BY LEE PFEIFFER
Stories
about troubled cops or ex-cops still have a foothold in movies and TV shows --
almost to the point where you wonder why so these emotionally vulnerable men
and women chose a stressful career in law enforcement in the first place. Private eyes, on the other hand, are almost
an extinct species on the screen, after great media popularity in the 1950s and
intermittent periods of audience demand since then. Maybe, as fantasy figures who embody power,
personal integrity, and social conscience, trenchcoated PIs have been displaced
and replaced by superheroes. The hero of
Hal Ashby’s “8 Million Ways to Dieâ€
(1986), Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges),
begins as a policeman but becomes an unlicensed, free-lance gumshoe in the
course of the story. A detective with
the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office, Scudder serves a warrant on a
suspected drug trafficker in the opening scenes of the film. When the suspect attacks another deputy with
a baseball bat, Scudder fatally shoots him in front of his wife and
children. Either out of remorse for
killing the suspect or out of anger for being raked over the coals by Internal
Affairs for using his gun (the movie is a little hazy on this point), Scudder
quits the force and becomes an alcoholic. Deciding to clean up his act after his wife and daughter move out, Scudder
joins Alcoholics Anonymous, where another attendee at a meeting, an attractive
woman, slips him a note with a name and phone number. These developments all take place within the
first few minutes of the picture.
From
the staging, the audience initially thinks that the woman is flirting with
Scudder and giving him her personal information. (Nowadays, she’d Tweet -- were the 1980s
really that long ago?) But it turns out
that the name and phone number belong to the woman’s friend, Sunny (Alexandra Paul), a prostitute. Sunny offers a job to Scudder as a go-between
with her pimp, Chance (Randy Brooks). Sunny wants out of the life but she’s afraid to approach Chance herself.
Scudder agrees to represent her. Chance tells
him that Sunny is free to go: he doesn’t control her and she can do what she
wants. But then Sunny is abducted off
the street and brutally murdered while Scudder watches helplessly. Scudder goes on a bender, but revenge gives
him a motive for going on the wagon again. He’s convinced that Chance was the murderer, and he wants to bring him
to justice, but as he confronts Chance and gathers other clues, his suspicions
turn to Angel (Andy Garcia), a high-living Colombian cocaine kingpin. Scudder enlists another hooker, Sarah
(Rosanna Arquette) to help him get close to Angel. The previous tragedy of a woman horribly
murdered while under Scudder’s care threatens to repeat itself. Sarah, a shotgun held under her chin, becomes
leverage for Angel as Scudder tries to entrap him by instigating a raid on his
multi-million dollar cache of coke.
The
story behind “8 Million Ways to Die,†(1986) Ashby’s final, troubled film,
arguably is more interesting than the movie itself. The initial script by Oliver Stone, adapted
from a 1982 novel by Lawrence Block, went through at least two rewrites, one by
an uncredited Robert Towne. As director,
Ashby encouraged the actors to improvise many scenes. Some accounts say that Ashby did so in a
spirit of creative collaboration, others contend that he’d simply lost interest
in the job after ongoing interference by the producers. Many of the scenes stumble around with the
actors improvising dialogue that sounds like what might emerge from
drama-school tryouts where hopefuls are encouraged to “talk about your character’s
feelings.†In a showdown between Scudder
and Angel, Bridges and Garcia set a record for the number of F-bombs shouted in
a given time period. Ashby’s supporters
claim that “8 Million Ways to Die†would have been a good film, rather than an
exasperating but sometimes interesting failure, if he’d been allowed to oversee
post-production, choose the best of multiple takes from certain scenes, and
rearrange the story to better frame it as a journey of redemption as seen
through Scudder’s eyes.
Kino
Lorber’s Blu-ray edition of “8 Million Ways to Die†is rich in special
features, including an informative audio commentary by film historians Howard
S. Berger and Nathaniel Thompson, and new interviews with Garcia, Paul,
Arquette, and Block. All three actors
are collegial and engaged, but Garcia, especially, reminisces about the movie
eloquently and warmly; it’s unfortunate that most younger viewers, now,
probably know the handsome actor best for his commercials with George Clooney,
hawking Nespresso. Block talks about
meeting with Stone early on, and wryly notes that the producers had concerns
about the logic of retaining the title of the novel. The book had been set in New York City, and
the title had been a play on the tagline for the classic, NYC-based Naked City TV series (“There are eight
million stories . . .â€). But the script
relocated the action to Los Angeles, where the population falls short of eight
million people. The producers decided to
keep the title when they calculated that, if you counted the number of
residents in the entire LA metro area, you’d come up with about eight million.
Berger
and Thompson note that the film was a commercial flop in initial release (I
remember seeing it in a nearly empty theater, the first week it played), but
gradually picked up an audience from VHS and pay-cable through the late
‘80s. Is it sexist to wonder whether
many of those home-video watchers were guy teens who sneaked the cassette to
fast-forward and freeze-frame to Alexandra Paul’s brief, full-fontal nude
scene?
The Kino Lorber
Blu-ray includes a reversible cover sleeve with alternate poster art on both
sides. The main side reproduces the
poster showing Bridges and Arquette against a pastel-neon sunset and a waving
palm tree. The color scheme, I’m
certain, was designed to entice fans of TV’s “Miami Vice,†the hottest ticket
in pop culture at the time.
CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON
(Fred Blosser is the author of "Pulp Slam: Rip-Roarin' Tales of Mystery, Murder and Mayhem. Click here to order from Amazon)