THE PUBLIC LIFE OF EMILIO ESTEVEZ

Emilio Estevez remains one of the biggest movie stars of his generation, adored by Gen-Xers for The Outsiders, Repo Man, The Breakfast Club, Stakeout, St Elmo’s Fire and Young Guns and by their kids for the Mighty Ducks franchise. Twenty years ago, he cashed in his stardom to forge a career making a rare kind of modern film – the heartfelt, humanistic drama, once common amongst Hollywood’s output but now too indie-minded for corporate L.A. Bobby (2006), The Way (2010) and his latest, a crowd-pleasing study in civil disobedience called The Public, are the works of…well, an outsider. He has never been to Australia, much to his regret (“Every time I get invited, it's work-related and they want to get you in and out quickly”) but he was happy to phone in to talk at length with SCREEN-SPACE about his latest film, it’s depiction of America’s homeless population and the changing role that public librarians play in maintaining his homeland’s fragile democracy…

SCREEN-SPACE: You excel at directing the socially conscious film, like Bobby, The Way and now The Public. Cinema is still a very important forum, an important art form, for you, isn’t it?

ESTEVEZ: It is. It has the ability to change minds and hearts and educate, as well as entertain. What other venue can you sit in the dark for two hours and ask to have your attention be held? Great leaders and speakers can barely do that. I think that film is an art form that is under siege right now, especially independent film. It's trying to find its way again, and I believe it will. I just think that there's so many different delivery systems now that filmmakers are having to adapt to and [they] may not like how they're having to adapt to it. We all come from a generation where seeing your movie on the big screen was the ultimate prize for a filmmaker and that may not be the case anymore, right? I'm not big on sitting in front of a small screen and watching much these days. I love the theatre experience. I love going to the movies and sitting in the dark with a bunch of strangers. There's nothing like it.

SCREEN-SPACE: You grew up alongside artists and storytellers and activists that the rest of us look to; your father, of course, and the likes of Mr. Coppola and Mr. Hughes. Who have been the storytellers that inspire you today?

ESTEVEZ: I love the films of Paul Thomas Anderson. I think he's a terrific storyteller. He always puts characters and people first, and the bulk of my work in the last 20 years has been all about that. Character-driven, actor-driven. I respond to filmmakers who haven't lost that sense of humanity, haven't lost their sense of storytelling. So I'm drawn to actors' directors. Scorsese is still somebody who I think makes extraordinary films and movies that I want to see. (Pictured above; Estevez as librarian Stuart Goodson in The Public)

SCREEN-SPACE: The Way came out at the height of an America that was full of Obama-inspired hope and optimism. In 2019, things such as understanding and empathy aren't…on-trend, let's say, under the current administration. Has selling a film like The Public been tougher this time around?

ESTEVEZ: Yeah. It's a film that's decidedly uncynical, that speaks to a gentler pace, to compassion. And it has come out in a very noisy world, a confusing time, [that] we've not seen in this country in over 150 years. So to make a movie that is about hope and compassion was, yeah, I think it's a tough sell. Unfortunately. Sadly.

SCREEN-SPACE: What did you have to get right about your depiction of civil disobedience?

ESTEVEZ: I grew up under a roof with somebody who is very, very active. My father's been arrested 68 times. And all for acts of civil disobedience - anti-nuclear rallies, immigration rallies, issues regarding homelessness and the environment. While I was exposed to it, I didn't fully understand what he was doing, spiritually, until I started working on The Public. And then it all started to make sense to me as to why he was doing what he was doing and why he couldn't say no. Why he couldn't be complicit in the policies that were cruel. I understood it on a much deeper, more spiritual level after getting involved in the film. Which is why that act of civil disobedience at the end of the film, is such an unexpected moment. And as we've screened the film here in the States so many times ... I went on a 35-city tour of the film. The audience never sees the end coming. Ever. They anticipate that it's going to end up in a bloodbath, but, in fact, it ends with an act of love. (Pictured, above; Alec Baldwin as Det Ramstead in The Public)

SCREEN-SPACE: And what needed to be most honest about the way homeless life was portrayed?

ESTEVEZ: It was important not to stereotype them, to give them a depth and a character and make sure that they were humanized. In my research, there was a self-effacing nature to many of the homeless that I talked to, who said, "This is where I am in my life, and I have hope that it will turn around, and here's how I arrived here, and I'm not proud of it." They were very honest and truthful in sharing their personal stories.

SCREEN-SPACE: You draw extraordinary performances from Michael K. Williams (pictured, above; with Estevez), Alec Baldwin and my favourite actress, Jena Malone. Your entire ensemble is remarkably natural…

ESTEVEZ: Thank you. What's interesting is a lot of these actors were not friends of mine before starting the film, so they weren't in my Rolodex. And often times, we would meet on the day, on the set. And that's very ... it's a little unsettling. You're hoping that your conversations on the phone have landed, that you see eye-to-eye on the character, and you're not going to be spending a whole lot of time rewriting the scenes on the day, because that eats up your time. So for us, we were very fortunate that all of the pieces of the puzzle fit together beautifully, because we shot the film in 22 days.

SCREEN-SPACE: How do the added duties of the indie filmmaker sit with you - finding financing, traveling with the film, having to talk to people like me in Sydney?

ESTEVEZ: I think that these days, there is so much noise and so much competition for people's attention. And with a film that didn't have a hundred-million-dollar budget or a big studio behind it needed as much advocacy as possible. And by going out and screening the film, not only to librarians but to homeless advocacy groups, at film festivals, and stopping in those regions, as we travelled around and across the country, where people from Hollywood don't normally stop, and bringing the movie to the people. And that was in the spirit of the film, but also necessary. (Pictured, above; Jena Malone as Myra in The Public)

THE PUBLIC premieres on DVD/Blu-ray and digital platforms in Australia this week via Rialto Distribution; check local schedules for release details in other territories.

PENNY MARSHALL AND THE BEAUTY OF BIG

Post-2000, the typical Hollywood slate – comic book pics, YA franchise gambles, teen vampire romances, PG horror – has not suited the storytelling skills of Penny Marshall. The director, who passed away overnight aged 75, found occasional gigs on the small screen; her last directing credit was a 2011 episode of The United States of Tara. But in the mid 1980s, when studios developed a broad roster of projects with both commercial and critical ambitions, Penny Marshall became an overnight sensation when her second feature delivered on both. That film, in every sense of the word, was Big.

Penny Marshall had directed a few episodes of her iconic TV series Laverne & Shirley (1976-1983) and ceded control of the comedy Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) to Francis Ford Coppola when 20^th Century Fox recruited her to rescue the Whoopi Goldberg vehicle Jumpin’ Jack Flash in late 1985. Director Howard Zieff (The Main Event, 1979; Private Benjamin, 1980) had been removed and Marshall would be stepping into a shoot behind schedule and leaking money. Her sitcom training and natural comic timing ensured Jumpin’ Jack Flash sped to the finish line and became a sleeper hit for the studio.  

Marshall was rewarded with her choice of projects and zeroed in on a fantasy/comedy script about a young boy who wishes himself into adulthood. Big had been written by Anne Spielberg as a project for her brother Steven to develop with Harrison Ford attached, but their workloads meant the Fox property languished. Oscar-winning industry heavyweight James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, 1983), a staple at the studio with film (Broadcast News, 1987) and television (The Tracey Ullman Show; The Simpsons) works in development, brought the screenplay to Marshall. She warmed to it immediately, and began a casting search for the role of 12 year-old Josh Baskin (pictured, from left; Marshall with actors Jared Rushton and David Moscow)

Marshall’s attachment to the resurgent production meant the Fox brass started to weigh in on key pre-production decision-making. Marshall toyed with a rewrite that made the lead character female, hoping to cast Debra Winger (with whom she had almost shot her aborted Peggy Sue… project). When this proved unworkable, the casting call went out Hollywood’s biggest stars, including Bill Murray, Jeff Bridges, Robin Williams, Michael Keaton, Judge Reinhold, Albert Brooks, Dennis Quaid, Sean Penn, Gary Busey and Steve Guttenberg. Marshall zeroed in on two favourites, both of which were nixed by the studio – John Travolta, who was in the worst box office slump of his career, and Robert De Niro, America’s greatest living actor (and dear friend of Marshall) though untested as a comedy lead (pictured, left; Tom Hanks as Josh Baskin in Big)

Instead, the studio and their director decided to hold out for Tom Hanks, who had hit big with Bachelor Party and Splash (both 1984), though had lost momentum after a string of underperformers (The Man With One Red Shoe, 1985; Volunteers, 1985; The Money Pit, 1986; Nothing in Common, 1986). With young David Moscow cast as boy Josh (outfitted with contact lenses to match Hanks’ eye colour), support players Elizabeth Perkins, John Heard, Mercedes Ruehl and Robert Loggia adding dramatic heft onscreen and top-tier talent such as DOP Barry Sonnenfeld, composer Howard Shore and writer Gary Ross (who did a WGA-recognised polish on the script) in the mix, the US$18million film began shooting at locations in New York City and New Jersey in mid-1987, eyeing the prime summer release date of June 3, 1988 (pictured, from left; Marshall, DOP Barry Sonnenfeld and Hanks on-set).

Marshall has been forthright about her anxiety during the shoot. Dailies were certainly supporting the decision to cast Hanks; the now iconic scene in which he and Loggia dance on the giant piano keys had Fox executives thrilled. The comedic chemistry between Hanks and Jared Rushton, cast as Josh’s boyhood friend Billy and the only character in on Josh’s secret, was plainly evident. But the director spent much of the shoot diplomatically fending of studio interference, most notably their insistence that love-interest Susan, played by Elizabeth Perkins, make the journey back to childhood with Josh in the film’s final scenes.

Several of the film’s biggest laughs were workshopped/improvised, such as Billy and adult Josh’s classic silly-string fight or Hanks chewing on a baby-corn cob; the ‘Shimmy Shimmy Coco-Pop’ song was entirely Hanks’ idea, inspired by a tune his own kids came home from summer camp humming. Marshall had no idea if they would cut into the finished film at all, leaving her to ponder its potential as a ‘laughless comedy’.

To further complicate principal photography, four other ‘body-swap’ storylines hit theatres while Big was in production – in order of release, Like Father Like Son (1987), with Dudley Moore and Kirk Cameron; the Italian comedy, Da Grande (1987); Fred Savage and Judge Reinhold in Vice Versa! (1988);and, 18 Again (1988) with Charlie Schlatter and George Burns. Each was met with middling critical and commercial interest, ensuring further concerns for Marshall and her producers.

In hindsight, any concern was unwarranted. Big became one of 1988’s biggest hits, earning US$114million domestically (in 2018 dollars, a whopping US$243million) and placing it as the years’ #4 box-office earner, behind Rain Man, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Coming to America. It was record-setting triumph for Penny Marshall; her comedy was the first film directed by a woman to break the US$100million barrier and would earn Academy Award nominations for Hanks in the Best Actor category and for its Original Screenplay. In 2000, the American Film Institute included Big on its ‘100 Years…100 Laughs’ list, honouring the best American comedies of all time (pictured, above; from, left, Marshall, Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks).

In an interview with The Washington Post following the film’s release, Penny Marshall was typically acerbic about her beloved comedy classic. "I hated it for a long time," she says. "You go through different phases, so I'm told. 'Oh, God. What did I do here? What is this? This is crap.' And then your saving grace is you see it with an audience. They give you feedback and they give you the energy to go on."

A NIGHT TO REMEMBER: THE STEVE DE JARNATT INTERVIEW

The defining elements of Steve De Jarnatt’s 1988 feature Miracle Mile could just as easily condemned it to Netflix oblivion, instead of the deserved cult status it enjoys. The central romance between nebbish muso Anthony Edwards (pictured, below) and sweet diner waitress Mare Winningham is achingly pure, as only a ‘Hughes-era’ love story could be. And the threat to their dreamlike eternal togetherness – an impending thermonuclear ‘doomsday’ – seems as 80’s as shoulder pads. But the director’s second (and, to date, last) film boasts a legion of fans, who have hailed the long-overdue HD-remastered Blu-ray release; the pre-dawn hues and eerie expanses of an ethereally ambient downtown LA have been beautifully re-energised for collectors of unique American genre works. “I think if I had not held to my vision,” De Jarnatt tells SCREEN-SPACE, “no one would be watching it today…”

Miracle Mile was written in the late 1970’s, when Cold War tensions were rife and nuclear winters were a real threat. “Let’s say I had nightmares that needed to be purged,” says De Jarnatt (pictured, below). “The project definitely was my reaction to a childhood indoctrination into the inevitability of total nuclear annihilation. ‘Duck, roll, and cover’ [was] a mantra at school from an early age, being taught that we would just dust the radiation off the canned goods in the bomb shelter and live to fight the commies another day.”

The script was highly regarded amongst the studio execs of the day, but the fatalistic trajectory of the narrative and the unproven commerciality of nuclear disaster movies stalled a greenlight. “To me, it was a given that this dire outcome would be followed through with to the end in the film,” De Jarnatt recalls, citing such brooding classics as Peter Weir’s The Last Wave, William Friedkin’s Sorcerer and the Nathanael West novel Day of The Locust as inspirations. “It was never going to be about stopping things, and not really about escaping. There is no such thing.”

Instead, the story would combine the ticking-clock tension of a high-stakes thriller with the inevitability of a grand, doomed romance. “What can you do to find some grace and meaning in the last few minutes of humanity? [Accept] love,” says the director, who chose the iconic La Brea tar pits to bookend his protagonist’s journey. “Two people meet among the extinct species of the [La Brea] museum and at the end, they are perhaps going to be dug up to be put on display in some future museum. At least that semblance of a sort of immortality is all you can hope for.”

After Jane Alexander’s Oscar-nominated turn in Lyne Littman’s nuclear war drama Testament and the social phenomenon that was Nicholas Meyer’s TV movie The Day After, the Miracle Mile script was given priority and Steve De Jarnatt's vision neared a shooting date. But the defiantly unconventional story structure and that ending were still causing sleepless nights among the suits at Hemdale, the now defunct independent studio that had backed such auteur-driven hits as The Terminator, Platoon, River’s Edge and Salvador. “The setting up of all the diner characters then never cutting away to their story to see if they made it out of town breaks a lot of rules of drama,” admits De Jarnatt. “And I did spend eight years struggling to keep this ending, [which] was deliberately subversive.  Some viewers cannot believe a film was allowed to end this way.”

Final say fell to Hemdale boss John Daly, who struggled with early cuts of the film. It took some minor reshoots but, says De Jarnatt, “finally he thoroughly embraced the darkness of the film.” An alternate ending was conceived, where the white light at the end coalesced into two animated diamonds that spun away (it can be seen on the extensive Blu-ray extras). But the studio head, now firmly on board with the director’s vision, would not allow such a concession. Recalls De Jarnatt, “Mr Daly actually said, ‘That’s too upbeat, let’s rip their hearts out!’ You do not find such adventurous film titans today, I guarantee you.” (Picture, left; the director on the 'La Brea Tar Pit' set)

Miracle Mile found much love from critics; Roger Ebert compared it to Martin Scorsese’s own nocturnal odyssey, After Hours, stating, “Both show a city at night, sleeping, dreaming, disoriented, while a character desperately tries to apply logic where it will not work.” (Notes De Jarnatt, “I had the whole film storyboarded before After Hours, which does have a similar looping inevitability that traps its anti-hero. But that makes a nice double bill.”) But a May 19, 1989 release date in a scant 143 theatres, at a time when the US summer movie season would not launch in earnest until a week later with Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade, meant Miracle Mile would only muster a total theatrical gross of US$1.15million. (Pictured, below; De Jarnatt with the Miracle Mile storyboards).

Despite its under-the-radar theatrical run, a new generation of critics have embraced it - in June 2014, Slant magazine said, “If the mainstream cinema of the Reagan era was intended as a soporific for the agitated masses, Miracle Mile was a small part of the wake-up call”; in 2011, Sound on Sight called the denouement, “one of the ten greatest endings of all time.” Humbled that his film has proved so enduring, Steve De Jarnatt believes the M.A.D. principles that calmed the global population three decades ago are now more tenuous than ever. “The scenario in the film is actually much more likely tonight than back the 80s,” he opines. “Missiles are still primed and pointed. I do have a fatalistic view that until an accident or God forbid, a terrorist act does occur, we cannot really fathom what would be involved, the scale and carnage.” 

Having also suffered distribution woes with Orion’s botched release of his debut film, the Melanie Griffith sci-fier Cherry 2000, the non-response to Miracle Mile was a further disappointment. But despite not directing another feature, Steve De Jarnatt has no regrets. “I do wish I could CGI a few hair styles in the film,” he laughs, “but other than that, [given] the US$3.7million below-the-line budget we had, I’m very proud of what was accomplished by all the talent on the film.” He worked non-stop within the Hollywood system from the early 1990’s; his writing credits include The X-Files (Season 2 fan favourite, ‘Fearful Symmetry’) and American Gothic, while his diverse directing skills were utilised on such small-screen hits as E.R., Nash Bridges, Strong Medicine and Lizzie Maguire. (Pictured,above; co-stars Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham)

“People sometimes think I have been slighted somehow, never making another film,” he says, “but that was more by choice. I turned down several more and didn’t want to go broke putting it all on the line again on my own films.” He has turned to the halls of academia, teaching at Ohio University and has found a new following as one of America’s leading short-story authors; his work ‘Rubiaux Rising’ made The Best American Short Stories, 2009. “It is nice to not have to worry about budget and scale and just tell stories,” he says.

MIRACLE MILE is available on Blu-ray and DVD via US distributor Kino Lorber.