Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (6 page)
Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
In the fall of 1982, Americans could choose from just three broadcast television networks. Wednesday nights at eight, NBC was broadcasting
Real People,
their hit hour of human-interest stories (a man who walks everywhere backward!), which alternated between heartwarming and bizarre. ABC offered
Tales of the Gold Monkey,
a
Raiders of the Lost Ark
ripoff about a seaplane pilot in the South Pacific in 1938, featuring Roddy McDowell as a dapper French magistrate. And CBS had a modern update of the 1954 frontier musical
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
—this version was about a family of ranchers in Northern California. The oldest brother was played by Richard Dean Anderson, soon to be famous as MacGyver, while the youngest brother was played by newcomer River Phoenix.
The series featured a musical number each week, so River brought his guitar to the audition and did his Elvis Presley impersonation. Executive producer David Gerber said, “He had that clean, fresh, wholesome young look and a really ingratiating smile. He was a natural. I always thought he was the peach-fuzz kid.”
When River found out he had the part, he said, “I just leaped five feet into the air.” Or more honestly: “I got all red and freaked out.”
The Phoenix family relocated to the Northern California town of Murphys, in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. John and Arlyn took turns supervising River on the set and homeschooling the rest of the family.
Almost immediately, River’s veganism came into conflict with the production: he wouldn’t wear leather cowboy boots or a leather belt. After some wrangling, the costume department found plastic cowboy boots (and River went without a belt). But the incident provided fodder for the actors playing River’s six older brothers: they would razz him about his veganism and generally condescend to him. Twelve-year-old River didn’t know how to cope.
Cast member Terri Treas, who played Hannah (a bride), remembered, “He would burst out crying, which only made things worse. River had been isolated, and he did not have the social skills to know how to be with other boys. He had never had to go out and defend himself on the playground.” Unsure how to fit in, River spent most of his downtime on the set by himself, playing guitar.
The pilot episode was cowritten by Sue Grafton, later the author of the best-selling Kinsey Millhone series (
“A” is for Alibi,
etc.). In keeping with her book titles, the brothers were named in an orderly alphabetic fashion: Adam, Brian, Crane, Daniel, Evan, Ford, and (River’s role) Guthrie. In the pilot’s opening scene, an extremely young River, wearing a baseball cap and a denim jacket, pops open a beer. An older brother confiscates it, telling him, “Hey, not until you’re fourteen.”
On-screen, River’s most obvious qualities were his soup-bowl haircut and his eager-to-please puppy-dog quality. His offscreen desire to be considered a peer of the older actors came through all too strongly. Where he really came to life was during the musical numbers, where he could play guitar and hop around on one foot.
A dinnertime scene:
RI
VER PHOENIX:
Pass the damn bread.
RI
CHARD DEAN ANDERSON:
Guthrie, watch your mouth.
RI
VER PHOENIX:
Pass the damn bread, please.
As the season progressed, River was astonished to get fan mail, and insisted on responding to each letter personally. He got to sing “Rock Around the Clock” while trapped during a cave-in, and to star in an episode where his character was abducted by gold prospectors. Stripping River to the waist in that episode may have been intended to make him seem more vulnerable, but it made him look like the star of an inappropriate Calvin Klein ad.
There was even an episode, “The Killer,” that played off River’s vegan beliefs: brought on a hunting trip, Guthrie finds himself unable to shoot a deer. By the end of the episode, he decides that he is willing to shoot a mountain lion to save his brother’s life. That episode’s featured song was a ballad about the mountain lion, rhyming “a warrior brave and bold” with “a wonder to behold.”
Judy Marvin, the owner of the property where the show was filmed, thought of River as “a sad little child.” And not just because of his failed efforts to fit in with American teenagers and adults, she said. He seemed “as if he had the weight of providing for his family on his little shoulders.”
The last new episode of
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
ran in March 1983—the show was on the air for twenty-two episodes and just one bride.
Rain, now eleven, decided her name was “kind of dreary” and changed it to Rainbow. The Phoenix family moved back to Hollywood, and River resumed the lather-rinse-repeat life of a working actor, even a teenage one: lots of auditions, lots of rejections, occasional breakthroughs. Over the next two years, he collected credits and gained experience.
River and Rain sang on
Fantasy,
an NBC daytime variety show that fulfilled the dreams of people who appeared on it, whether that meant paying for medical procedures or letting a teenager perform with a professional ventriloquist. Their number went well enough that the show hired River to be the “Kid News Roving Correspondent,” joining the team alongside variety-show veteran Leslie Uggams.
On the NBC miniseries
Celebrity,
he played Jeffie, the son of movie star Mack Crawford (played by Joseph Bottoms) and spent an inordinate amount of screen time building a sand castle on the beach. His big scene came when Jeffie discovered that his dad was gay—by finding him in bed with another man.
Next was an
ABC Afterschool Special,
“Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia.” River played Brian Ellsworth, a bright junior high kid doing poorly in school because neither he nor his family realizes he suffers from dyslexia. Although the script mainly called for River to look frustrated (and for some reason, to run in slow motion through a flock of pigeons), he began to display actual acting talent, convincingly portraying a class clown who was frantically masking his own insecurities. And if he was sometimes wooden—well, the adult cast wasn’t any better.
In retrospect, the most charming aspect of “Backwards” is the appearance of ten-year-old Leaf as River’s on-screen little brother. Leaf looked young enough to be convincing as a kid just learning to read—and the brothers were utterly at ease together, whether they were roughhousing or reading cereal boxes. Leaf gazed at River adoringly, while River regarded Leaf protectively as he threw him up in the air and told him bedtime stories. It was the only time they acted together.
River appeared in the pilot for
It’s Your Move,
a sitcom starring Jason Bateman as a teenage scam artist; River played a minion helping out with the annual term-paper sale.
On
Hotel
—an Aaron Spelling show that was like
The Love Boat,
except at the landlocked location of a luxury hotel—River played a preppy gymnast whose sportscaster father (Robert Reed) turns out to be bisexual. The repetition of the plot from
Celebrity
suggests that either forty percent of prime-time programming in 1984 was about closeted gay husbands or that River had found an unusual niche as an actor.
Next up: the miniseries
Robert Kennedy and His Times.
If it wasn’t critically acclaimed, at least it was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Achievement in Hairstyling. A slew of top child actors played RFK’s children, including River, Shannen Doherty, and Jason Bateman again.
River turned fourteen. His teenage years were rolling by in a procession of sound stages; he never attended a conventional high school. In September 1984, when he might have been entering his freshman year, he instead flew to Oklahoma City to film the television movie
Surviving,
about teen suicide. Director Waris Hussein said, “River was very much part of the Hollywood auditioning scene at the time, but he stood out from the others.”
Molly Ringwald (after
Sixteen Candles
but before
The Breakfast Club
) and Zach Galligan played the star-crossed lovers who kill themselves; River was cast as Galligan’s younger brother, with Ellen Burstyn and Len Cariou playing his parents, too shattered by the death of their older son to see how it’s affecting their other children. River won the obscure but nonfictional “Young Artist Award” for his raw performance in
Surviving
—there wasn’t much nuance in his acting yet, but he was learning the trick of slipping into somebody else’s skin.
Tina (Ellen Burstyn) has just discovered that her son Philip (River Phoenix) has taken a handful of sleeping pills in a copycat suicide attempt. In a clean beige polo shirt, he is slumped over the desk in his bedroom, about to die from a drug overdose. “How could you do this?” she demands, and slaps him. “Damn you! Damn you, Philip! Damn you!”
Heading for the hospital, she lugs him down the stairs with his arm draped over her shoulder, angrily asking how he’ll do it next time, and whether she’ll be the one to find the body. At the car, he starts sobbing, explaining that he was jealous of how his older brother had gotten all the attention, and that he had even wished he was dead: “He was always better than me. It was my fault, it was my fault.”
Burstyn hugs him tightly. River survives his overdose and lives to see his family another day. On the TV screen, anyway.
While on location in Oklahoma City, River got a hall pass: the shooting schedule of
Surviving
was rearranged so he could fly back to L.A. for an audition. Director Joe Dante, fresh off the success of
Gremlins,
was putting together another family-friendly sci-fi action comedy. This one, called
Explorers,
was about three suburban kids who make first contact with an alien race, using the information they receive in dreams to build their own spaceship.
“I got a thrill just from reading the script,” said River, who landed the part. He declared his first feature film to be “a movie kid’s dream.” River was cast as Wolfgang Muller, the nerdy brainiac inventor of the trio. The regular-kid hero was played by Ethan Hawke, also making his film debut, while Jason Presson was the tough kid. The movie shot in Petaluma, California, just north of San Francisco, and on the Skywalker Ranch, George Lucas’s production facility. The cast stayed in a motel outside of San Francisco. A few days into the shoot, Hawke realized that River wasn’t your average teenager: “I saw him practicing his character’s walk in the parking lot,” Hawke said. “Uncommon behavior for a thirteen-year-old.”
Over the previous couple of years, River had phased out his bowl haircut, but for Wolfgang, it was back in all its symmetrical glory. Plus, he had to wear a particularly bookish pair of glasses—which he removed as soon as he got off camera, or if a pretty girl walked by. River had been many things in his life, but never a dork. “River had to do the most acting of all the kids, since he was playing against type,” Dante said.
“Although River liked to be cool and act cool, there was a geek inside him that would come out and embarrass him,” Dante added. “He did not enjoy watching himself in that part—I think that he saw a lot of things about himself that he wished he didn’t have. There were childish things that he was trying to change.”
By law, the teen actors could work only four hours a day, so the three of them had lots of off-duty time together, and soon became fast friends. “It was the longest shoot I’ve ever had,” Hawke said a decade later. “Six months with River Phoenix. Man, it was intense.”
River and Hawke both pretended to be more mature than they actually were—and both strived to attract the interest of their beautiful costar, Amanda Peterson, a contest that Hawke won. “We competed for the attention of girls like crazy,” Hawke said. “In fact, we competed over everything. We bragged and boasted continually about sex. The truth is, we were both virgins. I guess it’s touching to look back on two teenage boys struggling with hormones.” (River actually hit puberty on the
Explorers
set.)
Dante added that “getting laid was a major goal” in River’s life. “It was one of the things that was most important to him.” (Neither Dante nor Hawke seems to have known of the Children of God’s sexual practices.)
On the set, through his headphones, Dante could hear River and Hawke talking between takes. “River had a very doctrinaire set of ideas that he had been taught by his parents,” Dante remembered. “Ethan, who was a far more worldly boy, would often challenge River—and I don’t think he was used to that. He was suddenly confronted with a whole lifetime of thinking one way and finding out that it wasn’t the way the mainstream of the world thought. It was probably the first time that River had spent time with people who weren’t necessarily agreeing with everything that he had heard at home. It was a great experience for him and very mind-expanding.”
Although Hawke liked River, he thought his defining quality was “naïve pretentiousness.” Hawke said, “To me, education helps you see that your weirdness is not unique. I doubt, though, that River, at age fourteen, had read a book. He thought his ideas on life and the environment were original. Because he’d never been to school, he had no social skills, and lacked a sense of what was appropriate conversation. And he had this peculiar way of anecdotalizing his past, living his life in the third person. You had the sense he was making his own mythology. I suppose we all do that, but River went to the extreme.”
River’s lack of formal education frequently tripped him up on the set. He would mispronounce words or names that would be familiar to most other teenagers, betraying his lack of familiarity with them: past presidents; famous actors, writers, and singers; major historical events. “River didn’t have a lot of material knowledge of the world because of the way he had been brought up. The meaning of things often had to be explained to him and it put him in a difficult position,” Dante said. “Considering River had been somewhat deprived of an education, he was a very bright kid and very smart and knowledgeable about things. He just didn’t have a lot of facts at his command because he’d never been walked through history and literature.”
Television was also a largely unknown landscape to River. He had spent more time in his life making TV than watching it. “Television wasn’t really one of the things that was in our house,” Arlyn said, in an understated description of the family’s itinerant lifestyle. When River, on a break from shooting
Explorers,
stumbled across a TV set playing MTV, he was immediately hypnotized and spent the next several hours inhaling clips by the likes of Van Halen, Prince, and Night Ranger. When he was introduced to the Three Stooges, he couldn’t understand why anybody thought they were funny; he started asking random people if they liked the Three Stooges.
Dante encouraged his young actors to improvise, and was pleased by the spontaneous rapport they developed. “We got along exceptionally,” River said. “It’s like having foster brothers and sisters that you just move in with for a while and get to know. Ethan, Jason, and Amanda are good personalities, very easy to work with. There are some Hollywood kids who are really brats, and it’s just hard to deal with them. I’ve been lucky that I haven’t been such a brat; I’m trying my best not to be . . . When we get hyper, we can get on adults’ nerves, and we get tired of just hanging around the set. And maybe we, like, light people on fire and stuff.”
One night, River asked Hawke a direct question that most actors, of any age, would dance around: “Are you going to be famous?”
Hawke tried to play it cool, and act more humble than he actually was. “I don’t know—I don’t care much,” he lied.
River was straightforward: “I’m going to be famous. Definitely. Rich and famous.”
“Why? What’s so cool about fame?”
Hawke didn’t expect River’s answer: “I’m doing it for my family.”
“After that night, I really saw the heavy trip his family had laid on him. To them, he was the Second Coming, the man of the house at age fourteen. Maybe that’s why River always took himself so seriously,” Hawke said. “I also think he made a myth out of his parents. Incessantly bragging about his father, he’d say, ‘My father is the coolest guy with the deepest philosophy.’ ”
John’s behavior could fall short of his son’s claims. “One day, John showed up at a looping session obviously drunk,” an eyewitness reported. “River tried to laugh it off, saying, ‘My dad, well, he gets funny sometimes.’ But you could see the kid was hurt and embarrassed.”
Explorers
flopped at the box office. It was hindered by being released on the heels of another kids’ adventure,
The
Goonies,
and further hurt by not being a good movie. “It’s charmingly odd at some moments, just plain goofy at others,” opined Janet Maslin in the
New York Times.
The first two-thirds of
Explorers,
when the kids build and test-drive a spaceship, mouths agape with a sense of wonder, played like warmed-over Spielberg. But the final third went off the rails: the kids reach an alien spaceship, only to find that the extra-terrestrials are the movie’s comic relief, quoting incessantly from American television broadcasts. The mix of action and pop-culture insanity that worked so well in
Gremlins
fizzled here.
All three leads turned in good performances, though—and periodically, on the faces of both Hawke and River, you could see flashes of the adult actors they would become.
When Hawke left for home, River wept.
AS AN ADULT, HAWKE HAD
nothing good to say about child acting: “I believe it is profoundly negative and hurtful. Sure, it’s natural for kids to act in school plays, but to be adulated by fans is not natural. It’s not natural for a fourteen-year-old to have adults fetch him coffee.”
Hawke didn’t appear in another movie for four years, although he did audition for
Stand by Me,
which would prove to be the movie that launched River to stardom. Hawke wasn’t cast. He went home to New Jersey, and soon found that people wanted his autograph—because he knew River. “He would send me into fits of envy,” he said. “Unadmirable fits of envy, because I respected him. He became wildly famous, and I was in French class.”
It worked out in the long term for Hawke: he had a relatively normal high school life, and then left college after one semester to make
Dead Poets Society,
directed by Peter Weir. River very much wanted to be in
Dead Poets Society
and, having starred in Weir’s
Mosquito Coast,
hoped he had the inside track. But even writing a song about the Dead Poets Society didn’t get him the part—Weir wanted unfamiliar faces opposite Robin Williams. “The fact that I was unknown helped me get the part,” Hawke said. “We were friendly competitors. He said he admired my work, but I didn’t believe him. He liked to play head games.”
Eating in a high school cafeteria instead of at the craft-services table gave Hawke perspective, and fostered ambitions beyond money and fame. He started a theater company and wrote novels—but after
Dead Poets Society,
he was so worried that he would become a cheesy sellout, he wrote himself letters reminding himself of his values, to be opened at age forty. “My biggest fear,” he said, “was that you get a lot of success as a young person, you don’t know who you are. I was just worried I would turn into somebody I hated. And that’s what makes you come off as pretentious—but the one thing you learn pretty quickly is that if you don’t take yourself seriously, nobody else is going to.” He smiled ruefully. “Ultimately, nobody else cares what you do.”
Hawke never moved to Hollywood, which, ironically, may have helped with his longevity in the movie business: being three thousand miles away from the Viper Room proved to be a better way for him to become an artist.
In regard to River, Hawke said, “I would have really liked to work with him again. I had a really hard time with the idea that he wasn’t going to give me the opportunity to be better than him. I’m a very competitive person. You remember the Daffy Duck cartoon, where Daffy’s trying to do all this stuff in front of this audience and the cane keeps coming and dragging him off? And finally he does this big magic trick and kind of lights himself on fire and he gets a standing ovation, and as he floats up and away, he goes: ‘It’s a great trick, but you can only do it once.’ I thought that about
My Own Private Idaho:
We got to watch River light himself on fire. And he did. And he was somebody really worthy of being competitive with.”
