A Book Review by Matthew Sorrento.
Oh, what can you do with a man like that?”
John Cheever, “Goodbye My Brother”
And what can we do with John Milius, a writer-director so stubbornly Right-wing in his views: do we urge viewers adamantly to embrace or to resist him? He’s undoubtedly important in the 1970s, with several script contributions (including uncredited work on Dirty Harry [1971] and Jaws [1975]) and the unquestionable quality of his writing-directing effort, Big Wednesday (1978), a film that shows surf culture to be much more than what beach movies could offer. But we have his 1980s output to deal with, in a time when Reaganite audiences would embrace Milius’s convictions. Conan the Barbarian (1982) remains a document of its time, harkening back to early entertainment (so common in the 1980s). In this case, it’s to pulp fiction, to deliver a one-man army better remembered than re-seen. (Viewers would benefit instead from returning to The Terminator [1984], which uses Conan’s budding star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to better effect with fewer words and a unique visual presence.)
In Red Dawn (1984), Milius made the call to have a Soviet paratrooper gun down a Black high school teacher to start their attack, before others fire into the school. It’s a moment that establishes a toxic ideology, by not only assuming that all communists (and socialists, by faulty extension) care little about the oppressed, but also that the production could so casually use race baiting and introduce an underrepresented figure just for him to die moments later. (These nationalist instincts, as we have seen, have only increased in some circles.) And when the film’s micro teen army fighting the Soviets grabs a football when getting supplies, the viewers see this attempt at propaganda as really just silly games. The fan-friendly documentary Milius (Joey Figueroa and Zak Knutson, 2013), by relying on generalizations about the man, avoids such moments from his work.
As much as I detest Red Dawn for the toxic scene and approach Milius with caution, Nat Segaloff’s new collection of interviews from BearManor Media proves his subject to be intriguing (even if he acknowledges him as Big Bad John in the title) in a release more informative than the doc (in which Segaloff appears as a talking head). Aside from his politics, Milius has a perspective so unique that it would be hard to imagine the film world moving on as it did without him, for better or worse.
Segaloff, a former Hollywood insider who’s now a sharp and tireless journalist, offers a series of themed interviews in a slim text that date back to early 2000s, though the author has known Milius since Dillinger (1973). Milius’s recent health problems serve as a shocking moment of pathos in the documentary, though Segaloff wisely avoids them as not to distract from Milius’s distinct journey in filmmaking (the book wisely covers it, in a touching personal approach, at the end). Organized by thematic chapters, Segaloff addresses aspects of the career one at a time, an approach I also found rewarding in his 2017 (very official) biography of writer Harlan Ellison (1934-2018), A Lit Fuse.
In Milius’s words, we learn of his stint into writing for AIP out of film school and how he became responsible for writing a series of ruthless early 1970s films. After contributing to Dirty Harry (1971), he scripted The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972, which became an early negative experience, with Milius upset with director John Huston’s extensive changes [26]) and Jeremiah Johnson (1972), a script he originated and then returned to after Edward Anhalt (The Sniper, 1952) had briefly taken over. Milius’s anecdote of how he wrote a new script for Evel Knievel (1971) represents the kind of colorful conversation that we see throughout the book. Segaloff includes other the memorable (though off-quoted) stories, like how Milius beat the earlier Knievel script with an oar in a pool and how he randomly walked into a Kurosawa film series years earlier, which launched his career interests.
Known best as a screenwriter, Milius told Segaloff that “(n)o one else wanted to be a writer. They were all…putting pieces of film together. If you look at a film like The Emperor (the George Lucas short, 1967), it was clearly made from putting pieces together. Very well done, but clearly not a written film” (11). There are plenty of frank comments that put famous names in the crosshairs, though Milius remains overall more amusing than scathing in these moments. When Segaloff brings up collaborating with Walter Hill, Milius interrupts with “No, no, he’s just taken my films and ruined them” (105). Some comments, though, are head-scratching, as when Milius calls Walter Huston a “worthless actor” (28), one too old for him to have ever worked with (revenge against the son?). We also sense bitterness when Milius notes that “my generation was so influenced by movies that they take scenes from movies and re-do them, and they have sensibilities that totally come from movies, not from real life” (143).
In making the book a solid piece of criticism in conversation, Segaloff addresses Milius’s historical interests, like Teddy Roosevelt, on which the filmmaker sounds well versed, and not always politically biased. Segaloff also addresses Milius’ non-historical influences, specifically walking him right up to connections between Bonnie and Clyde and Milius’s script for Dillinger, though Milius denies any influence (34). Also very telling is Milius on Charles Portis’ True Grit, a key work for the writer and, as he notes, key to his voice (18). Segaloff uncovers the subject’s approach to the film business and respect of budgets, in a response that recalls the honorable Bushido so influential to Milius, and one of the most memorable in the book:
You’ve heard all kinds talk about the ‘fools that run the studios’ or the ‘fool producers,’ the dishonorable, rotten people. Some of them truly are all of that. But, at the same time, I always had very high regard for the fact that they’re people who give you the money and the responsibility to do a job, and, as a professional, you owe them your word to do that job. So I do the best I can to give ‘em their money’s worth and not spend more. I’m really honored each time they let me go out. I can call them fools and dolts creatively, but I can’t break that discipline that they’ve put upon me. It’s a matter of honor. As a professional I’ve given my word that I will do this job” (62).
In these moments, we see Milius at one with the system to which he appears such a contrarian, specifically in his pre-1980s work. Thankfully, the book offers a window into this distinct, troubled experience, one that shaped popular cinema like no other ever will. Big Bad John shows that Milius was hardwired for the medium, even if he tells Segaloff that he’s not so fascinated with movies and that he “really should be a novelist.” Always telling stories, and the frames roll on.
Matthew Sorrento is co-editor of Film International and teaches film studies at Rutgers University-Camden. The editor-in-chief of Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of NoirCon, his latest book is David Fincher’s Zodiac: Cinema of Investigation and (Mis)Interpretation (co-edited with David Ryan, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, December 2021).
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