On Day 1, my first directing experience in five years, I ran around like a hare from the hounds, shooting thirty-three first camera setups and sixteen second camera shots in one beach restaurant scene that introduced several main characters and some death squad heavies. I hardly sat down during the twelve hours. Bob Richardson and his crew were kind of shocked, flying in all directions; no one worked this fast. I had something to prove, but to do so, I rushed some shots, which were not quite working and would have to be cut. Our Mexican crew was wondering, Is this going to be our pace every day? They weren’t used to the “American” style. No one was.
Reality set in at the Day 2 location, a backcountry town where Woods surprises Elpidia Carrillo (Maria), who, in a ritual outside time, is washing laundry down by the river with other women. Her baby is nearby in a blanket, unattended. After some gentle dialogue, reunited, she walks off with Boyle. “Cut,” I called out, pleased.
The sweet Mexican script man came running over to me, worried, not knowing what the “gringo” director really wanted. “Señor Stone, please—didn’t Elpidia forget her baby?” Oh, shit. He’s right. It was still there. What kind of mother . . . ? Of course, it was a dummy in a blanket; maybe that’s why she forgot it? We laughed, but this tells you a little something about Elpidia, who could sometimes go totally blank in her performance, a proclivity that I’d wrestle with throughout. She was accustomed to the mores of the Mexican film industry, being told everything she was supposed to do in the shot; thinking for yourself was not encouraged.
We were filming two or three scenes a day at different locations at breakneck speed—but we were still falling behind. A flash flood hit one day, washing out the dirt paths for our cars and trucks. Communication problems were constant. My second assistant director, Ramón Menéndez (who soon became my first when we fired the original), was bilingual and smart, AFI-trained in the States—but he was a native of Cuba, and when he started to order the Mexican crew around to get things moving, they rebelled, unwilling to be bossed around by any Cuban. Menéndez was an opinionated idealist who annoyed me several times in pre-production when he was loud and clear about his wanting to become a director one day. But I needed his brains too much to let him go. Soon, indeed, Ramón would go on to direct the excellent Stand and Deliver (1988), and on our shoot, he was without equal.
The third day, as we were finishing a scene at Elpidia’s beach shack, Bruno Rubeo, our production designer, by custom went ahead of us to the last location of the day, which was miles away and was to be shot that night. We were starting half-day, half-night shoots, which I learned to prefer after finding out on night shoots, meaning 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., that much of the work done after midnight is achieved too slowly and at high cost. Starting the day (if it can be done) at 1 p.m. and calling it at 1 a.m., twelve hours later, aligns better with the body’s rhythms, until, that is, we can clock our body around after two or three such days to a full night rhythm. This meant working from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. and sleeping the first part of the day. In this case, Bruno, whose powers of concentration were suspect, had gone off alone but neglected to tell anyone where this night location was; satellite phones didn’t work well in these rugged areas, so by the time we located him and the screaming had stopped, the crew refused to go to the night location because it was too far away at that hour. It wasn’t a strike, but it gave clear warning to the gringos that “Hey, we’re in Mexico here. We do things our way.” Storm warnings noted.
Another night, our heavyset “government censor” was quite upset when we displayed a fabricated young boy’s severed head at city hall as a warning from a death squad. She thought the way we’d arranged it and shot it was “too much,” especially as she was already disturbed by the amount of garbage we’d strewn on the streets. I argued that this was the reality of Salvador, not Mexico, but she saw it as a larger issue, a degradation of Latin Americans. Woods didn’t help this situation when, in the middle of a sex scene at Maria’s beach shack, he needlessly teased the censor, “Why do you need to be on the set for this moment?” followed by remarks like “What do you think of your job? Does it make you happy?” Everyone heard it.
Gerald had warned me to be especially polite to the censor, because unless she approved the film, we’d never get an export license for our negative to go back to the States. I turned to our Hispanic American casting director, Bob Morones, who fancied himself a ladies’ man, with the idea that he’d spend some time with our censor—and who knows? He was repelled by the idea but tried his best to get the hound off our scent. We did modify the garbage in the streets, but nonetheless, she filed several negative reports on us. The worst moment would come several weeks later.
Jimmy Woods became another issue entirely—a beast of an issue. Almost immediately, he was not just stepping on Belushi’s lines but taking him aside to tell him how to say them—as well as telling him to “cut the jokes.” At first Belushi bowed to Jimmy as the more experienced actor, but soon he got wise—and tougher. It wasn’t long before they started screaming at each other on set.
Woods: “Whattaya mean? I’m only trying to help you, for Chrissake.”
Belushi: “Fuck you, man, I know what the fuck you’re trying to do! I saw the back of your head crawling into my close-up” (an over-Jimmy’s-shoulder shot onto Jim). Let them fight, let the tension work in favor of the scene, I told myself; after all, Boyle had dragged Rock down to Salvador with lies and promises, and it made sense for Belushi to be upset in this mess of a situation. I was getting the results on film, even if it was not pleasant.
But I sensed there was a bigger problem. It was between Jimmy and me. First of all, it’s telling that he arrived in Mexico with his new girlfriend from San Francisco, whom he was preening over, telling us how high-bred Sarah was, a horsewoman of distinction. Jimmy was deeply insecure, but he was also the “star” of the picture with the most experience under his belt; he certainly let us know that we were all amateurs and he was the professional. I had to take him on; if he sensed anybody was weak, he’d clearly jump all over him. There was in Jimmy that paradox of being the dog who barks when he can and cowers when he can’t, and I had to be kind enough that I could feed him his biscuits and keep him happy. He had that “genius” sense of superiority—no one knows movies better than me. So I inevitably ended up getting in the way of his reflection, driving him nuts, and once his uncertainty kicked in (“What does Stone really want—he’s making me feel like shit here!”), he’d get really crazy or surprisingly vulnerable, and sometimes, thank God, it’d come out on camera. But not always.
Things went to shit during the Friday all-night shoot at the end of the first week. Jim Belushi, in his first solo scene without Woods, is drunk in a rat-hole cantina when he takes on five tough death squaders in the street outside. To play the scene, Belushi, frustrated by Woods upstaging him in their scenes together, drank himself into an angry stupor—call it “Method drunk”—and began screaming at the villains as he ripped his shirt off, sweaty and barefoot, and turned the scene into an over-the-top performance, losing the humor of being a victim and instead becoming the victimizer. The befuddled Mexican heavies, who didn’t speak a word of English, retreated in confusion as Jim stalked forward, shouting at these big guys who could’ve easily taken him out. As I looked up in despair, dawn creasing the sky, I knew we had nothing we could use. We were falling another half day behind. Giant locusts now invaded the set, and the toads, croaking loudly, were feasting on them. The strong eat the weak at any hour.
The next day Jim apologized to me in tears, complaining of Woods’s putdowns, telling me he wanted a true relationship with me, “man-to-man.” It’s painful to discuss this with an actor when he’s floundering, and I tried to help him as best I could, but he had to understand clearly that he was supposed to be in a desperate situation, and I liked the way he was frustrated. I just didn’t want him to drink anymore.
By the time we got to the end of the second week, we were dragging. Everyone was nervous about the rape and murder of the Maryknoll nuns. But Cindy Gibb and the older actresses playing the nuns were possessed of stern imaginations, convincing the audience they were terrified while staying true to their God, hoping for the best. The night was short and cold, and we had to shoot fast. I was unhappy with some of the crudely shot “grabs,” which were big, slobbering close-ups of the death squaders drooling over Cindy’s angelic face. After the rapes, there’s a silence, marked by the sound of jungle bugs, as the nuns put their shirts back on, and we think, momentarily, they’ll be let go. At least that. But their fate was a harsh one, and as in the real event, each was shot in the face at point-blank range and tossed in a mass grave. Although I was unhappy with the way I’d hurriedly shot it, it turned out powerfully.
After two weeks in the Acapulco area, we badly needed to get back to Mexico City to check the cameras and retool. On location, we’d had reports of focus problems from our processing lab at Churubusco. Woods naturally went nuts when he saw bits of the blurry dailies, which looked far worse than they were when projected on location on our old projectors off improvised screens made of bedsheets. The lab, however, was of dubious quality, printing lights that were often too green or blue, and the “timer” in charge of printing the film was having communication problems with Richardson, who was still young and would fly off the handle. When we finally checked the footage on proper screens back at the Mexico City studio, we were vastly relieved to see we had just enough focus to avoid a reshoot. By necessity, we fired our Mexican focus puller and brought down a well-paid assistant cameraman from Los Angeles. I had other problems too—with my editor. She was a newcomer whom, like much of my inner circle, I’d hired on instinct, but we were unfortunately out of sync on almost everything, so I specifically instructed the editor to cut to my wishes until she could please me. Many disagreements followed, but I’d never show the rushes before I was ready. I’d stay in the editing room extra hours, sorting out the chaos no matter how tired I was, to get it right. After my experience on The Hand, I was adamant about not allowing this film to get out from under my control. This was, of course, increasingly difficult as the money noose tightened.
From Mexico City, we moved for the next four weeks to a new base in lovely Cuernavaca on a Sunday. The problem was no one then worked in Mexico on a Sunday, so it was a logistical disaster; it took hours to check in, find our staff, book the actors into rooms, etc. All this wasted my energy in anger and irritation. I went ballistic on Gerald about the organizing, but then learned that on top of this, without telling me, he’d fired fifteen of our crew, including stand-ins; he told us we could use crew members who weren’t working to stand in for the actors when being lighted. Why? Money, of course. Additionally, Woods was calling his CAA agent to complain that Belushi “with his Jackie Gleason shtick” was getting all the coverage, when in fact 75 percent of it was focused on Woods.
Now the agent was coming down to police us, as was Film Finances, watching my number of takes, extras, my rehearsal times, making estimates that the film, when roughly assembled, would be more than four hours, and so forth. I was now cutting the script as tightly as I could, not shooting certain scenes I wanted but that, under this pressure, no longer seemed essential to me. A US video sales company also came to watch us; so did our foreign salesman, Arnold Kopelson, and his wife, Anne, as did Marion Billings, our publicist; and then John Daly showed up (with a new girlfriend). I was under a microscope in a surveillance state, but I was in another zone now, utterly possessed by my need to “make” the next setup at whatever cost. I had no shame. My temper grew short with our Mexican sound engineer, who Green said had done “four hundred Mexican films” and who said I wasn’t giving him enough rehearsal time. He quit. So did the hysterical “genius Mexican art director” who’d done some “two hundred films.” I didn’t care; at that time, Mexican films were not noteworthy for their sound or other technical qualities. Later, the veteran sound man came back and we made up. He told me, “You’ll be a great director. I know it.” And then he said exactly what he’d said when he quit: “Forty years I’ve worked in this business. I know.”
I’d sold the film to John as a “Hunter Thompson and his buddy go to Salvador” tale that becomes darker as it goes on. And in that anarchic spirit, a highlight of the story was to be Boyle’s reunion with “Colonel Figueroa” at a military cuartel near rebel territory. Boyle and Rock, having been arrested as “periodistas” (journalists) and nearly killed, are brought in to Figueroa, filthy, near naked. But in a stroke of Irish luck, Boyle once glorified the colonel in a long-ago article, and he remembers Boyle! Then they’re feasting together, drunk in Figueroa’s quarters with several busty, colorful whores. As I told Riordan for his book: “Doctor Rock is getting a blowjob under a table. Boyle is fucking a girl while trying to pry information from the Colonel, and the Colonel is so drunk out of his mind that he pulls out this bag of ears [shades of Vietnam war trophies] and throws the ears on a table and says, ‘left-wing ears, right-wing ears, who gives a fuck!’ He throws an ear into a champagne glass, proposes a toast to El Salvador, and drinks the champagne with the ear in it!”
And then, improvising, the actor playing Figueroa put another ear into a whore’s open mouth!
Well, this was one step too far for our government censor, who was horrified and ran to Green, who in turn was terrified—there goes our export license! We sweet-talked the censor for the next two days, trying to keep things quiet, and I presume Gerald pulled out every stop to keep the ship afloat. Later, because of pressure from the American side over sexual content, it was all chopped up in the editing room anyway, losing impact. I believe South American and European audiences would’ve understood the madness inherent in this scene, but when we screened it for American audiences, it just didn’t work the same way. Why? Because, as it was then perceived, perhaps less so now, audiences were dependent on categorizations. If a film was sold to them as a comedy, they laughed, an adventure, they gasped, a drama, they cried. Salvador, like The Hand, was neither fish nor fowl and would be put through this laborious testing process where I found that, if something is new or unexpected, it would generally register on the audience’s judgment scale as “upsetting,” “chaotic,” “disturbing,” etc. Neither good nor bad, just new, and not to be trusted yet. Salvador, in hindsight, would never make for an “acceptable” film, much less a studio film, but I didn’t know it then. I thought that something new could break through.
By this time, Jimmy had been yelling so much in front of the Mexican crew that he was suddenly and officially warned by the Mexican government that his behavior “as a guest in our country” was “unacceptable,” and that if it continued, he’d be asked to leave Mexico—which meant the film would have to shut down. Gerald was very somber. They meant it; there was no question the film was teetering into chaos.
We shot one hundred–plus extras lying on the side of a steep slope on an extremely hot day amid vultures and garbage, as Woods, complaining most of the time, and John Savage take photographs of the victims of the death squads. Black smoke from tires, permissible in Mexico, permeated the air, congesting our throats. There was very little water, and it was a long, long day. I should’ve fought harder for the necessary water, but I was barely hanging in myself; standing braced on a slope for several hours with no even ground is most taxing. In the final film, in the background, you can hear groans and see several “dead” extras squirming with discomfort; one lady, ready to black out from dehydration, simply sat up in the middle of a shot, which I left in. After all, I rationalized, some of these victims might not have been dead.
We moved on to Mexico City for the giant cathedral interior and exterior with one thousand extras. This scene is the turning point for Boyle’s character; he’s been through several close calls and seems now to want to buckle down and make up for his dubious past by marrying Maria (Elpidia), who surprises him when she tells him she’s not interested because he’s a “schemer and a scammer.” He then begs her—and takes her to church to prove that he’s now rediscovered his morality; he’ll receive communion from Archbishop Romero himself. The day before we shot this complex and massive scene, fed up with his behavior, I suggested to Jimmy that in addition to the scripted scene, Boyle should also go to confession for the first time in thirty years. I looked at it as a chance for Jimmy to repent. Jimmy, however, was raised Catholic, and explained it this way to Riordan:
“Oh, really? First of all, let me tell you something, Oliver. You don’t go to confession on the morning before the mass.”
And [Oliver] says, “Well, the audience won’t know the difference.”
“Right—there’s like 80 million Catholics in the United States, but they probably won’t notice? Sure.” And the irony was, they didn’t. He was right. That’s what’s so aggravating about him! So I asked him for the lines, but he said, “I don’t want to give you the lines. I want you to just look into that dark, murky soul of yours, into that weasel soul of yours, and come up with whatever you want . . .” What you saw was the first time that it came out of my mouth, just total improvisation. I just used the whole thing to get back at Oliver for stuff that happened during the film. At one point, he’d certainly called me a weasel and a rat, so I mentioned that in the confession and so on.
That ad-libbed scene brought, as much as anything, howls from the audience and highlighted Woods’s Oscar-nominated performance.
As it turns out, just as Maria and Boyle are kneeling together at the altar, about to accept the wafer on their tongues from Archbishop Romero, this is the moment when an assassin shoots the archbishop and the whole church erupts in panic. It seems nothing comes easy for Boyle.
Now it was time to film Salvador’s most complicated scenes, the full-out battle of Santa Ana. We shot in the picturesque sixteenth-century town of Tlayacapan, which we set up with vast swaths of burning rubber tires and black smoke, bombs, squibs, actors running, dying—and hundreds of fascinated locals watching from the edges. This was truly a dream day for me, as I got to be the general in this game, moving the camera and the actors as if I were a boy playing with my toy soldiers. The town’s tough-talking Mayor Gomez was by my side, fully supportive; he’d modeled himself on Al Capone, and much admired Scarface. He allowed us to build first-story “fronts” on the main streets and second-story structures to blow out during the battle. He also gave the okay for us to redecorate his office in city hall as a whorehouse, replete with plush red furnishings (a makeover he liked so much, he left it as his office).
By this time, we were clearly well over budget and schedule. The bond company was pressuring Green for “cuts . . . cuts . . . and more cuts.” Their toughest field man was coming down that day, replacing their previous representative, who seemed to them too compliant with Green, who was certainly good at evading the truth, shuffling numbers around in ways, I think, worthy of Enron later in the century. Ominously, the day before, I had my first real fight with Daly, who now wanted to “call” the completion bond—that is, force them to put up their money for our overage, as he realized we could not come close to finishing on budget; it would effectively give the bond company control of the film. I was shaken, and I told John on the phone, in as steady a voice as I could, “John, if Film Finances takes us over and in any way damages the integrity of what we” (I purposely emphasized the “we”) “set out to do, you and I part company on this film and all other projects. I’ll leave the picture.” John, usually calm, yelled right back at me, “I won’t be threatened like this!” I didn’t have a leg, really, to stand on, except the work, but at least he knew it was important to me if I was willing to walk away both on this picture and on Platoon. Of course, if Daly pulled the plug, any chance of a new beginning for me would go up in smoke. And so would the film—and with it John’s investment; our arrangement was a case of “mutually assured destruction.”
With the bond people en route and Gerald on the phone telling me he was going to get the cash from a Mexican syndicate friendly with his father-in-law, I called “Action!” and the cavalry charge began. Seventy horses, which we’d wrangled with great difficulty, were galloping at full speed with rebel riders down cobblestone streets. The riders were the descendants of Zapata from the state of Morelos, although the Zapatistas never really used horses then, nor did the Salvadoran rebels ever mount a horse charge. But fuck it! If I was going down—and this was probably my last film—fuck the bond company, I wanted my horse charge.
To guarantee it, I offered to pay for it out of my fee, of which I hadn’t yet seen a penny, but was rejected because there was no real money for my fee at this point; but I’d go down in style. We shot the cavalry charge four more times. Greatness! I was so excited. A complex job achieved, all this in the face of looming disaster. We were moving to our next setup when Green quietly slithered over to me, our eyes tensely meeting. “I’m not frowning, am I?” he quipped with a sly smile. “I made a deal.” A million dollars out of a Mexican consortium. No takeover. Another day to live!
We plowed on. The next day the army tanks we’d rented were a few hours late. An aerial gasoline explosion misfired on one sandbagged position, and two stunt people were burned and evacuated, but they’d be okay. (When Woods heard about the accident, of course, he turned it into another melodrama.) There was a bazooka mishap on a rooftop. Then another camera malfunctioned. Fifty of the Mexican soldiers we’d hired kept smiling at the camera. I screamed them back into reality by the third take. We’d hired a small plane, repainted it with army markings to strafe low over the street where Woods and John Savage are taking photos of the battle. Jimmy was especially nervous about all the explosive squibs. He was heavily wired to the squibs in order for him to get shot in the leg. A Mexican pilot, who didn’t speak English, was going to fly a single-engine plane real low right over Jimmy, who was talking nonstop to calm his rattled nerves.
I suddenly heard an explosion of words out of Savage, who never lost his temper, his soft voice raised at Woods, who was now apparently giving John some kind of advice or instruction. “You don’t talk to me! You don’t talk to me, you hear!” John screamed—after which Woods went ballistic, threw his prop camera bag to the ground, and yelled, “I’ve had enough of this shit!” Our plane was circling overhead, losing gas, and then I heard Ramón, our AD, yelling over the radio, “Woods left the set!”
“Don’t let him have a car!” I said, reading Woods’s freaked-out mind. A few minutes later, I heard Woods was already “three miles down the road!” Ramón was now walking alongside him pleading, “Jimmy, Jimmy, don’t leave! Come on, man, we need you. Don’t do this. It’s a good film. We’ll work this out. You’ll be safe.” Nothing doing. I instructed all the production people and Ramón to get ahead of him and tell anyone on this road in the middle of nowhere not to stop under any circumstance and pick this guy up. Jimmy had a prop gun in a holster around his waist. “Tell them he’s a crazy gringo with a forty-five looking for a ride.”
Eventually, Ramón cooled him down. The plane had to go back to refuel, another hour of daylight lost. We got Woods back to the set, and John Savage graciously apologized to Jimmy, who accepted it, and then started ranting at me. I wanted to kill him—strangle him, actually—up close, personal. Rarely has a human being brought out this desire for violence in me. I repressed my urge, and the plane returned, and in the course of things we got the shot without injury. Ten Mexican businessmen brought out by Gerald were watching the whole thing—quite an impression of our business they must’ve carried away.
By 6 p.m., with the sun dipping lower, we got our last aerial from a private chopper, rigged with an M60 machine gun and rocket, swooping into our tight frame and shooting Jimmy down in the same shot, wounding him; this was a miracle. Although the helicopter was about thirty feet above his head, Jimmy would claim it brushed his hair.
We’d made it. Or had we?
Early the next day, our Mexican crew solemnly called a strike. Gerald implied that something was not working out with his consortium. I shrugged. I just didn’t give a shit anymore, and I walked over to a bombed-out prop car in the cemetery and gratefully fell asleep in the backseat. Some two hours later, Ramón woke me. “We’re back.” We were? I didn’t need to know why anymore. I was ready to accept anything. I couldn’t blame the crew, and we went to work like automatons and finished the day.
But there was no question our production was being hunted by the furies; it was in the air. The rumors were building through the office staff and crew: “We’re closing down.” Mexico was turning into a surrounding army of creditors, people everywhere not paid, angry, and we were at the Alamo. We’d also lost four rolls of film from the battle sequence when our camera loader, out of fatigue no doubt, reused two rolls we’d already shot.
The next day—our forty-second in Mexico—was our last. It was tense all the way. We were shooting Boyle’s execution scene at the hands of the death squaders who catch him at the border of Guatemala, trying to sneak out with Elpidia, but he’s saved at the last second by a call from the American ambassador—“Stars and Stripes” to the rescue. Naturally, Woods, before he filmed the scene, blew up at me when he claimed he’d found a real bullet in the prop rifle’s chamber (I’m sure several of the crew had thought of it), which was all bullshit anyway, but another great story of Jimmy saving the day from the incompetent morons around him. We finished again at a roadside cantina, chasing the setting sun at 7:30 and making it by about thirty seconds before losing the light. It was done—we were finished, the end of Mexico! And I accepted defeat. It was an ignoble end, but I felt we had to get out while we could. Say good-bye. No sense of having “achieved” this film. Everyone seemed depressed, fatalistic.
We still owed five more days of opening scenes in San Francisco, and three days for the crucial ending in Las Vegas and the surrounding desert. We heard from Daly that first he wanted the negative, work print, and sound out of the lab and out of Mexico. Though Film Finances had apparently paid the lab, they “didn’t give a damn about the beginning or end”; they were furious at Green and told him, “You’ve done nothing but lie! . . . Now deliver the picture as per contract!” When I called John to talk about how we could finish the movie, I reminded him that I hadn’t shot the film’s opening or close. We had the middle for sure, but . . . In his detached Cockney accent, he interrupted, “Oh, fuck. Well, can’t you just cut the beginning?” Turbulent, I pleaded, “Are you crazy? You love the beginning, remember?” He grudgingly admitted he did.
The next day in our editing room in Mexico City, as we were packing to move, Gerald was telling me with his hangdog eyes that he was “fucked,” as if I was the only one left in this world, next to his wife, who might still believe him. “I’ve lost my shirt, Oliver.” Shock on his face. “I owe a lot of money to a lot of people. My father-in-law thinks I’m a con man . . . I’m facing death here. This is bankruptcy.” I genuinely felt sorry that I had contributed to his despair, but with Gerald, his expression was so sad sack that I had to suppress a laugh, wondering if he had yet another card up his sleeve.
I never did figure out how our picture was paid for; it was a secretive poker game among three parties that was way over my head. I asked Daly years later what really happened, and I remember his Cheshire cat grin as he said, once more shaking his head with delight, “That Gerald—my Lord, what a rascal!” And so it remains—a mystery.
We got out fast, grateful to cross the US border, where we rested and prepped for the finale in San Francisco and Las Vegas. Bob Richardson went to the hospital with a serious salmonella infection, which set Woods off, going hypochondriacal about the parasite he now pictured, as large as an alien, in his intestines. Boyle, who’d been drinking way too much and again looked like a bloated red toad, wanted to continue collaborating with me and start working on a new film—we’d call it “Beirut,” or “Boyle Goes to Beirut”—about his previous adventures in the Middle East. Of course, in this story, he crosses Arab-Israeli lines and falls “in love” with a local beauty, then manages to find himself in the middle of the terror bombing that took 217 US Marine lives. John surely would’ve staked us. Yes, Richard was a pain in the ass, but it was worth the result. But there I went again, dreaming of another movie with Boyle. First I had to finish this damn movie, Salvador—and then closely supervise the cut. I wasn’t going anywhere right now, and Daly reiterated he wanted to make Platoon early the next year. He’d even do it the same way we’d made Salvador, with or without a distributor. Daly even wanted to make the Russian script, “Defiance,” that went to cold storage with Marty Bregman; he’d buy it back from Universal. I had my doubts about any of this happening. And I was still out $30,000 in out-of-pocket production costs I’d incurred, among them subsidizing Boyle.
Year of the Dragon had finally opened that August of 1985 and, costing approximately $24 million, would make $19 million domestically, not the number they wanted. In the theaters, where I saw the film twice, my feelings were enthusiastic but mixed; the film polarized the audience. The main character was a loudmouth, and Mickey Rourke, mesmerizing in his way, lacked an overall charm. Did it have racist strains? Sure, it had elements of insult. Marion Billings in New York reported a negative reaction from her film circle. On my thirty-ninth birthday, my frequent critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker called out both Cimino and me as “still living in a cave . . . one [a] brazen vulgarian—both xenophobic—bring[ing] out the worst in each other . . . so neither one knows when he has become a public embarrassment.” Another notch in my career belt. In New York magazine, David Denby actually separated the two of us, sparing Michael his rod in order to punish “the dread Oliver Stone.”
In any case, Dragon would never be, as we’d hoped, Michael’s comeback film, and he would troll along for years, demanding, difficult to work with, and expensive to finance. He would remain a mystery not only to me but also to his macho buddies like Mickey Rourke and my detective friend Stanley White, whom he loved to hang with; they would have a hard time telling you who he was. Michael enjoyed the cloak of his own enigma, and transforming or cross-dressing, whatever, he died relatively young, without ever really becoming more of the artist he was when he made The Deer Hunter. He ran, I believe, headlong into his own demons—hubris, arrogance, a classic Greek flaw—when he made Heaven’s Gate so costly, and this in turn was the checkmate of a film that mortally wounded him. I’d face a similar reckoning in a few years.
We trudged up to shoot our San Francisco opening—Boyle and Rock zooming across the Golden Gate Bridge in their battered Mustang, yapping about their woes with women on a perfectly blue day. I used my son Sean as Boyle’s screaming baby in the opening shots set in Boyle’s broken-down apartment in the Tenderloin. While we were shooting, Elizabeth burst in, and seeing Bob Richardson’s smoke infesting the small set, started screaming at me like the angry mother she was. “No smoke! You lied to me! This is it! It’s his last shot!” It seemed like everyone was screaming as we grabbed our classic opening. I guess, like Richard, I’d always be rushing and screamed at, but no matter what, fuck it, for a good cause my son could swallow a little smoke.
We checked into The Dunes in Las Vegas for our grand finale. The last of three days of shooting began on Saturday, August 31, with the temperature hitting 115° in the desert. It was fitting that I was leading a caravan of one hundred–odd people in fifteen or twenty vehicles on this insane movie on its very last day—with no idea where we were going; I was a one-eyed general leading an Army of No Money. The two previous days had been grueling and long, and now we were on to the crucial last scene of the movie—Elpidia and Jimmy and her kids on a Greyhound bus, heading north past the Arizona border, safe back in the USA. That is, until the cops suddenly pull them over for an immigration spot-check that becomes a nightmare. I hadn’t scouted anything out here on US 95 out of Vegas, where it was all flat high desert anyway with no shade at all.
After twenty minutes of driving surrounded by protective police cars, their roof lights soundlessly flashing, I called the caravan to a halt when and where I felt lucky; after all, I’d gone on instinct up to now. I had three and a half pages to shoot, mainly inside a crowded sauna of a bus. Rehearse. Light. Shoot. Work it out. Block it. Block it some more. A line of dialogue here, not there, then rise, move, turn, speak here, then not . . . and so on and so on, twenty to fifty beats to every scene. It was so hot inside the bus, extras and actors needed constant water. It didn’t look like we’d make it in time, but between 3 and 7 p.m., we finally got a “roll on,” a sailing or surfing analogy, I think—you get the wind and you go, because the wind can change at any second. Moviemaking is very much like sailing, in that every moment is fraught with change.
Chris Lombardi, our stalwart assistant camera/focus puller from Los Angeles, went down suddenly with heat prostration. This was serious, his pallor reminding me of soldiers in the Vietnam jungle—in danger. No one else could keep the focus while Bob was operating a handheld in the small, intimate spaces of the bus. Now we were fucked. I begged him to try to stand. “Chris, you can do it! I know you can. This happened to guys a lot in Vietnam, but we always made it . . . And you know—think about those guys in the Foreign Legion. What they went through! You can do it, Chris, I know you got the guts!” Richardson later told me he couldn’t believe I’d invoked the French Foreign Legion, but for me it was a life-and-death situation; there’d be no next day! Chris was a big guy with deer-in-the-headlights eyes, but, bless his soul, he groaned, probably to get me out of his face, pulled himself upright, and made it through this monster last day.
The two immigration cops quickly figure Elpidia and her two kids are illegal, and they drag her off the bus as Jimmy passionately pleads with them in vain. The worst kind of separation at the border—loved ones—except that these three poor people were headed back to a war zone in Salvador, where memories of her involvement with Boyle could endanger her life. With the sun a minute from inching down behind a far-off mountain, we rolled our last shot, from a crane above the bus, of Elpidia and the two kids being led to the cop car and driven away to detention as Jimmy watches in the foreground, forlorn.
This was what Elizabeth and John wanted me to change to a more hopeful ending. But what was Boyle’s real life about but disaster and defeat? In my heart, this was so right even if I had to pay a price for it. Any other way would be dishonest about what our government was really doing in Central America.
The film was over—here, now, finally. I just couldn’t believe it, and sat down at the side of the desert road, stunned with fatigue. Jimmy came and sat next to me, and in my diary I have him saying, “You know, it might’ve been my best performance. You kept me off balance, confused enough that I let things happen I usually don’t. You made me vulnerable. Usually, I’m in complete control . . . You’re not going to believe this, but I really love you, and I think you made a great film. I want this to be the one they put on our gravestones. The one that we’re most proud of.” Although it would still take me a little time to trust him again, these were big words from Jimmy and reflected one of his dual personalities—no doubt Dr. Jekyll. Yet I do think we actually started liking each other through this adversity we’d endured. And life does have these impossible turnarounds if you let them happen to you, and don’t stay in “complete control.”
Our relations ripened in later years into a mature friendship, each of us knowing the other’s character from seeing the worst and the best we had to offer. Through the years, I produced the Emmy Award–winning TV movie Indictment: The McMartin Trial (1995) with Jimmy in the lead role, as well as Killer: A Journal of Murder (1995). And I cast him ten years after Salvador as the dread H. R. Haldeman, the president’s chief of staff, in Nixon (1995), followed by his turn as a corrupt football team doctor in Any Given Sunday (1999). Jimmy, to this day, remains a bachelor who seems to have the most fun playing high-stakes poker; he tells me he’s “one of the top five in the nation.” Of course. Jimmy is Jimmy, larger than life, and how can we ever know the truth?
The battles of production are not to be confused with finishing a film and winning the war. The two most treacherous stages of this process are (1) the editing, and (2) the marketing and distribution of the movie. I would come to realize that it’s in the marketing and distribution where the game gets even more intense; it’s where the money is. And we directors, actors, writers, producers, outside studio control, might be the colorful buccaneers of olden times who captain the ships and steal the treasures, but it’s the empires that still control the seas and the trade routes—and the banks. And that’s where the fate of the film lies.
Editing the film over the next four months would be both tedious and terrifying, in that I seemed almost always to be on the edge of losing control of it, either to Daly’s distribution needs or, more insidiously, to the forces of convention. Case in point: the ending, wherein I resisted consistent pressure to change it to a more upbeat finale. I could have finished the film with a ride into the sunset with Jimmy and his new family on the bus without any ugly surprises from the US Border Patrol—and no reshoot would have been necessary. Another stark example was a contentious five-minute conversation set in the garden of an exclusive Cuernavaca country club. The scene is all dialogue, as Boyle lets loose on a CIA agent, undercover with the State Department, and a Pentagon colonel, who are trying to recruit him as a journalist to spy on the rebels. Boyle’s argument is anti-interventionist. The technocrats believe they’re fighting communism. “You guys been lying about that from the fucking beginning,” Boyle says. “You never presented one shred of proof to the American public that this is anything other than a legitimate peasant revolution. So don’t start telling me about the sanctity of military intelligence, not after Chile and Vietnam.” They argue back, but he counters, “What are death squads but the CIA’s brainchild . . . but you’ll run with them, because they’re anti-Moscow, you’ll let them close the universities, wipe out the Catholic Church, kill whoever they want, wipe out the best minds in the country, but as long as they’re not commies, that’s okay. That, Colonel, is bullshit. You’ve created a major Frankenstein, that’s what.”
The scene built to a powerful close: “So that’s why you guys are here, looking for some kind of post-Vietnam experience, like you need a rerun or something? Turn this place into a military zone. Pour in another $120 million so they can get more chopper parades in the sky? . . . All you’re doing is bringing misery to these people. For Chrissake, Jack, you gotta take care of the people first, in the name of human decency, something we Americans are supposed to believe in, you’ve at least gotta try to have something of a just society here!” This was all rendered relatively quickly in machine gun dialogue from Jimmy, somewhat similarly to what I did later with Donald Sutherland’s sixteen-minute near monologue in JFK. Because it was wordy and “on the nose,” there was resistance to it. But I fought for the scene in its entirety, because I thought it would probably be my last shot at saying what I believed about our government, Vietnam, and Central America. It would be my gravestone speech that would forever distinguish me from the scripts I’d written in the past but whose contours, as directed by others, concealed murky liberal sentiments at their core. If this was my last film, which I was now expecting it to be, I did not want it to be, once again, misunderstood.
In that same vein of taking stands, I decided to leave the ICM agency after these four unsatisfactory years and try this new CAA. I’d still be paying ICM for another year, but Paula Wagner and Mike Menschel, accepting that economic arrangement, had already been on set in Mexico; no one from ICM even asked to come visit. I went into CAA for the “final sale,” a meeting with the notorious Mike Ovitz, whose reputation was fast-growing as the new “gunfighter” in town. I found him to be a master—in psychology, certainly. He was sure of himself, aggressive right off the bat, keeping me in suspense as to what he was going to say next. His secret was that, as the meeting goes, he’s creating the suspense, not you. He started with “You’re a mystery to me, Oliver, your career . . . You’re a talent here . . .” (his hand indicates a high bar) “of the highest plane—with Robert Towne, Elaine May, but you make films here . . .” (with another gesture, he indicates a lower bar) “another level of people. You know, I met you years ago,” which I didn’t recall. “I find you very changed—calmer.” This, of course, put me in sensitive territory. Jesus, how bad was I? When I mentioned my relationship with John Daly, he made it clear that although he was okay with that, they only “half-believed” in Daly (he was, after all, outside CAA’s ecosystem, hardly a big buyer)—“but I think we can get you alternatives.” With his whispered confidences and strong body language, Mike left the room with the same sense of mystery with which he’d entered—and left the impression that he could have been a leader in any field if he so chose. The only obstacle, I came to believe, was that he made too many people jealous. The nature of the business beast. Not to make others jealous. This is perhaps one of the hardest and most subtle obstacles anyone, especially in the film business, faces, but it’s true for every facet of life. Jealousy is an underrated emotion, an invisible land mine really, a barrier of energy that would trip me as well, time and again.
I looked forward to visiting the Malibu set of 8 Million Ways to Die, which was finally filming. Deep in my own troubles in Mexico, I had not paid any attention to its progress, as there was no further money coming to me because a fellow writer, Lance Hill, was co-credited. A third writer, Robert Towne, who remained anonymous, called and, in his gentlemanly way, told me he’d done a four-week rewrite, “purely a matter of economics” in that, at the request of Ashby and the company, he’d transposed the story from New York to Los Angeles. He shared sympathy with me in that he knew the feeling of being “robbed of my script.” By the rules of our Writers Guild, it was kind of him, as neither Ashby nor the producers had bothered to notify me that I was being rewritten. When I looked at the script and hardly recognized anything I’d written, I should have taken my name off. But there were residuals and possible profits due. With Salvador in the heavy liability column, I was in no position to rebel.
Mine was a strange visit to the Malibu location, given the contrast to my Salvador experience. I rode up in an elaborate elevated tram to a cliffside fantasy glass house lit by giant arcs, almost like a candy box; the night lighting itself cost a fortune. When I got off the tram, the location parking lot was filled with Porsches, Maseratis, motorcycles, all kinds of stylish transpo fit for a well-paid LA crew. The starting “call” had been for 5:30 p.m., but no one seemed to be around or in a hurry. Dinner (in this case called “lunch”) was being prepared on the scale of ancient Rome—shrimp, pastas, steaks, anything you wanted off white tablecloths set on outdoor tables.
“Where’s Hal?” I asked.
“He’s in the trailer with Jeff.” When I inquired doing what, all I could get was that he was “rehearsing” and/or “talking.” “He’s been in there for an hour.”
I didn’t want to interrupt. I learned that the line producer was pissed at Ashby and had left the set. Apparently there’d been a lot of this “rehearsal” going on, with Ashby being indecisive about his shooting plans.
In any event, I enjoyed the dinner, talking with the intelligent and delightful Rosanna Arquette and the gracious Andy Garcia in his first film role, who described a movie to me where there were no more hookers, no New York City, no urban density or grit. It was a completely different film from what I’d written, with a somewhat unreal climactic shootout between Garcia and Bridges on the very tram I’d just come in on. The sixty-day shooting schedule was going to seventy days, the cost, I gathered, was at $12.5 million and climbing. I could’ve made three Salvadors with this. No rush, either, as Ashby came out with Bridges for the first shot at 11 p.m., hardly knowing who I was. Bridges was polite, shy. I went home bored, depleted. Farewell, 8 Million.
Some nine months later, I slipped into Broadway’s Criterion Theatre in New York and walked out in disgust, not believing what they’d done to my script, my character. How bad could it be? The reviews had been mediocre, dispassionate. It didn’t hurt my career or help it; it was another forgotten film. But if you knew the inner workings of that screenplay, they’d left nothing of value in it. How could Ashby and Towne, two pros, have done this? It was offensive, like seeing your own baby aborted bloodily in front of you. I was out of the country when they released it, but if I’d been able to screen it, which they hadn’t offered to me, I would’ve used a pseudonym—“Huckleberry Twist” or something—in the credits.
Eventually I saw the film again on video and found it simply meaningless and dull, and I thought of that $16 to $18 million churned up out of the ether—for this? PSO, the producing entity, would soon go belly-up. All that angst and that crazy psycho producer with his two accents, trophy family, and grandiose cocaine dreams, and how upset I once got—all that was gone, a legacy of ashes. No hard feelings, in fact no feelings at all. I’d been paid well—and that is how I believe many Hollywood people feel in the end, on their way to a grave at Forest Lawn.
Although we’d finished Salvador in Las Vegas on the last day of August, John Daly now wanted the film ready for a Christmas release for his new Hemdale distribution company, which, through its new chief, Peter Myers, had a distribution arrangement with MGM, supposedly worth $4 million in prints and ads. MGM, on shaky financial ground since the mid-1970s, had become more of a rent-a-distributor outlet. But they were better than none. So there was hope.
I had to move fast—too fast. The film, when roughly assembled, was three hours and forty-five minutes, but I knew it could work, because the Woods character was exciting, magnetic, even if sometimes repulsive. Jimmy was on fire. Working intensely, we cut it down to two hours and thirty, then, with great difficulty, to two hours and nineteen, then, in deepening pain, to two hours and eleven minutes, and finally two hours and five minutes. To keep pace with my mind, I supervised a system of editing with multiple editors in different workspaces. I brought our second editor, whom we’d been using throughout, up from Mexico, along with a third in the US who was really an assistant editor but who followed my instincts better than my first editor, with whom I still was having difficulties communicating; something in our natures was as allergic as cat and dog. It was a painful, self-flagellating process, like cutting out my own flesh. But I was driven.
Daly dropped into the edit room each week, looking over my shoulder, and we had several confrontations over the rape of the nuns, the sex, the violence, the ending. I soon gathered that John had a reputation for being heavily involved in the editing on his other productions, which led to some public battles, notably with Jim Cameron on Terminator, as well as with others on At Close Range and Hoosiers. I did have some leverage with him in that I had repossessed my Platoon rights; the free option I’d given to Arnold Kopelson had expired. He’d struck out and been unable to finance the film. Of course, Daly did not have to make Platoon, though he still wanted to. Additionally, since I had not yet been paid for Salvador, I still theoretically owned the underlying rights to it. All this, in the end, was a negotiation over my right to cut the film I’d directed the way I wanted. John joked with my lawyer, Bob Marshall, in reference to my stubbornness in editing, that “Oliver has a bullet in his head, which got lost in there somewhere, no one knows. You can tell from those mad eyes of his.” Shades of Gore Vidal’s “metal plate.” Deep down, I think John respected me for fighting back so hard, even if he sensed the film might be a losing cause. He once told me his father had been a boxer in England and had always taken in strays, dogs and cats and such, and that had left a deep impression on his mind. I think, in a way, I was his “stray.”
We had a public screening in LA in early November for 160 people. There was little laughter, a lower-than-average score, the film too vulgar and gross, a turn-off to the middle range in the market. One woman in the focus group afterward was screaming out her hatred for the film, which marked me. Joe Farrell, for many years a professional screener and researcher for the studios, whom I came to trust, described it as a “hesitant audience . . . a reluctant liking.” I saw hope in this; I too believed they wanted to like Salvador, and that it was my job to fix it. I kept trimming, squeezing, shifting, improving.
But by mid-November, the boom came down when Mike Medavoy and an Orion-invited group of twenty people, including some directors, screened the film. I wasn’t invited. Daly went, and it turned out worse than I could’ve imagined. Medavoy apparently cut off the screening at the midpoint, and they all walked out! As Daly told me, they “loathed the film” for its “unsympathetic characters, its excesses of violence and gore.” Not only did Orion not want the film, but also they pulled out of their vague agreement to distribute Platoon. I was stunned, deeply wounded, growing paranoid that I had enemies everywhere, and that an underlying reason for Medavoy’s displeasure was that in his neoliberal view of the world, my film was “communist, revolutionary,” and overly critical of US policy in South and Central America. It was around this time too that the Reagan administration was making another hard push to legitimize the barbaric “Contras” against Nicaragua’s leftist government. And it didn’t help when the Maryknoll Sisters, without having seen it, sent a letter stating their concern over the depiction of the rape and murder of the nuns from their order; they threatened legal action unless it was made clear that the victims had “no political involvement there . . . [but were] solely religious, and must be so portrayed.” For the record, it had been Alexander Haig, Reagan’s hot-tempered secretary of state, who actually described the nuns as “pistol-packing” as a way to possibly exonerate the motives of the killers. Still, I cautiously removed an actual reference to their order from Cindy Gibb’s lips.
A series of harsh letters followed from Daly to my lawyer, reasserting his right to re-edit in these circumstances. He specified twelve cuts, saying about the film, audiences “want to like it, but you make them stop and hate it.” Some of his ideas seemed reasonable to me. Negotiations followed between John and my lawyer Bob Marshall with Arnold Kopelson, our foreign salesman on Salvador, helping to negotiate a settlement in which I agreed to make a certain number of cuts, and Jimmy Woods, of all people, would be the third-party arbitrator. My views of violence at that time, it’s true, could be extreme. When Kopelson told me he’d shown a part of the film for buyers abroad where a soldier’s face was blown off, the buyers objected vehemently. To me it was a story point, a cold revenge execution at close range.
While all this was going on, Alex Ho came back into my life and returned to the Philippines with me to plan a shoot for early the next year. All of this was financed by John because, as I say, he liked Platoon on its own merits, unrelated to Salvador. My old “friend” Dino had even weighed in with John, wondering in his guttural English, “Why you wanna make Platoon?” As if John had to have his mind checked out. And why, I had to wonder, did these people persist in haunting me? A good part of my life’s anxieties had come from trying to outrun my ghosts. In my favor, it certainly helped that Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam epic Full Metal Jacket was beginning to shoot (for an entire year, it turned out), and John Irvin’s super-patriotic Vietnam film Hamburger Hill was also set to go. The competition in this case stoked the fires.
And after Alex rendered a budget for nine weeks at $5.6 million, Film Finances, stipulating that they’d never bond Gerald Green again but trusting Alex, rather promptly said Platoon was “a go” for February 23, 1986. Holy cow! Unlike Salvador, this was going too smoothly to really believe it, and for the next weeks I took every day as it came, one by one, trusting nothing. Although I wanted to work with Gerald again, I had no interest in making Platoon in Mexico, where his money was. John, with an extraordinary generosity of spirit, asked me if I wanted to let Kopelson back in as the producer on the film. No doubt he was favored by Film Finances, and his foreign sales might help in the overall structure of the film. So I said yes, but this would end badly for John in a bitter lawsuit from Arnold. And right away, Arnold made his weight felt in his refusal to accept Alex Ho as his equal, seeing to it that Alex took “co-producer” status instead; this would lead to many unforeseen problems.
John also made it quite clear that he would back Platoon 100 percent, with or without the Orion distribution deal (Orion had turned down Salvador) and that I would have “final cut” in that if I didn’t accept Hemdale’s cuts, I’d have the right—if Hemdale did not then want to distribute the film—to go out and sell it myself. It was a risk I was quite willing to take to preserve my vision of the film. Damn the consequences. Full steam ahead. Even though I still didn’t think Platoon was going to be made, John’s confidence was deeply reassuring and during these four months helped me get through the turbulent uncertainty over Salvador. In fact, it was a dream moment. Why? Why with all this pain on Salvador did John still believe in me? He told Riordan in 1995, “Oliver puts 100% of himself into a film. It all goes up on the screen. For Salvador, he waived his salary, he waived his expenses. I think he would have given up his house. For him, it’s the film. And that is why, whether he gets things right or wrong, there is an intensity up on the screen that could only come from a man with absolute passion.” Bless him, his boxing father’s spirit resides in him, and no matter how critically some people speak of him, I’ve always known John as a man of generous heart who cared very much about the things we did together.
Sadly, Gerald Green would never be bonded or work again with Film Finances. Platoon, which he’d first discovered and brought to the attention of both Kopelson and Daly, would’ve changed his life, but he had to drop out. He went on to make other films, none notable, and for years afterward always told me Salvador, although it had cost him his reputation and his financing base in Mexico, was the film he was most proud of. Years later he was convicted under idiosyncratic US laws of bribing Thai government officials, and after a stint in prison, he ended up, with his wife, under house arrest wearing an ankle monitor. When I visited him during this incarceration, despite his Graham Greene frown, he was the same cool James Bond–ish “Englishman,” not one dry martini different. You’d think, despite all his worrying, what more could go wrong for him? Maybe he’d relax a little more. And maybe he did. I hope so. He “shuffled off this mortal coil” in 2015 at the age of eighty-three, not long before the late, great Richard Boyle passed on, well worn at the age of seventy-four. Two rascals without whom Salvador would never have been born.
I kept at the Salvador cut, making it tighter, funnier, the usual “sweating” that goes on for most filmmakers overly doubting and questioning their basic sanity—and then going over it again. Rewriting is something I learned, taught to me by others like Robert Bolt, Marty Bregman, and my father, and when you think about it, film is such an elastic medium that editing becomes another form of rewriting. First, you write solo—it’s in your head. Then when you direct it, you’re exteriorizing it, sharing it with all; you’re acting it out. And when you’re editing it, it’s your last chance to be alone, to rethink and rewrite. Most every dialogue can be cheated in or out of the film; new dialogues can be written, off camera, or looped into an actor’s mouth. Significant cuts can be made, or linkages you never saw before you shot the film, and some things you thought so crucial to tell in the script now become unnecessary or redundant. The edit becomes as expansive as your imagination. But at a certain point you do go public again, partners looking on as you try different things, some of which don’t work at all, and you bleed in front of others. To edit is to suffer because it is always difficult to close the book.
I went over the film with John reel by reel, slowly, torturously—at first with Jimmy as third party, and then just me and John. And honestly, the more closely he looked at the film, the more difficult he found it to cut this or that after all. We all share in judging another’s behavior, but the more we see something, the more we understand it; the less we see it, the harsher we can be in cutting it. Empathy is born from understanding, and yet sometimes our empathy leads us astray. I venture to say that it’s better to err on the side of saving what you love rather than cutting it. Because if you cut it, no matter what you’re thinking, you’ll always miss it years later. Find a way to make it work. I must say, to his credit, we cut less than John had planned.
Georges Delerue, the French composer who’d allied with François Truffaut for many years, had moved to the US, and Budd Carr, a canny and tasteful music industry executive who’d become my music supervisor on all my films, introduced us. We shared the French language and its humor, and that November, for very little money, Georges produced a magnificent, sweepingly romantic score, which lifted Salvador at least 25 percent but came too late for the people who’d passed—which now, unfortunately, included MGM, which was backing out of its vague distribution arrangement with Daly’s Hemdale. Four million dollars in promotion and advertising gone.
We brought our film to its bloody conclusion just in time to make the Christmas date to validate Daly’s tax shelter for the 1985 fiscal year, which required Salvador to be shown in an American theater before the end of the year. In any case, I couldn’t “touch” the film anymore—we were out of money. Hemdale chose, of all places, Elizabeth’s hometown of San Antonio, and opened it, for legal purposes only, with a minimum of advertising. For the real opening, Hemdale planned a small six-city release starting with three theaters in New York in March of ’86, then other cities depending on bookings, and Los Angeles in mid-April. Not the kind of broad-shouldered release I’d had on The Hand, by any means.
Elizabeth, Sean, and I thus headed to San Antonio for Christmas—but there was to be no fairy-tale ending. The ten o’clock weekend show at an upscale theater held maybe a dozen people, while next door, Spielberg’s The Color Purple was packed, as was Sydney Pollack’s Out of Africa. How do I describe the tight knot in the stomach or throat when you walk into a theater and find only a smattering of people spread around large, empty spaces? I kept reminding myself that this wasn’t the real opening, nor was this a test for sample size; nonetheless, it was a hard comedown for Christmas. And for that matter, it was becoming clearer we weren’t going to register much when we opened officially the following year.
I was not comfortable with parts of my movie; it was crude and, yes, at times choppy. But what it had was power, vitality, originality, and something not seen often in American film—some critics would pick up on it—a radical and dramatic political commitment reminiscent of some young playwright of the 1930s or 1940s, a Clifford Odets or an Arthur Miller, bursting to tell a truth in a blunt, dynamic way.
I also realized two things, both painful: (1) although I’d been deeply involved for a year in Salvador the country, not many people in my own country cared at all about this small nation, this “shithole” we were helping to ruin; and (2) I’d overestimated my film. It was exciting, fresh, made in spite of overwhelming odds, but it was not “great”—and that fell heavily on my own shoulders. But I was proud of it. I’d achieved what Marty Scorsese had asked of us in film school: “make it personal.” I’d made the Salvador story mine. I knew the effort we all made, and I knew there was a classical worth in this film that could not be denied.
In my mind, I was no longer “only a writer.” I’d grown, finally, by fire, into a director. Michael Cimino told the press, “I don’t think Oliver wants to direct. He prefers writing.” But maybe Michael missed the fusion in me of two different parents that was coming into being—a father who was a writer, a mother who was a director, a giver of parties, a bringer together of diverse elements. Why not? Actors exteriorize our scripts. So do directors. From inside ourselves to outside. But perhaps because Mom and Dad, France and America, had been so different, this contradiction had grown inside me so intensely that I was now what Homer said of his most self-conscious Odysseus—“double-minded.”
I dedicated Salvador to my father, who I wished had lived a little longer to see it. Even he would’ve laughed at the madness of Richard Boyle. And maybe even come to believe that his “idiot son” had not turned into “a bum” after all.