[00:00:08] From Los Angeles, California, the entertainment capital of the world, it's the 80s Movie Podcast. I'm your host Edward Havens, thank you for listening today. On today's episode we're going to be talking about a mostly forgotten, not-so-sexy, not-quite-teen-teen-sex comedy that featured two future Oscar-nominated actors in the lead roles alongside one of the stars of one of the biggest TV sitcoms of the 1980s
[00:00:34] being directed by a filmmaker who had an Oscar win of his own in his future. The actors are Jackie Earl Haley, Tom Cruise, and Shelley Long. The director is Curtis Hansen and the film is best known as Losing It. The concept for Losing It was pretty straightforward. Four teenagers from 1965 Los Angeles are on their way to Tijuana, Mexico. Dave, Spider, and Woody are there to lose their virginity
[00:01:02] while Dave's little brother Wendell came along to buy fireworks. On their drive down, the four pick up a woman named Kathy who is looking for a fast divorce from her husband and the five get into a series of hijinks and misadventures south of the border. But between the writing of the script in 1980 and the release of the film in 1983 there would be so much trouble behind the scenes that it would literally change cinema for the next four-plus decades. But we're not at that part of the story just yet.
[00:01:32] The original screenplay for Losing It was titled Tijuana and was conceived as a deeply nostalgic personal look back at Southern California youth culture in the mid-1960s. Bill Norton, who had been working in Hollywood for more than a decade the last year in the mid-1959 sequel to American Graffiti, was an early 20-something man in 1965
[00:02:03] and would draw on some of his own personal experiences to form the screenplay along with his friend Brian Gindorf. An early version of the script would feature a younger sister for Dave named Wimp described in a casting notice as a Christy McNichol-like character who, as the screenplay evolved, would become Dave's firework-obsessed little brother Wendell. The movie would be produced by Garth Trabinski, the flamboyant CEO of the Canadian exhibition company Cineplex and his producing partner Joel Michaels.
[00:02:33] In the June 30, 1981 issue of Daily Variety, it was announced that Tijuana would be distributed by 20th Century Fox as part of a distribution deal the pair had made with the studio and that the film would not be made under Canada's then tax-shelter rule that allowed investors to write off 100% of their investments. The article would also note that American lead actors and an American director would be settled on soon,
[00:02:59] with some Canadian actors and crew on board for filming what was expected to start in late September. Production on the $7 million film would commence on October 1, 1981, and last for eight weeks filming in Los Angeles and various parts of Southern California that could still reasonably stand in for 1965, while the Tijuana scenes themselves would be shot in the southern Imperial County city of Calexico, on the shared border with Mexico about two hours east of San Diego.
[00:03:29] For Curtis Hansen, Tijuana would be his third movie as director, after the 1972 softcore Roger Corman production Sweet Kill and the 1980 comedy The Little Dragons. For Jackie Earle Haley, best known as the troublemaking baseball player Kelly Leake in the three Bad News Bears movies, Tijuana would be his first film since playing Moocher in the Oscar-winning sports dramedy Breaking Away in 1979 and his first ever leading role.
[00:03:57] For Tom Cruise, this would be his third movie, and also his first leading role, after his blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance in the 1981 Brooke Shields movie Endless Love and his powerhouse performance as the troubled David Sean in Harold Becker's Taps, which we covered on this show last year. For Shelley Long, this would be her third movie as well, including a major role in the 1981 Ringo Starr comedy Caveman,
[00:04:21] after years of single-episode guest roles in shows like The Love Boat, Family, Trapper John M.D., and MASH. For John Stockwell, this would be his second movie after a small role in the 1981 Ryan O'Neill comedy So Fine. And for John P. Navin Jr., this would not only be his second film, but his second film in which he would share screen time with Tom Cruise, having played a younger cadet in Taps.
[00:04:50] Once production completed on December 4th, the actors would move on to their next projects. Tom Cruise would begin shooting The Outsiders in Oklahoma in late March of 1982. Shelley Long would get cast as Diane Chambers on Cheers and begin shooting the pilot episode in April 1982, but not before Ron Howard and his producing partner Brian Grazer got her back up to Los Angeles during a two-day break for her shooting this movie in Calexico.
[00:05:16] And she would be offered the lead female role in Howard's next movie, Night Shift. Jackie Earl Haley would start shooting The Zoo Gang in October 1983. John Stockwell would start work on Eddie and the Cruisers in late March 1982. And John P. Navin Jr. would begin shooting National Lampoon's Vacation in July 1982, after he also worked on the pilot episode of Cheers, being the very first patron to enter the bar in the opening scene.
[00:05:46] Curtis Hanson and his editor would get to work on their cut of the film shortly after the New Year, crafting the story as a scruffy, adult-oriented coming-of-age comedy about four immature Los Angeles teenagers crossing the border in search of sex... or fireworks... only to discover that the adult world that they were trying to enter is considerably stranger, sadder, and more dangerous than they could imagine.
[00:06:11] Hanson was more interested in the gap between adolescence fantasy and adult reality. And then... Porky's happened. The unexpected and widespread audience acceptance of Porky's was one of the biggest movie stories in a year of big movie stories in 1982. And Fox, the distributor Porky's, found themselves holding what they felt could be an ace in the hole...
[00:06:39] an already-completed, ready-to-go teen sex comedy, albeit not anything close to the raunchiness of Bob Clark's film. But the question was, how would Fox sell the film to audiences who loved Porky's, but weren't going to get Porky's 2? The key art Fox's publicity department would come up with would feature caricatures of Jackie Earl Haley and John Stockwell hanging onto the brim of a sombrero...
[00:07:06] while what I am presuming to be Tom Cruise and Shelley Long's characters, only visible from the buttocks down, supposedly making out inside the sombrero. The tagline they would use would read, The funniest movie you'll ever see about three high school kids looking for love in all the wrong places. Not very inspiring, to say the least.
[00:07:30] On August 20th, 1982, while Porky's was still playing in 158 theaters in America during its 22nd week of release, Fox would open Tijuana in four theaters for a test run. In Pueblo, Colorado, the film would open at the Pueblo Mall 3. In Swansea, Massachusetts, southeast of Providence, Rhode Island, it would open at the Swansea 4, which ironically was also playing a test run of Creepshow at the same time,
[00:07:58] months before that movie's official November 1982 opening date. And in Columbia, South Carolina, the film would open at the Dutch Square 4 and the Columbia Mall 8. Fox was following their own Porky's release pattern to a T. In November 1981, four months before its national release, Fox would release Porky's in three theaters, at the Bush River Mall 8 and Richmond Mall 4 in Columbia, South Carolina,
[00:08:25] and an unknown theater in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Like almost every other test run, Fox office figures for Tijuana were never made public. But since the film only played for two weeks at each of those four theaters, one can assume it did not go very well. In comparison, the three-screen test run for Porky's went so well, Fox would initially extend the test run playdates from two to four weeks,
[00:08:50] and make the unusual announcement in the trades that the film had grossed $127,000 in those three theaters after only 17 days of release. And remember, this is a time when movie tickets in those cities would have only been around $3. In fact, at one of the theaters in Columbia, Porky's would continue playing for 12 weeks, finally leaving theaters in mid-February 1982,
[00:09:17] just before the movie went out to more than 1,200 theaters nationwide on March 19th. Without grosses and with such a short test run, what Fox did next with Tijuana would not be that much of a shock. They just dumped the film altogether. An article in the November 30th, 1982 issue of The Hollywood Reporter would note that a foreign distribution rights company, Manson International, had acquired the non-American rights to the film,
[00:09:45] and that Embassy Pictures would be releasing the film in the United States during the summer of 1983. Manson International would highlight the film, now titled Losing It with a G at the end of Losing, during the March 1983 American Film Market in Los Angeles, with an even worse tagline than the one used for Tijuana. It simply read, the last word about the first time. When the film, finally titled Losing It,
[00:10:14] opened in Los Angeles and New York City on April 8th, it would come up against some fairly unusually strong but unorthodox competition. Jensen Farnley's Curtains would open a huge business in New York City, earning $600,000 from 82 showcase theaters. Dennis Hopper's Out of the Blue, which we covered a few years ago, would earn $26,000 in its first weekend at only two theaters in the Big Apple.
[00:10:40] And in Los Angeles, the gates of hell would earn $140,000 from just 13 showcase theaters. And losing it? $437,000 from 180 theaters. Now you have to remember that in April 1983, Tom Cruise was not a major star yet. The Outsiders had only opened in theaters two weeks earlier, and we were still three plus months away from risky business.
[00:11:07] And we also need to remember that Shelley Long wasn't a major star yet either. While Night Shift had been shot after this film, it had been released in the summer of 1982. And while the film became somewhat of a hit, Michael Keaton would be the one everyone was talking about, even more than the film star Henry Winkler, Howard's old friend from Happy Days. Cheers had premiered on NBC in September 1982, but it would regularly rank amongst the lowest
[00:11:34] five to ten shows each week in the ratings and wouldn't become the show everyone loves and remembers until its fourth season, starting in 1985. After two weeks, losing it would be down to just two theaters in New York and two in Los Angeles. But it would also open another 156 theaters, mostly in Texas, New Mexico, and Oklahoma, where it would gross just $198,000.
[00:12:01] After three weeks of release, the film had barely grossed $1,000,000. After two more weeks, Embassy Pictures would give up on the film, with only $1.246 million in ticket sales. At the top of this episode, I mentioned the film would literally change the direction of Hollywood for the next four plus decades, which seems like a fairly odd statement for such a bomb. In May 2025, after the world premiere of Mission Impossible The Final Reckoning,
[00:12:29] at the Leicester Square Cinema in London, Tom Cruise would open up for the first time about his experiences working on the film during a career retrospective discussion at the British Film Institute. Here is a short 90-second excerpt from that one-hour discussion, which we will link on our website at the80smoviepodcast.com, if you wish to see and hear the entire program. Right away with Taps. I was offered other films immediately, and I did a film, you know, and it was called Tijuana at first,
[00:12:59] and it was with Hanson, you know, Curtis Hanson, who went on to direct LA Confidential, and Shelley Long was in there, and it was Jackie Earl Haley. And coming out of Taps, which was, you know, we spent, I don't know, six weeks with rehearsals, and there was an environment that Stanley and Harold, Stanley Jaffe and Harold Becker had created, that really defined the rest of my career. Because then I went on to Tijuana, I was like, okay, whoa, I'm making this movie, and the quality wasn't there,
[00:13:28] and the intention to make a great film, because what they told me what it was going to be, and what it ended up being, were two different things. And I was in it, I was like, I always made my own decisions. Like, I listen to people, I listen to advices, but I hold my own counsel with everything. You know, it is literally like, I know these are my decisions, and everything in my life. It's like, I am responsible for it. So I was very much, when I did it, I was like, I'm choosing, and it was an incredible learning experience, because it was the first time I realized,
[00:13:57] like, some people didn't know how to make movies. And some people didn't have the same level of passion or quality commitment. And going from that experience of Taps to that, and I'm not making less of it, that experience was just as valuable and important as the Taps for me. And I went back and I would go, okay, what was different in these two environments? And how can I set myself up to learn and to keep growing? And so that experience was very important.
[00:14:26] Then I went, okay, this is, I'm now kind of redefined and spend more time interviewing people before I go in to work with them. Even if, obviously, my opportunities grew with After Risky Business, but it was, I had the opportunities for there. And it's hard to argue with his sentiments, even if we can argue with some of the results. By the end of the 1980s, he was not only one of the biggest movie stars in the world, he had already worked with some of the best directors of the day.
[00:14:56] Ridley Scott, Tony Scott, Martin Scorsese, Roger Donaldson, Barry Levinson, and with Oliver Stone on Born on the Fourth of July, which would garner Cruz the first of three Oscar nominations for acting. In the 90s, he would continue working with the likes of Ron Howard, Rob Reiner, Sidney Pollack, Neil Jordan, Brian De Palma, Cameron Crowe, Stanley Kubrick, and Paul Thomas Anderson. And in the 2000s, he would work with Spielberg multiple times,
[00:15:26] as well as John Woo, Ed Zwick, Michael Mann, and Robert Redford. It would also change the direction of Curtis Hansen's career. After the 1982 test runs and the Embassy Pictures pickup, the film was taken away from Hansen. Over the next few months, he could do nothing but sit back and watch his original vision for the film be completely destroyed. Despite the fact that there was no reshoots for the movie, Embassy did their best to turn the character-driven coming-of-age road movie
[00:15:55] into a crass, commercialized, team sex comedy. He hated the title losing it, and he hated how they changed the original score for the film with a generic mid-60s pop soundtrack, although the distributor did leave in the champs' tequila, for some reason. As the film was a non-union production and Hansen was not a member of the Directors Guild of America, he had no recourse from having his name removed from the final film.
[00:16:24] Motivated by that exact experience of having his project taken away, Curtis Hansen would join the DGA in 1984 and would spend much of his subsequent career heavily involved with the Guild's Creative Rights Committee to ensure that other filmmakers were legally protected from losing post-production control over their works. Upon his death in September 2016, the Directors Guild issued a statement on his passing which included the following passage.
[00:16:51] As a DGA member, Curtis was a champion of protecting the director's vision, serving on the DGA's Creative Rights Committee. He was also a tireless advocate for film preservation, serving on the President's Committee of Film Preservation, and as a board member of the Film Foundation. We are proud to have recognized Curtis with the DGA honor in 2003 for his prolific career as a director, producer, and preservationist. He will be deeply missed. As of September 2026,
[00:17:21] the original cut of Tequila has never resurfaced after those 1982 test runs. It has never been released on home video anywhere in the world Fawesome, Hoopla, Pluto, The Roku Channel, Shout Factory, and Tubi. Thank you for joining us.
[00:17:50] We'll talk again soon. Remember to visit this episode's page on our website, the80smoviepodcast.com, for extra materials about tequila and losing it. The 80s Movie Podcast has been researched, written, narrated, and edited by Edward Havens for idiosyncratic entertainment. Thank you again. Good night.