If there is a reliable truism
that can coexist alongside the American film industry’s dance of death with
economically insane budgets that now routinely soar north of $200 million, it
is that (most) critics and potential ticket-buyers can be counted on to review
bad buzz and publicized woes of dollars and production instead of the actual
movie once it finally finds its way to a screen. And it may in fact be true
that the drama behind the scenes often outstrips the quality of the wide-screen
finished product, though certainly this is not always the case. The reception
of big-budget box-office flops like John Carter, The Lone Ranger, Jupiter Ascending and
Oliver Stone’s Alexander are but some late examples of our number-crunching
obsession with pop culture minutiae and the fascination of a behemoth’s
preordained fall. Most who trudged out to see any of these films during their
theatrical runs probably knew more about their troubled histories and the swirl
of negative word-of-mouth (generated before a single ticket was sold) than they
did, in the case of John Carter,
about Edgar Rice Burroughs, upon whose once-popular novels that movie was
based; the well-publicized rumors of discontent at Disney which preceded that
movie’s release ended up serving as the real text to which audiences referred
when they finally saw the film.
So what’s new? Stories of studio publicity departments
dodging bad press and creating their own legends about the rocky road traveled
to the silver screen are a movie history tradition, and the stories they peddled
were more often than not vivid, unstable and as combustible as if they’d been
printed on nitrate film stock. The brouhaha over Michael Cimino's Heaven’s Gate, including Steven
Bach’s compulsively readable account of its out-of-control production in Final Cut: Art, Money and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists pushed behind-the-scenes battles into the public
arena like never before, not only helping to put a gravestone on the age of the
unfettered auteur in American filmmaking, but also ushering in the current
entertainment reportage obsession with catching a glimpse of Oz behind the
curtain, an era in which no aspect of a movie or TV show’s creative birth goes
undocumented or unexamined.
But movies whose names become synonymous with the wretched
excess and folly of the movie business are fairly rare. Heaven’s Gate is
one. So is my beloved 1941. John Carter and The Lone Ranger may prove to be others.
(Titanic was all ready to join the crowd, but it turned out Fate
had something else in store for James Cameron’s potentially checkbook-boggling
shipwreck.) Twenty-five years ago this week, Hudson Hawk, directed by the team who made previously made
the cult hit Heathers, director Michael Lehmann and screenwriter Daniel
Waters, also arrived in theaters under a ripe thundercloud of bad
press, originating from its own studio as well as entertainment media watchdogs.
That cloud further accumulated a shower of disdain for its
popular star, Bruce Willis, whose screen persona made plenty of room for smug
self-regard and who was perceived, after the success of Moonlighting,
Die Hard and its first sequel, Die Hard 2: Die Harder, as
somehow needing a good old-fashioned Hollywood spanking to bring him back down
to earth. (Willis managed to not be held significantly responsible for
appearing in another apocalypse the previous year, Brian De Palma’s ill-fated The
Bonfire of the Vanities.)
The reviews for Hudson Hawk weren’t any too
kind either, most echoing hyperbolic sentiments typified by Peter Travers (“A
movie this unspeakably awful can make an audience a little crazy. You want to
throw things, yell at the actors, beg them to stop.”) or Mick La Salle, who
wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle that “There is probably
not one interrupted 60-second stretch in which a line of dialogue doesn't
clunk, an action doesn't ring false or an irritating plot turn doesn't present
itself.” Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman at least sensed a pulse—
“This may be the only would-be blockbuster that's a sprawling, dissociated mess
on purpose. It's a perverse landmark: the first postmodern Hollywood disaster.”
It’s valuable to be reminded, however, that not all the notices at the time
were scathing. In his indifferent capsule review, critic Jonathan
Rosenbaum was quick to remind his readers of Hudson Hawk’s
roots in ‘60s genre spoofs like Our Man Flint and Modesty
Blaise and noted that “at least the filmmakers keep it moving with
lots of screwball stunts.” And the notoriously cranky Richard Schickel was
feeling downright generous, dispensing a bit of wisdom that would prove
prescient regarding believing the hype: “If you can see past the thicket of
dollar signs surrounding Hudson Hawk,” Schickel wrote, “you may
discern quite a funny movie-- sort of an Indiana Jones send-up
with a hip undertone all its own.”
I saw Hudson Hawk on its opening night, May
24, 1991, at the Pacific Theater on Hollywood Boulevard, and by the time I took
my seat that two-word title had already become industry code for what producer
Tri-Star chairman Mike Medavoy, in recounting the making of the movie in his
memoir You’re Only As Good As Your Next One, termed “a total
fucking disaster.” What I saw on screen that night didn’t rank in my eyes as a
moral or aesthetic crime, but I was none too taken with it either; I remember
reacting against what felt like the ultimate loud, incoherent inside joke, one
which the performers obviously thought was a riot (it certainly sounded like
one) but whose humor thoroughly escaped me. I also freely admit I was in the
Spank Bruce Willis camp-- and the Spank Joel Silver camp too, for that matter.
(Though for being the bull in the china shop that ushered the Wachowski
Brothers’ vision of Speed Racer to the screen, Silver gets an
eternal pass from me.) To my eye, Hudson Hawk at the time was
crass and disposable, a symptom of a system of making movies that was totally,
fatally out of whack, and I had little trouble spending the next 21 years in
almost total disregard of this latest Hollywood flame-out.
So why was I laughing my helpless ass off at Hudson
Hawk when it saw again in 2012, on a thoroughly enjoyable
double feature with Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief at the
New Beverly Cinema here in Los Angeles? I’ll admit a certain attraction to the
disreputable, a perverse desire to find something in a beat-up, bedraggled
movie that others just don’t see. But recent re-encounters with movies as
diverse as John Frankenheimer’s 99 and 44/100% Dead, Ridley Scott's Legend,
Brian De Palma’s Scarface
and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (to name but a very few) have proven that
sometimes a rotten egg is just a rotten egg. My reaction to Hudson Hawk might also have something to
do with my own recent voracious appetite for laughter. Those who bestow awards
don't give much of a crap about comedies, but so often they are the movies I'm
most happy to see, the ones I feel like I need more than others, and I feel
like I’m often more likely to respond to the sometimes desperate impulse
underlying comedy than others might, or seem willing to. I am, after all, a huge
fan of the Farrelly Brothers’ The Three Stooges,
another movie that was crucified on
the Internet solely on the basis of its idea and its trailer. (Does this make
me the ideal demographic for this summer’s Ghostbusters
reboot?)
But of course “funny ha-ha” is probably the most subjective
and elusive response that a movie can go fishing for—it’s not as reliable or
quantifiable as the tears or the swelling of pride or fear that movies in other
genres can more easily access, which is probably why laughs, which may seem
more fleeting, don’t get as much in the way of award respect. The kind of
hi-jinks on display in Hudson Hawk can be infectious, or they
can be, when echoing off the walls of an empty auditorium as they did when I
saw the movie 21 years ago, off-putting, a sign of the movie’s insular
disregard for anything beyond the pleasure of the folks who made it.
Hudson Hawk is big, cluttered, and
dingy-looking, all qualities that I associate, rationally or irrationally, with
the type of sausage usually spit out by Tri-Star and other companies in the
‘80s and early ‘90s. The cinematography, credited to Dante Spinotti (Manhunter,
Heat, The Last of the Mohicans) but also presumably including contributions
by Jost Vacano (Total Recall, Starship Troopers, Das Boot), who was
fired six weeks into shooting, is inconsistent, flatly lit and composed one
moment, particularly in the dank-looking interiors, then incandescent and
receptive to the natural beauty of the Italian locales the next. And it’s
filled with actors who either travel from scene to scene unsure of what kind of
movie they’re in (Exhibit A, Andie MacDowell, though she gets major points for
her drug-induced dolphin impersonation) or who seize on the raucous,
over-the-top sensibility rooted in Daniel Waters’ irreverent rewrite of Steven
De Souza’s more straightforward caper script and turn the knob all the way up
to 11 (Exhibit B, everyone else in the cast).
Willis clearly overestimated his appeal as a smirking,
self-assured hipster with this role, but the performance works because it's in
conflict with his status as a newly emergent action icon. The tension between
the two approaches provides much of the movie’s comic juice, especially when he
so willingly dives in the silly pool and bumps up against performers who are
clearly from another world. The presence of James Coburn, Flint himself, is of
course a major clue as to the intent of director Michael Lehmann and the other
filmmakers in regard to tone and pop culture touchstones. But the very notion
of casting Sandra Bernhard and Richard E. Grant as
the super-villainous Mayflowers, who force Willis’ master thief into stealing
rare Da Vinci treasures that will somehow pave the way for their ascendance to
World Dominator status certainly puts the movie’s cult sensibility at odds with
the prospect of reaching the level of mass appeal needed to justify a
multimillion-dollar budget. (These actors don’t project to the rafters, they
threaten to grab them in their powerful jaws and masticate them into dust.)
Bernhard, Grant, Coburn and a host of other game participants, including Frank
Stallone, Lorraine Toussaint, Leonardo Cimino and a pre-CSI David
Caruso, add a lot to the movie beyond an elevated level of cacophony. They
underline the movie’s goggle-eyed, giddy celebration of its own incoherence.
Inconsistency, or at least the harboring of warring impulses
of storytelling “rules” and anything-for-a-laugh energy within the same genre
peapod, is the game Hudson Hawk is playing right up front, and
it’s a game that usually doesn’t result in this many points prejudicially subtracted
when the context is wacky comedy. This is probably where the movie ran into
trouble with viewers and reviewers back in 1991—no one (Rosenbaum and Schickel
excepted, I suppose) had much of an idea what the movie had on its mind;
certainly not mass audiences who were conditioned, after Die Hard,
to come to a Bruce Willis picture with a set of expectations and prided
themselves on being able to detect (with some culturally pervasive help) the
scent of a stinker.
But it seems to me even the movie’s idea of a good joke is a
risky one. Waters’ notion of a couple of cat burglars (Willis and an eager
Danny Aiello) so in love with the hep cat culture of The Rat Pack that they’ve
memorized the length of the tunes just so they can use them to gauge the timing
of their capers-- in sing-along musical sequences that really helped to
alienate the cognoscenti back in 1991, no less-- will either make you giggle or
gag. (I giggled when I saw the movie four years ago, and then some.) And Willis
caught between the push of the megalomaniacal Mayflowers and a deadly band of
rogue C.I.A. assassins named after candy bars results in some patently bizarre
action-comedy sequences which make the sensation of having no idea what will
come down the pipe next a gleefully pleasurable one. You laughs at what you
laughs at, and if the movie’s wicked, cynical, absurd vibe hits you just right--
it helps to be surrounded by an audience that is also similarly tickled— it is
entirely possible to have a much better time watching Hudson Hawk than
its tarnished reputation would ever suggest.
There’s little use in denying that the movie is something of
a major train wreck in terms of conventional structure, logic, temperament and
escalating ludicrous plot development. But what’s on screen also suggests that
the creative forces behind the movie, embittered and otherwise
drawn-and-quartered as they may have been, were also aware that the chaotic
energy of the production could be used in the movie’s favor. It was a genuine
pleasure to finally enjoy Hudson Hawk when I saw it that night
four years ago at the New Beverly, after having spent 21 years secure in the
belief that it was a piece of shit. The imminently self-deprecating Daniel
Waters was also in attendance, and his comments to the near sold-out
crowd suggested that although elements of the movie’s tortured history and its
reception in the marketplace might still be sore spots there was also the
feeling that he’s at peace with it, fully aware of the value of his
contribution and understanding that a movie this crazy has no chance of
pleasing everyone.
As it turned out, my daughter Emma and I sat in the seats
directly in front of the screenwriter, and I loved her vocal enjoyment of the
movie as much for her sake as for Waters’—the movie definitely appealed to her
emerging sense of the absurd and her appreciation of slapstick violence. But
the roaring of that New Beverly audience wasn’t entirely for Daniel Waters’
benefit-- they seemed to genuinely enjoy their time with Hudson Hawk,
a movie that the teeming, contradictory, fractured, multitasking sensibility of
American pop culture may finally have caught up with. As Waters himself
characterized it, on the Island of Misfit Toys that comprises his singular
sensibility as a screenwriter and director, Hudson Hawk might
most aptly be seen as the cinematic equivalent of the squirt gun that shoots
jelly. Of course there are those who want their squirt guns to do what squirt
guns always do. But there are also folks who have a pretty soft spot reserved
for a toy that does something unexpected, even if it makes a mess. For those, I
would guiltlessly recommend another (perhaps a first?) viewing of Hudson
Hawk.
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For those interested, I direct you to Joe Valdez’s solid account
of Hudson Hawk’s beleaguered production history that can be found
on the blog This Distracted Globe.
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