“You got enough unhappiness in you for nine people.”

Rafferty And The Gold Dust Twins

Directed By: Dick Richards

Written By: John Kaye

Notable for: Proto-indie quirkiness, Young McKenzie Philips

Explosions: Zero

Dogme-esque confession: In my last post, over one year ago, I wrote that Bruckheimer worked with Director Dick Richards on just one other film besides Cullpepper. That was inaccurate. Richards only wrote two films. Richards and Bruck were paired for Bruck’s first four films, after which, they never worked together again. It’s a little exciting to imagine what could have driven the two apart. Were they film-school buddies who had a falling out? Were there not enough car chases for Bruckheimer? Maybe by the end of film four, March Or Die, an auteur’s narrative of their working relationship will emerge.

Second confession: Despite starting this in September of 2008, this his has taken me over a year to write. More on that below.

I had an easy time finding Cullpepper. Two clicks on Netflix and it was at my doorstep. Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins is another story, one that I will have to repeat again on occasion. Rafferty, it turns out, is not available on DVD in any country*. And this pains me, because at a time when I am trying to not have so many things, I had to buy a used rental videotape off of Half.com. A (shudder) videotape. I didn't even know if my VCR was still functional when I purchased it at the bargain rate of $5.49, including shipping.

Popping it in, I briefly forgot how much I hate videotapes. There’s a sense memory of inserting a videocassette into VCR, the machine tugging it out of your hands to play a movie I never would have had a chance to see when I was growing up in small-town Wisconsin. But then, the hatred returned. Instead of the brief crisp black screen that precedes the film on a DVD, it’s a minute of dark brownish-gray. The picture is grainy, the sound is washed out, and random lines jump across the screen. Thank god we’ve moved on, and, with the emergence of Blu-Ray, moved on again.

The film started with a cold opening of a celebration at a VFW hall. The film pans across a bunch of happy older men, all of whom are honoring a WWI veteran. There’s a nice cinema verité look to it that wiped away my hatred of the video format.

Then the camera pans over to Alan Arkin doing an obvious drunk act, falling off his seat in the midst of “My Country ‘Tis Of Thee.” Oh boy.

This cuts immediately to Arkin in bed, his alarm radio goes off, blaring Edgar Winter Group’s “Frankenstein,” a clear indication that this ain’t your grandpa’s senseless road movie!

This film would be a character study if there were any characters. Arkin is Gunny Rafferty, a milquetoast former marine man who starts out his day running his beat-up car into a dumpster, knocking over a motorcycle in the process, and goes to his job…at the Department of Motor Vehicles! Wha?!

Yes, that’s the sort of scenario that passes as a joke in this film. After administering some driving exams to a series of stereotypes, he knocks off to the park to drink whiskey, were he meets Mackenzie Phillips, who is introduced as the 15-year-old Frisbee (because she is playing Frisbee and, while she chooses her own name, seems to lack imagination) by Sally Kellerman, who plays Mackinley Beachwood.

They con him into giving them a ride, and then pull a gun on him, hijacking his heap to New Orleans. Of course, their first stop is at a Dairy Queen, because when you have a hostage, you need ice cream. In the next scene, Gunny gets a chance to make a break for it, and leaves the two girls at a gas station. After Frisbee fails to get any cash from the gas station attendant, they hitch a ride from a traveling preacher, the Reverend Cullpepper. Like the last Bruckheimer film. Cullpepper. Cullpepper Cattle Company. Get it?

Gunny finally pulls over to look for any remaining booze in the car (really, what sort of alcoholic leaves bottles that haven’t been drained?) and, in the process of throwing their stuff out of his car, discovers box of blanks. So it turns out the two aren’t really violent sociopaths. They're sociopaths who wouldn't hurt a fly. He reconsiders is own safety and wellbeing, then doubles back to pick them up again, which is good, because Frisbee has had it up to here will all that Jesus talk.

What would a road movie be without Las Vegas? One quick Louis Prima cameo and two escapades later, and they’re off. They steal booze. Gunny and Mackinley have sex while Frisbee is in the back seat. They steal gas. The breaks to the car give out, and the reaction of the car ahead of them that they keep ramming is played off for cheap laughs, as are the Mexican couple whose lives they jeopardize by stealing the brake part from the used car lot.

They reach Mackinley’s hometown in Arizona, and stop into a hat store, and Gunny falls in love with a hat he can’t afford. He goes to check into a motel. Mackinley goes to meet up with her estranged father, and is told he never wants to see her again. In one of the film’s longer set pieces, Frisbee goes off to a bus station, where she meets a young soldier, leads him to a hotel room, then robs him of all but $10 and an engagement ring he was going to give to his gal back home.

Gunny and Mackinley go out to a honky-tonk so she can sing, and they meet one-legged Viet Nam vet Harry Dean Stanton. Mackinley goes up on stage to sing and Frisbee enters with the hat Gunny coveted. See, she’s actually a good kid after all! Then she goes to play 8-ball with Harry Dean Stanton, a dollar a game. Mackinley sings Kitty Wells “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,” then breaks Rafferty’s heart by clearly being interested in the lead singer and guitarist of the band.

While a new musician takes the stage to lead a sing-along of “You Are My Sunshine,” the soldier Frisbee robbed is closing in on the bar…with the police!

But, before they get there, Gunny goes out to the car to pass out alone. Harry Dean Stanton turns into a one-legged would-be rapist. Gunny prevents the crime, Mackinley piles out of the car where she’s apparently been having sex with the band member, the cops show up, and Frisbee (actually a runaway orphan named Rita) is arrested. Mackinley leaves with the band.

One week later, Frisbee is at the orphanage, Gunny is posing as her father, and he takes her away, driving across the lawn of the orphanage, presumably to have more adventures.

End.

So, I got this film in August of last year. I watched it 2 ½ times in order to write what is essentially a scene-by-scene recap of the film with little commentary. Why? I don’t know what to comment on. The movie is so slight, it practically begs your pardon as it passes you by. It’s one artless slap-sticky incident after another with a periodic seventies flute soundtrack interlude stringing them together into a blocky whole.

Nothing coalesces. No character has a motivation remotely believable. It is mentioned briefly that Frisbee is writing a book about all the crazy shit she's done, and then it's never mentioned again. Every actor is terribly bland, with the exception of Mackenzie Phillips, who reads every like it was the dénouement of the original Bad News Bears, and Harry Dean Stanton, who is always a joy, even when he’s playing a rapist.

This film leads me to believe that Bruckheimer had aspirations of making artier fare when he started out. Pauline Kael apparently even liked it, which only fortifies my notion. I get the impression that the Bruck wanted to make Paper Moon and wound up with…well, fuck, he wound up with Rafferty And The Gold Dust Twins.

Bruckheimerisms: The use of a square old couple in jeopardy for comic effect is definitely a motif that shows up again in Bruckheimer films, although the stakes were not nearly as high in Rafferty.

What I learned: Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins is a quirky road comedy starring Alan Arkin and prominently featuring the song “You Are My Sunshine.” Years later, Arkin won an academy award for his role in the quirky road comedy Little Miss Sunshine. Coincidence?

I also learned that Sally Kellerman was hot.

*In a crime against commerce, some of his other early films are unavailable on DVD as well, but thankfully, in the year between this post and last, most have been put on Netflix instant view.

"Kid, cowboyin' is somethin you do when you cain't do nothin' else."

The Cullpepper Cattle Co.
1972
Directed by Dick Richards
Written by Dick Richards, Eric Bercovici, and Gregory Prentiss
Notable for: Banjo abuse, faux western homilies
Explosions: Zero

My first Bruckheimer film arrived the other day. My wife was baffled, since she had no idea it was on our Netflix. In fact, she had no idea that such a film existed, let alone that I wanted to watch it. But when she performed her due diligence and looked it up, she was impressed that Bo Hopkins was in it.

Me-"Who's Bo Hopkins?"
Anita-"You'll know him. Blonde-haired guy. He was in two Peckinpah movies."

Shoot, it wasn't Warren Oates, but still, that seemed to be some mark of quality. My interest built, and I began to look forward to getting some time to sit down and delve into Cullpepper. It's important to note that since Bruckheimer was only the assistant producer on this film, I wouldn't give him full credit on Cullpepper's merits.

After watching it, I couldn't assign full blame to him either.

Ben Mockridge (Gary Grimes from Summer Of '42) is a 16-year-old with a dream. He wants to be a cowboy, so much so that he spends $4 on a pistol and holster. He shows it to his friend, who hates his life on a chicken farm. That's all we really learn about this friend, setting the pattern for every single character.

Within ten minutes, Ben has fulfilled his dream by going to talk to Frank Cullpepper, who is taking 2000 head of cattle up to Colorado, albeit as the cooks assistant, or "Little Mary." When they set off, The cook and Ben are sitting on a covered wagon, and Ben is enthusiastic about his life as a cowboy and what lies ahead for them. "Wait'll we get to the desert. Sand scorching your eyeballs. Drivin' through country that aint' fit for scavengers and hot enough to make you drink your own piss. Sit downwind, son." This bit of dialogue is the best the film has to offer when it comes to hard-boiled cowboy dialogue or character development.

The film is entirely populated by two-dimensional characters. Maybe. When first goes to speak to Cullpepper, Ben is wordlessly directed to him by a man with a wooden leg. Minutes later someone is trampled to death in a cattle stampede, his identity revealed in the aftermath by a shot of a wooden leg separated from its master. So that character wasn't even two-dimensional. Wooden Leg was a dot, a point, an artificial limb that didn't even get a speaking part. You don't care that he's dead, but that's okay, because no one in the film seems to care, either.

And on it goes. They camp. There are shootings. Ben loses his gun and horse to dishonest trappers, and eventually gets it back with more shootings. They ride. Banjo music plays. The horses are stolen while Ben is on watch, and, following some shooting, they get them back.

All of this transpires with an economy of banal dialogue. With the exception of the cook, everyone is written like Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, minus the cool, and you can't have a film with 10 Clint Eastwoods and zero foils.

Around the seventy-five-minute mark (right around the time the film should wrap up), the cattle herders are run off the property of a greedy land baron, and they encounter a group of religious pacifists. It turns out that they haven't gone far enough, because the pacifists and the cowboys are still on the land baron's property. They are given one hour to vacate. The pacifists are determined to stay, and Ben decides that they need someone to help them. While Cullpepper and his crew rides off, Ben prepares to do the right thing, even if it means his end.

But wait, four mercenary cowboys–including the aforementioned Bo Hopkins–decide to abandon Cullpepper and help Ben. Their motives for refuting everything we know about them aren't confusing, they simply don't exist. They ride back, set up for one last unexciting battle. When the smoke clears, the gunfighters on both sides are all dead, save Ben. Feeling the land is tainted, the pacifists decide to leave, but Ben levels his gun at their leader and insists they help him bury the bodies.

***MESSAGE ALERT***

Standing by one of the open graves, Ben unfastens his holster and drops his gun in the grave. End.

I suppose there was really no other way to end this movie. There was no dramatic tension, no interesting characters, and no real theme up until the final episode. This was in the Viet Nam era, and I can only imagine that the script for Cullpepper passed through the hands of a studio executive who thought "This is a film the kids will really get."

Bruckheimerisms: None that I noticed. The deaths were artless and the characters were downright boring. However, Bruckheimer went on to produce another film by Dick Richards, March Or Die.

What I learned: If you're going to try to manipulate the audience, you need to set it up a lot earlier than 15 minutes before the end of the film.

How does he do it?

Flashdance. Top Gun. The Rock. Con Air. Coyote Ugly. National Treasure. Pirates of the Caribbean.

None of these are good films. All of them were wildly successful. So what is it about this guy that he can do what no one else can do? Namely, pick a winner.

I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to say that his films have had no effect on me. At first, I was appalled. Then I was amazed. As a writer, I tend to shun anything that eschews realism. I have high-minded ideas that I respect my audience, that they would see through anything that was transparently pandering

Not Jerry's writers. Jerry's writers think of ways to put a kitten in the shot so the danger will be that much more visceral to the audience. Can you wring a tear out of them? Then do it. Can you make them jump up in surprise? Have at it. Can you make them look at the screen and cheer when a villain, unkilled by a collision with a Las Vegas skyway, is pulverized by a damn ROCK CRUSHER? Genius.

In order to figure out how he does it, I am going to watch EVERY SINGLE JERRY BRUCKHEIMER-PRODUCED FILM, in the order it was released. I'll even watch some of his television shows. This will take years. But I will do it, and when I come out the other side, drop forged and hardened, I will be a better screenwriter.

Back in two weeks.