On this episode, film critic and historian Edward A. Havens III begins a two-part look back at the 1980s films of one of cinema's truly gifted storytellers, John Sayles.
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We talk about his beginnings in upstate New York, his college years, where he would meet several of his regular future collaborators, his early career as an author, his time as a screenwriter for the legendary film producer Roger Corman, and into the first three movies of his filmmaking career.
The movies discussed in this episode include:
Alligator (1980, Lewis Teague)
Baby, It's You (1983, John Sayles)
Battle Beyond the Stars (1980, Jimmy T. Murikami)
The Big Chill (1983, Lawrence Kasdan)
E.T. The Extraterrestrial (1982, Steven Spielberg)
The Lady in Red (1979, Lewis Teague)
Lianna (1983, John Sayles)
Piranha (1978, Joe Dante)
Poltergeist (1982, Tobe Hooper)
The Return of the Secaucus 7 (1980, John Sayles)
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On this episode, we will explore the 1980s career of one of cinema’s true master storytellers, John Sayles.
If you are familiar with the works of John Sayles, you probably know most of what I’m about to talk about. But if you’re not, I encourage you to start taking notes now, because once you hear the list of the films he’s worked on, and the actors he’s worked with, you’re going to want to seek out his films.
John Thomas Sayles was born in Schenectady, New York, in the fall of 1950, the son of a a school teacher and a school administrator. He would come of age during the turbulent late 1960s, which would forever inform his world view and writings. After graduating from high school, he would attend Williams College, a private liberal arts college in Williamstown MA, the second oldest institute of higher education in the state after Harvard.
Sayles would excel in his studies, getting a B.A. in psychology in 1972, and it would be at Williams where he would meet three of his closest friends and regular collaborators, actors Gordon Clapp and David Straithairn, and producer Maggie Renzi. You know Clapp best as Detective Medavoy on NYPD Blue, while Straithairn is best known for his Oscar nominated performance as Edward R. Murrow in George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, and his appearances in such films as A League of Their Own, Sneakers, The Firm, The River Wild and L.A. Confidential. Renzi has produced 15 of Sayles’ 18 films as writer and director, and has been the filmmaker’s life partner for more than fifty years, since their days at Williams.
After graduating from Williams, Sayles would move to Boston, about three hours east of the school, which Renzi would graduate from a year later. He would work a series of blue-collar jobs, including working as an orderly in a nursing home, a stint as a day laborer on a farm in Atlanta, and hanging pepperonis at a sausage factory in East Boston, while he wrote short stories. The day he would get laid off from his job at the sausage factory, he would get a letter from an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, the literary and cultural magazine founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in 1857, asking him to either expand or cut a fifty-page short story he had sent them, for future publication.
After half a year on unemployment, the 25-year-old Sayles would have his first work published, and would write his first novel, The Pride of the Bimbos, a satirical work about a little person who travels the country dressing in drag and plays for local baseball teams. A $2500 advance from publisher Little, Brown for the novel would set him up financially to start doing what he always wanted to do: write movies. When Pride of the Bimbos was published, critics would applaud the book’s tweaking of machismo stereotypes, but it would not sell very well. It would, however, get him an agent in Hollywood, when he sent a copy of the just-published book to an agent with a note that read “If I send you a script, will you represent me?” The answer was yes, and now Sayles needed to write a screenplay, quickly. Three weeks later, the first draft of that script was on the agent’s desk, and the agent knew exactly who to take it to. Film producer Roger Corman.
Corman, who by this time in his career had produced more than a hundred films and helped to give early writing and directing jobs to filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, was looking for a new writer not yet signed to the Writers Guild to rewrite a Jaws ripoff he was ready to produce, a horror-comedy which told the tale of the lives of the local inhabitants of a small town whose local river has been infested by lethal, genetically altered piranha, threatening both their lives and the visitors to a nearby summer resort.
Like many a Corman film, Piranha would feature a mix of newcomers and industry veterans both in front of and behind the camera. For director Joe Dante, this would be his first solo directing job, after having co-directed the comedy Hollywood Boulevard with Allan Arkush two years before. Dante would, of course, go on to become a Hollywood legend with such films as Gremlins, Explorers, Innerspace and Matinee.
For editor Mark Goldblatt, this would be the first time he would edit a film by himself, and he would go on to a distinguished career that included editing the first two Terminator movies, Robocop, and four straight movies for Michael Bay, from The Rock to Bad Boys 2. And the cast for Piranha would be filled with genre favorites like Bradford Dillman, Kevin McCarthy, Dick Miller, Barbara Steele and Keenan Wynn.
Once the script for Piranha was written, Sayles would have enough to live modestly while he continued to write or ghost polish a number of screenplays for Corman, and to be able to write a second novel, 1977’s Union Dues, and a collection of short stories, 1979’s The Anarchists’ Convention.
As New World prepped Piranha for theatrical release in August 1978, Steven Spielberg and Universal Pictures threatened an injunction against New World and Joe Dante to prevent the film from being released, in part because Universal was releasing an actual sequel to Jaws around the same time. Dante and Corman would invite Spielberg to watch the movie, to prove just how different their film was. This would be an important move in the history of cinema, as not only would Spielberg greatly enjoy Piranha, and get Universal to cancel the lawsuit, but he would end up hiring Joe Dante to direct an episode of his Twilight Zone movie a couple of years later, as well as for Gremlins and Innerspace, and Spielberg would end up hiring Sayles to develop a sci-fi horror film he was considering as a not-quite-sequel to Close Encounters, which had come out the previous fall. But we’ll get to that in a few moments.
New World would first release Piranha into nine theatres and three drive-ins in the Detroit area starting on July 28th, 1978, where the film would gross more than $259k.
In its second week, that number would drop to $167k. Which doesn’t sound like a whole lot, until you remember that ticket prices in Detroit in July and August 1978 ran from $1.50 for matinee shows to $3.50 for evening general admission tickets. If you were to take Spider-Man: No Way Home’s opening weekend per-screen average of $60 and reverse inflation it down to 1978, that would be about $14 per screen. And at an average ticket price of $9.35, that’s about 6 people per theatre for Spidey, which was often playing on four to ten screens per theatre. Not bad.
But in 1978, with an average ticket price of $2.34, that first week of Piranha in twelve theatres in Detroit would have a per-screen average of $21, which is about 9 people. About 50% busier than Spider-Man. And each theatre playing Piranha that week was only showing it on one screen, with an average seat count of nearly 750. One theatre, the Adams Theatre in downtown Detroit, not two blocks from the stadium where the Tigers play their home games, sat 1 by itself, and it was never close to selling out any shows.
After four weeks in Detroit, New World would open the film in 119 theaters in ten major markets, including 23 theatres in Chicago, 17 theatres in Los Angeles and 3 in St. Louis, where the film would gross $1.15m. Each week, New World would move their prints played out in one market into another.
The week after Pirahna opened in Chicago, Los Angeles and St. Louis, it would open in 13 theatres in Miami. By the end of September, the film would have grossed more than $2m. New World would hold off releasing the film into more markets until early November, when they would release the film into sixty theatres in the New York City metropolitan area. But maybe late fall wasn’t the best time to release a summer movie in The Big Apple, as the film would gross a rather anemic $117k. For comparison’s sake, John Carpenter’s Halloween had opened the previous week in 72 theatres and had grossed half a million dollars. And it would continue to open across the country, market by market, until the spring of 1979.
When all was said and done, the $600k movie would have grossed $16m. There would be a sequel made a few years later, the directorial debut of one James Cameron, but neither Corman nor Dante nor Sayles, had any involvement in its making.
After Pirahna, Sayles would write three more films for Roger Corman and New World Pictures:
1979’s The Lady in Red, a film so admired and beloved by Quentin Tarantino, he even wrote a section of his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood where he himself directed a remake of Sayles’ screenplay in an alternate 1999;
1980’s Alligator, another movie so admired by Tarantino that he would cast Robert Forster in Jackie Brown because of his performance here;
and 1980’s Battle Beyond the Stars, a space opera inspired by both Seven Samurai and The Magnificent Seven, and meant to capitalize on the success of Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, which, at a budget of $2m, would be the most expensive movie Corman would produce to date. Battle Beyond the Stars would become an important movie in the history of cinema, not because of its success, because it wasn’t very successful, but because it’s the movie on which an assistant production manager named Gale Anne Hurd would meet a visual effects artist named James Cameron, who would, a few years, partner to create The Terminator, Aliens and The Abyss. It would also be on the set of Battle Beyond the Stars where Cameron and Hurd would meet a carpenter and set painter who also wanted to be an actor: Bill Paxton.
When Joe Dante was hired by Embassy Pictures to direct their adaptation of Gary Brandner’s horror novel The Howling, about a television reporter who stumbles across a pack of werewolves when she is sent to a remote mountain resort for a story, he would have continual disagreements with original screenwriter Terence H. Winkless, the editor of Toby Halicki’s seminal 1974 car chase film Gone in 60 Seconds, over the direction of the script. Dante would call up his Piranha writer Sayles and ask him to come aboard to completely rewrite the script, knowing Sayles would give the script for The Howling the same satirical and self-aware tone he gave Piranha. It would be the first time Sayles would be hired for a movie outside of Corman’s mini-studio.
Now, remember a few moments, when I was talking about how much Steven Spielberg enjoyed Piranha, how he would eventually hire director Joe Dante to direct several movies, and that he would also hire Sayles to write a movie for him? I’m going to take a sidetrack for a moment, because this mutual appreciation would change the course of modern cinema.
Let me explain.
In November 1977, Columbia Pictures would release Spielberg’s follow-up to Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And although it would not be the success Jaws was, Close Encounters would gross more than $116m, and Columbia wanted a sequel. Spielberg didn’t really want to make a sequel to the film, and he was already contracted to make his next film for Universal Pictures, which would be his scattershot 1940s war comedy 1941. So he’d offer the studio a compromise. He would both create a Special Edition of the film for release in 1980, incorporating seven minutes of new footage, including a view of the interior of the alien mothership, but he would also delete or shorten minutes of footage from the original film, which would make the special edition shorter than the original film, and he would write them another alien story which he would also produce but not direct. His first choice to direct this film? Texas Chainsaw Massacre director Tobe Hooper.
In the original treatment for the then-titled Watch the Skies, named from one of the final lines of the 1951 classic The Thing from Another World, eleven malicious extraterrestrial scientists try to communicate with various farm livestock in an attempt to discover which of Earth's animal species are sentient, before turning their attentions on a human family. While he was working on the storyline, Spielberg would contract with NASA to reserve space on the first Space Shuttle flight, when it was originally set to launch in March 1979, so that he could have film of the Earth and the Moon shot in space to use in how he saw the opening sequence for the movie.
Once Spielberg had the basic idea for Watch the Skies, he wanted to hire Lawrence Kasdan to write the screenplay, but Kasdan was still working with George Lucas on the script for The Empire Strikes Back. So Spielberg would call up Roger Corman to get Sayles’ phone number. Sayles would fly out to Los Angeles to meet with Spielberg, and would soon sign on to write the script. But it was during this time that Spielberg discovered he couldn’t use Watch the Skies as the title, as the producers of The Thing from Another World owned the rights to those words. Spielberg and Sayles would come up with a new title for the film, Night Skies. Sayles’ script would reduce the number of alien visitors from eleven to five, and would draw on themes from two of Sayles’ favorite westerns, John Ford’s 1939 film Drums Along the Mohawk, and John Ford’s 1956 film The Searchers.
Sayles would also take the story away from straight horror and turn in to a horror/drama hybrid that included a new character not present in Spielberg’s original story idea: Buddy, who, unlike the other aliens he worked with, was a kind and gentle soul, who would strike up a friendship with an autistic Earth boy. Buddy would be left behind on Earth when his peers discover Buddy made a human connection.
Since Spielberg would be busy for a while, first on 1941 and then Raiders of the Lost Ark, Sayles would have until the summer of 1980 to complete the script.
While Sayles was writing Night Skies, Spielberg would have Rick Baker, the amazing special effects master who was also working on John Landis’s An American Werewolf in London, start to create several of the alien creatures for the film, at a cost of around $700k. When Sayles did finally turn in his first draft of the script, Spielberg realized that it was both a very well-written screenplay and something he wasn’t all that interested in anymore. The two men would part ways amicably.
Now, where this sidetrack gets interesting is when Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter of The Black Stallion, came to the location shoot for Raiders to visit her then-boyfriend, Harrison Ford. Looking for a second opinion on Sayles’ screenplay for Night Skies, Spielberg would read it to Mathison during an off day from shooting. As Spielberg read, Mathison found herself starting to cry, finding Sayles’ idea of an alien who was benevolent, tender, emotional and sweet, and could strike up a friendship with a human child who came from a broken home, to be very moving.
After talking with Mathison more about the story, and hearing her ideas of what she would do, Spielberg would realize the movie she was thinking of was the movie he wanted to make next. But there were also some horror ideas in his original treatment for Watch the Skies he still wanted to see on film.
So he would have Mathison start to write her own screenplay take on the friendly alien directions Sayles took with his script, which she would title E.T. and Me, while hiring the screenwriting team of Michael Grais and Mark Victor, writers for Starsky and Hutch and Kojak, whose unproduced comedy screenplay Turn Left and Die brought them to Spielberg’s attention, to flesh out the more paranormal concepts from the original Watch the Skies treatment, which would become Poltergeist. Whose director was Spielberg’s first choice for the project all along, Tobe Hooper.
Now, to get finally back to Sayles, he would funnel the paycheck for this first excursion into big-budget Hollywood screenwriting into becoming a director himself, something he would do time and time again throughout his career.
He would, over the course of his career, become one of Hollywood’s most sought after script doctors, working with the likes of James Cameron, Guillermo Del Toro, Jonathan Demme, John Frankenheimer, Ron Howard, Sam Raimi and Rob Reiner on the scripts for their some of their best films. The genre didn’t matter. Sayles would write action films, westerns, monster movies, historical epics, even animated films. It is estimated that Sayles has done uncredited work on more than sixty movies, including Apollo 13, Mimic, and The Quick and the Dead.
But for his Night Skies paycheck, as well another check for a script for MGM called Terror of the Loch Ness that would never get made, Sayles would take $40 and pull out one of his personal scripts to shoot as his debut, which he would shoot over the course of twenty-five days in a cabin in New Hampshire in the fall of 1978.
The screenplay would tell the story about a group of friends, who all met in college and participated in anti-war activist activities in the late 60s and early 70s, who spend an uneasy weekend together in the home of two of the friends, the first time in years all of them would be together in the same space. Old wounds are ripped open, fresh wounds are created, one of the group brings an outsider to the gathering, and they spend a lot of time reminiscing about their youth.
Sound familiar?
To some who saw The Big Chill in 1983, they would feel it was a redundant replay of Sayles’ movie here, The Return of the Secaucus 7, but with better actors and a better soundtrack.
Lawrence Kasdan, who wrote and directed The Big Chill, has sworn for damn near forty years now that he never saw or heard of Sayles’ film, which could be true. When this film was released in September 1980, Kasdan would be deep into pre-production on what would be his own directorial debut, Body Heat.
But pre-production isn’t production, and you usually have your evenings free in pre-production, and it would be hard to believe a self-professed film lover like Kasdan didn’t at least hear about this movie, especially after its splashy debut at the biggest film festival in town, Filmex, in March 1980. Or after the film was nominated for Best Screenplay by the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, or winning the Best Screenplay award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Or winning the Best Independent Film award from the Boston Society of Film Critics. Or, more importantly, when Sayles was nominated by his fellow writers of the Writers Guild of America, a guild that included one Lawrence Kasdan, for Best Comedy Written Directly for the Screen, an award Kasdan would have voted for as a guild member after he was done shooting Body Heat in Florida in February 1981. But let’s just say he didn’t see it.
Does it matter?
Not really.
Not only would Secaucus 7 be the first of four collaborations between Sayles and Gordon Clapp, the first of seven between Sayles and Straithairn, and the first of fifteen producing collaborations between Sayles and Renzi, as well as the first of seven acting credits for Renzi in a Sayles movie.
Sayles himself would not write and direct, but also edit the film, and play the role of Howie, one of the Secaucus 7 members’ friends from high school. It would be the first of seven times Sayles would direct himself in one of his own movies. And the house that would serve as the main shooting location would also provide the lodgings for the actors and the crew during the shoot, a relative bargain at $800.
Once Sayles finished directing the film, at the end of 1978, he would need to raise another $20k in order to pay for the cost of processing the footage, which he would do by writing a CBS-TV movie called A Perfect Match, about a woman who meets the daughter she gave up for adoption at birth when the older woman needs a bone marrow transplant. Living in Santa Barbara at the time, Sayles would rent an editing bay, load it and all the footage he had printed for the film onto a U-Haul truck and drive it to his home so he could work without the pressures of being sociable around others working on their films in rented editing suites. He would spend most of 1979 writing scripts during the day and editing Secaucus 7 at night, while his partner Maggie Renzi would edit the film during the day, in part because the $500 it cost to rent the editing machine each month was twice their rent and he wanted to get his money’s worth. At the end of 1979, thanks in large part to a recommendation from Roger Corman, Sayles and his film would be invited by The Los Angeles International Film Exposition festival, better known as Filmex, to screen the movie at their March 1980 event.
The film would be very well received at Filmex, and Sayles would make a deal with the Libra Films, operated by the legendary film exhibitor and distributor Ben Barenholtz, to release the film theatrically.
Now, to give you an idea of how big a deal this would have been to a first-time filmmaker like John Sayles, amongst the other films Libra would distribute over the years included George A. Romero’s first film, Night of the Living Dead, Derek Jarman’s first film, Sebastiane, and David Lynch’s first film, Eraserhead. A month after its Filmex premiere, Secaucus 7 would screen as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s annual New Directors/New Films series, where the New York film critics would hail Sayles and his film. “Sayles has remarkable talent,” Richard Corliss of Time Magazine proclaimed. Vincent Canby, the top film critic at The New York Times who had been writing film reviews for thirty years, would say the film was “about as sweet and engaging a movie as anyone can make.” Bruce Williamson from Playboy would exclaim that “American cinema may have found a new voice, a sure hand and a clear case of unimpeded vision.” And William Wolf of New York Magazine said “This year’s most dramatic discovery is John Sayles, who deserves recognition as an important new filmmaker.”
Libra Films would make the unusual move of opening the film at the 587 seat 57th Street Playhouse on a Sunday, September 14th, 1980, instead of the usual Friday most movies open on.
But despite the critical accolades, the little film would only gross $3 in its first day, about 135 people per show, less than 25% of the theatre’s capacity. The film would pick up some steam during the rest of the week, eventually grossing over $19k from Sunday to Thursday. In its first full weekend of release, Secaucus would gross another decent $13.6k.
But after a subpar third and fourth week, the film would exit the 57th Street Playhouse, having earned less than $50k after four weeks, about 15% less than the eventual Best Picture winner for 1980, Ordinary People, would earn in its three days at just the Astor Plaza Theatre in Times Square.
The Return of the Secaucus 7 would open at the Westland Theatre in Los Angeles on Wednesday, November 5th, and at three other locations in major markets, and would gross a decent $44k. Adding two more theatres the following weekend, the gross would increase to $57.5k. And that pattern would continue for months. A few theatres here one week, a few theatres there the next. Never more than twenty screens on any given week. And wherever it played, good reviews followed.
Now, I already mentioned the awards Sayles and the film would be nominated for or win during the 1980 awards season. One benefit of all the awards love the film was getting was that independent theatres all across the country were contacting Libra Films to book the film, including areas like Los Angeles where the movie had already played.
After eight months in theatres, the little $60k first-time production would have grossed more than $2m.
And with that success, Hollywood came knocking.
Embassy Pictures would hire Sayles to rewrite a screenplay for director John Frankenheimer called The Equals, about a down on his luck prizefighter who is hired to smuggle a long-lost katana sword into Japan. The final film, titled The Challenge, isn’t very good, but it does feature good performances from Scott Glenn as the prizefighter, and Toshiro Mifune as the master of a martial arts school in Japan who teaches Glenn’s character the ways of the Bushido.
Twentieth Century-Fox would make a deal with Double Play Productions, operated by actors Griffith Dunne and Amy Robinson, in the late fall of 1980 to produce two movies for them, including Baby It’s You, which Sayles would write and direct, based on a story by Robinson, which she based on her own life as a teenager in New Jersey in the mid-60s.
But just before he made Baby It’s You, Sayles was able to find financing for another screenplay he had written just before he started shooting Return of the Secaucus 7.
Lianna would tell the story of a thirtysomething woman who, bored with her life as a wife and mother, leaves her family and starts to explore her long-repressed identity as a lesbian. Sayles had wanted to make the film right after Secaucus 7 in the spring of 1979, but found trouble both finding production companies to fund the film, and finding actresses who wouldn’t be afraid of playing a lesbian on-screen and becoming type-cast. Sayles and Maggie Renzi would spend nearly two years raising funds to make the film. They had originally planned on spending $800k to shoot the film on 35mm, but, after raising only $300k through a series of non-industry investors, decided to shoot on 16mm instead, which would be significantly cheaper.
There would be an unexpected benefit from the process of getting the film funded taking so long. When Sayles sent the screenplay to potential investors, including a number of lesbian women, several of those ladies would contribute anecdotes from their own lives as women who had lost custody of their children because they came out.
The film would shoot in and around the Hoboken NJ area in the summer of 1981, and he would have to rush right into editing the film, as he would be due to start shooting Baby It’s You after the new year. But we’ll get there in a moment.
What Sayles didn’t know while he spent years working on his screenplay and shooting of the film was that it would inadvertently become a part of a movement where gay characters and culture would be front and center on cinema screens, alongside James Burrows’ Partners, Robert Towne’s Personal Best, Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie, Blake Edwards’ Victor/Victoria, and George Roy Hill’s adaptation of John Irving’s novel The World According to Garp, all of which were also in production around the same time as Lianna in 1981.
In late June 1982, Sayles would show the film publicly for the first time at a theatre in suburban Boston, comprised mostly of gay and heterosexual women, who mostly responded positively to the film. He would, after the screening, do some final tweaks to the movie, before having the final print blown up to 35mm. After a series of screenings for potential distributors in Los Angeles and New York City, the movie would be picked up by the arthouse-minded Classics division of United Artists, and the film would open at the Embassy 72nd Street Theatre in New York City on Wednesday, January 19th, 1983.
In this review, Vincent Canby of the New York Times was convinced Sayles had at least three different personalities as an artist, noting his careers as a serious novelist, the author of a number of, and I quote, “quite wonderfully uninhibited screenplays for such B-movies as Battle Beyond the Stars and Alligator,” and the writer and director of, and again I quote, “far less hysterical films” like Return of the Secaucus 7 and Lianna.
Canby would continue to wonder how the same man could be responsible for these movies, then answer his own question by noticing that while the films are very different in styles and concerns, they are all controlled and illuminated by the same resolute intelligence. He would continue later in the review to note that the title character was a perfect Sayles protagonist, which might be strange since this was only the director’s second movie, but Canby would nail the description, not only for this character but for many of Sayles’ protagonists for decades to come: stubborn, initially foolish, terrifically earnest, and, finally, heroic. Canby would end his review examining what he would consider a problem for the director and his audience, that Sayles so effectively simulated the manner and temper of ordinary lives that there would be, the critic posed, a danger the audience would not recognize the very real art by which it was created.
In it's first five days at the 288 seat Embassy 72nd Street Theatre, Lianna would set five consecutive single-day attendance records for the theatre, and would gross $29, breaking the previous first-week record set a couple of years earlier by Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears by more than 40%. In its second week at the theatre, business would only drop 5.8%, but it would increase 1% in its third week. After 19 days, Lianna had set 12 house records in terms of single day and full week grosses.
UA Classics would expand the film to the Nickelodeon Theatre in Boston on Wednesday, February 9th, and Westland Theatre in Los Angeles, the same theatre where Secaucus 7 opened two years earlier, on Wednesday February 16th. After four months, never playing in more than 61 theatres in any week, Lianna would end its theatrical run with just under $1.5m in ticket sales. It would around the end of Lianna’s run in theatres when Ms. Magazine, in an article about the film, that while the film was favorably reviewed by critics and well-regarded by those who saw it, there was a very strong negative reaction to the film from heterosexual mothers, who viewed Lianna as “a traitor to her class” for choosing her own sexuality over the welfare of her children.
As I mentioned earlier, Sayles had to finish editing Lianna by the end of 1981, as he would begin shooting Baby It’s You at the start of the year. He would work on the screenplay for the movie when he wasn’t directly working on Lianna. Baby It’s You would be Sayles’ first film with a Hollywood studio, and with that, he would see another exponential jump in the budget afforded to him. Secaucus 7 cost $60k to make. He could have made five of those movies with his budget for Lianna. And he could have made ten Liannas with his budget for Baby It’s You. But having a $3m budget would give him tools he hadn’t had before. Like a real casting agent, who could have an eye for emerging talent to get into the film.
For up and coming actors Rosanna Arquette, playing the Amy Robinson stand-in, and Vincent Spano, playing a wannabe Frank Sinatra cryptically called The Sheik, this would be their first major leading roles in any film, and they would be supported by Frank Vincent, in only his third movie overall and first after being featured in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, as well as Tracy Pollan, who would become famous a few years later for her co-starring role on Family Ties and her 34-year marriage to its star Michael J. Fox, as well as Sam McMurray, who would become famous a few years later for his co-starring role on The Tracy Ullman Show, Fisher Stevens, who would become famous a few years later for his co-starring role in the Short Circuit movies, and two of the better talents to come out of cinema in the 1980s, Matthew Modine and Robert Downey Jr.
But there would be a hiccup before production could begin. Twentieth Century-Fox and the producing team of Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson were having disagreements about both the screenplay for Baby It’s You and the second film in their agreement, a drama called Vegas that was being written by Dunne’s uncle, John Gregory Dunne, and aunt, Joan Didion, two of the most famous authors and screenwriters of the day. Things would get so bad between the studio and the production company that Dunne and Robinson would cancel the Fox deal and buy their projects back.
Vegas would never get made, but Dunne and Robinson would spend the first half of 1982 hustling up the money needed to make Baby It’s You, and the film would finally begin production in and around Trenton Central High School in the fall of 1982.
In addition to being the first major film for Arquette, Spano, Pollan, McMurray, Modine and Downey, Baby It’s You would also be the first American movie to be shot by the celebrated German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus, who had shot thirteen of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s movies between 1971 and 1981, and would go on to shoot seven of Martin Scorsese’s movies, the first being After Hours, which was produced by and starred Griffin Dunne, who recommended Ballhaus to Scorsese based on Ballhaus’s work on Baby It’s You. Ballhaus would also shoot films for Franz Oz, Mike Nichols, James L. Brooks, Paul Newman, Prince, Robert Redford, Barry Levinson, Francis Ford Coppola and Wolfgang Petersen.
Baby It’s You is a sweet and painful remembrance of first love in those awkward teenage years, when Arquette’s Jill, an upper-middle-class Jewish girl from the right side of the tracks, falls for a lower-class blue-collar Italian boy, Spano’s Sheik. Jill is her class President, the captain of the cheerleading team, the President of the Drama Club, the captain of the debate team, the student editor-in-chief of the school paper, and she knows she’s going to become a Broadway star someday. The Sheik, on the other hand, doesn’t really show any interest in anything outside of Jill. One thing Jill is sure about is that, while she is attracted to the Sheik, she does not want to have sex with him. The Sheik, frustrated by her continual rebukes of his advances, comes onto and has a one-night stand with one of Jill’s friends, who, when she discovers the Sheik only slept with her because Jill wouldn’t, attempts to kill herself.
Soon after this incident, the Sheik is expelled from school. With little prospects for a future in Trenton, the Sheik hightails it to Miami after a robbery attempt goes south for him. Jill graduates from high school with honors, and begins her studies at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall, but she hasn’t quite forgotten about the Sheik. On spring break, she travels down to Miami to see him. He has been making ends meet by working as a dishwasher in a night club during the week and lip-synching to Frank Sinatra records there on the weekends. They end up making love, and she learns the truth about his nickname. At the end of spring break, she heads back to college, but neither of them are very happy about their lives at that moment. He gets replaced by a real singer at the nightclub, which prompts the Sheik to steal a car and head up to New York, to try and have a real relationship with Jill.
Jill, on the other hand, is finding it difficult to replicate her idyllic life in high school at college. After he arrives at Sarah Lawrence and is unable to find Jill, he trashes her room out of frustration, and waits for her return.
When Jill does finally come back, the Sheik opens himself emotionally, possibly for the first time in his life, declaring his love for Jill. But after their encounter back in Miami, Jill has realized that she does not love him, and possibly never has. He has trouble accepting this at first, before finally realizing there is no future between them. But before he leaves, Jill asks him for a small favor, to be her date at a school dance that’s happening on campus right then and there. The movie ends with the pair slow-dancing to Strangers in the Night, the Sinatra song that had been a major part of their earlier romance.
With Lianna done and ready for release, Sayles would be able to fully concentrate on getting Baby It’s You into shape.
Now, one of the things that drives me absolutely bonkers is clear anachronisms in movies and television shows. And while Baby It’s You is filled with period-proper songs, it also features no less than five of Bruce Springsteen’s songs from his first three albums, which were released several years after the film takes place. Sayles loved the music of Bruce Springsteen, and lobbied hard for the inclusion of the songs, saying that while he knew they were from the wrong era, they fit the spirit of the movie. Dunne, being fully supportive of his director, would get a copy of the screenplay into the hands of Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau. Landau and Springsteen loved the script, and they would make a very good deal with the filmmakers for the songs.
And because of the friendship the director and the musician would strike up thanks to this meeting, Springsteen would turn to Sayles in 1984 to direct three of the music videos for songs from his Born in the USA album: Glory Days, I’m on Fire, and the title song.
With the music rights in hand, Sayles and his editor Sonya Polonsky would start to make their assembly cut of the film, which is all of the usable footage shot and printed put together into one very long movie. But before Sayles and Polonsky could even finish assembling that first cut, Paramount Pictures executive Jeffrey Katzenberg would contact Griffin Dunne and Amy Robinson about acquiring the film for release, which didn’t make much sense, as Paramount was one of the few major studios to not have a quote-unquote “classics” division to handle smaller budgeted films like Baby It’s You.
Paramount originally considered releasing the film in the summer of 1983, but decided to give the film a test run at the Varsity Theatre in Seattle on March 3rd, to see if the film should be marketed as a summer youth entry or a specialized art-house release.
I want to point out real quick that this test run would make John Sayles one of the few directors in the modern era to ever have two movies released into theatres within a few weeks of each other.
I mention this because the movie that Baby It’s You would replace at the Varsity was Sayles’s own Lianna, which had been playing at the theatre for the previous four weeks.
Okay, so Paramount opens Baby It’s You, to figure out how they should market it. The poster and newspaper key art would feature a yearbook open to a certain page, which would show pictures of Arquette and Spano, with their characters’ names and accomplishments listed underneath, and a tagline at the top that said “There’s the first one. There’s the right one. And there’s the one you never forget.
Paramount would have their answer on how to market it very quickly.
In the first three days at the 400 seat Varsity Theatre, Baby It’s You would sell $21 worth of tickets. For comparison’s sake, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome, which had bigger stars in James Woods and Deborah Harry, and a bigger advertising budget, would open on four screens in Seattle and only gross $6.
Paramount would rush to add a New York playdate as quickly as possible, opening the film at the 598 seat Coronet Theatre, across the street from the flagship Bloomingdale’s store, three weeks later, on March 25th.
And using the same poster and newspaper key art as in Seattle, with added pull quotes from David Ansen of Newsweek, Richard Corliss of Time, and Molly Haskell of Vogue, the film would gross a respectable $23k, which isn’t bad for a film with no stars and barely any time to market it due to the rushed release. Four weeks later, after a screening at the 1983 Filmed festival in Los Angeles, the film would open at the Regent Theatre in Westwood, where it would gross $26k in its first three days. And Paramount would somewhat successfully pull off a gradual modified arthouse release like Fox Classics or United Artists Classics would, although the film would only find moderate success. After four months of release, never playing in more than forty screens nationwide on any given week, the film would only end up grossing $1.87m, slightly more than half its budget. Paramount would end up profiting from the release, having spent very little to acquire the rights and only about $50k to advertise it, but the production company would be out a couple million dollars.
And with that, we are going to say good night for now. Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again next week, when Part 2 of this mini-series is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, FilmJerk.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.
The FilmJerk Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.