This Day in Film History (Cult Horror Fave ‘The Hunger’ Opens)

Apr. 29, 1983—The Hunger may not have drawn blood at the box office—or even garnered much critical appreciation—upon its release in U.S. theaters. But the erotic horror movie opened a vein for Hollywood to tap into the emerging energies of two transatlantic cultural forces: New York’s downtown scene and London’s advertising directors.

Over time, the film became a special cult favorite for two different audiences: those transfixed by its scenes of the “goth” club life, and a gay/lesbian community that  welcomed one of the first –and certainly one of the most explicit—depictions by a major Hollywood studio of a same-sex love scene, in this case involving Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon.

The film was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, but you would never know it originated from this source material just by looking at what was onscreen. (Thirty years later, Sarandon had no idea the movie was based on a novel, let alone that the latter spawned two sequels in the early 2000s.) Its characters are largely ciphers, and the plot—an 6,000-year-old (give or take a few years) Egyptian vampire having to replace her rapidly aging 300-year-old mate—is reed-thin.

Forget about selling such a story to an audience. How do you even interest studio execs in giving it the green light? Hollywood is addicted to “The Pitch,” a one-minute-tops description of a plot that can take the form of a formula (“fish out of water,” such as Beverly Hills Cop) or an improbable mash-up (going further back for inspiration, “Abbott and Costello Meet the Wolfman”).

I suspect that the pitch that might have worked for producer Richard Shepherd was “MTV vampire movie.” The same phrase could also apply to Grace Jones’ Vamp, or The Lost Boys, starring Kiefer Sutherland and Jamie Gertz. But The Hunger got there first, so it deserves the credit—such as it is—for the style.

Such movies depend less on plot and character than on atmosphere. In the case of The Hunger, it struck me as similar to MTV (still only two years old at the time) because its director, Tony Scott, was part of a generation of British filmmakers who got their start making videos and commercials. (Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Hugh Hudson and brothers Ridley and Tony Scott made a big splash in Hollywood in the 1980s with work that set a premium on rapid cutting and moody music that often substituted for dialogue.)

Tony Scott (tapped to direct after Parker turned down the assignment) was certainly fascinated by the musical element. After discovering the group Bauhaus in a London nightclub, he ended up using their song "Bela Lugosi's Dead" in the opening credits of The Hunger. 

Even Scott’s casting was designed to appeal to viewers with avant-garde musical tastes. Ann Magnuson, a performance artist and nightclub proprietor, ended up playing a victim of the male vampire John. And John himself, the cellist mate of Miriam Blaylock, was played by David Bowie. 

Even Bowie, an artist as captivated by image as by sound, wondered about Scott’s preoccupation with the visual, which the rock ‘n’ roller felt was “nearly all of what he [Scott] was doing. He did not have great ideas about the through-line of the story. It was about moving one interesting visual against another.”

In one sense, Scott, in his rookie effort, was a throwback to another filmmaker of the Thirties. Let’s see: an émigré director with a fixation on light and frank lack of interest in narrative coherence, with cinema centered on a cool continental “Blonde Venus” with as much appeal to women and men—is that Scott with Deneuve, or Josef von Sternberg with Marlene Dietrich?

Starting with the two novels often considered central to the vampire fiction, Sheridan LeFanu’s Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the genre has featured a strong undercurrent of the sexual. The Hunger amplified that theme, not only through the greater freedom that filmmakers were increasingly enjoying in depicting sex and violence but also by appearing in a time when the notion of contaminated blood could not only be viewed as symbolizing transgressive intercourse but as actual fact.

Dracula was published in 1897, at a time when medicine had still devised no effective means of fighting syphilis. In 1981, the first headlines had started to appear discussing a deadly new disease mysteriously striking the gay community, and two months after the release of The Hunger, nearly 1,300 AIDS cases had been identified in New York alone, with 483 deaths. 

One Canadian academic, American studies specialist Priscilla L. Walton, in Our Cannibals, Ourselves, sees The Hunger as “one of the first post-AIDS movies.” That identification grows stronger when thinking about the milieu of the early scenes of the movie: the kind of underground nightclub where drugs and unprotected sex flourished and destroyed lives. 

Indeed, Sarandon’s character, Dr. Sarah Roberts, is a gerentologist whose ground-breaking scientific research involves monkeys and blood work. When Deneuve’s Miriam decides that the good doctor would make an ideal mate to replace Bowie’s John, the icily beautiful piano-playing blonde in the mansion effects a transfusion of blood in which Roberts, instead of curing the mysterious disease she’s investigating, finds herself experiencing similar: loss of appetite, dizziness, vomiting, and loss of color. 

Critics greeted The Hunger as coldly as the touch of Miriam’s hands. Roger Ebert, for instance, assigning it only a star and a half, called it “an agonizingly bad vampire movie.” Yet, in the very next clause, he pinpointed why its fans would embrace it, referring to its “exquisitely effective sex scene.”

Same-sex erotic scenes, in which the partners were unapologetic about their orientation, were rare at this time in Hollywood, and even in genre films. (The Vampire Lovers, an adaptation of Carmilla, had been released in 1970, but that came from Hammer Film Productions, a British studio that specialized in shock and schlock.) So, when a mainstream studio like MGM released a film with this content—and did so not with unknown actresses, but the likes of Deneuve and Sarandon—it marked a departure in how the LGBT community was depicted onscreen.

Scott would survive his critical roasting and go on to make one of the greatest—and, in its way, deeply emblematic—hits of the 1980s: Top Gun. His path to sleek, sexy, stylish cinema began, if inauspiciously, with The Hunger.

This Day in Film History (“Thelma and Louise” Premieres as Cultural Flashpoint)

May 24, 1991—Fresh from a triumphant reception at the Cannes Film Festival, Thelma and Louise was released to U.S. theaters. Other films made more money that year, but few sparked more water-cooler debates or critical commentary than this movie that dramatized unilateral female punishment of male violence.

(In addition to debates and commentaries, the female “buddy” movie starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis also inspired parody, in the form of an episode the following year of the TV dramedy Sisters. In this particular episode, Swoosie Kurtz’s Alex, traumatized by a mugging, seeks out the services of a female self-defense instructor with definite ideas on how to render the male of the species harmless. Her name--wink, wink—is Thelma Louise.)

The central dilemma of Callie Khouri’s Oscar-winning Best Original Screenplay—the fateful consequences of waitress Louise’s decision to shoot—execute, really—Thelma’s would-be rapist, might seem the product of the late 20th century, impossible to imagine without the social and legal revolution following Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will.

But in many ways, the film is a throwback to films of the Thirties and Forties. I don’t mean simply the previously mentioned “buddy” film (at points, the farcical elements make the two female friends a distaff version of Crosby and Hope), nor the screwball comedy (the absurdities pile higher and higher the farther the women drive in their ’66 Thunderbird), nor even the more durable and adaptable “road” movie.

No, I’m talking about crime films early in the talkie era, years of desperation in which ordinary Americans, with no other recourse, took to a life of crime. Thelma, struggling to make sense of their experience, finally blurts it out to Louise: “You know, something’s, like, crossed over in me and I can’t go back, I mean I just couldn’t live.” If you want a good example of what I mean, catch sometime the 1937 Fritz Lang film You Only Live Once, starring Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as doomed lovers forced to go on the run.

This type of movie, like the later Bonnie and Clyde, features escapes deep into the American Heartland. Danger bonds the two lovers ever more tightly together.

And so it is again, a half-century later, in this drama directed by Ridley Scott. Originally set simply to be executive producer, the creative force behind Alien took the helm of the film himself when he realized that nobody else shared his vision that this material formed, in a way, an American epic.

In the patriarchal America of this film, every man is found wanting in some way, either commitment-phobic (Louise’s eternal boyfriend, the musician Jimmy), infantile (Thelma’s husband Darrell, who likes his wife to stay quiet while he takes in football games on the TV), deceitful (Brad Pitt’s career-making role as easygoing bank robber J.D.), or exploitative and violent (Thelma’s attacker). The one sympathetic figure, Harvey Keitel’s law-enforcement officer, is, at least as far as his power goes to save the women from jail time, impotent.

And so, Thelma and Louise can only depend on themselves. Before they drive off the cliff, in their own version of Butch and Sundance’s decision to go out shooting against a Latin American posse waiting for them, the two longtime friends declare their mutual love—something they haven’t been able to enjoy in a world outside deeply inimical to their elementary desires.

This past March, Vanity Fair published a 20-year retrospective of the film, “Ride of a Lifetime,” by Sheila Weller. Among the juicy tidbits of trivia in the article:

* Holly Hunter, Frances McDormand, Jodie Foster, Michelle Pfeiffer, Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn were all considered for the two roles that went to Sarandon and Davis.

* Billy Baldwin beat out Pitt for two roles that year. He gave up his role in Thelma and Louise to take on the second of the two movies, Ron Howard’s Backdraft. When he saw what Pitt did with J.D.--and the film’s success--he was undoubtedly sorry for his decision.

* As he has continued to do with females the world over in the two decades since, Pitt had a discombobulating effect on Davis. She had performed perfectly well with a couple of actors who preceded him, but when he auditioned he was so cute that she kept flubbing her lines. Finally, as Scott and the casting director considered the choices, she couldn’t resist chiming in: “The blond one--duh!”

Thelma and Louise, as I indicated earlier, though it did well enough at the box office, with a gross nearly three times its estimated budget, was hardly the greatest blockbuster that summer (Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Terminator 2 grossed five and ten times, respectively, its U.S. total).

But it was a much greater cultural landmark than those other movies. Later in 1991, the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings would take up the issue of how far a male could go with a woman. But Thelma and Louise had already fired the first feminist shot across the bow.

Movie Quote of the Day (“Bull Durham,” on Baseball and Walt Whitman)

Annie Savoy (played by Susan Sarandon): [narrating] Walt Whitman once said, ‘I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us.’ You could look it up.”—Bull Durham (1988), written and directed by Ron Shelton

Like Annie, I’m a member of the Church of Baseball. And so, with Opening Day here, I say: Amen, and play ball!

Quote of the Day (Susan Sarandon, on Being Suddenly Single Again)

“I did a movie a long time ago where I had to fly in a glider. You get towed up in the air by a plane. At some point you pull the cord and you’re suddenly floating, and in your mind it makes absolutely no sense. But it’s exhilarating and terrifying at the same time. That’s where I am now.”—Susan Sarandon, quoted in Chris Nashawaty, “Susan Sarandon Talks to EW About Life After Split With Tim Robbins,” Entertainment Weekly, April 1, 2010

This Day in Film History (Baseball Classic “Bull Durham” Scores)

June 15, 1988—Make up any list of the greatest baseball films and the greatest romantic comedies, and one movie will likely appear on both: Bull Durham, which premiered on this date 20 years ago and promptly became a popular and critical hit.

The movie marked the passage of several talents coming into their own: stars Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, and Tim Robbins—and, most significant for its eventual success, I would argue, writer-director Ron Shelton, who captured the anxieties and idiosyncrasies of minor-league players so well because it reflected his own experience in the game he had quit 15 years before.

Bull Durham strikes me now like one of those “Folly Floaters” that Yankee reliever Steve Hamilton used on nonplussed hitters in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: A lazy pitch that sneaked up on you and was a hilarious wonder to behold (so long, of course, as you weren’t at the receiving end of it).

To their immense credit, critics got it about Shelton’s offbeat take on love and the Great American Pastime, as his screenplay netted both the New York Film Critics Circle and L.A. Film Critics Association Awards. 

To its shame, Hollywood didn’t, giving the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay instead to Rain Man—hardly a bad film, by any means, but one that, when you get right down to it, never deviated far from its road-film and buddy-film genres. 

(Even odder, Sarandon was never nominated for her career-defining role as Annie Savoy, the community college English instructor who makes it a point to take a new player under her wing, so to speak, each year.)

In contrast, I think it’s safe to say there was no baseball film quite like Bull Durham beforehand, and there’s been none since then. 

(In fact, the odds are high against it: no less an authority than Shelton himself believes that nowadays his seminal work would only see the light of day as an indie, and even in that instance getting it launched would be dicey, because of that market’s heavy reliance on foreign sales.)

Consider the other major baseball films that appeared in a five-year span from 1984 to 1989:

The picture whose success probably helped get Shelton’s project greenlighted was the Robert Redford film The Natural in 1984. Like Kevin Costner’s other significant baseball film made only year later after Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, the Redford movie appeals heavily not only to the mythic and nostalgic elements of the game, but also to the longed-for connection between fathers and sons.

John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, based on the Eliot Asinof account of the “Black Sox” betting scandal in the 1919 World Series, for all its finely wrought and historically accurate detail, follows a straight-through narrative—owner Charles Comiskey’s greed, the players’ fateful decision to bet (or, in the case of third baseman Buck Weaver, not to bet but not to inform), and the legal fallout.

David Ward’s Major League had the dubious distinction of following the far superior Bull Durham. Its fine cast could not surmount a painfully pedestrian plot whose twists could be guessed at within 10 minutes of the opening credits.

Shelton’s script, in contrast, threw out the conventions of the baseball film. There’s no real-life hero, such as in Pride of the Yankees; no American Pastoral (the Durham Bulls’ home games are in a small city ballpark that everyone walks to); and, most of all, no Opening Day and World Series. Quick – summarize the plot in a sentence. (Didn’t think you could!)

Instead, it’s built on a series of terrific scenes that highlight the players’ flakiness: the wild fastball of Ebby Calvin “Nuke” LaLoosh; the pitcher’s mound conference involving Nuke’s jammed eyelids, a live rooster to take a curse off a glove, and “what to get Millie or Jimmy for their wedding present”; and Nuke’s misinterpreted lyrics of “Try a Little Tenderness.”

And there are also some of the most famous monologues in film history, notably Annie’s opening “Church of Baseball” speech and Crash’s summary of his 21 magical days in the major leagues, or “The Show” (“You hit white balls for batting practice, the ballparks are like cathedrals, the hotels all have room service, and the women all have long legs and brains”).

Pitchers as a class are so flaky that Nuke is hardly an exaggeration. Any list of baseball characters is bound to include ball-addressing, mound-landscaping Mark “The Bird” Fidrych; reliever Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky; and perhaps the wildest eccentric of them all, Rube Waddell, who, when he wasn’t delayed for games because of drunkenness or playing marbles with street urchins, would run out of the stadium, mid-windup, the second he heard a fire engine.

In his madcap reverence for the strikeout (pronounced “fascist” by Crash), Nuke most resembles Roger Clemens, who has named all of his children with the letter “k”; in his taste in exotic underwear fashions (“The rose goes in front, big guy,” deadpans Crash), he appears to have inspired Jason Giambi.

I don’t believe the three principals have ever been better, despite Oscars they earned in other films. 

Costner is best at his loosest, as Shelton sensed not only in casting him for this but also in his fine golf film, Tin Cup. 

Sarandon’s role as Annie may have been the most significant sexy older woman role since Mrs. Robinson, and it was criminal that she was not even nominated for a role that called on her to be by turns funny, alluring, rueful, maternal and smart. 

Robbins’ dim bulb of a rookie was so convincing that I had trouble for a long time imagining him as anything else.

There is an undercurrent of sadness in the film, typified by the sequence when Annie bids goodbye to Nuke and Crash is released. The two realize the full truth now of Annie’s remark that “The world is not made for people cursed with self-awareness,” and the kindred spirits’ recognition of this draws them close together at last—and brings this classic to its inevitable conclusion.

(As luckless as Crash and Annie are, it’s nothing compared with the real-life manager of the Durham Bulls at the time of the film’s release, Grady Little – yes, the same poor guy who, as manager of the Boston Red Sox, lost to Joe Torre’s Yankees in 2003, then lost his job with the Los Angeles Dodgers to the same Torre this past off-season. “There’s no crying in baseball,” Tom Hanks famously proclaimed in A League of Their Own. Also, I might add, no fairness or justice.)