Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (11 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
Running on Empty
is the story of two sixties radicals (Judd Hirsch and Christine Lahti) who have been on the lam from the FBI since 1971, when they blew up a napalm laboratory (and accidentally blinded a janitor). Whenever the law gets close, they uproot themselves and their two sons, including seventeen-year-old Danny (played by River). But now Danny, an extremely gifted pianist, wants to go to Juilliard—which would mean declaring his true identity and not being able to see his family anymore, lest he lead the feds to them.
River bristled when people compared
Running on Empty
and his own life: “People think the Popes are like my family, but they aren’t. My parents were never on the run . . . My parents would sympathize with the Popes, but they are pacifists.” But the parallels extended beyond two families that kept changing their names: both the Popes and the Phoenixes were insular families, extremely devoted to each other and mistrustful of outsiders. While the Popes had battled the military-industrial complex, the Phoenixes were skeptical of American society in general. Both families had moved constantly: the Popes driven by the need to stay ahead of the law, the Phoenixes by the urge to change the world. At age seventeen, Danny Pope was finally asserting that he needed to live his own life away from the family; at age seventeen, River wasn’t sure.
“There’s a connection there,” River admitted when he was less defensive. “I think that’s maybe why the
Running
script appealed to me from the start.”
RUNNING INTO THE SUN BUT I’M RUNNING BEHIND
The director of
Running on Empty
was the legendary Sidney Lumet, famous for
Dog Day Afternoon
and
Network,
among many other classics; he had the cast learn the script as if it were a play, and led rehearsals for two weeks before he started shooting. Lumet compared River to Henry Fonda, whom he directed in 1957’s
12 Angry Men,
for the honesty of their performances. “He’s never studied formally, but boy, does he know how to reach inside himself,” Lumet said of his young star. “So long as River follows his instincts, takes stuff he believes in, there’ll be no stopping him. I first saw him in
Stand by Me
and there was such an extraordinary purity about him. Then he did
Mosquito Coast
and you could feel the growth of his understated power. There were a couple of films he could have done without:
Little Nikita
and
Jimmy Reardon
. Terrible scripts. But he didn’t have the choice then that he has now. He still has a long way to go. He has to make the transition from kid actor to grown-up, but he has such intelligence and such a good heart, I don’t have any doubt he’ll do it.”
Playing a musical prodigy, River practiced on the piano for six months before shooting. While he wasn’t able to get up to concert-pianist proficiency, his “pianomanship” (as Lumet put it) got good enough that he could synchronize his fingers with the music on the soundtrack (actually played by Gar Berke).
In the middle of shooting one scene, River stopped and complained, “This feels fake to me.” From another actor, it might have been a prima donna move, but coming from River, it was a genuine concern. Lumet, who didn’t coddle actors, agreed with River that his character’s motivations were sketchy and cut the scene. “River doesn’t have a false bone in his body,” Lumet testified. “He can’t utter a false line.”
The script by Naomi Foner explored the emotional territory that
Little Nikita
gestured in the direction of: a son’s conflicted response to his parents’ legacy. At the time of the movie, Foner had two grade-school children, who grew up to be the well-known actors Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal. She was fond of River, but astonished by the gaps in his knowledge. When his character railed against his father for becoming the authoritarian figure he claimed to despise, he asked, “Who do you think you are, General Patton?” River, who had never heard of the famous World War II commander, had to stop the scene to ask, “Who’s General Patton?”
Foner concluded that education had not been a priority for the Phoenixes. “He could read and write, and he had an appetite for it,” Foner said, “but he had no deep roots into any kind of sense of history or literature.” For River’s birthday, Foner gave him an assortment of classic novels.
On the set, River was an advocate for veganism and healthful eating, even lecturing Christine Lahti, who played his mother, for drinking a Diet Coke. Lahti (then thirty-six, and most famous for her Oscar-nominated performance in
Swing Shift
) found herself wrestling with competing biological urges toward River, a beautiful creature with one foot in boyhood and the other in manhood—did she want to mother him or seduce him?
The latter option was a passing fancy for a variety of reasons—to start, River didn’t need another Jocasta figure in his life. Also, Martha Plimpton was on the set, playing River’s love interest for the second time in three years. The intensity of their relationship only grew: one day, during a shoot at a high school, producer Griffin Dunne went looking for the couple and spotted them by an athletic field. “As I got closer,” he said, “I could see by their silhouettes that they were having a really heated conversation. And I just watched in the distance for a moment. They were both gesturing really strongly at each other. And all of a sudden, they embraced with such passion, such love like they were never going to see each other again.” Dunne couldn’t tell if they were rehearsing a scene or really arguing.
Foner witnessed a happier scene between the couple, when River couldn’t physically contain his joy as they walked down a New York City sidewalk. “He was leaping and jumping, sort of like a young deer,” Foner said, recalling how River would twist his body in midair. “He would hail taxis, leaping like Baryshnikov, and Martha would say, ‘That taxi’s taken, River. See, the light’s off.’ He didn’t care. He danced down the street.”
Danny Pope has been falling for Lorna Phillips, the daughter of the music teacher at his latest high school, but he keeps dodging her questions about his past and his future. The emotional turning point of
Running on Empty
comes when he climbs into her bedroom late at night and leads her outside.
She sits on the ground, wearing a blue nightgown and his sneakers, as he tells the truth to somebody outside his family for the first time in his life. At first, he speaks haltingly, unable to look her in the eye, and then the words come tumbling out of him, his face showing fear and relief. “I don’t know what I’m doing and I love you,” he concludes.
Both of them burst into tears and he buries his head on her chest. It’s an astonishingly intimate moment, both between Danny and Lorna, and between River and Martha.
In the following scene, wrapped in each other’s arms in a postcoital embrace, she says to him, “You have a lot of secrets? Now you have one more.” A light sparks in his eyes, as if it’s the truest thing anybody has ever said to him.
“WE’RE ALL WORTH MILLIONS OF PLANETS AND STARS AND GALAXIES AND UNIVERSES”
© by Lance Staedler/Corbis Outline
John Phoenix wanted his family to quit Hollywood—both the town and the business. To his thinking, the family had some money in the bank, but they had lost sight of their original intentions: not just to pursue fame, but to bend Hollywood toward their belief system, rather than getting sucked into a vortex of commercial values.
“My father is worried that we could be ruined by this business,” River said. “It’s got a lot of pitfalls and temptations, and he doesn’t want us to become materialistic and lose all the values we were brought up believing in . . . he’s pleased we’re doing well, but in a way he’s almost reached a point where he could just drop out again like he did in the sixties and move to a farm and get close to the earth.”
After some heated family discussions, Team Phoenix arrived at a decision. River would not quit acting—he loved it too much—but the family would leave California, and rely on Iris Burton to handle day-to-day contact with producers and studios. Hollywood stars have often left town in favor of a ranch (Harrison Ford relocating to Wyoming, for example)—River was younger and not as well established as other performers who chose that path, but he could always get on a plane to take care of (show) business.
Although John would have preferred that the family return to Mexico or Venezuela, they looked for a warm-weather American college town with a thriving music scene. They considered Austin, Texas, but settled on Gainesville, Florida, once home to Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers and still the host city of the University of Florida.
They also decided that it was time for River to put forward his beliefs more forcefully, using interviews as opportunities to change the world. Soon he was holding forth to journalists: “I’m against the nuclear arms race and apartheid in South Africa and cruelty to animals, which means that I’m a vegetarian. Diet is a good place to start making a change, because it’s something I can do. I can’t on my own change the regime in South Africa or teach the Palestinians to live with the Israelis, but I can start with me. I have strong opinions and people disagree with me, but there are those who agree, too.”
Sometimes simplistic but always sincere, River quickly became a poster boy for environmentalism and animal rights, the sort of person prone to describing dolphins as “the gods of the oceans.”
River Phoenix walks through the Gainesville campus of the University of Florida, carrying a blank check in his pocket. Seventeen years old, he’s the right age to be a freshman here. “I like to pretend,” he confesses. He is actually a movie star looking for a musician: surely, in a student population of thirty thousand, there must be a bassist who will jam with him in his garage.
Then, amid an ocean of southern preppies, he spots a candidate: a skinny white kid with his hair in dreadlocks. He’s not carrying an instrument, or wearing a shirt that says
BASS PLAYERS DO IT DEEPER
. But River thinks he might be a fellow traveler. He can’t quite work up his nerve to talk to him. Maybe tomorrow.
The blank check in River’s pocket was signed by his mother—although the bank account it draws on is filled with money he earned. River wants to spend $650 on a twelve-string guitar, but now that he has the ability to buy it, he’s having second thoughts. Maybe, he thinks, he doesn’t deserve it until he’s completely proficient with the guitar he already has.
In the center of the campus, two Hare Krishnas have set up a folding table, which is laden with large containers of vegan food. The pair—a man and a woman—are wearing bright orange robes, and have daubed their faces with white clay. River politely accepts a plate of free food and chats with the Hare Krishnas about veganism. When they ask his name, he just says, “River.”
The man with the shaved head is startled. “River
Phoenix
?” he exclaims.
Later, his love of music triumphing over his self-doubt, River returns home without a blank check and with a twelve-string guitar.
The Phoenix family moved to Gainesville in August 1987, and soon found a home in nearby Micanopy, a sleepy town (population six hundred) that had become a hippie encampment. They bought a seventeen-acre ranch, which the locals nicknamed “Camp Phoenix,” and decorated the three-story house in the style of a sixties commune: hanging tapestries, environmental posters, and clotheslines instead of a dryer. There was a large deck, a swimming pool, and a second building, called either a guesthouse or a service shop, that River earmarked as a place where he could play music.
Arlyn hired another family tutor: Dirk Drake, a sharp guy in his twenties with long blond hair that was congealing into dreadlocks. As classwork, the Phoenix children started writing letters to world leaders about the environment and human rights. Drake assigned River
The Catcher in the Rye
and, seeing how he was struggling to read it, suspected (like Ed Squires before him) that River might be dyslexic.
Drake said, “River had his own way of writing and structuring paragraphs. He could understand the rules of grammar, but when he wrote things down, it was all very free form, like e. e. cummings.”
Camp Phoenix had plenty of trees, especially oaks, which were covered with Spanish moss and lichen. A nearby lake was really more of a swamp, home to gators and countless frogs. To buy the property, River (or more precisely, his company, Phoenix in Flight Productions), took a mortgage of $123,950—which got paid off within a year.