Hoffa

 

Danny DeVito is quite the accomplished character actor, starring in television shows such as Taxi and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and highly regarded films such as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Get Shorty (1995). What isn’t talked about nearly enough is his directorial output, which is not as prolific but does contain some notable efforts. In the 1980s, he directed back-to-back hits with the Hitchcockian goof Throw Momma from the Train (1987) and the pitch-black divorce satire The War of the Roses (1989). Both films demonstrated his stylistic flare behind the camera and decidedly darkly humorous worldview.
 
DeVito parlayed the box office clout he accrued from those two films into Hoffa (1992), an epic rise and fall historical biopic about controversial labor leader James R. Hoffa, who led the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters union and eventually ran afoul of both organized crime and the United States government, disappearing on July 30, 1975 never to be seen again.
 
The success of Martin Scorsese’s GoodFellas (1990) kicked off a golden age of historical biopics in the 1990s with the likes of JFK (1991), Bugsy (1991), Malcolm X (1992), Quiz Show (1994), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) among many others populating cinemas during this time. Stone’s The Doors (1991) and the aforementioned JFK, however, paved the way for Hoffa to get made – that, and the machinations of the film’s producer Edward R. Pressman to put together the team of legendary actor Jack Nicholson in the titular role, getting Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Mamet to write the screenplay, and DeVito to direct.

This was going to be the latter’s magnum opus that would garner all kinds of awards and catapult him into the rarified air of the likes of Steven Spielberg and Stone. Some critics, however, bristled at the lionization of Hoffa as a hero, raising more than a few more eyebrows as the man was known for employing controversial tactics to get want he wanted. Hoffa failed to make back it’s $40+ million (which reportedly rose to close to $50 million) budget, received mixed reviews and picked up a few, scattered award nominations. What happened?
 
The film begins at the end of Hoffa’s (Nicholson) life – the last day he was seen alive with the rise and fall of his career seen through the flashback reminisces of Robert Ciaro (DeVito), a long-time friend and an amalgamation of several real-life associates. We see how the two men met, while Ciaro is on the road making a delivery and Hoffa pitches him a membership to the Teamsters, then a fledgling organization. At the time, truck drivers were overworked and underpaid. Hoffa shows up to the loading docks one-day spouting Mamet’s profane dialogue, telling the workers to go on strike, which starts a massive brawl. In doing so, he also costs Ciaro his job and later that night he ambushes Hoffa only to be held at gunpoint by one of his associates, Billy Flynn (Robert Prosky). “Life’s a negotiation. It’s all give and take,” Hoffa tells Ciaro as he apologizes and explains him motives.
 
We see Hoffa’s early, botched strong arm tactics, such as firebombing a local business that results in the death of Flynn. We see Hoffa mixing it up, yelling at scab drivers crossing picket lines, getting into scuffles not just with the cops but also the mafia. The strike is cutting into their profits and Hoffa cuts a deal with them, which not only aids in his rise to leadership of the Teamsters, but also, ultimately, led to his downfall. The film shows early on how Hoffa wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, helping a trucker change his tire while he pitches membership to the Teamsters, natch, and getting bloody while fighting in the strikes.

 At times, David Mamet’s Midwest tough guy dialogue feels like it could have come from one of fellow Chicago native Michael Mann’s films but it has his distinctive cadence in such gems as “Because I’m sitting out here to meet with a fella,” or “What’s out the car is my guy. What’s in here is you watching the phone.” Another memorable bit of dialogue: “Are we talking words, here, we usin’ words? That’s what we’re doin’.” The cast, in particular Nicholson and DeVito nail the sharp, clipped style of Mamet’s dialogue.
 
Unlike the cast of The Irishman (2019), Nicholson, et al were cast at just the right time in their lives to play younger and older versions of their characters credibly. Nicholson does an excellent job delivering several of Hoffa’s fiery speeches. He fully commits to the role compared to Al Pacino’s take on the man in The Irishman where the legendary actor seems to be playing himself rather than the man. Nicholson certainly captures the bluster and swagger of Hoffa, a man with charisma and confidence to spare. One of the joys of his performance is watching him spout so much of Mamet’s dialogue – no easy feat – and he does it while adopting the Teamster’s distinctive tone and way of speaking. Some of his best scenes are the ones where he squares off against Robert Kennedy (Kevin Anderson) as he reduces their conflict to the working man versus the rich elite. Nicholson does get a few reflective moments in the scenes on his last day seen alive as he and Ciaro reflect on their friendship over the years.
 
Nicholson and DeVito are surrounded by a hell of a supporting cast with Anderson’s uncanny take on Kennedy, nailing his distinctive accent. J.T. Walsh shows up as one of Hoffa’s close associates who is initially loyal until he gets a taste of power and turns his back on his mentor at a crucial moment. A young John C. Reilly shows up as another one of Hoffa’s associates who worships him early on but eventually betrays him by testifying against him during the trial for labor racketeering. Armand Assante also pops up as the mob boss that Hoffa makes a deal with to gain more power within the Teamsters. The veteran actor wisely downplays his performance next to Nicholson’s acting pyrotechnics. He doesn’t need to chew the scenery as his mere presence exudes power and authority. His performance is a sobering reminder of how much his presence is missed films such as this and Sidney Lumet’s Q & A (1990). There are also small parts for Bruno Kirby and Frank Whaley, who was on quite the run at the time with pivotal roles in The Doors, JFK and Hoffa.

The film is ambitious in its scale and scope as evident in the scene where Hoffa leads a strike that turns into a massive brawl involving hundreds of people. DeVito captures the chaos masterfully as trucks are overturned, people are viciously beaten and even a mother is separated from her child all the while the corporate bigwigs can be seen watching safely from their lofty vantage point. It’s a tough, brutal sequence that is unflinching in its depiction of ugly violence. The epic look and feel of Hoffa is due in large part to his direction with the help of legendary cinematographer Stephen H. Burum as he digs deep into his stylistic bag of tricks including crane shots, split diopter lens, sweeping 360-degree camera moves, God’s eye overhead shots, point-of-view shots, and masterful framing of shots and scenes via 2:35.1 aspect ratio that rival the likes of Spielberg and Stone at the time.
 
Joe Isgro was a top record promoter making a reported $10 million a year but in 1989 a grand jury indicted him on 51 counts of payola and drug trafficking. The charges were dismissed a year later but the damage to his reputation had been done and he decided to pivot into the film business. Just before this legal mess he had been approached by Frank Ragano, former Hoffa attorney, and Brett O’Brien, son of Chuckie O’Brien, Hoffa’s adopted son. The former claimed he had obtained the film rights from the Hoffa estate, however, not long after Isgro signed a letter of agreement to do the film, O’Brien told him that they didn’t have the rights and their option had expired. Isgro told O’Brien the deal was off and made a new one with another production company for the rights to Chuckie’s story, which was used as the basis for the screenplay written by Robin Moore, who had authored The French Connection, and interviewed several members of the Teamsters union about Hoffa’s disappearance in 1975.
 
Isgro approached film producer Edward R. Pressman with Moore’s script hoping that Pressman could convince Oliver Stone to direct. Pressman liked what he read and optioned the script as well as the tapes and transcripts of Moore’s interviews. He found the script “very expositional, not fully formed as a movie but there was the raw material for one.” Caldecot Chubb, then Vice President of Pressman’s production company, pitched Hoffa to 20th Century Fox production executive Michael London in August 1989. He recalled telling London, “In America, everyone thinks they know Hoffa. They think he was a gangster, period. But he was a labor leader, a guy with courage and heroism, a guy who stood up for his men.” An hour and half after their meeting concluded, London called Chubb and told him that if he could get David Mamet to write the script they would finance the film.

Pressman had met Mamet in 1985 and called him, pitching the idea of Hoffa as King Lear. In October 1989, Mamet met with Pressman, Chubb and Joe Roth, then President of Fox. Pressman remembers Mamet telling them that his father had been a labor lawyer and he understood that world. His conditions were that they could give him and all their research material and he would give them back a finished script. He was paid in the neighborhood of one million dollars and put two other projects on hold while he spent several months writing the script.
 
The studio loved what Mamet wrote and told Pressman to hire a top director. His first choice was Barry Levinson but when he met with Mamet about the script in 1990, the men did not see eye to eye on the vision for the film and the director passed on the project. Pressman reportedly met with Stone and John McTiernan but they weren’t seriously considered for the film. Around this time, Danny DeVito was having lunch with Roth who was telling him about the projects they were working on and when the former heard about Hoffa he immediately wanted to do it. He met with Pressman in April 1990 and presented his vision of the film. The producer said, “It was clear to me Danny was articulate and ambitious and every bit as prepared as the best filmmakers I’d worked with.” DeVito was hired.
 
To play Hoffa, both Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino were considered until someone suggested Jack Nicholson. He read the script in the summer of 1990 after making The Two Jakes (1990) and agreed to do it but principal photography had to be delayed for six months while he filmed Man Trouble (1992) for Bob Rafelson. His salary increased the film’s budget dramatically to over $40 million and Roth told Pressman in the fall of 1991 that Fox would only pay for $37 million of it. Pressman sold the cable rights in France for $5 million and convinced DeVito to work for union scale, saving an additional $7 million in exchange for a share of the film’s box office receipts.

Hoffa shot for 85 days, starting in February 1992 in Pittsburgh before moving on to Detroit, then Los Angeles with the final two weeks in Chicago in June on an initial budget of $42 million that eventually came in just under $50 million.
 
Hoffa received mixed reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three-and-a-half out of four stars and wrote, "Hoffa shows DeVito as a genuine filmmaker. Here is a movie that finds the right look and tone for its material. Not many directors would have been confident enough to simply show us Jimmy Hoffa instead of telling us all about him.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, "Mr. Nicholson has altered his looks, voice and speech to evoke Hoffa, but the performance is composed less of superficial tricks than of the actor's crafty intelligence and conviction. The performance is spookily compelling without being sympathetic for a minute." The Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan wrote, "All the audience is left with are snapshots of repetitive tough-guy behavior, a scenario that is too limited to hold anyone’s interest for a 2-hour-and-20-minute length."
 
Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman gave the film a "D" rating and wrote, "When an actor as great as Nicholson gives a performance this monotonous, it raises the question, Why make a movie about Jimmy Hoffa in the first place? The answer, I suspect, is that it wasn’t so much Hoffa’s life as his lurid, headline-making death that hooked a major studio into backing this project. The result is somehow perversely appropriate: a massive Hollywood biopic about a man who never quite seems there." In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe wrote, "The biggest mistake is DeVito's direction. He fills every moment with soaring, weighty music and spectacle-happy cinematography. Like a kid clutching power candy, he can't let go." While doing press for the film, DeVito made no apologies for his positive take on Hoffa: “He put bread on the table of the working man. That to me is a hero.”
 
DeVito does lay it on a bit thick at times, such as the scene where hundreds of trucks park by the side of the road as drivers show their support for Hoffa as he and Ciaro are driven to prison with David Newman’s score swelling dramatically. Hoffa’s home life is also never seen with his wife Josephine (Natalia Nogulich) trotted out for a few moments but we get no insight into their dynamic. If the film’s portrayal of Hoffa has fault it’s that we don’t get an understanding of what motivated the man. When we meet him, he is fully-formed. He is confident of his convictions. How did he get that way? What made him such a staunch defender of the working man? Why was he so power hungry? We never know for certain and maybe no one did but it is a lack of depth in an otherwise compelling portrait of the man. For all the hero worship of Hoffa, DeVito does try to show the ramifications of the man’s actions such as him ignoring the Teamsters leadership’s orders to back off and starting a massive brawl with the scabs and cops that results in the death of several of his fellow members. There’s also the scene where he uses intimidation tactics to kill a newspaper story that will portray him in a negative light thereby damaging his chances of being elected President of the Teamsters.

Among the gold rush boom of historical biopics in the ‘90s Hoffa has mostly become forgotten thanks to its lackluster box office and mixed critical reaction. By the time Stone made Nixon (1995), large scale, star-studded historical films were no longer en vogue and by the end of the decade less and less of these films were being made with notable exceptions such as Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), but despite stellar reviews it also underperformed at the box office. Hoffa has enjoyed some renewed interest thanks to The Irishman, which features the labor leader prominently. While he is not the central character his presence casts a long shadow over the film and is nowhere near as interestingly depicted as in DeVito’s film. Perhaps there is a more definitive take on the man? A limited series that could go into more detail? In the meantime, we have this lavishly staged, well-acted look at the man who had a profound effect on labor unions and the working class.
 
 
SOURCES
 
Freedman, Samuel G. “The Captain of the Hoffa Team.” The New York Times. September 13, 1992.
 
Goldstein, Patrick. “A Labor-Intensive Hoffa.” Los Angeles Times. August 30, 1992.
 
Willistein, Paul. “DeVito’s Hoffa Salutes Top Teamster Working Class Hero.” The Morning Call. December 25, 1992.

First Man

Ever since I can remember I have been fascinated by space travel. The seeds were planted in science fiction movies like Star Wars (1977) but my interest intensified in the early 1980s with the United States Space Shuttle program. If kids in the 1960s and 1970s had the space race between the Americans and the Russians, my generation had the Shuttles – incredible spacecraft that would hurtle into outer space to launch telescopes or rendezvous with space stations. The tragic Space Shuttle Challenger mission in 1986 where it exploded 73 seconds into its flight was a sobering reminder of the danger of these endeavors.

My interest in the Space Shuttles dovetailed with the release of The Right Stuff (1983), a historical biopic about the Mercury Seven astronauts that playfully exposed their flaws and celebrated these brave men. Over the years, my interest in the subject continued with films like Apollo 13 (1995) and so when it was announced that a biopic chronicling Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon was being made I was all in.

First Man (2018) is Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to La La Land (2016) and reunited him with his leading man Ryan Gosling playing Armstrong. As a result, anticipation for the film was high and then it failed to perform at the box office despite mostly glowing reviews. Some have speculated that the frivolous controversy over the omission of the planting of the American flag on the Moon as being unpatriotic may have turned off mainstream audiences, it was more likely Gosling’s historically accurate, reserved take on Armstrong, coupled with a somewhat detached point-of-view that probably turned off filmgoers. Who cares? First Man is a thoughtful, moving film that takes a visceral approach to the challenges of traveling into outer space.

Much like The Right Stuff, First Man starts off by putting its protagonist in peril. Armstrong (Gosling) is testing the X-15 rocket-powered plane by pushing it and him to the absolute limits as he escapes the Earth’s atmosphere. It is a gripping, visceral experience punctuated by a brief break of serene beauty as he takes a moment to admire the view of our planet from such a great distance. This soon gives way to sweaty, white knuckled panic as he has trouble re-entering the atmosphere. Chazelle makes sure we experience it right along with Armstrong and it sets the tone for the rest of the film.

It’s 1961 and Armstrong and his wife Janet (Claire Foy) are dealing with the death of their young daughter Karen. The taciturn Armstrong internalizes his feelings in front of everyone, only grieving by himself in private. He processes her death and goes immediately back to work but the powers that be ground him. While dealing with paperwork he notices a pamphlet for Project Gemini, whose focus will be on space exploration. In 1962, he applies for and is accepted into the program. The rest of First Man chronicles his journey and some of the challenges he faced on the way to achieving his goal: landing on the Moon.

Unlike The Right Stuff, First Man plays the astronaut training scenes straight-faced with the physical exercises depicted as grueling affairs that best the most determined men, like Armstrong, and the most confident, like Ed White (Jason Clarke), who are all pushed to their physical and mental limits. He spends little screen-time on this aspect of the program as it has already been depicted numerous times before.

Chazelle makes interesting choices on how he depicts certain events, like how Ed tells Neil about their friend and fellow astronaut Elliot See (Patrick Fugit) dying in a jet crash. Instead of going for the obvious close-ups on anguished faces, he shoots both men silhouetted in the frame of Armstrong’s front door. They accept the news with no emotion having been trained to be cool under pressure but when Armstrong comes back into the kitchen with his wife and son, Gosling conveys the inner turmoil through his expressive eyes and how every facial muscle clenches as Armstrong fights to keep in the emotions he’s feeling about the death of one of his closest friends.

Most of the film is experienced through Armstrong’s perspective. When he goes up in the Gemini 8, Chazelle depicts it through his P.O.V., quite often showing us what he sees – a seemingly endless array of dials and switches and then cutting to close-ups of Armstrong’s face as he reacts to this extraordinary experience. Once the rocket launches, Chazelle bombards us with a cacophony of sights and sounds as the noisy rocket shakes and vibrates violently, escaping the Earth’s atmosphere in an incredibly intense sequence.

Chazelle ratchets up the tension even more when Armstrong’s spacecraft suddenly loses control and plummets via a violent continuous left roll towards the Earth. The G-forces cause his co-pilot to pass out and within seconds of passing out himself, Armstrong manages to gain control, which is conveyed in jarring close-ups and kinetic editing as Chazelle cuts from Armstrong’s panicked eyes to the various switches and mechanisms he utilizes to keep alive. Chazelle juxtaposes these intense moments of Neil at work with his downtime at home presented in elegiac fragments reminiscent of the family scenes in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (2011). They aren’t traditional scenes with a beginning, middle and ending, but rather snapshots of the Armstrong family dynamic.

Gosling is excellent, delivering a complex portrait of Neil Armstrong. He digs deep and shows the man’s private side, how he doesn’t show emotion to anyone, even, at times, his wife, preferring to express it alone. His generation saw emotion as a sign of weakness. Any private reservations he has he keeps to himself. This lack of communication comes to a head, however, on the eve of his mission to the Moon. Janet finally has had it and confronts him, forcing her husband to talk to their children about the danger of the mission. It might be the last time they see him and she wants Armstrong to let their children know that. He is not afraid of many things but having an open and honest conversation with his family terrifies him. Gosling is incredible in this scene as he conveys how uncomfortable Armstrong feels in this situation, answering his children’s questions like a press briefing as he doesn’t know any other way. Gosling conveys the emotions brimming under the surface in his eyes while his body language gives nothing else away. It is this unflappable nature that makes Armstrong a brilliant astronaut but not the greatest husband and father.

For all his stoicism, Chazelle shows a lighter side to Armstrong when he and his wife recount how he wrote lyrics in the vein of Gilbert and Sullivan to the faux disbelief of their friends as they all break up into laughter. This is an important scene as it humanizes Armstrong. This portrait of the man feels authentic but it isn’t very audience-friendly. He isn’t an easy person to relate to or like and Gosling’s natural charisma tempers this somewhat but he doesn’t try to go for the easy route nor does the film and make you like him. It forces the audience to meet him on his own terms, which probably hurt its commercial appeal.

Jason Clarke turns in another wonderfully solid performance as Ed White, Armstrong’s best friend and one of the few people able to penetrate the man’s stoic exterior. He’s an astronaut, too, so he knows what Armstrong is going through but even he can’t relate to the part of him that is still dealing with the death of a child. He is aware of his inscrutable nature and allows White in further than anyone else. After the death of See, Armstrong doesn’t want to let anyone else get too close as he knows how dangerous their job is and doesn’t want to mourn yet another person close to him. When one of their own dies on a mission they all think that could have been them. That’s the reality of their existence: there is always a high probability that they won’t come back and First Man shows how it affects Armstrong and his family.

The actual mission to the Moon is masterfully recreated with Chazelle capturing all the technical details while also allowing for a bit of artistic license that feels right and remains true to the spirit of Armstrong’s character as he finally gets closure on his daughter’s death. While there is a certain amount of tension conveyed in the actual landing on the Moon (they almost run out of fuel), Chazelle tempers this with the wonderment of being there in a way that has not been done before in a fictional film. Everything Armstrong has done in his life has prepared him for this moment and instead of underlining how momentous landing on the Moon was for the United States and for the world, the director opts for showing what it means to Armstrong.

In 2014, Damien Chazelle was approached by the producers Marty Bowen and Wyck Godfrey with the book, First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong by James R. Hansen they’d optioned for Universal Pictures. Initially, he had little interest in Armstrong or the space program and was unsure about doing an adaptation as well as something based on real life. Everything he had done before had been made up and personal. The more he read about the man, though, the more he was intrigued about the very private person that had experienced multiple tragedies, which included the loss of his home in a fire and the death of his daughter at age three. Chazelle was also able to find a personal connection – he could identify with the hard work it took to achieve something and realize a dream. He pitched First Man to Ryan Gosling but they started talking about La La Land instead and made that first. The director felt that both Gosling and Armstrong shared similar qualities: introverted, cool-under-pressure and men of few words. Working with the actor on La La Land and getting to know him personally confirmed that Gosling was right for the role.

Chazelle began looking for a screenwriter that could do the research needed and then transform it into a narrative. He met Josh Singer in 2015 and liked his passion for the project. While Chazelle was shooting La La Land, Singer worked on the script. For research, they visited NASA and met a few of the surviving astronauts like Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins as well as spending time with Neil’s wife, Janet.

As he began assembling his crew for the film, he sought out Nathan Crowley, the production designer on Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014), as he admired his practical approach: in-camera effects, miniatures, full-scale replicas, and lived-in sets. The look of the film was inspired by the archival materials that were uncovered during research and this included photographs the astronauts took in space, the LIFE magazine photos of the family, old home movies, photos the astronaut families shared, and seeing actual capsules. He also eschewed obvious themed films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Apollo 13 in favor of films like Battle of Algiers (1966) and The French Connection (1971) that opted for gritty realism. He ended up compiling a 300-page dossier of images that the crew nicknamed “The Notebook” (in reference to the Gosling film of the same name) that he could refer to during the 58-day shoot.

Chazelle worked hard to separate the man from the mythology and wanted to show his range of emotions. He was interested looking at Armstrong on the family level with his wife and children. He also wanted to depict lesser known aspects of Armstrong’s life, like how he almost died in the Lunar Landing Research Vehicle while training for the Moon landing. Chazelle also wanted to remind people “how dangerous that first era of space travel really was,” and “make it as scary and uncertain as it really was.”

During filming, Chazelle told his cinematographer Linus Sandgren, “imagine we’re a fly on the wall, carrying a camera, running and gunning with these astronauts.” He wanted to do as much “in camera” as possible and for the actors to see what the audience would see, so if they saw the Earth out a window it was on a 35-foot-tall, 65-foot-wide LED screen. To film the space flight sequences, visual effects supervisor Paul Lambert used the screen to project 90 minutes of digital imagery created for the film. A replica spacecraft was built and mounted on a gimbal and synchronized to move in sync with footage on the screen. This allowed the astronauts’ surroundings to be filmed in real time. The footage consisted of 20 cans of 70mm NASA footage that was discovered at the Marshall Space Center in Alabama that had not been viewed in decades as the equipment to project it no longer existed. The filmmakers digitally processed and cleaned up the footage and used it in the finished film. Other footage, like the Saturn V rocket falling away was done with models built at varying scales. No blue-screen or green-screen was used in any shot. Only 726 effects shots were added in post-production.

To stand in for the Moon, Chazelle and his team found the Vulcan Rock Quarry south of Atlanta. Crowley and his team sculpted five acres of it to replicate the Sea of Tranquility. Shooting on location, however, proved to be challenging. On the first day it snowed and the schedule was pushed back a week. The specially built lamp that was 15 feet long, 200,000 watts – the most powerful movie light ever built to simulate the sun – exploded and caught fire 30 minutes into shooting due to the freezing temperatures.

First Man received mostly positive critical notices. In his review for The New York Times, A. O. Scott felt that the film was "strangely underwhelming. It reminds you of an extraordinary feat and acquaints you with an interesting, enigmatic man. But there is a further leap beyond technical accomplishment – into meaning, history, metaphysics or the wilder zones of the imagination – that the film is too careful, too earthbound, to attempt." Entertainment Weekly gave the film "A-" and Chris Nashawaty wrote, "Where the film really comes alive, though, is when it leaves the ground and soars into the heavens with all of its terror, beauty, unpredictability, and majesty. You’ve never seen a movie that captures space flight with this degree of authenticity." The New Yorker's Anthony Lane wrote, "Instead, the movie seeks to remold its protagonist in the image of our own era; it tells us more about us than it does about him." In his review for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw wrote, "It is a movie packed with wonderful vehemence and rapture: it has a yearning to do justice to this existential adventure and to the head-spinning experience of looking back on Earth from another planet. There is a great shot of Armstrong looking down, stupefied, at the sight of his first boot-print on the moon dust, realising what that represents."

It is the emphasis on the intimate in favor of the epic that helps First Man stand out from other films of its ilk. We know the actual event’s place in history and Chazelle opts for telling a more personal story about the man, never losing sight of that right down to the understated yet moving conclusion as Janet meets her husband after he returns from the Moon. Hopefully, it will find a new life on home video and rekindle interest in space exploration, something that people used to dream about and has become forgotten over the years as we’ve become mired in a multitude of earthbound problems.

SOURCES

Davids, Brian. “How Damien Chazelle’s First Man Took a Page Out of Christopher Nolan’s Playbook.” The Hollywood Reporter. October 12, 2018.

Galloway, Stephen. “Damien Chazelle Shoots the Moon: Oscar’s Youngest Best Director Grows Up with First Man.” The Hollywood Reporter. August 22, 2018.

Rottenberg, Josh. “How First Man Director Damien Chazelle and His Visual Effects Team Took Moviegoers to the Moon.” Los Angeles Times. October 16, 2018.

Born on the Fourth of July

“When people say if you don’t love America, then get the hell out. Well, I love America, but when it comes to the government, it stops right there.” – Ron Kovic

Oliver Stone’s filmic prescience is widely regarded by critics, students and the public at large. It hit is apex with 1989’s Born on the Fourth of July, a cinematic crystal ball, which anticipated the rise of Donald Trump’s divisive “Make America Great Again” nationalism. Stone’s biopic traces the life of Ron Kovic (Tom Cruise), from his beginnings as the quintessential all-American boy proud eager to serve the country he loves and respects in the Vietnam War, to being a disillusioned veteran, paralyzed in battle and how it led to his anti-war activism. This film asks particularly difficult questions about what it means to be American and has become even more relevant today than the year it was released to critical and commercial success.

Ron Kovic’s voiceover narration establishes a picturesque childhood, he and his best friends play soldiers with other neighborhood kids. He grows up in the Norman Rockwell-esque small town America of the 1950s. Born on the Fourth of July is propaganda – but all is not what it appears; Stone cleverly subverts it, showing us little cracks in the idyllic façade. As a child, Ron idolizes the soldiers he sees with his family in a parade early on in the film. This is tempered when one soldier visibly winces at the sound of firecrackers and another is shown, arms lost in battle, a grim look on his face.

Stone’s multi-layered patriotic imagery during the opening credits sequence is bathed in a sun-kissed glow, courtesy of Robert Richardson’s stunning cinematography. Ron’s mother (Caroline Kava) even calls him her “little Yankee Doodle Boy.” This is the land of 4th of July fireworks, parades populated by beautiful cheerleaders and where Ron is an exceptional athlete, hitting an in-the-park home run as a boy. He lives in suburbia with a family that embodies the American Dream.

As a teenager, he excels in wrestling, being pushed to his limits by a coach whom has all the zeal of an army drill sergeant. It is in these early scenes that we see the Tom Cruise we all know – the ambitious go-getter, but Stone tempers this by showing Ron lose an important match in front of his classmates, friends, and family. His anguished expression – as boos ring out around him –foreshadows more painful defeats to come.

Ron’s hero worship of the military continues when he attends a presentation (a.k.a. a recruitment pitch) by the United States Marines at his school. There is delicious irony as Ron looks adoringly at the Marine speaking (played by none other than Tom Berenger) as if the actor’s demonic soldier from Platoon (1986) somehow survived, returning stateside to recruit young men to fight in the Vietnam War.

Ron buys into it, eager to serve his country as his father (Raymond J. Barry) did before him in World War II. He wants to go and fight in Vietnam and is even willing to die there (“I want to go to Vietnam – and I’ll die there if I have to). His life is playing out like a stereotypical Hollywood movie. He even rushes to the prom, in the rain, to declare his love for girl-next-door-eseque Donna (Kyra Sedgwick) as “Moon River” plays over the gymnasium speakers.

Ron’s idyllic youth comes to a violent end once we see him in ‘Nam, his platoon accidentally slaughtering an entire village. To make matters worse, he inadvertently shoots and kills one of his own soldiers. He tries to own up to it but his superior (John Getz) dismisses him. Where everything stateside was simple to understand – Ron always took for granted that he knew what was expected of him. Vietnam is chaotic and confusing, the enemy difficult to identify. As he did with Platoon, Stone immerses us in the sights and sounds of battle, albeit in a more stylized depiction. Here, he employs more slow-motion, filters, and skewed camera angles to show the disorienting effect of combat through Ron’s eyes.

He is wounded in battle and is shipped back to the Bronx Veterans Hospital where he finds out that he’s been paralyzed from the chest down. Despite the absolutely appalling conditions (rats scurrying between beds, interns shooting up in closets and Ron starring at his own vomit for hours), he still believes in the American Dream and is critical of the anti-war protestors he sees on television. He aggressively attacks physical therapy, refusing to accept the doctor’s diagnosis that he’ll never regain the use of his legs.

Cruise is particularly effective in these scenes as he conveys Ron’s gradual disillusionment with the system. He is slowly becoming dehumanized by the system that cares little about him. Government cutbacks result in poor conditions and treatment that Stone depicts in unflinching detail. Is this how our country honors those that put everything on the line to serve their country?

Ron’s homecoming is a heart-wrenchingly bittersweet one. On the surface, his family is happy to see him – the heartbreaking emotions swell under the surface, conveyed in his mother’s eyes when she embraces him, giving a brief, sad look that he is unable to see. While his father goes on about the changes he’s made to the bathroom to make it more accessible for his son, Ron only half-listens as he looks around his old bedroom, lingering on a photograph of himself during his wrestling days at high school. Stone shows Ron’s image reflected in the glass of the picture frame, visually giving us a before and after of this man’s life.

Ron quickly picks up on how differently people in the town look at him: “Sometimes I think people know you’re back from Vietnam and their face changes, their eyes, the voice, the way they look at you.” A family dinner breaks up when Ron’s brother (Josh Evans) leaves the table, unable to stomach his brother’s patriotic rant. He participates in a parade, much like the one he saw as a child and flinches at the sound of a firecracker, like the veterans he once saw, and this time is faced with angry protestors and other townsfolk; he begins to realize this is not his father’s war.

At the rally afterwards, Ron falters while making a patriotic speech as he experiences a flashback to ‘Nam. Confused, he is “rescued” by childhood friend and fellow veteran Timmy Burns (Frank Whaley). The relief that washes over him at the sight of a familiar face is palpable. The scene between the two men afterwards is quietly affecting as they share stories of their experiences on the battlefield. Timmy tells Ron about the headaches he has – “I don’t feel like me anymore” – and his frustration that the doctors don’t know how to help him. Cruise conveys incredible vulnerability as Ron regrets the mistakes he made in Vietnam, how he feels like a failure, and how badly he wants to regain the ability to walk. This scene features some particularly strong acting from both men, defining moments for both actors and the characters.

I like how Stone spends time showing the moments and events that happen to change Ron’s views of the war. It wasn’t just one incident but a series of them, most significantly an anti-war rally where we can see the change of his way of thinking play over his face. Without warning, cops move in and he watches, helplessly, as they beat protestors. At last, Ron breaks down in his parents’ home, getting into a shouting match with his mother as he finally lets out all of the anger and anguish built up inside him about the war. He’s approaching rock bottom and Cruise conveys Ron’s hurt in a raw and powerful way that is riveting to watch.

It isn’t until he goes to Mexico – in a dust-up with a group of veterans in a bordello – that Ron has an epiphany out in the desert with Charlie (Willem Dafoe), a fellow Vietnam vet. They get into a heated argument about how many babies they killed over there. Afterwards, exhausted, Ron says, “Do you remember things that made sense? Things you could count on before it all got so lost? What am I gonna do, Charlie?” This conversation, combined with visiting the graveside and confessing to the parents of the American soldier he accidentally killed (in a painful, gut-wrenching scene that Cruise gives everything he has), are the pivotal moments that transform him into being an anti-war activist.

When Ron emerges on the floor of the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, speaking out against the war and President Nixon administration, Ron has a cathartic moment, finally finding a way to channel his anger and frustration. Once removed from the convention, he’s almost arrested and roughed up, the police giving no consideration for his physical condition. Undaunted, he uses his military training to organize the protestors and continue on in a battle of a different kind.

One month after Ron Kovic gave a speech at the 1976 Democratic Convention, his book about his experiences before, during and after the Vietnam War was reviewed in The New York Times. It drew the attention of movie producer Martin Bregman who bought the rights to the book. He quickly realized that it didn’t have good commercial prospects as the subjects of Vietnam and life as a paraplegic being its focal points. Kovic then served as a consultant on a film about the same subject – Hal Ashby’s Coming Home (1978), starring Jon Voight, who won the Academy Award for his performance. Universal Studios – who were going to finance Born on the Fourth of July – pulled their money and support. No other studio was interested and no one wanted to direct it. All Bregman had was a screenplay written by a young Oliver Stone, who clearly identified with Kovic’s experiences: “My story and that of other vets is subsumed in Ron’s. We experience one war over there then came home and slammed our heads into another war of indifference…and we all came to feel we had made a terrible mistake.”

Bregman found German investors willing to put up money for pre-production, hired Dan Petrie (A Raison in the Sun) to direct, cast Al Pacino as Kovic, with Orion Pictures distributing the film. A few weeks before rehearsals were to begin, the foreign financing fell through and the rights reverted back to Universal. Pacino had second thoughts and left to make …And Justice For All (1979), leaving Bregman $1 million in the hole and Stone depressed, his script without a home. The latter promised Kovic that one day they’d make this film together and became a filmmaker in his own right.

While Stone wrote the script for Wall Street (1987), Tom Pollock, then-president of Universal, took a look at the filmmaker’s script for Born on the Fourth of July and realized, “it was one of the great unmade screenplays of the past 15 years.” He told Stone that the studio would make it for $14 million and a major movie star as Kovic. After making Platoon, Stone considered rewriting a script from 1971 based loosely on his own experiences returning home from Vietnam but put it aside in favor of Kovic’s story, which he felt had broader appeal.

Stone and Kovic considered Sean Penn, Charlie Sheen, Nicolas Cage, and ultimately went with Tom Cruise. Stone met with him and told the actor he needed a movie star to play Kovic and had a small budget to make it. Cruise, who had wanted to work with Stone, accepted the challenge. He was drawn to the film as he felt it was a personal passion project for Stone: “I thought it was almost his life story, too, his Coming Home.”

The young actor identified with Kovic’s working class ethic and his drive to become the best: “I grew up hearing ‘no’s and can’ts’, but I pushed myself forward, always looking ahead so I wouldn’t get stuck.” Stone was drawn to Cruise’s all-American boy image: “I thought it was an interesting proposition: What would happen to Tom Cruise if something goes wrong?” Furthermore, “I sensed with Tom a crack in his background, some kind of unhappiness, that he had seen some kind of trouble. And I thought that trouble could be helpful to him in dealing with the second part of Ron’s life.”

Bregman felt that Cruise was a safe choice and not strong enough an actor for the tough material. Initially, Kovic agreed until he met Cruise: “I felt an instant rapport with him that I never experienced with Pacino.” The two men talked for hours and Kovic got very emotional. He remembered, “I felt like a burden was lifted, that I was passing all this on to Tom. I knew he was about to go to Vietnam, to the dark side, in his own way.” The actor remembers meeting the man he would play on film and how he “really opened up to me.” Cruise knew this would be a daunting role and felt ready after making The Color of Money (1986) with Martin Scorsese and Rain Man (1988) with Barry Levinson. “I made it work one day at a time. If I looked at the mountain, it was just too high.”

Stone wasn’t immediately convinced: “Tom was cocky, sure he could handle everything. But I wasn’t so sure…He was shaky at first, but we shot in continuity as much as possible to show how, step by step, he began to understand.” To prepare for the role, Kovic took Cruise to veterans’ hospitals where he spent days talking and working with paraplegics. He hung out with Kovic in a wheelchair until it became second nature. Cruise also read many books about the war, including Kovic’s diary. Stone brought in his trusted military adviser Dale Dye to work with Cruise and the cast on two separate week-long training missions. Dye remembered that he “treated him no differently than I treated anybody else…A big part of it was, of course, helping Tom Cruise get the mentality he needed for the film.” They had to dig their own foxholes and live in them as well as learn to handle a variety of weapons. Stone also brought in Abbie Hoffman to talk to the cast about the peace movement in the 1960s. The legendary activist even has a cameo in the film.

Principal photography was a grueling 65-day shoot with 15,000 extras and 160 speaking roles. Dallas doubled for both Long Island and Mexico. The production shot 10-12 hours a day in 100-degree heat. At one point, Cruise got sinusitis. Several crew members fainted in the extreme climate. At one point, Stone became quite sick. Focused on the film, he ignored the symptoms until they got in the way of his work. He went to a local hospital in Dallas, underwent a panel of tests and was given medicine. His condition, however, only worsened. The film’s production coordinator called a local physician who had treated other crew members. He recognized Stone’s symptoms as an allergic reaction to a particular kind of pollen common in Dallas at that time of year.

Stone challenged his crew to duplicate Long Island in Dallas on a small budget. Several blocks of houses were given new looks and landscaped to recreate Massapequa, 1957. Principal photography began in October 1988 with the successful transformation of a southeast section of the city into a Long Island neighborhood. Born on the Fourth of July also saw Stone, for the first time, experiment with several different kinds of film stocks: 16mm, Super 16 and 35mm. He combined footage shot for the film with grainy, archival footage that was originally shot for network news in ’72 to recreate the veterans demonstrating at the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach. This certainly wouldn’t be the last time as he continued to do so with The Doors (1991), JFK (1991), Natural Born Killers (1994), Nixon (1995), and U Turn (1997).

Filming went on hiatus for the Christmas holidays, giving Stone an opportunity to edit sections of the film. He realized that his vision for Born on the Fourth of July had expanded and he would need to shoot more footage than budgeted. Stone went to Pollock and told him he needed an additional $3.8 million. The studio executive was hesitant but after the director showed him some edited sequences, he was given the money and allowed to go ten minutes over the running time that was in his contract.

Cruise had a particularly tough time with the scene where a sexually impotent Kovic pays to be with a Mexican prostitute. Stone remembers the actor’s shyness:

“We just kept shooting, working up to the place where Tom cries, thinking about everything he’ll miss – certainly not from the joy of sex. On one take, something happened inside him. Those tears came from someplace in Tom.”

Cruise remembered, “I went to Oliver and I said, ‘I’m just not there. It’s just not working.’ I remember feeling a lot of anxiety actually.” Stone told him to just do the scene and not think about it. The actor did it and, in the process, learned to let go. The two men clashed occasionally: “Tom is macho, aggressive, male and he wants the best. Perfection is his goal and if he doesn’t achieve it, his frustration is high.” Stone also clashed with the studio, nervous about the film’s commercial prospects so he and Cruise gave up their salaries for a percentage of the profits – a gamble that paid off exponentially.

Kovic was so impressed by Cruise’s performance that on the last day of filming he gave the actor his Bronze Star that he won in Vietnam. For Stone, he wanted the film to “show America, and Tom, and through Tom, Ron being put in a wheelchair, losing their potency. We wanted to show America being forced to redefine its concept of heroism.”

More conflicts arose between Stone and the studio during post-production. When it came to editing the film, Stone felt that the ending needed to be reshot and he also wanted John Williams to score the film. Cruise and Pollock agreed about reshooting the ending but the executive did not want to spend the extra money required to get Williams. In addition, he wanted to move up the release date to Veterans Day instead of Christmas. This enraged Stone and he went to Mike Ovitz, then-head of Creative Artists Agency, who wielded great power in Hollywood, and got him involved. After a meeting with Pollock, Stone agreed to shoot a new ending and Pollock agreed to both keep the original release date and pay to have Williams create the score. Stone remembers, “It left a lot of bad blood. I didn’t continue to work with Universal.”

Born on the Fourth of July received mixed to positive reviews at the time. Roger Ebert gave the film four out of four stars and wrote, “It is not a movie about battle or wounds or recovery, but a movie about an American who changes his mind about the war…This is a film about ideology, played out in the personal experiences of a young man who paid dearly for what he learned.” Pauline Kael was much more dismissive: “Born on the Fourth of July is like one of those commemorative issues of Life – this one covers 1956 to 1976. Stone plays bumper cars with the camera and uses cutting to jam you into the action, and you can’t even enjoy his uncouthness, because it’s put at the service of sanctimony.” In his review for The New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote, “It’s the most ambitious non-documentary film yet made about the entire Vietnam experience. More effectively than Hal Ashby’s Coming Home and even Michael Cimino’s Deer Hunter, it connects the war of arms abroad with the war of conscience at home.”

Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman gave the film a “C+” rating and wrote, “Tom Cruise tries hard, yet he’s fatally miscast: He simply doesn’t have the emotional range to play a character wallowing in grubby desperation.” In his review for the Washington Post, Hal Hinson wrote, “Born on the Fourth of July is nettlesome work. Stone has gifts as a filmmaker, but subtlety is not one of them. In essence, he’s a propagandist, and, as it turns out, the least effective representative for his point of view.” Finally, Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers wrote, “Stone has found in Cruise the ideal actor to anchor the movie with simplicity and strength. Together they do more than show what happened to Kovic. Their fervent, consistently gripping film shows why it still urgently matters.”

There are people that are patriotic and those that are nationalistic fused with fascism, twisted into something so ugly that it doesn’t resemble what would be called patriotism, to spawn the bastardization of what passes for democracy today. This film wrestles with the definition of patriotism. The power of constitutional rights – most pointedly, the right to assemble and freedom of speech – are both key to our understanding about what it means to be American. It is not un-American to be critical of the country when it has become an unjust place, when the landscape has become an inhospitable place no longer nurturing the ideals upon which it was founded.

Within the fabric of Born on the Fourth of July lies hope. We hope that Kovic is not representing the lone man but the everyman. Hopefully, we will all wake up to what is really happening, pick ourselves up and enact change. This film is a rallying cry that needs to be sounded again, repeatedly, unrelenting in its echo.

SOURCES

Chutkow, Paul. “The Private War of Tom Cruise.” The New York Times. December 17, 1989.

Dutka, Elaine. “The Latest Exorcism of Oliver Stone.” Los Angeles Times. December 17, 1989.

Gabriel, Trip. “Cruise at the Crossroads.” Rolling Stone. January 11, 1990.

O’Riordan, James. Stone: A Biography of Oliver Stone. Aurum Press. 1996.

Ressner, Jeffrey. “Breaking Conventions.” DGA Quarterly. Fall 2012.

Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones

The first time I ever heard of Jim Jones and the tragic events of Jonestown was from the absolutely gripping episode of In Search Of…, a television series that investigated controversial and memorable historical figures, and paranormal phenomena, hosted by Leonard Nimoy from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. The eyewitness accounts and actual news footage taken before and after the mass murder of 909 people on November 18, 1978 at the direction of and orders from their leader, Jones, was disturbing, even more so because it actually happened.

It didn’t take long for a fictionalized account of what went down to be made, entitled, Guyana: Crime of the Century (1979), a Mexican exploitation movie starring Stuart Whitman, Gene Barry and Joseph Cotton. The next year, a classier, more fact-based docudrama was made. Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones was a T.V. miniseries based on Charles A. Krause’s book, Guyana Massacre: The Eyewitness Account and starred Powers Boothe as Jones. It chronicled the man’s journey from devoutly religious child growing up in Indiana to fanatical cult leader in Guyana.

The story begins with Jones (Boothe) testing his followers’ loyalty while Congressman Leo J. Ryan (Ned Beatty) plans to fly down to Guyana and investigate reports that some of his followers are being mistreated and others being held against their will. Jones is told of Ryan’s impending arrival and flashes back to his childhood. This miniseries attempts to dig deep and show his early adoption of The Bible as a way to live his life. It also provides salvation from a dysfunctional household where his strict father (Ed Lauter) abused his mother (Diane Ladd) until she took her son and left.

Jones grows up to be a preacher, standing up to a racist barber that refuses to cut the hair of a little African-American boy. He espouses that everyone is equal in the eyes of God. He is soon put in charge of a struggling congregation consisting mostly of a few elderly parishioners and literally going door-to-door asking people to come to his church. It works and Jones has a racially integrated congregation at a time and in a place where that was vehemently objected to by some.

He eventually forms the Peoples Temple, a venue where he can preach his progressive views. Boothe is excellent in these early scenes as a straight arrow that faithfully believes in religion and its ability to bring everyone together regardless of color. He’s also a great salesman, using his charisma to not only attract people to his church but also get them to contribute financially or donate items. Jones genuinely cares about people, feeding and educating them as well as the community at large.

Jones meets with Father Divine (James Earl Jones), a spiritual leader that believed he was God, and who is doing what he’s doing only much more successful at it. Their brief meeting is a revelation for Jones and shows him a way to build up his congregation: he must develop a bigger personality and be so charismatic that people are willing to do anything and give everything for him. It is the beginning of the Jim Jones cult of personality.

Guyana Tragedy takes the time to show why so many people believed so devoutly in Jones. Initially, he honestly wanted to and did help people but the bigger his congregation got, the tougher it became to do everything he wanted to do. He began to rely on drugs to keep his energy up but he also staged fake faith healings and cheated on his wife (Veronica Cartwright) only to rationalize away these things by saying that he was close to a “vision of life everlasting,” claiming that he was “The Chosen One.”

Anybody who knows anything about Jones’ story knows that everything that happens before Jonestown is prologue, anticipating the centerpiece of the miniseries when Jones and his people move to Guyana and make a go of it, building an agrarian society. It is a disturbing testimony to Jones’ hold on that many people that he was able to convince them to start a new life with him in a foreign country.

The last hour shows how things go from bad to worse in Jonestown. His followers work long, grueling hours while Jones tells them the “news” from around the world over a loudspeaker. The attractive young women are drugged and have sex with him. He then dissolves all marriages among his followers and pairs them up himself. Jones believes he has created a utopia but it’s actually hell on earth.

Powers Boothe excels at Jones’ fiery preaching style, delivering the man’s sermons with a conviction and intensity that is something to behold. During these sermons, the actor adopts a kind of seductive purr in his voice as he woos his congregation and then brings a powerful intensity when Jones gets worked up with his fire and brimstone rhetoric. It is fascinating to see how he works a room in such a dynamic fashion. The actor does a masterful job of showing Jones’ gradual shift in ideology, from idealistic symbol of change to an increasingly paranoid man with a messiah complex. He is absolutely riveting in his depiction of Jones’ descent into paranoid delusions, convinced that the CIA is plotting against and spying on him.

The cast is an embarrassment of riches featuring the likes of Brad Dourif as a junkie that is taken in by Jones and Diana Scarwid as his desperate wife that find salvation with the Peoples Temple. Veronica Cartwright plays Jones’ long-suffering wife that is first to recognize and call him on his changes in attitude and behavior but ultimately remains loyal to him. Meg Foster and Randy Quaid show up in minor roles as loyal employees of Jones’ day-to-day operations that have a change of heart when he keeps their child from them, claiming the boy to be his own. These talented actors enter and exit Boothe’s orbit throughout the show, playing well off of him, helping paint a portrait of a complex man.

Originally, director William A. Graham approached Tommy Lee Jones to play Jim Jones but he was busy filming Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) and was unable to do it. Someone recommended then-relatively unknown actor Powers Boothe who got the part. To research the role, the actor interviewed former Peoples Temple members and watched any footage of Jones that was available. He asked former followers, mostly women, why Jones attracted so many people to his cause: “The answer I heard most was that Jones had more sex appeal than any man they’d ever seen.” Boothe has said that he approached the role as if he was playing King Lear and with his portrayal, set out to avoid the cliché vision of Jones as “a maniacal ogre. Wrong. He was charming, sweet and a fabulous speaker. If someone chooses to take that power, he can lead a lot of lambs to slaughter.”

There was an infamous sign displayed prominently in Jonestown that said, “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” It is an important reminder that we cannot let mad men like Jones run rampant. One of the lessons to be learned from Jonestown is that we must be vigilant against cults that are harmful under the guise of helping people in the name of God.

The last few minutes of Jonestown are as harrowing as you’d expect, but ultimately nothing is as horrific as the real thing and that is the problem that all dramatizations of Jonestown face. No matter how faithful a recreation it will always pale to what actually happened as the chilling newsreel footage and photographs of what went down there in that In Search Of… episode powerfully demonstrate. Like any good historical biopic should do, it is a good jumping off point for one to do their own research and dig deeper into the subject if they are so inclined. That being said, this does nothing to diminish Boothe’s powerhouse performance as Jones. He commits completely to the role and brings the man vividly to life.

SOURCES

Patches, Matt. “Q&A: Powers Boothe on Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, Deadwood, and His Heavy Career.” Grantland. August 22, 2014.

Scott, Vernon. “The Rev. Jim Jones Haunts Actor.” The Hollywood Reporter. May 27, 1987.

Sheff, David. “An Unknown Actor Re-Creates the Horror of Jonestown and Makes His Name: Powers Boothe.” People. April 20, 1980.