Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (14 page)
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Authors: Gavin Edwards
Not long after the Oscars, River had to leave Florida again for another movie. His departures were beginning to rankle the other members of Aleka’s Attic. “We’d practice for six or eight months, and we’d kind of reach this apex, and then he would go off for three months and do a film,” violist Tim Hankins said later. “It was like
coitus interruptus,
you know?”
While River’s stardom brought the group a lot of attention, his absences had a way of killing the band’s momentum—and underscored that no matter what he said, his real first priority was movies. Greenbaum said, “We were all kind of at the mercy of his career.”
I Love You to Death
was directed by Lawrence Kasdan, famous for directing
Body Heat
and
The Big Chill
(and writing
Raiders of the Lost Ark
and
The Empire Strikes Back
). He hired River after a phone call, never having met him, and added him to an impressive ensemble cast, including Kevin Kline, Tracey Ullman, Joan Plowright, William Hurt, and Keanu Reeves. The plot, loosely based on a true story, is that Rosalie Boca (Ullman) finds out her husband, Joey (Kline), is cheating on her. She resolves to kill him, but he seems impervious to her efforts, surviving poison, bullets, and a car rigged to explode. It’s the only out-and-out comedy River made in his career.
River played Devo Nod, a chef with New Age beliefs working at Joey’s pizza parlor. Infatuated with Rosalie, he helps her in her efforts to knock off her husband, even hiring a pair of inept, stoned hit men (Hurt and Reeves). The film doesn’t really work, partially because Kline gives one of his broadest, hammiest performances. But it’s fun to see so many fine actors goofing around, and River serves ably in a middleman role. As usual, River absorbed all the knowledge he could from the older performers, particularly the British chameleon Ullman. “Tracey and I clicked especially well,” he said. “We’d just mouth off, get clever on each other, and play word games.”
He formed an even closer bond with Reeves; they knew each other through the movie
Parenthood,
in which Reeves had appeared opposite Martha Plimpton and River’s brother, Leaf. Reeves—who despite his Hawaiian name had grown up in Toronto, aspiring to be a hockey goalie—was River’s elder by six years. River joked, “He’s like my older brother, but shorter.”
The production filmed exterior shots in Tacoma, Washington; River and Reeves did their best to locate the local nightlife. One evening, the daughter of a local coffee-shop owner was watching as a drunk River stumbled across the coffee shop’s parking lot and then pissed on the back of her father’s old Ford. Soon after, her father sold the vehicle, for $200. She let him know that he had made a big mistake: “You could have gotten ten times that much! All you had to do was write on that quarter panel, ‘River Phoenix peed here.’ ”
The movie got worse reviews than River’s late-night urination, and flopped at the box office. In the
Chicago Tribune,
Dave Kehr dismissed River’s performance as “strangely timid.”
Around this time, River explained his mature acting process, which required lengthy preparation: “You can’t just wake up the next morning and
be
the character,” he said. “I start off by stripping myself of who I am, by thinking more neutral. You
have
to neutralize yourself before you can become another character. I become nonopinionated, refusing to think from River’s perspective, and then, slowly, I add characteristics and start thinking the way the character would. I fantasize about being the character, and I play mind games with myself until the transition takes place.”
Stripping away his own identity meant that once River was deep inside a character, be it Jimmy Reardon or Devo Nod, he would often act like him offscreen and find it hard to switch back to being River Phoenix once the movie was over. After
I Love You to Death
wrapped, River confessed, “Devo is bouncing off the walls wherever I go and it’s very hard to let myself out and open my eyes.”
Not that he wanted to learn how—on the contrary. He cited Kasdan as having given him the best acting advice he ever received. “He said that the best actors and actresses have at least half of themselves in the role,” River said. “I’m still the type to have only one-eighth of myself in the role.” He wanted to give more of himself, but he recognized the danger: “The point is to not lose yourself
completely
.”
Veteran British actress Miriam Margolyes, who played Joey’s mother, praised River. “He is a wonderful actor,” she said. But she cautioned, “At the moment, he has no way of distancing himself from a part.”
HOW DO YOU SAY GOOD NIGHT TO AN ANSWERING MACHINE?
On the last day of filming
I Love You to Death,
River left a rambling message on William Richert’s answering machine, providing a glimpse at a teenager trying to find himself and lose himself simultaneously:
Hello, Bill. If you’re sleeping, please, by all means, ignore this message. But in fact, if you are awake, then you’d better not ignore me . . . I had the most amazing day. It was just beautiful, the things I learned, through the pain and misunderstanding, and through being displaced, discombobulated. I come out on my last day of work as a triumphant failure. I stand here; need not I die nor I need drink, for I know that my soul will keep. And who’s to say he or she is the one, for I to know from where it has begun? Doctor Bill . . . where am I coming from? Who cares? Do I need to know where they’re coming from to get along with them? No, I accept them. But I come from a place that is so foreign, a place where no other eyes see . . . the stuff is so vague . . . in case. And did you know that? There is? And wait. Not. No. Sure. But maybe. That doesn’t matter. All those words. All those broken phrases. They don’t mean anything. But where was the point? You have missed the point. But don’t take it upon yourself. Don’t carry that weight. It’s not your fault . . . I would say that it’s safe to guess that people simply don’t understand.
Back in Florida, River happily expunged Devo Nod from his system, cleared his lungs of Hollywood smog, and resumed his bohemian life as an aspiring musician. He had become a fixture on the Gainesville scene; when he walked around town, approximately once per block a local hipster would greet him with “Hey, Riv!”
When he went out for Mexican food, he would down the salsa straight from the bowl. He also liked to eat at the vegan Bahn Thai restaurant; his favorite menu selections, owner Pam Maneeratana said, were “number 89, Tofu Yum-Woon-Sen, served at room temperature, and number 92, Gang-Ped-Tofu, a Thai curry dish, and he loved the garlic tofu spread.” River would sit in a booth with his back to the entrance so nobody could spot him. He continued to hang at the Hardback Café, drinking his Guinness. Soon Aleka’s Attic had resumed their weekly gig there; River worked on drumming up other gigs.
Over in Pensacola, Florida, Gus Brandt was working at a club called the Nite Owl when the phone rang. It was River Phoenix, whom he had never met, asking if he ever booked shows. Brandt allowed that he did, and Phoenix explained that his band was called Aleka’s Attic. “The nicest, most unassuming guy,” Brandt said. “He sent me his tape himself.”
Brandt listened to the tape and deemed it up to the standards of the Nite Owl, so soon after, “The whole band rolled up in a yellow school bus.” Brandt remembered the show as a success, although the crowd didn’t much look like River’s scruffy band: “It was mostly teen girls, along with some music lovers and curious people.”
Wanting to stay in Gainesville and play music, River started turning down movie work. He dropped out of
Coupe de Ville,
a period comedy about three sons driving a Cadillac convertible from Detroit to Florida for their father (Alan Arkin); Patrick Dempsey took his place as the youngest son. He was repeatedly approached to star in
A Kiss Before Dying,
a remake of the 1956 film noir. “They came back eight times to try to get me to do it,” River said. “They kept coming back, I kept saying no, no, no, and they went up, up, up with the money.” Ultimately Matt Dillon took the part.
Another regular act at the Hardback was the Mutley Chix, an all-girl band who had been playing in Gainesville (with personnel changes) since 1984, their music evolving from three-chord “humorous noise” into proggish modern rock on self-released albums like
Burn Your Bra
. On Halloween 1989, they debuted two new members, one of whom was saxophonist Suzanne “Suzy Q” Solgot. She had graduated from the University of Florida that spring with a B.A. in fine arts (photography) and a pawnshop saxophone, and decided to stay in town for a while. “When you’re a Mutley Chick, Gainesville rolls out the red carpet for you,” Solgot sarcastically told a local reporter. “People stop me on the street all the time and say, ‘Aren’t you in the Mutley Chix?’ ”
River met Solgot at a party and introduced himself as “Rio.” Another woman challenged him, saying that he looked a lot like River Phoenix. “I’m not that guy,” River told her. “I’m nothing like him.” On that night, it may have even felt like the truth.
“He was very private and mysterious,” Solgot said. “We never talked much about our past or who we were, though I was always curious.” Solgot, five years older than River, was a beautiful blonde with a countercultural bent. They started seeing each other, and soon became serious enough that they decided to move in together. Nineteen years old, River moved out of the Micanopy family ranch and rented a large apartment in Gainesville.
He wasn’t accustomed to paying bills; most months, the landlady would have to call to remind her tenants that the rent was late. Solgot would say, “Mrs. Phoenix, she’ll take care of it,” and the landlady would call Micanopy. Heart would drive up to the property in a battered truck, send in one of the Phoenix children with a check, and then drive off. River was asserting his identity as an adult, even if his mother still controlled his bank account. Heart gave him some space, at least nominally.
With no job or movie set requiring his presence in the morning, River routinely stayed out half the night, bringing a crowd of friends home after the bars closed. “River had a little too much time on his hands and I don’t think he knew how to handle it,” his friend Anthony Campanaro said. “I would look at him and say, ‘If you can just survive these next three or four years, you’re going to be one hell of a star.’ He was going to be a great actor, if he could just hold on.”
Publicly, River was vehemently antidrug, and said he couldn’t stand the cocaine culture of Hollywood. “People look at you if you have a
cold
. You feel you can’t blow your nose,” he complained. “It depresses me. The biggest thing that gets me are the girls, because of . . . the way men use women. It really upsets me—the wonderful extra-virgin olive oil young ladies, who are so wholesome and so together and their heads are on tight and you see them a year later and”—River affected a blank expression—“all they’ve got left is just a recorded message in their heads.”
By this time, the Micanopy property had over a dozen extra people living on it, in trailers, the old motor home, and the vacant space in River’s recording studio. They served as gardeners and gofers, but River’s friends with actual jobs just called them “Klingons” (as in “cling-ons”) or “the tofu mafia”; ultimately, River paid all the bills.
One person who was no longer living in Micanopy was John, River’s father. Having lost the battle for the soul of the Phoenix family, he checked out of the United States altogether. River bought him property in Costa Rica—seven hours away from the airport by bus and ferry—and he ran a (low-capacity) bed-and-breakfast.
River also bought a Florida home for his grandparents, and gave $10,000 to a
Jimmy Reardon
cast member so he could afford to go to school. He quietly bought hundreds of acres of rain forest in Latin America to stop it from being turned into beachfront hotels.
When he saw a journalist from
Vogue
use only half a sheet of paper in her notebook, he lectured her on her wastefulness. “We cut down an area the size of Connecticut
every year
. The Forest Service plant trees, sure, but for wood pulp. I think wood pulp should only be used for writing materials. People
waste
so much paper. In every hardware store, you get acres of paper for every receipt. Three copies of all this crap—surely our technology is more advanced than this! I mean, if they can make a plutonium generator that will orbit Jupiter and stay out there for
forty-three years,
surely they can make a receipt that will save paper.”
And then River Phoenix joined the marines. Admittedly, he was only a movie leatherneck, but it still seemed like a stretch for a crunchy rain forest-saving vegan. The movie was
Dogfight,
set in 1963. The story: Some marines have the night off in San Francisco before they ship out to Vietnam, which they’ve barely heard of. For their evening’s entertainment, they organize a “dogfight,” a contest where each marine brings the least attractive girl he can find to a party. Whoever brings the ugliest date wins.
River plays Eddie Birdlace, who invites Rose Fenny, a plain coffee-shop waitress and aspiring folk singer played by Lili Taylor. He has misgivings about taking her to the dogfight—and rightly so, because she’s hurt and livid when she finds out the nature of the party. After he attempts to apologize, they spend the rest of the night walking around the city, making an unlikely but real human connection.
The director was Nancy Savoca, who had made an impressive debut with
True Love,
an independent film starring Annabella Sciorra as a young Italian-American bride overwhelmed by her own wedding (to Ron Eldard)—it won the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Festival in 1989. That year turned out to be a turning point for Sundance: the Audience Award went to
sex, lies, and videotape,
directed by Steven Soderbergh, who just the year before had been driving a shuttle bus at the festival. A bidding war broke out for Soderbergh’s film; it went on to make over $25 million and he went on to a career as a great American director. Sundance became the launching pad for a new generation of auteurs: Richard Linklater (
Slacker,
1991), Todd Haynes (
Poison,
1991), Quentin Tarantino (
Reservoir Dogs,
1992), Robert Rodriguez (
El Mariachi,
1992), Kevin Smith (
Clerks,
1994), and David O. Russell (
Spanking the Monkey,
1994).
Sundance regulars grew accustomed to movie stars trudging through the snow and agents sitting in the back row of screenings, talking on cellular phones (they weren’t just “phones” yet) about deals until the moment the lights went down. American indie films pushed aside Europe fare on the art-house circuit, and the distributor Miramax grew into a powerhouse.
If the Hollywood studios didn’t completely understand this new generation of low-budget filmmakers, they could at least throw money at them: Savoca found herself directing
Dogfight
with a mind-boggling (for her) $8 million budget. During the negotiations with Warner Bros., Savoca and her husband, producer Richard Guay, were leery of the studio executives in Burbank. Savoca said, “I had one foot out the back door the whole time we were talking to them.”
Savoca insisted on directing a tough-minded version of the story: Rose might grow into herself in the course of her night with Eddie, but she wouldn’t, as the studio had once wanted, turn into a beautiful talk-show host in the coda. Savoca also insisted that although ninety-nine percent of the movie took place off duty, the actors playing marines needed to feel like soldiers. So two former drill instructors trained and berated the cast for five days on Vashon Island, near Seattle.
Actor Anthony Clark said, “When we first got to Seattle, we were all these meek and mild actors ready to work together and give each other back rubs. Then they put us through marine boot camp.”
River was a particular focus of the instructors, both for his name and for his vegan diet, which they referred to as “twigs and bark and foo-foo shit.” They asked him how he planned “to kick ass on that kind of hippie fruitcake diet.”
As usual, River stripped away River Jude Phoenix to immerse himself in the mind-set of his role. But this time he got deeper, even before filming started. After boot camp, some of the cast went to a party at a club, and got so rowdy—making rude gestures, projectile-vomiting, being generally belligerent—that somebody called the police. “River was the head of that whole thing,” Clark said. “I hate to talk bad about him, but he had a mean streak. He wanted to get into a fight. That night, he was a marine.”
To play Birdlace, River cut off his hair in favor of a high-and-tight military style. The studio worried that, like Samson, River drew his strength from his follicles, and asked that he at least get blond highlights. River complied, although the results weren’t really visible. Off camera, he would fold his arms or hold them in parade-rest position, having learned that a marine never puts his hands in his pockets, even in civilian clothes.
During the shoot, River said, “I like the character of Birdlace because he’s a simpleton. An average boring guy with a boring life, like so many who joined the marines. Birdlace is your average goon-squad leader. He’s an easy read. He just wants to go out and have a good time. And one day his conscience catches up with him.”
All well and good—River knew there was some daylight between himself and Birdlace—except that manifestly isn’t how he played the role. Birdlace has confusion and rage coming out of every orifice, but he’s clearly not stupid, and River didn’t portray him with the contempt that his words suggest. River sounded defensive—he’d found the Birdlace within himself, and didn’t want to acknowledge that any part of his soul could be a jarhead.
On a day off from shooting, Clark joined River and Heart on a trip to visit a nearby redwood forest, where he found that the Phoenixes were literally tree huggers. “Hug a tree, Tony,” Heart urged him. Clark resisted, but left impressed by the impossibly tall trees swaying in the wind, and by just how important the planet was to the Phoenix family.
Back on the set, they usually worked at night: most of the film takes place after dark, but because they were shooting in Seattle during the summer, the production had only seven hours until sunrise each day. On a street corner outside the Rose’s Coffee Shop set, Savoca—unruly red hair, blue jeans, pink Converse All Stars—conferred with her crew while River and Taylor sat down in the fake coffee shop, reconstructing the emotional state of their characters before they played their next scene.
“Okay,” Taylor said. “It’s 2
A.M.
and we’ve had two hours of frolicking and talking.”
“Yeah,” River agreed. “We felt good, and we kissed.”
“And now what? What about you?”
River looked nervous, tapping into Birdlace’s discomfort at having gone behind enemy lines at the dogfight. “Well,” he said, and paused to think. “I guess I’m curious to see how far it’ll go.”
Dogfight
wasn’t seen by many people beyond the immediate families of the filmmakers: Warner Bros. never released it in more than twenty-four theaters, and it grossed less than $400,000. On its opening weekend, it sold not even one percent of the tickets bought for
Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare
. But it’s a beautiful film: Rose and Eddie fumble their way toward each other, trying to transcend the cruelty of the dogfight, their ignorance of the world, and the fleeting nature of their encounter. River gave the performance of his life, showing the vulnerability behind Birdlace’s bluster without ever falling into sentimentality.
Savoca was concerned that River was playing the character with insufficient warmth—but her fears were allayed by the end of the shoot: “I realized, the way he’s playing that character—and it was revealing itself to me every day—it was actually much more complicated than what I had imagined [the role] to be.”
“By trying to be about so little, telling a simple fragile romantic story,” Louis Black wrote in the
Austin Chronicle,
“
Dogfight
is about so much—war and peace, love and romance, sex roles and cultural myths.” The movie generally received warm reviews, although some writers had reservations: Peter Travers in
Rolling Stone,
for example, opined that “what could have been an incisive movie about alienation deteriorates into a conventional romance.” But he did praise the male lead: “River Phoenix busts out of his usual sensitive mode . . . to deliver a performance of blunt intensity.”
Also in
Dogfight,
making his film debut, was Brendan Fraser, playing a drunk sailor who gets into a brawl with Birdlace’s marine pals. The following year, Fraser would rocket to stardom in
Encino Man
and
School Ties,
becoming a very different type of leading man from River: a broad-shouldered hunk with comedic timing who felt like a throwback to the studio system. One could imagine Fraser as a contract player at MGM in the forties, something that seemed much more improbable for River. In
Dogfight,
Fraser had but a single line. Let history record that the foundation of his film career was his convincing delivery of “How’d you like to eat my shit?”
Although Fraser didn’t act opposite River, he did meet him on the set. “I anticipated River having a lot of hostility,” he said. “I think I wanted him to be standoffish and cold—but he was really gentle and sweet.” Fraser had been telling himself that Hollywood actors were phony sellouts, which gave him an excuse to stay in Seattle. Meeting River and discovering an example to the contrary changed his life: he packed up his mountain bike and drove south, to the film career that awaited him in Los Angeles.