Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 4, 1993 TAG: 9303030237
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MIKE MAYO CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
A DIFFERENT LOCATION
old hippie." s the cryptic, quirky title suggests, "Falling Down" is a cryptic, quirky film that's hard to describe.It's a comedy-drama, partly realistic and partly allegorical, about an average guy (Michael Douglas) who becomes fed up with all of the frustrations of contemporary life. Stuck in a steaming traffic jam, he abandons his car and sets off for home on foot. This is definitely not conventional Hollywood "formula" entertainment, and the odds that it will be a commercial hit (in theaters, at least) are, at best, even. If nothing else, though, it's the kind of movie that people will talk about.
That's why the studio is promoting the film strongly. Michael Douglas has been giving interviews, and director Joel Schumacher is making a publicity tour. Recently, he stopped in Washington, D.C., to talk about "Falling Down."
Given his hard-to-categorize career, he was a good choice to direct. He's made such diverse films as "St. Elmo's Fire," "D.C. Cab," "The Lost Boys" and "Dying Young." And though he's serious about his work, he views it and himself with a sense of humor.
"I don't think of myself as an artist," he said. "I think of myself as a pop culture sponge, or a child of my times, an old hippie." And that's exactly what he looks like dressed in a houndstooth tweed jacket and yellow sweater vest over a plain white T-shirt, black jeans and boots. He wears his hair long and has a silver bracelet on his wrist over his watch.
Schumacher's mother was a Swedish Jew; his father was a Tennessee Baptist. He grew up in Queens, N.Y., and got into the movie business as a costume designer. Scripts that he wrote for "The Wiz" and "Car Wash" were the key to his first directing work. Since then, his career has been the typical Hollywood roller coaster ride of hits and flops.
He admitted that he took over "The Lost Boys" because he needed a job.
"Dick Donner had a screenplay he'd been working on but backed out of - `Goonies Go Vampire,' 9-year-old kids with vampire jokes," said the director. "Then they handed it to this old jaded hippie."
Schumacher turned the 9-year-olds into teen-agers with motorcycles, but he still wondered if this kind of project was what he wanted to be doing with his life.
"My fear was that I'd wake up in the middle of the night thinking, my God, you wanted to make `Lawrence of Arabia' and `Grand Illusion' and now you're making a teen-age vampire movie."
Given that inescapable truth, he decided to make "the greatest teen-age vampire in the history of the world."
"Flatliners," about medical students experimenting with the near-death experience, was more serious. It was strongly influenced by a 1990 documentary he'd made about people who were HIV-positive. He was moved by their talk of unfinished business, fear of death and death itself.
"Falling Down" is his most complex work to date. He called it a "moral tale, Ralph Nader meets `Apocalypse Now.'
"I can't imagine why somebody hadn't made a movie about a man walking out of a car in a traffic jam a long time ago. It's a universal feeling. It's a frustration and a madness. Life doesn't work the way we want it to. This guy has reached the breaking point so he sets off on a journey [that] is a total delusion in his mind.
"He's walking across the city on a very hot day encountering situations that disturb him or anger him. It's a day when he's ultimately going to meet his destiny. He throws Judeo-Christian caution to the wind. . . . He disintegrates before your eyes. To me that's a great American story."
The film's complication comes in the fact that it's not clear whether Douglas's character is a good guy or a bad guy. There's a thin line between righteous vigilante and hostage-taking terrorist.
Schumacher admitted that he was trying to dramatize the kind of story you'd see on the local TV news, the kind that usually ends . . . and then he turned the gun on himself.
But in the movie, it's not that simple. "This was about a white middle-class guy and his rage. I hadn't seen this story. I thought I was all alone there. I was angry about what was happening in the country, angry at the last 12 years. Everyone in `Falling Down' is angry and crazy to a certain degree, and they're reacting to their anger, fear and paranoia."
Then he sums it up as well as any reviewer could: "I make movies about imperfect people in imperfect worlds, and that's what may be different than what we expect from Hollywood, which is usually about perfect people who somehow wind up in a perfect world."