“Nothing’s ever just a conversation with you, John.”
by Mark A. Altman
I was talking to a friend of mine who works at Lionsgate, who had always been wonderfully generous about sending me tickets for the studio’s star-studded premieres, from The Hunger Games to The Expendables to Knives Out over the years, regarding an upcoming movie he was particularly enthused about. Knowing he always had impeccable taste, my interest was immediately piqued. “What’s the movie?” I breathlessly inquired.
The answer: “John Wick.”
“John Wick?” I replied, deflated. I had no idea what it was, nor did it sound particularly promising. John Wick?!? It sounded as potentially exciting as a remake of Patch Adams. What the hell was a John Wick? I think my friend could sense my palpable disappointment as he told me to check my email. I opened my inbox and realized he had sent me the trailer for the film to take a look at. I told him I’d watch it when I had a chance, but he wasn’t going to wait. He wanted me to watch the trailer right then and there. “You’d dig it the most,” he suggested. So I hit Play and was immediately ushered into the world of the Baba Yaga, the Boogeyman … John Wick. And this was definitely no Patch Adams.
By the time the trailer was over, I knew this was a special film. A combination of the chopsocky and gun fu I had fallen in love with after moving from New York to Los Angeles after college, where I would spend my days at theaters like the Nuart, the New Beverly, the Egyptian, and the Sunset 5 while spinning LaserDiscs of such films as the Criterion Collection’s Hard Boiled and The Killer. I had a huge grin on my face—and even long before the benefit of Zoom, my friend knew it. “That’s John Wick,” he replied with utter self-assurance, knowing that they’d sold the first of what would be many movie tickets to come.
Long before I fell in love with films like Enter the Dragon and later films like The Heroic Trio, Ong-Bak, Bullet in the Head, and The Raid, Hong Kong Phooey—Number One Super Guy!—was my somewhat elementary (and arguably culturally appropriated) introduction to kung fu, followed by Roger Moore’s James Bond capitalizing on the kung fu craze of the seventies in The Man with the Golden Gun, the first Bond movie I ever saw in a theater. (Thanks, Mom and Dad!) But it wasn’t until the dawn of the home video era and the eighties when action movies first caught my interest in a big way.
Although never a fan of the Reagan-era, testosterone-infused right-wing masturbation fantasies of Rambo (albeit First Blood was a great film before the franchise became as big a fantasy epic as the Lord of the Rings) and Red Heat, movies like Lethal Weapon 1 and 2 (“diplomatic immunity”), Commando, and Die Hard, which blew me through the back wall of the theater, were more up my alley. And one of the reasons I think I fell so hard for John Wick when it was released was its neo-noir-infused cinematography and a reluctant hero who is drawn back to his old life after suffering unimaginable loss. He’s not a cipher but a fully drawn human being who can kick major ass and was a throwback to the iconic soft-spoken heroes of classic Westerns with a code—like Shane or Randolph Scott in the Ranown Westerns, like Ride Lonesome, The Tall T, and Seven Men from Now, or Gary Cooper in High Noon—as well as film noir antiheroes with a dark and tragic past like Alain Delon’s Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï or Lee Marvin in John Boorman’s Point Blank presented in a candy-colored wrapper filled with hyperkinetic action scenes, an Oz-like phantasmagoric New York City shot through the lenses of what seemed like a modern-day John Alton (watch The Big Combo or T-Men and you’ll see what I mean), and a dense and well-conceived, ever-metastasizing mythology.
That’s why when our jocular editor, Michael Homler, came to Ed Gross and me and asked if we were interested in writing an oral history about John Wick, gun fu, and the new age of action, Ed and I jumped at the chance. And despite going through a lot of lead writing this book, I can safely say none of our pencils ended up in anyone’s aorta—at least that I know of. You’d have to ask Ed.
Finally, one last story that I love that I couldn’t fit into the book but seems apropos given that it captures the nexus of the Hollywood dream factory and reality in Los Angeles. Back in the late 1980s, when ex-president (and Bedtime for Bonzo star) Ronald Reagan was moving into Fox Plaza in Century City, his Secret Service agents were briefly flummoxed when they discovered tons of spent shell casings in and around the offices that Reagan and his staff were to soon occupy. Their grave concerns soon evaporated to amusement when they realized, of course, that Fox Plaza had been the stand-in for Nakatomi Plaza, and the shell casings were only leftovers from a band of German terrorists and a lone cowboy, police officer John McClane. And no, I didn’t read that in Time magazine. True story.
So yippee-ki-yay, motherf#%@s, time to lock and load …
Mark A. Altman
August 2021