Bring Me the Head of Tony Scott
May contain strong language.
So who is this Tony Scott guy anyway, and what has he done to deserve a fortnight’s scrutiny here? Isn’t he precisely the kind of filmmaker serious film buffs are meant to hate? You know, he makes this commercial garbage that people actually want to see. How dreadful. And his films are so vulgar, full of violence and explosions and swearing. How distasteful. Why can’t he be more like Merchant Ivory and make some bland, generic, coffee table bullshit that can win some Oscars and be called respectable. Isn’t Tony Scott just the death of film as art? And isn’t he responsible for Michael Bay?
In an unusual step for me, I’ve posted some monetary details just under the title of each of the films. All details come from the imdb so I can’t vouch for their accuracy. If you’re wondering what the worldwide gross for the movies was, take the US gross figure and double it. It so turns out that the movies which were the most financially successful (Top Gun & Beverly Hills Cop II) are the movies which are the least successful artistically. And the movies which failed the most at the box office (The Hunger, Revenge, True Romance & Domino) are the artistic successes, and quite frankly, the better films.
The Hunger (1983)
Budget $11m - US gross $6m
Prior to The Hunger, Tony Scott had spent a couple of decades directing commercials and music videos through the company he ran alongside his brother, Ridley. It should come as no surprise then that Scott’s first cinema film looks like a lesbian vampire movie in the style of Blade Runner (1982). Smoke has been used on every set for texture, and the majority of the light comes from windows behind the actors because this was the era of backlit is best (see also the films of Alan Parker and Adrian Lyne). These are traits Scott has stuck with throughout his career. The Hunger is a fairly typical studio-produced horror film in that not for one moment is it scary, and whole swathes of the story fail to make any sense. The Hunger isn’t really about anything (it has serious script problems which Scott was unable to solve) but it is never less than watchable. It has Catherine Deneuve and Susan Sarandon sucking each other’s blood, lots of ankhs and all around gothicness, and Pete Murphy singing Bela Lugosi’s Dead, so it’s not all bad news. It’s a walking definition of a cult movie though (I enjoy the brief small role of Ann Magnuson) in that it isn’t really any good, it failed at the box office, but it does have an overbearing sense of style and taste. If Tony Scott was going to make any headway in Hollywood, he needed to attach himself to a more commercial project.
Top Gun (1986)
Budget $15m - US gross $177m
The days when you could make a glossy hit movie for as little money as $15m have gone forever. Tony Scott’s feature length advertisement for the US Navy’s Top Gun flight school has been kicked to death by enough critics not to need me to elaborate that much, though it did famously inspire Quentin Tarantino’s Sleep With Me (1994) speech:
http://www.godamongdirectors.com/scripts/sleep.shtml
It may be that the gay subtext is the only worthwhile thing to come out of Top Gun. The script is shockingly bad, the characters are bland ciphers, and the mechanics of the plot only attempt to provide an illusion of depth where there is none. This is, as Jerry Bruckheimer says, “Star Wars on Earth”. It’s high concept filmmaking where the whole film can be summed up in four words: Beverly Hills Cop II.
Beverly Hills Cop II (1987)
Budget $20m - US gross $154m
These two films mark the zenith of Tony Scott’s financial success in Hollywood, but represent the nadir of his artistic achievement. This is one of those 80s sequels where everyone seems to have been motivated by greed rather than anything worthwhile or, God forbid, original (cf. Ghostbusters II (1989)). Notable only for an early cameo from Chris Rock and a gratuitous visit to the Playboy mansion, the film manages to revisit every cliché of 80s cop movies: police chiefs function by yelling at everybody, everyone says fuck all the fucking time, everyone wears sharp suits and drives expensive cars (which in reality they would never be able to afford), and women are only allowed to have functions rather than characters. A plus for Tony Scott was that because Eddie Murphy liked to improvise on the spot (some of it works, some of it doesn’t), Scott had to film scenes using two cameras running simultaneously. This was the start of the multi camera set up Scott’s used ever since (on Man on Fire (2004) as many as six cameras would be running for every single take of every single scene).
Revenge (1989)
Budget $?m - US gross $16m
And then suddenly Tony Scott gets everything right. Revenge is the first film that feels like it has material with which the director is fully engaged. It has strong characters defined by their actions, a proper role for a woman and Kevin Costner as an utterly convincing badass in one of the strongest performances of his career. I can no longer remember why I went to see Revenge in the cinema in 1990, but I must have read a good review somewhere. At this stage of Scott’s career, I’d only seen The Hunger and Top Gun on video, so this was the first time I saw one of his films in the cinema. My theory is that Scott’s emphasis on visuals and atmosphere is so strong that the script and characters have to be equally as strong. Only when this is the case do the films work, and fortunately, for the next sixteen years, Scott would have access to some powerhouse scripts. It would be nice to think that Tony Scott realised this himself, and however much fun he had filming F-14s in Top Gun, he worked out he could have even more fun if he filmed actors with interesting things to say and do. Before that began though, there would be one step back into the commercial maw.
Days of Thunder (1990)
Budget $60m - US gross $82m
Isn’t it interesting that the only film to have a Tom Cruise co-story credit is so irredeemably awful that Cruise has never sought a writing credit ever again, even though it’s well known he likes to work with writers to fashion scripts to his liking. Does Days of Thunder even have a script? I don’t know, I was totally confused. This by the way was the first time I’d ever seen it, having steadfastly managed to avoid it all these years. High concept: “It’s Top Gun on wheels”, who could not love that? Maybe it’s because I just don’t like cars. And whereas I can appreciate the skills of Formula 1, NASCAR seems to be interminably boring; they just go round and round, that’s it. The whole thing is full of contrived bullshit conflict with people flying off the handle for no reason at all. It has an early appearance by Nicole Kidman at the height of her frizzy redhead period as cinema’s least convincing doctor, but there’s nothing she can do to bring this corpse of a script back from the dead. A script written by Robert Towne no less! Presumably in his sleep. If there was any justice in this world, Days of Thunder would have been the Heaven’s Gate (1980) of 1990 and sent Paramount into financial ruin, but that didn’t happen. Instead, Kidman married Cruise and Tony Scott found a proper script.
The Last Boy Scout (1991)
Budget $?m - US gross $60m
Stop reading this right now. Go to your retailer of choice, buy this film, watch it, and then report back. Have you just seen one of the greatest films ever made or what? Working from one of the notorious million dollar scripts of the early 90s, Tony Scott fashions a high octane, hilarious, violent, foul-mouthed, inflammatory ride that gobs in the face of political correctness. It has more scenes-we’d-like-to-see than any other movie I know. And explosions, lots and lots of explosions. Bruce Willis has never been better, it’s a mystery why Damon Wayans didn’t become the Will Smith of the 90s instead of Will Smith, and Halle Berry is an exotic dancer. It’s everything Beverly Hills Cop II wasn’t.
True Romance (1993)
Budget $13.5m - US gross $13m
Hang on a minute. Isn’t there some sort of typo there? Surely the US gross of this movie was $113m? Don’t people love this movie? What the hell’s going on? I thought True Romance was a big hit? Well, True Romance was a big hit in the UK, and a big hit on video and now DVD, but no one went to cinemas in the US in 1993 to see it. Now that Quentin Tarantino has become part of the furniture, it’s easy to forget that in 1993 he was the new kid on the block with something fresh to offer. And yet even then it should be remembered that Reservoir Dogs (1991) barely covered its budget on its initial cinema release in the US; in 1992 Dogs grossed $3m, which is, as they say, pocket change. The difference is that everybody in Hollywood saw it: every actor, every director, every writer, and all of these people wanted to be in on the next Quentin Tarantino project (or they wanted to rip him off wholesale, cf. Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead (1995)). This is why True Romance, Natural Born Killers (1994) and Pulp Fiction (1994) are rammed to the gills with the best actors in Hollywood. Tarantino was hot shit, and everybody wanted a piece of him. Actors didn’t care how big the part was, they just wanted in. Which is why Brad Pitt is in True Romance for 6 minutes as the stoner Floyd and Val Kilmer is in it for 4 minutes as the ghost of Elvis Presley. As with Shane Black’s script for The Last Boy Scout, Tarantino’s script is so powerful that Scott can stage the infamous Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper facedown with minimal directorial intrusion. Scott sits back and lets the actors go at it with relish. True Romance is a film that is loved.
But Tony Scott was only getting started. More next week.
April 10th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Very perceptive comments on the younger Scott. He is certainly has become quite the artist, especially with the outrageous experimentation of his last few films. Very underated work. As a photographer familiar with cross-processing, hand cranking, etc, it’s so exhilarating to see such joyful and proficent application of the craft on the big screen. Glad to see some insightful writing about the guy.
April 10th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
I’m not sure Scott’s been that outrageously inventive lately - everything he’s done stylistically recently has been done in the mainstream before, by Oliver Stone for one. And his revoltingly miniscule average shot length makes me feel fairly sick.
It’s interesting that you pick out Revenge as some kind of turning point for Scott, because that film got taken out of his hands by the producer and recut for being too uncommercial.