Every day, all over Hollywood, thousands of people have meetings where they hash out the details of movies, most of which will never get made. One afternoon in 1986, writer/director William Richert returned from yet another Hollywood lunch to his office on Sunset Boulevard. His secretary told him that River Phoenix was waiting to audition for him, for a project of Richert’s called Jimmy Reardon. There was industry buzz that River was excellent in Stand by Me, which hadn’t been released yet, but nobody in Richert’s office even knew how old he was: one person said twenty-five, while another said thirteen.
Richert went to his waiting room, where River was sitting in the shadows next to a potted plant. Then River stood up, “and he was completely surrounded by light,” Richert said. He knew it was because of the way the California sun was streaming through the window, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that River was glowing from within.
Richert said, “You know, you’re a movie star.”
River demurred; only one of his movies had even been released, and that was Explorers.
“And you’re going to be incredible in my movie,” said Richert, overcome by River’s luminous beauty.
“But you haven’t auditioned me—I haven’t read anything.”
“You don’t need to.”
“Oh, I should read it,” River said. “Don’t you want to hear me read it?”
“Do you want to read it?”
“Yeah.”
Richert consented; they went into his office and River gave a fine reading. When he was done, Richert instructed him, “Take the script and go home and call your agent. Tell them you’ve just been offered the lead in this movie.”
Richert was a garrulous, strong-willed operator. Then forty-four, he had made a series of documentaries—one about the daughters of Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson, another about roller derby. When his political satire Winter Kills (with a cast including Jeff Bridges, John Huston, and Elizabeth Taylor) was shut down mid-shoot—the producers got busted for smuggling pot—he made another movie (The American Success Story) with much of the same cast in Europe to finance completion of the first one.
Jimmy Reardon, based on Richert’s own semi-autobiographical novel, Aren’t You Even Going to Kiss Me Goodbye?, was the story, set in 1962, of a high school senior from a middle-class family in Evanston, the upper-class Chicago suburb. Jimmy Reardon, a Casanova with women, is nevertheless out of place with his rich friends—who are heading off to Ivy League colleges and other exotic locales, while his father is steering him toward an uninspiring local business school. As Jimmy frantically tries to scrounge up enough money for a plane ticket to follow his girlfriend to Hawaii, all his schemes gradually come undone. If he doesn’t arrive at an adult acceptance of his situation, he at least ends the movie with a greater understanding of the world he lives in.
River hoped it would be an “intelligent teenage comedy,” a coming-of-age story that crossed Risky Business and The Catcher in the Rye. John was against River taking the role, feeling that it was too licentious, but Arlyn and Iris Burton both thought it was a good career move—a transition into adult parts—and their view prevailed. River signed the contract and started to prepare.
“In three months, he made himself look seventeen years old,” Richert said. “He wasn’t eating, and he was doing push-ups day-in and day-out, because he had a kid’s body and he wanted to get some abs.”
River went to Illinois for the shoot, joined by a cast that included Ione Skye, performance artist Ann Magnuson, future Big Bang Theory star Johnny Galecki (then just eleven years old), and in his first movie ever, future Friend Matthew Perry (Richert discovered him while eating breakfast in the San Fernando Valley). Not there: John and Arlyn Phoenix, who opted to go to Key West to supervise Leaf on the set of Russkies.
River was chaperoned by his maternal grandfather, Meyer Dunetz—but the supervision proved to be nominal. “I could get away with a lot,” River said, “because he didn’t know me, so he didn’t know how I acted. So I could not be River, and there wasn’t my mom around to say, ‘Hey, come on, what’s going on, you’re losing yourself.’ ”
Richert fondly remembered the time River stepped out of his trailer, still wearing a bib to protect his clothes from makeup. There were dozens of teenage girls sitting on a nearby lawn, a crowd waiting to catch a glimpse of River Phoenix, the latest teen idol. “He looked at me and said, ‘How many blow jobs do you think are lying out there?’ ” Richert recalled, roaring with laughter. But the quip was much more like Jimmy Reardon than River Phoenix; it was mostly a sign that River was experimenting with staying in character.
According to Skye, the shoot had a “very party atmosphere,” with the teens and the adults socializing together, and Richert leading the way. “It wasn’t creepy,” she said—it was exhilarating for the kids to be taken seriously by their adult coworkers.
If River was misbehaving, he did so discreetly. Cast member Louanne Sirota said, “The most out-of-control thing we ever did was order beer through room service when we were underage, and that was cool.” Although River was in a movie full of attractive women ready to “rehearse” their sex scenes together, he seems to have resisted temptation. Mostly, anyway—actress Jane Hallaren, who played his mother, once found him entangled with a girl in a hallway.
“Don’t tell anybody, okay?” River asked.
Like, yeah, I’m going to call his girlfriend, Hallaren thought. “But that was River,” she said. “Whenever you thought you had him pigeonholed, he was someone else.”
“I’m the monogamous type,” River said. “I believe romance is important in sex. Doing it just for sensation and immediate gratification is selfish.” And then, without missing a beat, he argued the other side of the equation: “We all have these kinds of urges and feelings inside us and we can’t always suppress them.”
Martha Plimpton visited the set the day after River had spent a late evening in his hotel room with one of the actresses, hanging out and listening to Roxy Music. Plimpton, apparently unthreatened, teased him: “You were listening to the ultimate makeout record, Roxy Music!”
“I remember thinking that was such a grown-up thing to say,” Skye recalled. “I looked up to her—she was this New Yorker who was very intelligent and sophisticated.”
While Richert likened the blond couple of River and Plimpton to a pair of Tinker Bells, his son Nick (who had a small part in the film), thought that Martha had River perpetually apologizing to her. “She seemed to be in charge,” he said. “She was upset with him a lot of the time. I was never sure exactly what he’d done, but she probably had good reason.”
Working on movies, River often sought out older men and adopted them as mentors and father figures (Rob Reiner or Harrison Ford, for example). Jimmy Reardon was no exception, as he and Richert bonded—their friendship would last for the rest of River’s life.
Speaking of the novel that inspired Jimmy Reardon, Richert said, “I wrote that back when I was nineteen, and I shot it word for word. So the movie was written by a nineteen-year-old, directed by a forty-year-old, making a movie about himself with a kid who is acting out him, coming from a similar background. Because I came out of a Catholic cult and he came out of a Children of God cult.”
After River got a haircut, Richert was astonished at how much he looked like James Dean. He showed River a photo of Dean, and even staged one shot specifically to evoke the teen idol of the fifties, who died at age twenty-four. River shrugged off the resemblance, indifferent.
One day, he asked Richert, “Where do I cry in this movie?” Asked what he meant, he replied, “I’ve cried in all my movies.”
“Not in this one,” Richert told him.
“I’m not going to cry?”
“No.”
Realization dawned on River. “Because you want other people to cry.”
River had never done a love scene on camera before; now he was starring in a film full of them, and Richert had to walk him through the mechanics. “He was very powerful and confident as a performer. And with grown-ups,” Skye said. “But he was uncomfortable playing a ladies’ man.” River also worried about dialogue in which Jimmy encouraged his friends to get drunk, not wanting his fans to emulate that behavior.
There was only one line River wanted to add, Richert said, and it came in the scene where the older woman played by Ann Magnuson seduces him. River showed him what he had written in the script—“and his handwriting was like hieroglyphics, because River never really went to school,” Richert said.
The new line: “Well, I really do want to say that I’m a firm believer that everything happens for a reason.”
Richert was flabbergasted; not only did the idea seem precocious for a sixteen-year-old, “there aren’t a lot of actors who change dialogue with a philosophical context, or even think that way. It didn’t quite fit the scene, but I thought it was great. River was not one of us, not a person that would just go along with everything the way it was.”