America wouldn’t give her credit for her contributions and in protest, Coppola
temporarily quit the organization.
To prepare for filming, Hinton drove Coppola around Tulsa,
showing him locations she thought of while writing the book. To help the cast
get into character, Coppola separated them by social class and so all the
Greasers stayed on the same hotel room floor and hung out together while the
Socs had nicer rooms. Furthermore, the actors playing the Socs received their
scripts in leather-bound binders while the Greasers had them in denim
notebooks. Actor Ralph Macchio remembers that Coppola had “a very theatrical
way of working.” In early March of 1982, the cast spent two weeks rehearsing,
improvising, and doing acting exercises, which helped everyone bond with each
other. He then videotaped a dress rehearsal with the actors in front of a blank
screen. He would superimpose stills of exterior locations sites in Tulsa and
shots of interior sets so that by the time principal photography started on
March 29, he had a good idea of how each scene would look. C. Thomas Howell
remembers, “We were all raw and young and very impressionable, so it was a good
time for us to have a mentor like Coppola.”
Filming finished on May 15 as planned and Coppola began
editing it during the summer. He approached his father Carmine to compose “a
kind of schmaltzy classical score” that would embody the Gone with the Wind for teens vibe he wanted: “It appealed to me
that kids could see Outsiders as a
lavish, big-feeling epic about kids.”
While
performing strongly at the box office, The
Outsiders was not particularly well-received by critics with Roger Ebert
giving it two-and-a-half out of four stars. He wrote, “The problem, I’m afraid,
is with Coppola’s direction. He seems so hung up with his notions of a
particular movie ‘look,’ with his perfectionistic lighting and framing and
composition, that the characters wind up like pictures, framed and hanged on
the screen.” In his review for The New
York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “To those of us who can’t buy Mr.
Coppola’s inflated attempts at myth making, it’s a melodramatic kidfilm with
the narrative complexity of The Three
Bears and a high body count.” The Washington
Post’s Gary Arnold wrote, “Between the aimlessness of the plot and the
marshmallow sponginess of the sentimental content, Coppola is left with
ingredients every bit as defective and softheaded as the ones he overrated in One from the Heart.”
Coppola’s original version was quite faithful to Hinton’s
book but in 2005, he decided to revisit the film and put back in 22 more
minutes of deleted scenes, most noticeably at the beginning and end of the film.
This new footage opens up the film more. We are introduced to the Greasers much
earlier on now that Coppola isn’t reined in by the dictates of test screenings.
Another significant change has Coppola replacing all of his father’s beautiful,
classical score in favor of period rock ‘n’ roll music. In some cases, like the
opening scene where Ponyboy is jumped by some Socs, it works and in others,
like the whimsical surf music that plays over the scene where the Socs jump
Johnny and Ponyboy, it feels awkward and out of place. Part of the film’s
original charm was its moments of ‘50s style melodrama, as epitomized by the
film’s orchestral soundtrack, and this is diminished by the newly inserted
period music that could be right out of an episode of Crime Story. Hinton’s books are timeless with their universal
themes and the original music reflected that. This new music, while accurate
for its time period, contributes to a loss of some of the timeless feel.
Throughout the ups and downs that Ponyboy experiences, what
matters most is the bond he has with his brothers and his fellow Greasers that
are an extension of his biological family. They stick up for each other and
this is a large part of the film’s (and book’s) appeal – a story dominated by
teenagers with little to no adult presence. When you’re a kid and always being
told what to do by your parents, teachers and other adults, a story where kids
your own age are the protagonists has a very definite allure – a form of escape
that speaks to the reader in a way that feels honest and true. This is why the
novel and its film adaptation continue to endure and speak to successive
generations of young people.
SOURCES
Cowie, Peter. Coppola.
Da Capo Press. 1994.
Dickerson, Justin. “An Inside Look at The Outsiders.” USA Today. September 19, 2005.
Gilliam, Mitch, Joshua Kline, Joe O’Shansky and Michael
Wright. “Making The Outsiders.” The
Tulsa Voice. August 2016.
Harmetz, Aljean. “Making The
Outsiders, A Librarian’s Dream.” The New York Times. March 23, 1983.
Phillips, Gene D. Godfather:
The Intimate Francis Ford Coppola. University Press of Kentucky. 2004.
