THE USA WORLD PREMIERE MOVIE: THE FORGOTTEN REDHEADED STEPCHILD OF FILM NOIR
BY PAUL FREITAG-FEY

When it comes to genre filmmaking, there are a few names that fans tend to think of that made the movies they love, respect, and over-analyze possible. Roger Corman, Lloyd Kaufman, Charles Band and David Friedman immediately come to mind as being responsible for hundreds of minimally-budgeted epics that could be easily marketed to eager viewers. (The quality of entertainment in the content, in many cases, was a secondary priority.)

The late Tom Piskura is rarely, if ever, among those names. In fact, his name comes up in comparison to those genre film moguls only once that I can find—in a New York Times article from 1992, in which he’s quoted along with the likes of Corman and Kaufman. But Piskura deserves significantly more praise than he’s received: As Vice-President of Programming for the USA Network’s West Coast division, he created and shepherded the USA World Premiere Movie.

The USA Network had, since its launch under that moniker in 1980, been friendly to genre fans throughout the eighties, with programming like Night Flight, Commander USA’s Groovy Movies, and Up All Night, featuring movies and shorts for the psychotronic mindset. On April 25, 1989, however, the network branched out into creating its own films with the airing of The Forgotten, created especially for the network. It proved to be just the tip of the iceberg, as for the next decade, they’d average over twenty new films a year, quickly overshadowing the output of similar basic cable stations like TNT, Lifetime and the Family Channel.

The secret to USA’s success was finding their niche, as they couldn’t compete with the budgets, promotional powers and epic miniseries of the major networks, nor with the prestige, star power and lack of FCC standards that premium channels like HBO could afford. That niche was film noir. “We’re reinventing the B-movie,” Piskura stated in an interview in 1992. “If this were 1940 we’d be doing Paul Muni films and Petrified Forest. I think the audience always loved these films, and they were taken away from them. We’ve discovered a sleeping giant.”

Clockwise from above: Promotional artwork for the trippy High Desert Kill; a newspaper ad for Murder 101; and Robert Mitchum brings some class to the USA Original with Jake Spanner.

Piskura wasn’t just paying lip-service. By 1992, the network had found its footing when it came to original films. In the first year, the films ran the gamut of genres, from screwball tales like The Hollywood Detective or Jake Spanner, Private Eye to straightforward horror films like I’m Dangerous Tonight, High Desert Kill and The Haunting of Sarah Hardy to a series of more “prestige” espionage films presented by novelist Frederick Forsyth. A look at production in subsequent years reveals the real ratings winners, however, and while the network continued to produce films in different genres, more than two-thirds of them could be confined to one—the thriller.

The nineties were a big boom time for neo-noir, with films like The Grifters, The Last Seduction and One False Move among the more notable entries. Neo-noir’s slutty little brother, the erotic thriller, became commonplace on video store shelves and a staple of Cinemax’s Friday After Dark programming. The USA Network offered its audience a downscale, familiar version of the thriller, with tales of falsely-accused murder, reluctant detectives, long cons and sexy serial killers. They were the “B-movies” of their time, much like the film noir of the forties, even to the point of remaking some of the classics in the genre (à la 1991’s This Gun for Hire or 1989’s Sorry, Wrong Number) and utilizing plenty of pulp novels as source material.

USA World Premiere Movies, as the opening logo proudly called them, were steeped in the noir tradition not only in content, but in their creation. The films usually starred actors that were known quantities but not A-listers, like Timothy Busfield, Gregory Harrison, Tim Matheson, Madchen Amick, Crystal Bernard and Gregory Hines. They utilized whitebread actors like Richard Thomas and Ted McGinley to play dangerous psychopaths, and the performances show their willingness to break out of their stereotypical roles. The standardized plots resulted in great use of random character actors, and it’s virtually impossible to watch a USA World Premiere Movie without thinking some random cop or judge or storekeeper looks awfully familiar, you just don’t know from where.

The directors involved were no slouches either. The films employed genre favorites like Fred Walton (Dead Air), Tobe Hooper (I’m Dangerous Tonight), Larry Cohen (As Good As Dead), and Brian Trenchard-Smith (Atomic Dog, the second-best film of the nineties inspired by a George Clinton song). There were also soon-to-be-big names like Bill Condon (Murder 101, White Lie, Dead in the Water, Deadly Relations) David S. Goyer (writer of The Substitute), Frank Darabont (Buried Alive) and Gary Fleder (The Companion) before making the big budget equivalents of a USA World Premiere Movie in the form of Kiss the Girls, Don’t Say a Word and Runaway Jury. There were also actors making their directorial debut like James Keach (The Forgotten, Praying Mantis) and Tim Matheson (Breach of Conduct, Buried Alive II, Tails You Live Heads You’re Dead)—heck, 1997’s His Bodyguard was written by Dynasty’s Emma Samms!

Most of the people behind the camera, however, came from the trenches of television directing. The roster was filled with TV pros like Thomas J. Wright (Chrome Soldiers, Snow Kill, Deadly Game), Arthur Allan Seidelman (Body Language, Dying to Remember), Harry Falk (High Desert Kill), Sandor Stern (Jericho Fever, Duplicates, Dangerous Pursuit, Web of Deceit), and Robert Michael Lewis (Don’t Talk to Strangers, Circumstances Unknown, The Crying Child), and they were a big part of giving the USA World Premiere Movie the tone that made them so successful.

USA World Premiere Movies took the conceits of classic film noir with their twisting plots and sketchy characters and adapted them to the TV movie format, in which a dangling, tension-filled plot point was necessary every twenty minutes or so in order to keep people from changing the channel while the network exposes them to the joys of “Freedom Rock” and Fabio’s inability to believe it’s not butter. As a basic cable station, they couldn’t show nudity, nor have profane language, nor feature more than a modicum of violence. By design, the USA World Premiere Movies were ruthlessly efficient, having to shoehorn multiple plot threads into a very tightly-controlled package without the benefit of being able to wake up their audience with sadistic violence or a stray boob. From the musical scores of smooth jazz to the brief sex scenes that show just enough beefcake and leg reaching out from under the cover to get the point across, these were thrillers in which the priority was getting the plot from one point to the next in as quick and familiar a way as possible.

The most common criticism of USA World Premiere Movies, that they’re well-worn plots that have been done before, and better, completely misses the intended purpose of the films. Nobody is going to argue that 1993’s Voyage is a better movie than Dead Calm even if they share remarkably similar plots—Voyage is Dead Calm made with one arm tied behind its back and a cast and crew that just want to entertain you with ridiculous plot twists and game talent (in this case, Rutger Hauer, Eric Roberts and Karen Allen) that you may forget by the next day instead of creating a genuinely memorable film. USA World Premiere Movies are designed not to be memorable—they’re a tried-and-tested formula, designed for the most ephemeral of experiences.

This isn’t to say that USA World Premiere Movies are bad—they’re often highly entertaining, and the best of them (like Darabont’s Buried Alive or Condon’s Murder 101) rank with some of the better neo-noirs of the era. These standouts aren’t notable because they defy some sort of genre convention, they’re just memorable because they do what they’re intended to do really, really well.

It’s no surprise that, unlike a lot of made for television movies, many of the USA World Premiere Movies found their way onto VHS and Laserdisc via Paramount and Universal’s home video releases. With a learned eye, you can easily pick out the USA movie from a video store lineup. They’ve got the stars’ names at the top and they’re absent-mindedly promoted with some of the blandest covers ever to grace video store shelves—Photoshop the lead actors looking as though they’re on the verge of being menaced or menacing, throw in some shadows and part of a publicity photo and call it a day. They’re almost always rated PG-13 for such vague reasons as “mature thematic material,” “thrilling violence” and “sensuality.” (There are a few exceptions, like films that were made for other sources but debuted on USA in a cut form, such as Rutger Hauer in Past Midnight, the Pamela Anderson thriller Snapdragon and Gary Busey in the Bad Ronald copy Hider in the House. Purists of the USA World Premiere Movie, of which there may be only myself, consider these actual USA Movies with an asterisk.) Titles were often as efficient as the films themselves, usually having some variation of “Dead,” or “Perfect” in them—1991 alone had Deadly Desire, Deadly Game, Dead in the Water and The Perfect Bride.

Their prominence on store shelves was short-lived. Few of these films have made the jump to DVD, and some, like 1992’s Drive Like Lightning, featuring Steven Bauer as an ex-stunt driver hired to drive a stunt car cross-country in a plot that could have been sitting on Roger Corman’s desk fifteen years earlier (down to the comic relief small-town sheriff), never made it to video at all, and have been virtually unseen since their original airing. Viewing the films these days mostly involves a random accidental showing on a late-night cable station you forgot you had.

The USA World Premiere Movie is often conflated with the Lifetime Movie, and it’s not all that surprising, as many USA productions receive more airplay on the “Network for Women” (and its affiliated movie-only channel) now than they do on their home channel. Certainly, it’s easy to confuse titles like Out of Annie’s Past, Maternal Instincts and My Stepson, My Lover with Lifetime films, but there is a clear difference. While Lifetime original movies—at least during their prime before moving onto prestige sleaze like Flowers in the Attic—tended to concentrate on the melodramatic aspects of the plot with the “thriller” nature secondary to character woes, the USA productions focused on the thriller aspects with character and melodrama secondary. Put simply, Lifetime films are descended from Stella Dallas; USA films are descended from Double Indemnity. While USA films often did have female protagonists, the stories and situations they fronted weren’t exclusively “woman-centric.” Only in rare cases (like the addiction recovery tale The Perfect Daughter or the later production Baby Monitor: Sound of Fear) did the network’s films delve into the paranoid motherhood melodrama so often thought of as the heart of the Lifetime Movie.

The nineties boom in USA Network Movies soon petered out, and the thrillers became slowly subservient to varying genres as the network tried to move past its reputation into traditional biopics, like 1999’s Hefner Unauthorized and more prestige projects starting with 1995’s My Antonia. Thrillers were still being produced, but with titles that were increasingly odd (1995’s Where’s the Money, Noreen?, 1997’s When Danger Follows You Home) or simply bland (1997’s Perfect Crime, 1998’s The Con) it was clear the golden age was over. The network still makes an occasional original film, but their primetime schedule is now filled with quirky detective shows and quirky crime dramas, their neo-noir heritage left to the wee hours of the night, if noted at all.

Their legacy, however, remains, and in Tom Piskura’s hands, the network created over 200 original films, mostly the type of entertaining potboilers with affable casts that film noir fans celebrate with glee. If the USA World Premiere Movie can’t make the jump into the cultural canon the way that film noir has, inspiring festivals, conventions and an endless supply of writing on the subject, then the least we can do is justify it as a subgenre. Throughout the nineties, the network carried on the torch of made for television movies with relish and success, taking genre films (mostly noir, but also horror, disaster and science fiction) through the FCC-approved, commercial-scheduled ringer and produced dozens of entertaining little time-passers. Like the films noir of the forties and fifties, the USA World Premiere Movies were efficient, cheaply-made crime thrillers featuring notable performers and journeyman filmmakers going through the paces— even if Tails You Live, Heads You’re Dead or Tall, Dark and Deadly may never rank with The Postman Always Rings Twice.