Video Scripts: Intruder, Saving Private Ryan, Big Trouble in Little China
Cody shares three more of the videos he has written for JoBlo YouTube channels.
I have been writing news articles and film reviews for ArrowintheHead.com for several years, and for the last couple years I have also been writing scripts for videos that are released through the site's YouTube channel JoBlo Horror Originals. Recently I started writing video scripts for the JoBlo Originals YouTube channel as well. I have previously shared the videos I wrote that covered
Three more videos that I have written the scripts for can be seen below; one for the JoBlo Horror Originals channel and the other two for JoBlo Originals.
For the Best Horror Movie You Never Saw series, I went on about the greatness of Scott Spiegel's 1989 slasher Intruder - which counts Sam Raimi and Bruce Campbell among its cast members.
Intruder script:
Sam Raimi started directing Super 8 short films while he was growing up in Michigan, and the classmates who collaborated with him included future Evil Dead franchise star Bruce Campbell and Evil Dead II co-writer Scott Spiegel. Together, their circle of friends pumped out nearly seventy shorts. When Spiegel was given the chance to make his own feature directorial debut a decade after Raimi made The Evil Dead, he got some of the old gang back together. Sam Raimi, Bruce Campbell, and Raimi’s younger brother Ted all have roles in Spiegel’s movie, the 1989 slasher Intruder. Which happens to be the film we’re recommending in this episode of The Best Horror Movie You Never Saw.
The story of Intruder goes back to those days of Super 8 short films. Just like Raimi made a proof-of-concept short called Within the Woods to get investors interested in The Evil Dead, there was also a proof-of-concept version of Intruder. It was called The Night Crew. Raimi was a cast member and Campbell was the cameraman on this short, which was filmed after hours in the grocery store Spiegel was working at. The Walnut Lake Market. Over the course of the short’s twenty minutes, a masked slasher causes the deaths of three people. Sadly, Spiegel lost the only complete copy of The Night Crew soon after it was made, but all of the major moments would come up again in Intruder.
The Night Crew was shot in 1979, right before Raimi and Campbell went off to Tennessee to make The Evil Dead. Once their movie had been shot, there was some thought given to producing a feature-length version of The Night Crew as a follow-up. But the post-production process on The Evil Dead went on for a while and it took years for the movie to make it to the screen. So Raimi and Campbell’s attention was diverted from The Night Crew along the way. The idea didn’t come up again until the late ’80s. That’s when Lawrence Bender decided to set aside his dream of being a dancer and get into producing movies. He approached Spiegel and asked him if he had any stories in mind that could be made on a low budget. Spiegel pitched him The Night Crew: a film that would take place entirely in one location as a handful of characters are picked off by a slasher. Bender was sold on it immediately.
An initial budget of one hundred thousand dollars was secured, and Witchcraft franchise producer Jerry Feifer was consulted. Then more money came in when Raimi and his producing partner Rob Tapert were able to get B-movie legend Charles Band to join as an uncredited executive producer. The plan was that the movie would be released through Band’s company Empire Pictures. That plan didn’t work out, but we’ll get to that later. At this point, it was looking like everything was going to run smoothly.
Spiegel assembled an interesting cast for his movie, which has a higher body count than the short version. Danny Hicks of Evil Dead II was cast as Bill Roberts, co-owner of Walnut Lake Market. Eugene Glazer was cast as the store’s other owner, Danny, who holds a majority stake in the place and has decided they need to sell it. As the employees who make up the night crew, we have: Sam Raimi as Randy, the butcher. Ted Raimi as Joe, who prepares the produce while listening to a seemingly endless song. Craig Stark as Tim, who spends most of his time hanging out by the beer supply. Future Pride and Prejudice and Zombies director Burr Steers as stoner stockboy Bub. Sleepaway Camp 2‘s Renee Estevez as cashier Linda. Elizabeth Cox, who had small roles in The Wraith and Night of the Creeps, as the final girl, cashier Jennifer, who may be entering a relationship with stockboy Dave, played by Billy Marti. But first she has to deal with her drug-abusing ex Craig Peterson, played by David Byrnes. Craig was just released from prison and now he’s stalking his lost love.
When Craig gets rough with Jennifer while visiting her at work, it leads to a violent altercation with several Walnut Lake employees. So once people start getting killed in and around the store, Craig is the prime suspect. But we can’t be sure he’s the murderer, because Spiegel keeps the slasher’s identity obscured until the cast has been whittled down substantially.
The store employees are the main characters, but we also get cameo appearances by Green Acres co-stars Alvy Moore and Tom Lester, reunited to play a pair of police officers, Three Stooges cohort Emil Sitka as an elderly customer, Lawrence Bender and Bruce Campbell as another pair of police officers, and Spiegel himself as an ill-fated bread delivery man.
The movie was shot under the title The Night Crew, like the short version, but it was decided along the way that a title change was in order. Band suggested that it be called The Final Checkout, and a trailer was put together that combined the two titles: Night Crew, with the subtitle The Final Checkout. Then someone in the marketing department decided a generic slasher title would be the most appealing to audiences. So the film came to be known as Intruder… which isn’t very fitting, but works well enough if you don’t think about it.
Spiegel couldn’t film this take on The Night Crew at the actual Walnut Lake Market in Michigan. They had to find a suitable alternative in the Los Angeles area. Bender came across a store that was closed, but still had all the shelves and equipment in place. The manager allowed the production to move into the store and film there for a two week period while the owner was out of town on vacation. Getting this place for two weeks only cost two thousand, five hundred dollars. For another thousand dollars, Bender scored ten tons of “scratch and dent” merchandise to stock the shelves with, then donated the food to charity once filming was over. Sadly, the dog food and slabs of meat couldn’t be donated, since they spoiled during production and started to stink up the store. Seeing how the store looks in the movie, thankfully not being able to smell it, it’s mind-blowing that the production was able to get this place and make it look completely functional for a total of just three thousand, five hundred dollars. Spiegel certainly made the most of the location, seeming to get every inch of it on camera.
Also mind-blowing – if you watch the unrated cut – are the special effects. The blood and gore were supplied by KNB, the company that had just been formed by Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger. They had never been the effects supervisors on a film before, and were stuck in a Catch 22: companies don’t get hired to be effects supervisors on productions until they’ve already worked in that capacity on another production. Knowing the three artists from their work in the Evil Dead II FX department, Spiegel assumed KNB would be out of his price range. He thought they would just refer him to some other effects artists – but they were so eager to be the effects supervisors on something, they took the job. All they asked for was credit in the opening title sequence and seven hundred dollars a piece.
The unrated cut greatly benefits from the fact that KNB were out to prove themselves with this film. The death scenes are incredible, with heads being crushed and cut in half, and blood spraying across the screen. A scene involving someone’s head being run through the butcher’s bandsaw is the standout of the bunch. Even genre fans who haven’t seen the movie seem to be aware of the bandsaw scene. It’s a repeat of a kill that was done in the Super 8 version, but there the saw cuts into the top of a person’s head. KNB told Spiegel they could create a fake head that would look so good, he’d be able to show the saw cutting the face in half, cheek to cheek. As Spiegel told the Book of the Dead website, “When we were about to shoot the sawing of the gelatin head, which really looked like the actor, he turned to me and said, ‘My mom can never see this.’ We rolled cameras and turned on the bandsaw and sawed the gelatin head in half. It was so real it upset many crew members. Joyce Pepper, our script supervisor, was crying. I seriously questioned what I was doing.”
Unfortunately, for more than fifteen years the only way to see the uncut death scenes was by watching a low quality bootleg. Like many ’80s slashers, Intruder was hacked up by the ratings board even worse than the characters are hacked up by the killer.
The movie was shot on 35mm, with Spiegel and Bender hoping for a theatrical release. That hope was crushed when Empire Pictures went bankrupt. Charles Band was able to take a few films with him when he left the company behind, and one of them was Intruder. He was quickly able to set up a new distribution deal with Paramount – but it was for movies that would be released straight to video. This deal was the beginning of Band’s company Full Moon. Before the first official Full Moon release, which was Puppet Master, Paramount gave a video release to Band’s Empire leftover Intruder. The problem was, all of the movies released through this deal had to receive an R rating before Paramount would put them out. And to achieve an R rating, Intruder had to lose almost all of its bloodshed. The amount of gore had already been hyped in the pages of magazines like Gorezone and Fangoria, so when horror fans rented the VHS from their local video stores, they were upset to find that the gore was missing. The bootleg started floating around very quickly – Spiegel himself would even send out copies. But it wasn’t until 2005 that an official, good quality version of the unrated cut was released on DVD. Multiple Blu-ray releases have followed over the years, including a special edition release from Synapse Films. Now the unrated cut is the most readily available version of Intruder out there, as it always should have been.
The gory kills make Intruder a lot more fun to watch, but even if you watch the R-rated cut this is still a highly entertaining movie. Spiegel wrote a likeable group of characters for us to watch get brutally murdered. The Walnut Lake employees aren’t the most fascinating or deep people, they don’t have a whole lot to do before we see them get killed, but they come off well during the scenes they have, and the cast did a good job bringing them to the screen for their final moments of life.
While there are dark moments and disturbing murders, there’s also a lightheartedness to the film that makes sure we never take things too seriously. There are amusing moments and lines throughout, with a lot of the humor coming from the performances of Danny Hicks and Burr Steers. Those cameos by Green Acres and Three Stooges alums are also funny to see.
The character played by Hicks goes on quite a journey over the course of the film. Early on, he seems like the nicest, friendliest person around. But toward the end we’ll discover that he’s a psychotic killer, a fact which has always been spoiled by the marketing materials. He’s just crazy about his store! By the time the credits roll, there’s not a lot of good will left for Bill Roberts. During an interview for the Synapse Blu-ray, Hicks said, “I’m proud of the work I did in Intruder. There are bits and pieces in there that might be the best stuff I’ve ever done on film.” It’s easy to agree that Bill is his greatest role, because he is amazing in this movie.
Jennifer is the other character who gets the most to do, and Spiegel really put his lead through the wringer. She’s having a bad night even before the killing starts. Her obsessive ex is out of jail, she’s terrified of the guy, he gives her a nosebleed that won’t quit, and then all of her co-workers and her new love interest are murdered. She’s left to fight for her life while stumbling over their corpses. The script gave Elizabeth Cox a lot of different types of scenes to play and emotions to convey. She took it all on and made for a fine heroine. She was so dedicated to her role, which required abundant screaming, she even came up with four different types of screams to do: the High C scream, the whistle scream, the tarantula scream, and the suck-in gasp. See if you can spot them all when you watch the movie.
A co-worker once told Spiegel the story of a volunteer fireman who reported to the scene of a fatal accident while eating a sandwich. This guy was later seen walking down the road, carrying the accident victim’s severed head in one hand and his sandwich in the other. Spiegel told this story to Raimi, who passed it on to the Coen brothers. They wrote it into Raising Arizona, where M. Emmett Walsh tells the story to Nicolas Cage early in the film. Spiegel was disappointed that the story had already been used in a movie because he wanted to put it in a film of his own. So, undeterred, he put it in Intruder… and doubled down on it. Bill tells the story twice, and it’s memorable both times. The first time he tells it, he’s in nice guy mode, grossing out his employees during their break. The second time he tells it, he’s out of his mind and actually carrying a severed head in one hand and a sandwich in the other. It’s a troubling sight, and yet also another one of the movie’s amusing moments.
The playful tone of the film is enhanced by some of the unusual camera angles Spiegel chose. He’s a director who loves point-of-view shots, capturing moments in ways most filmmakers would never think of. When Linda takes a phone call, we get a point-of-view shot from inside the base of the phone, looking at her through the rotary dial. As Jennifer sweeps up trash, we see her from the floor’s point-of-view. A conversation between Linda and Bub is shot through their reflections in mirrors above their heads. In a moment where Bill sees a doorknob slowly turning, we see him from the point-of-view of that turning knob. These goofy angles are really clever, and bring a smile between moments of seeing amiable people getting knocked off in horrific ways.
With Intruder, Spiegel delivered everything a horror fan would hope to see from a slasher: cool kills, likeable characters, a beleaguered heroine, and an exciting climactic chase sequence. And he brought it all to the screen with his own unique, fun-loving style. There were a lot of awesome slasher movies released in the 1980s, and Intruder ranks up there among the best of them. The movie has a strong cult following, but it has never been seen by enough horror fans – especially not in its proper, uncut form. We need to get more people to watch Intruder so its following will grow, and it will get mentioned as one of the best slashers of the ’80s more often.
If you’re a slasher fan, seek out Intruder. Chances are you’ll go crazy for it.
For the Revisited video series I wrote about Steven Spielberg's 1998 World War II classic Saving Private Ryan. This video was released on Memorial Day:
Saving Private Ryan script:
INTRO: Steven Spielberg is the son of a World War II veteran, and as a child he developed a fascination with the war his father fought in. This is evident all through his career; many of his movies are set in and around the World War II era. Even some of the 8mm shorts he made as a teenager were set during the war, with shots of his friends wearing his dad’s uniform being spliced together with footage from war documentaries. In this episode of Revisited, we’re taking a look back at Spielberg’s 1998 World War II movie Saving Private Ryan, one of the most realistically brutal films to ever be made about that conflict.
SET-UP: Screenwriter Robert Rodat was drawing inspiration from two sources when he came up with the story for Saving Private Ryan in 1994. He was reading a book on the D-Day invasion, and had also seen a war monument that listed the names of several brothers who had been killed in action. The idea was to tell an old school, World War II “men on a mission” story, but in this one the mission would be to save one man. The last remaining brother from a family that had lost several sons in the war.
Throughout the war, there were several instances of families’ surviving sons being sent home after their brothers were killed in action. This was following the tragic loss of all five sons from the Sullivan family, who were killed together in 1942 when the ship they were serving on was torpedoed. After the Borgstrom family lost four sons in 1944, the fifth son who was serving in the war was released from service. When Charles and Joseph Butehorn were killed in 1944 and 1945, their brother Henry was sent home. And when it appeared that only one of the four Niland brothers was still alive, the remaining brother was sent back to the states. Thankfully, it was later discovered that one of the brothers who was believed to have been killed had been taken prisoner instead. He was released after spending nearly a year in a prison camp.
Rodat’s story begins on D-Day, the day of the largest seaborne invasion in history. When more than a hundred and sixty thousand American, Canadian, and British troops stormed a fifty mile stretch of German-occupied beaches in Normandy, France. Thousands of men lost their lives that day, but the invasion of those beaches began the liberation of France and eventually led to the Allied forces winning the war. Rodat introduces his lead characters during the invasion, most notably Captain John H. Miller. After the invasion, it’s discovered that brothers Sean and Peter Ryan were among the soldiers killed on the beaches. They lost another brother, Daniel, earlier in the year when he was killed in New Guinea. Their youngest brother James Francis Ryan is also serving in the war – but when the War Department realizes that he’s the last Ryan brother alive, his exact location is unknown. He was one of the twenty-four thousand paratroopers who dropped into the Normandy area before D-Day, but he didn’t land where he was meant to. Miller is tasked with assembling a team and searching the French countryside for him so he can be sent home.
Rodat pitched his idea to producer Mark Gordon, who attached himself to the project and took it to Paramount Pictures. Rodat then went to work writing and rewriting the script – and sometime during the early stages, Michael Bay was offered the chance to direct Saving Private Ryan. He turned it down because he didn’t know how to approach the material, but a few years later he would make a different World War II movie. Pearl Harbor. The script for Saving Private Ryan soon made its way into the hands of Steven Spielberg, who signed on to direct the film – and as part of his deal, his new company DreamWorks would also handle some of the financing and distribution. But first, Spielberg had to face the same issue that had troubled Bay: he had to figure out how to approach the story.
Spielberg’s first thought was to make Saving Private Ryan an adventure movie, which may have been fitting for the early drafts of the script, where Captain Miller was written as a stereotypical, tough action hero. But Spielberg started interviewing World War II veterans in preparation, and while talking to them he realized this should be about something more than action and adventure. He needed to bring this closer to reality. Rodat wrote eleven drafts of the script, reworking characters, adding some, changing their fates. Then Scott Frank and Frank Darabont were brought in to do revisions. The script was never in perfect condition, so the cast Spielberg put together was also given the chance to bring their own ideas to their characters and do some improvising on set.
Finding the right actors to play the characters presented another challenge for Spielberg, who felt that people looked different in the 1940s than they did in the 1990s. He needed to find actors who looked like the people he saw in the World War II newsreels. Mel Gibson, Harrison Ford, and Pete Postlethwaite were among the options he had in mind for Captain Miller, but he ended up going with Tom Hanks – who was definitely not the obvious choice for a movie like this. But he’s Tom Hanks, he can do anything. He turned out to be the perfect Captain Miller, and he and Spielberg have gone on to work on several more projects together. For Miller’s team, Spielberg cast filmmaker Edward Burns as Private First Class Richard Reiben, who most strongly disagrees with the idea of Miller and his men being ordered to put their lives on the line to find one guy. Vin Diesel as Private First Class Adrian Caparzo, a short-lived character who was written specifically with Diesel in mind after Spielberg saw his movie Strays. Adam Goldberg as Private Stanley Mellish, who will take opportunities to show Nazi soldiers that he’s Jewish, a character who didn’t exist until Goldberg was cast. Barry Pepper as Private Daniel Jackson, a sniper, a deeply religious man, and a role that was apparently offered to musician Garth Brooks at one point. Giovanni Ribisi as T4 Medic Irwin Wade, perhaps the most compassionate of the bunch. And Jeremy Davies as T5 Corporal Timothy Upham, an interpreter with no combat experience, who meets Miller and his men for the first time when they set out on this mission. Technical Sergeant Mike Horvath is second-in-command, and after Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Madsen declined the role it went to Tom Sizemore. Who had to drop out of another World War II movie, The Thin Red Line, to do this one. Sizemore’s struggle with drug addiction has been quite public, and Spielberg hired him on this film under the condition that he take a drug test every day of production. If he ever failed the drug test, he would be fired from the film, the role of Horvath would be recast, and every bit of footage with him in it would be reshot. Sizemore stayed clean for the entirety of the shoot.
To make sure his cast would respect what it means to be a soldier, Spielberg had them undergo an intense week of training under technical advisor Dale Dye, a Vietnam veteran who had previously helped Hanks get ready for the Vietnam sequence in Forrest Gump. This training course was so tiring, most of the cast voted to drop out of it. They thought they should rest up a bit before filming started. The only one who thought they should see it through was Hanks – and since he was going to stick with it, everyone else decided to as well.
Matt Damon was cast as the Private Ryan that everyone is searching for, and Spielberg didn’t have him participate in the training course. Most of Miller’s men resent being sent on the mission to find Ryan, so Spielberg didn’t want to give the actors the chance to bond with him during training. He wanted them to resent the fact that Damon didn’t have to endure the same thing they were put through. Neil Patrick Harris and Edward Norton had been considered for the role before Damon was hired, and Norton ended up receiving a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his performance in the movie he did instead: American History X. Hanks, nominated for playing Captain Miller, was one of Norton’s competitors in the Best Actor category. Neither of them walked away with the gold… but we’ll get to the Saving Private Ryan Oscars controversy later.
REVIEW: Nearly half of the film’s sixty-one day shooting schedule and around eleven million of its seventy million dollar budget went into the recreation of the Omaha Beach landing in Normandy, which Spielberg uses to drop the viewer into his vision of World War II. It’s a harrowing, gory sequence that really drives home that this film is endeavoring to show us the true horror of war. It’s also our introduction to the visual style Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kamiński went with for this film, a style that was – like the casting choices – inspired by World War II newsreels. The idea was for the movie to have a desaturated look, which was achieved by running the film through bleach bypass, which reduces the brightness and color. Kamiński also removed the protective coating from the camera lenses, allowing more light in. And for certain moments he changed the shutter timing, achieving what he described as a staccato in the movements and a crispness in the explosions.
Shot in sequence with up to one thousand extras moving their way up the beach location, bullet squibs and explosions going off all around them, the D-Day battle is the most famous part of Saving Private Ryan because of how shocking and intense it is. It lasts for more than twenty minutes and effectively makes the point that this is not your average war movie. This is a visceral experience. Spielberg wants you to keep in mind that the soldiers fighting in World War II really had to face these awful, terrifying situations. He wants you to think about the sacrifices that were made. The loss of human lives. When he decided to take this approach to the material, he didn’t think it was the commercial choice. He just knew it was the right choice. He didn’t expect to make a hit. In fact, since his company was co-funding and distributing, he was even willing to put the movie out with an NC-17 rating if that’s what the ratings board decided to give it. He wasn’t going to cut back on the depiction of violence for financial reasons. In the end, that wasn’t an issue. There are certainly sights that would have pushed the limits of the R rating at the time, but the ratings board let them pass.
Beneath the exhausting action and appalling visuals that serve as an endurance challenge for some viewers, the opening battle is also an impressive technical achievement, especially when you consider that none of it was storyboarded. Spielberg and his camera operators followed the action instinctively, catching shots on the fly because the director wanted them to feel unpredictable.
The D-Day invasion is the biggest sequence of the film, but slow, quiet moments are few and far between in the rest of the one hundred and sixty-nine minute running time. Miller and his team are sent out on their mission to find Private Ryan soon after the sequence ends, and this isn’t an easy stroll across France for them. There are enemy soldiers scattered throughout the countryside – leading to a sequence where they find themselves in a rainy, German-occupied village with a sniper set up in a tower. And another where they try to take out a machine gun nest set up at a defunct radar station. Every time gunfire breaks out in this movie, it’s jarring and usually ends in tragedy. Miller loses men along the way, which makes the survivors question their mission even more.
As the film goes on, we get a good idea of who Miller and his men are as people. Some of them are given strong emotional moments to play; Wade tells a heartbreaking story about his mother when the men spend the night in a church. Others share humorous stories. But even though we aren’t given back story information on most of them, we see who they are. We come to like them, we root for them, and feel the loss when any of them falls along the way. Spielberg chose the perfect actors for these roles, with each one bringing palpable depth and humanity to their character.
The decision to change Captain Miller from the stereotype he was in the first draft of the script to the man he is in the film was a very smart one. We see the toll the war is taking on him. His hands shake. He breaks down in tears. Although he’s a mystery to his men and they talk him up like he’s a mythical figure, he’s actually a regular guy. He has been traumatized. But he keeps following his orders and doing what needs to be done.
At times, it feels like Jeremy Davies’ character Upham is the audience surrogate. He’s the one who has no combat experience, so the frightening situations he finds himself in, the death and destruction he sees, this is all new to him. He’s ordered to stay back during most confrontations, and one sequence – the assault on the machine gun nest – is even shot through his monocular as he watches from a distance. Hanks has said Spielberg shot the sequence this way due to weather and lighting conditions at the location, but it’s a major example of Upham standing in for the audience. Viewers are likely to side with Upham when he shows empathy and convinces Miller and his men not to execute an enemy soldier they’ve captured. But there also comes a point when viewers start hating Upham. When he is finally forced to participate in battle, he does not step up. He is not a hero. From a real world psychological perspective, it makes sense that he shuts down when put in a life or death situation. But it’s really painful to see it happen in the movie, especially given the cost of Upham’s inability to put himself at risk to help others.
We don’t get to spend a lot of time with Private Ryan once he’s located, but he’s another character we learn plenty about. We see that he’s affected not only by the loss of his brothers, but also by hearing that two of Miller’s men were killed while they were searching for him. We get to hear him tell a story about him and his brothers, something that happened before they went off to war. Damon ad-libbed this story and Spielberg liked it enough to keep it in the film despite the fact that it presents a continuity error. Ryan says that he and his brothers haven’t been together since eldest brother Dan left for basic training. Yet dialogue earlier in the film tells us that the Ryan brothers served together for a while, they weren’t split up until the deaths of the Sullivan brothers. There’s also a picture in the Ryan home that shows all four brothers together in their uniforms. The story Private Ryan tells doesn’t fit what we’ve heard and seen before this scene, but it’s a nice character moment nonetheless.
During our time with Ryan, we also see that he’s a dedicated soldier, as he refuses to leave the men he has joined up with in the field. He won’t allow Miller to take him out of the fight until he has done what he said he would, which is help defend a bridge from approaching German forces. Since Ryan won’t leave the bridge, Miller and his remaining men have to help defend it as well. And try to keep Ryan safe during the ensuing battle.
Some have questioned Spielberg’s decision to put the most intense battle sequence right at the start of the film. The climactic battle to protect the bridge in the village of Ramelle – a location that doesn’t actually exist, but a scenario that was inspired by a real World War II battle – may not be as massive as the D-Day sequence, but it’s still quite impactful in its own way. It’s also roughly the same length as the D-Day sequence. The deaths we witness during this battle hurt even more than the ones on the beaches of Normandy did, because now we know the people who are dying. We’ve spent over two hours with them. We want to see them make it out of this. But not all of them do.
Even with all the loss, the mission is successful. The title is right, the movie is all about Saving Private Ryan. And when the fighting is over, we catch up with Ryan, decades later, and see how the knowledge that so many men died so he could live has affected him. For the scenes set in the 1990s, Ryan is played by Harrison Young, who turns in a heart-wrenching performance during his few minutes on screen.
Saving Private Ryan is a really violent movie, but its violence has a purpose. It never feels gratuitous or disrespectful to those who served in the war. The battles aren’t meant to be fun, and Spielberg wasn’t taking any of this lightly. He brought a rather melancholy tone to the film – but at the same time, he made sure that the overall viewing experience isn’t too grim or oppressive. There are some terrific moments of levity placed throughout that are right for the situations and characters. Moments that allow the viewer to laugh or smile before Spielberg cranks up the intensity again; whether that be through acts of violence or emotional character scenes.
Spielberg is one of the best directors in cinema history and has made several films that rank highly among the greatest movies ever made. That includes Saving Private Ryan.
LEGACY/NOW: The director didn’t expect this film to be a blockbuster, but it was. It earned just under five hundred million at the global box office and was the second highest grossing film of 1998, only coming in behind Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Its success wasn’t just financial; it also racked up eleven Academy Award nominations. Saving Private Ryan won Oscars in the Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Sound, and Best Sound Effects Editing categories. Spielberg also won Best Director for the second time in his career, his first win being for Schindler’s List five years earlier. In the Best Actor category, Hanks lost to Roberto Benigni for his performance in another movie set during World War II, Life Is Beautiful. That film’s composer Nicola Piovani also beat Saving Private Ryan’s composer John Williams for the Best Original Dramatic Score award. The Saving Private Ryan makeup team lost to the Elizabeth crew. And the film lost to Shakespeare in Love in three categories. Here’s where things gets controversial. After beating Saving Private Ryan in the Best Art Direction and Best Screenplay categories, Shakespeare in Love also took home the biggest award of the night. Best Picture.
To this day many viewers, including Academy members who voted against it at the time, feel that Saving Private Ryan should have won Best Picture. But the head of Miramax, the company that made Shakespeare in Love – we won’t say his name here, but you probably know who he is – ran an awards season campaign that was effective at getting enough Academy members to vote for his movie that it took the win. There were a lot of upset movie fans that night. In a poll conducted in 2015, Academy members confirmed that they would have voted for Saving Private Ryan if they were given a second chance.
But Saving Private Ryan is enduring just fine without being listed among the winners of Best Picture. The American Film Institute regularly includes the film on their lists of great films, and many publications have honored it over the decades. In 2014, the Library of Congress selected it as one of the “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” films worthy of being preserved in the National Film Registry. For three years, the television network ABC aired Saving Private Ryan uncut, with limited commercial interruptions, on Veterans Day. And it has always sold well on home video, most recently getting a 4K UHD release in 2018.
After making the film, Spielberg paid further tribute to those who served in World War II by donating an undisclosed amount of money to help fund the National D-Day Memorial in Bedford, Virginia. Part of the memorial is the Arnold M. Spielberg Theater, named after Spielberg’s father. The veteran who told his son stories of what it was like serving in the war, which would eventually inspire him to direct Saving Private Ryan. A film he made in honor of his dad.
And another one for the Revisited series, the John Carpenter / Kurt Russell martial arts action comedy Big Trouble in Little China:
Big Trouble in Little China script:
There’s a lot of attention paid to weekend box office numbers, even by movie fans who have no financial investment in how successful a movie is or isn’t. What was number one for the weekend? How much does a movie’s box office drop from week to week? But just because a movie rakes in the cash, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be an enduring classic. And if a movie flops, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be forgotten. Take for example the movie we’re looking at in this episode of Revisited: Big Trouble in Little China. Today it’s considered to be one of the most entertaining action comedies ever made. But when it was released in 1986, it was a disaster.
SET-UP: As the character Egg Shen says at the beginning of Big Trouble in Little China, major events always begin with something very small. The story of this film began when Gary Goldman went to see Tsui Hark’s directorial debut The Butterfly Murders, an odd movie that blended the Chinese wuxia genre with the style of Italian giallos, then added in killer butterfly attack sequences. Goldman exited the theatre inspired to write a story that would mix Asian mystical martial arts with another genre; the Hollywood Western. The first screenplay written by Goldman and his friend David Z. Weinstein, the script that would become known as Big Trouble in Little China was originally set in the Old West. It centered on a cowboy named Wiley Prescott, who provided buffalo meat to the Chinese immigrants building the transcontinental railroad. After making a delivery, Wiley would stay and hang out with the railroad workers for a while, befriending a man named Sun. He ends up accompanying Sun to the San Francisco docks to meet with Sun’s fiancée Lotus, who is just arriving from China… but before Sun and Lotus can be reunited, she’s kidnapped by a gang working for the sorcerer Lo Pan. Lo Pan was cursed to walk the earth as a ghost a couple thousand years ago, and he believes that he’ll be able to break this curse and regain his body by marrying Lotus himself. In the midst of Lotus’s abduction, Wiley also loses his horse to the villain’s gang. So now Sun and Wiley both have reason to enter the magical underworld hidden beneath Chinatown and confront Lo Pan: Sun wants his fiancée back, and Wiley wants his horse back.
Goldman and Weinstein managed to sell their martial arts Western to 20th Century Fox, and did the standard rewrite for the studio. Fred Schepisi, director of Six Degrees of Separation and the Steve Martin movie Roxanne, showed interest in directing the film, but didn’t sign on. The project was offered to Walter Hill, the director of The Warriors and 48 Hrs., but he passed on it, apparently because he couldn’t see himself dealing with the mystical elements of the story. After Hill turned them down, the studio started rethinking the script. They took it from Goldman and Weinstein and put out a call for a writer who could guide the story in a different direction. Enter W.D. Richter, who had written the 1978 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and had just made his directorial debut with The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Richter liked the basics of the story, but thought that asking the audience to take two steps out of their own reality was too much. You could give them a Western or a magical martial arts movie, but not both at once. So he suggested bringing the story into the 1980s, saving the studio the trouble of having to build Old West sets. Fox loved that suggestion.
With Richter’s rewrite, cowboy Wiley Prescott became truck driver Jack Burton, who hauls pigs into San Francisco’s Chinatown in a big rig known as the Pork Chop Express. The Chinese local Jack befriends is named Wang Chi, and he’s meeting his fiancée Miao Yin at the airport instead of at the docks. Lo Pan’s gang abducts Miao Yin, and in the ensuing madness – which includes a battle between rival gangs the Chang Sings and the Wing Kongs – Jack loses his truck. So he and Wang infiltrate the mystical underworld in search of Miao Yin and his vehicle. While modernizing the story, Richter also re-envisioned the lead character. Wiley Prescott had been your typical Western hero; capable, tough, a sharpshooter. Jack Burton talks like he’s tough and capable, he thinks he is your typical hero… but he’s actually a bumbling fool. Richter’s idea was to center the story on someone who doesn’t realize he’s the sidekick. Jack is completely out of his element and always confused as to what’s going on around him, while Wang is a skilled martial artist who understands the magic surrounding them. Richter also changed the tone of the story, giving it a strong comedic element.
Pleased with Richter’s script, Fox went looking for someone to take the helm again, and this time ended up choosing director John Carpenter. Best known for working on horror films like the hit Halloween and the box office failure The Thing, Carpenter was looking good to studios at the time because he had just directed Jeff Bridges to an Oscar nomination in the sci-fi romance Starman. Carpenter was a fan of martial arts films and he enjoyed Richter’s script, which he described as being “absolute nutball”, so he signed on to direct Big Trouble in Little China – and suddenly found himself in competition with a project he was offered and turned down, Paramount Pictures’ new Eddie Murphy movie The Golden Child. Another comedic action movie that dealt with Chinese mysticism. Fox put their movie on the fast track so they could beat The Golden Child into theatres – and Big Trouble in Little China did end up being released five months before Paramount’s movie.
Given a fifteen week shooting schedule and a budget of twenty-three million dollars, Carpenter began assembling his cast.
The director’s top choice to play Jack Burton was Kurt Russell, who he had previously worked with on Elvis, Escape from New York, and The Thing. Russell was initially reluctant to take the job because he didn’t think he could bring anything interesting to the role, but Carpenter convinced him to get involved. Russell would end up having a lot of fun subverting expectations and making Jack look foolish. Carpenter didn’t get his first choice for the movie’s more competent hero, Wang Chi. His suggestion of casting Jackie Chan was vetoed by a producer who feared that Chan’s English wasn’t good enough. It all turned out well, because the role went to Dennis Dun, who proved to be a great Wang Chi. Some trivia sources will tell you that Dun didn’t have martial arts experience before being cast in this movie, but that’s not accurate. He wasn’t an expert, but he had dabbled here and there.
The legendary and incredibly prolific James Hong was cast as the supernatural villain Lo Pan, with Suzee Pai as Miao Yin, who seems to be the green-eyed girl who can break Lo Pan’s curse. The role of Lo Pan’s rival Egg Shen went to Victor Wong, Kim Cattrall was cast as Gracie Law, an ally to Jack and Wang who becomes Jack’s pseudo love interest. Kate Burton and Donald Li fill the roles of a couple other allies, and Carter Wong, James Pax, and Peter Kwong were given standout roles as three characters whose appearance was inspired by three straw-hat-wearing assassins in Lone Wolf and Cub. The characters here are the Three Storms, Thunder, Lightning, and Rain, whose style and ability to control elements helped inspire the creation of the lightning-tossing god Raiden in Mortal Kombat.
The studio had wanted Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson to play Jack Burton. They were also uncertain about Kim Cattrall, because she was mainly known for Police Academy and Porky’s at the time. Carpenter said Richter didn’t seem to like Cattrall and tried to rewrite her character after seeing her in rehearsals, so Carpenter told him to stop coming to rehearsals. Anyone who questioned these casting decisions was incorrect, because the perfect actor was chosen for every single role in this movie.
REVIEW: Russell has played some iconic characters in his career, and Jack Burton ranks up there as one of his best, if not the best. With his John Wayne swagger and his way of dispensing wisdom over his truck’s CB radio, he seems like he’ll be able to solve everyone’s problems very easily. But while he’s up for the challenge, he’s not very successful. When faced with martial artists and supernatural beings, he barely knows how to react, let alone how to fight back – and he is taken out of fights on multiple occasions. He misses out on one battle because he accidentally tosses his knife across the room. He accidentally knocks himself out at the start of another, and when he is able to join ends up trapped under the body of an enemy. The idea of Jack unknowingly being the sidekick instead of the heroic lead was in Richter’s script, but Carpenter and Russell pushed it even further when they were on set. It was Russell’s suggestion that Jack should knock himself out. He also suggested that Jack get lipstick on his mouth after kissing Gracie Law and then leave the lipstick there through the following very important scene. He took every opportunity to lower Jack’s cool factor, he loved doing that. This is especially evident in the way he plays the character when he goes undercover to look for the abducted Miao Yin at a brothel. As Russell put it, Jack “falls on his ass as much as he comes through. He’s a lot of hot air, very self-assured, a screw-up”.
While Jack is being mostly counted out, other characters are helping Carpenter show off the fact that he was just as adept at making a martial arts action movie as he was at making horror or sci-fi. The fight scenes choreographed by James Lew are a lot of fun, well shot and cut together, and performed well by all of the fighters. As usual, Carpenter composed the score for his movie, in association with his frequent collaborator Alan Howarth, and they paired the impressive visuals with some really cool music. Carpenter and the Coupe de Villes, the band he had with director friends Tommy Lee Wallace and Nick Castle, also performed a goofy title song that plays over the end credits. They shot a video for this song that even got play on MTV, back when it was a music channel.
As the film goes on and the characters descend deeper into the underworld, the movie gets weirder. In addition to the standard kicking and punching, shooting and slashing, some of the characters are able to fly through the air in Chinese martial arts movie fashion. Lightning gets tossed around. And not only do Lo Pan and Egg Shen engage in a fight that’s like a mystical laser show, but we even get actual monsters in here. There’s a furry beast that’s meant to be a “Chinese Wildman” or Yeren, a version of Bigfoot. There’s also a floating head with eyeballs all over it. Jack thought it was crazy when he saw the Three Storms and Lo Pan. The sight of this eyeball creature nearly breaks his brain.
Since this is an ‘80s movie, those creature effects are practical, and the eyeball creature was quite a challenge for the effects department. It took over sixty artists and engineers to bring this wacky thing to life; it was an animatronic puppet that had multiple puppeteers controlling it while it was shot with a specially-designed matting system. The effects company had just under two million dollars to work with on the whole movie, and a hundred thousand of those dollars went into the creation of the eyeball creature. It was worth it. It’s an unforgettable sight.
Goldman and Weinstein gave Big Trouble in Little China a great foundation with their basic concept, and it probably would have been fun to see the martial arts and Western genres get mixed together, but the final script we got from Richter is gold. It gifted the world with Jack Burton, and features some wonderful, amusing dialogue. Carpenter had fun letting the actors bounce that dialogue off of each other at a rapid pace, like something out of films made by his hero Howard Hawks, and there are many times throughout where the lines and their deliveries are hilarious. Through the brilliance of Hong’s performance and the strangeness of Richter’s script, some of the laughs even come from Lo Pan, who is both a super-powered, intimidating sorcerer and a funny little old man.
If you ever feel like you can’t keep up with the exposition or don’t have a firm grasp on the rules of Lo Pan’s predicament, that’s okay, that just puts you on the same level as Jack Burton. He doesn’t get this stuff either, but he goes with the flow. So just sit back and enjoy watching all of the madness play out.
LEGACY/NOW: Carpenter had free rein to make exactly the movie he wanted to make… until he was in post-production. Big Trouble in Little China was moving toward release so quickly, the post-production process only took four months. But those four months were hellish for Carpenter. Goldman and Weinstein had envisioned their original script being turned into something along the lines of Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s exactly what Fox wanted. They were hoping Carpenter would be giving them the next Indiana Jones and, well… Jack Burton may see himself as being Indiana Jones, but he’s just not on that level. Fox CEO Barry Diller was baffled. He thought Jack was supposed to be the hero of the movie, but aside from his reflexes he wasn’t very impressive. Diller told Carpenter, “I don’t think the things Jack does are that good.” How could they fix this mistake? Diller demanded that Carpenter shoot a new opening scene for the movie that would help build up Jack’s heroism. That’s why the movie begins with a two minute scene in which Egg Shen talks to a lawyer about the events we’re about to see, and during this conversation Egg is very complimentary toward Jack, saying he showed great courage and the people are in his debt. He might as well be speaking directly to the audience, assuring them, “You might think this guy is an idiot, but trust me, he is heroic.”
Fox also felt Carpenter had made the film too humorous. At one point, he was told to cut out as much of the comedy as he could… and after the studio held a test screening for the less humorous cut, they told him to put the comedy back in. Carpenter has called his struggle with Fox over the movie’s tone “an odd, unpleasant experience” that really soured him on the idea of working with major studios – and that wasn’t the only trouble the project was dealing with at the time. The studio also wasn’t planning to give Goldman and Weinstein credit for writing the initial screenplay. In their press releases and on the title page of the script, Richter was the only writer mentioned. Goldman and Weinstein complained to the Writers Guild, and apparently the arbitration process took a while, long enough that Carpenter complained about it in an interview, saying it was “annoying as hell”. Carpenter had seen the original script and was not a fan, saying it was “outrageously unreadable” and would have been “unfilmable”. The movie he shot was written by Richter. The Writers Guild decided how to list the credits the week before Big Trouble in Little China was scheduled to reach theatres. Goldman and Weinstein would receive the “Written by” credit, while Richter would be credited as writing an adaptation of their work.
At the time, Goldman and Weinstein were not pleased that their script had been rewritten or that the tone had been changed. When Goldman was hired to work on Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall a few years later, he even used the job as an opportunity to get some revenge, writing a particularly nasty demise for a villain named Richter. But as the years have gone by, the writers have learned to enjoy Big Trouble in Little China for what it is instead of being disappointed that it isn’t what they imagined it could be.
Carpenter’s cut of the film scored very highly with test screening audiences, and journalists working the press junket were convinced it was going to be one of the biggest movies of the year. But its own studio still didn’t know what to do with it. The marketing campaign was half-hearted and didn’t sell the movie very well, and Russell has said that he was told the executives had decided to bury it. Fox wanted to cut their losses and focus on James Cameron’s Aliens, which they were going to be releasing just two weeks after Big Trouble in Little China.
The movie was released on Wednesday, July 2nd, 1986… but movie-goers didn’t turn out to see it that Fourth of July weekend. While The Karate Kid Part II, Top Gun, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off stayed in the top ten after multiple weeks in release, Big Trouble in Little China opened at number twelve. Its final box office haul was only eleven million, well below its twenty-three million dollar budget. But its failure on the big screen didn’t matter when the movie reached video and cable. That’s where it found its appreciative audience and quickly became a cult hit. The movie has had a devoted and growing fan base for almost forty years now, proving that the approach Carpenter took to the material was absolutely the right way to tell this story.
Big Trouble in Little China has been embraced after being misunderstood and underseen when it was first released, the same as what happened with the previous Carpenter and Russell collaboration, The Thing. When you have someone like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson hoping to cash in on the Big Trouble in Little China property by starring in some kind of follow-up and the makers of Thor: Ragnarok directly referencing it as an influence, it’s clear that Carpenter’s film was a hit in the long run. Hopefully he feels the struggle was worth it, because this was a great movie that more people should have seen in 1986. A lot of people have seen it by now, and it still holds up. It’s awesome.
So you know what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like this?
More video scripts have been written, so another batch of videos will be shared here on Life Between Frames eventually. In the meantime, keep an eye on JoBlo Horror Originals and JoBlo Originals!
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