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Home , Call of the West, Hollywood Vice Squad, Jon Cryer, Lee Ving, Penelope Spheeris, The Stunt Man

D U D E S An Oral History of a Punk Rock Western Road Movie

BY WILL HARRIS

A SCREENWRITER WALKS INTO A PRODUCER’S OFFICE…

Miguel Tejada-Flores (producer): I started out as a hardcore nerd. I was a story analyst and I worked for several studios. This was in the days before people knew what a reader was, and it was a great gig, because I actually had a couple of degrees in literature, I went to film school, and I loved movies. So I could do this shit in my sleep. [Laughs.] I was a very good reader at a couple of studios, and then I started moving , and – after everybody else got fired because they lost too much money – I briefly ran the film division at Lorimar and did a very cool sci-fi movie called The Last

Starfighter, which I put together. For various reasons, I left Lorimar, and I started writing – because it isn’t a career choice, it’s a disease – and I wrote a lot. And then a distinguished, brilliant, and thoughtful old-school producer, Herb Jaffe, who was the classic Hollywood gentleman and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever known or worked with, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Herb said he was starting a new , and he didn’t have a huge amount of financing, but he asked me to come and run his development and some production, because we had a mutual friendship and respect from the other projects I had brought him in on. I said yes, but as part of the deal… We actually made a handshake deal, one which he totally honored, because he was a cool human being. But because I was writing – and I actually had written [Revenge of the] Nerds, which coming out, so I was known as a writer at that point – I said, “The deal is, I want a multiple picture writing deal for myself and my partner, Tim Metcalfe, so he can make some money, and I want to produce a couple of movies.” And Herb said, “Fine,” we shook hands on it, and that was it. It was a simple, classic, old-school way of doing things.

So I went to Herb’s company, and…we weren’t starving to death. [Laughs.] We were okay. We had enough money to develop movies, and then we would get other people to produce our movies. We had a couple of hits and a couple of misses. And after a couple of years of more hits than misses, we had some Wall Street partners that did a public offering and raised us $75-80 million, which paid for financing slates and movies for a couple of years. And I was basically responsible for creating the whole slate, or at least developing it. Not totally always producing it, but I was the boss of all the scripts. We didn’t have enough for me to go out and spend like a drunken sailor, so part of my job as an executive for a moderately well-financed but struggling good indie company was to find good writers who I could afford. And by that time, I’d read enough bad scripts and done enough work with bad writers to know that bad writers can be either well-known or unknown, and the chance of getting a good writer just because somebody had credits was not necessarily carved in stone. So I spent a bunch of my time reading scripts and taking meetings with agents and trying to find good writers. And Randall wrote a really cool script.

Randall Jahnson (screenwriter): I’d gone to the UCLA Film School, I graduated in 1982, and I was inspired and swept up by the independent music scene, particularly the punk and art music scene that was going on in L.A. at that time. So I was out seeing a lot of shows, and I found music just being my primary source of inspiration. Even though I was aspiring to be a screenwriter, music was just blowing me away. I was quite struck by the tribal nature of the whole scene – you had your rockabilly tribe, you had your hardcore tribe, you had your New Romantic tribe – and it all struck me as a metaphor for the Wild West, in a way. So I had some things kicking around in my head.

There were a lot of bands at that time that had a fascination with the American west as well. The

Dead Kennedys had covered the theme song for the old TV show Rawhide. A band that was a big influence on me, , they covered Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” they put out an in 1982 – the one with their big hit, “” – called Call Of The West, and when I used to see them live, they did a live version of [Ennio] Morricone’s Hang ‘Em High and The Good, The Bad,

And The Ugly themes. So I was just interested and fascinated by the fact that these bands were interested in the west and all of that, and I had grown up as a big fan of American history and especially western history, so…it was a clash of elements in all these things.

When I first got out of film school, my first attempt at writing something commercial was a horror script called Slaughter Alley, about a stretch of highway that was haunted by a guy who was killed on it back in, like, 1962. That was also inspired by the same scene, in the sense that this was a guy who was probably cruising, sniffing glue, and drinking sloe gin in a hip flask in high school. He was a bad ass who rumbled with a tire iron and chains. But I wondered what would happen if some of these poseur kids that I was seeing at these rockabilly shows, with their cuffed jeans and their pompadours, ran up against a guy like that, the real McCoy, who wants to rumble. How would that go down?

So I wrote that script, it landed me an agent, and I started being sent around to meetings and meet- and-greets. The script was under option with another company, but you use it as a calling card. So I went around to a bunch of different companies, and they liked the writing and they liked the story, but I really wasn’t relating very well to any of the executives. And then I came into the office of the

Vista organization and I met Miguel Tejada-Flores. I walked into this office that was just a mess.

[Laughs.] It was piled high with scripts and books, stuff all over the place, and then on his desk were science-fiction characters, Godzillas, and toys. I just felt like I’d come into the right place.

Tejada-Flores: [Slaughter Alley] had moments of being brilliant, and Randall is a smart human being with a voice, he’s film-literate, and he’s cool. The other thing is that it’s true that when you make a movie, no matter what you’re doing, you’re spending a bunch of your time doing it, and you don’t just want to work with people who are good, you want to work with people who actually inspire you and who you want to spend time with. And Randall was not only a good writer, he was also a cool human being who was totally film-literate and could have conversations about all kinds of shit. So I did the usual routine: I forced him to come to my office and said, “Man, this is a cool script, but we’re not gonna fucking do it, so…what else do you have?”

Jahnson: It was out of my head before I even really put a lot of thought into it, but I just said, “Punk rockers out in the wilds of Wyoming.”

Tejada-Flores: I said, “Man, that’s fucking cool. That’s really cool. But what’s the story?” So we had to go through the whole mating dance, but we enjoyed it. He had to create enough of a story so that

I could pitch it to my boss, because I didn’t have the power to sign any checks myself, and I had to convince both my boss and myself that it was worth spending money on, which I took pretty seriously. And at the same time, I also had to convince myself that he was a writer I could work with, that we could communicate and listen to each other and do all that stuff.

Jahnson: I started working on it, I came back a little bit more, I started meeting with him every couple of weeks, and we kept working the story and working the story until finally they just said,

“Okay, I think we’ve got enough. Let’s go. Let’s roll!” But I begged them, I said, “I need some time. I need to go out and see what the modern American west is!” [Laughs.] Because I hadn’t been out there in a long, long time, y’know?

Tejada-Flores: Randall was smart. We actually made a deal right before the writers’ strike and gave him a bit of money to go off and do research.

Jahnson: I rented a Volkswagen Rabbit and I wandered all over the west for a couple of weeks. I was making music videos with Black Flag and Henry Rollins and the Minutemen and all these bands at the time, so SST Records said, “Well, if you’re going out there, you should go visit the Meat

Puppets in Phoenix.” So I did. That was, like, my first stop. And that was…memorable. [Laughs.]

Yeah, definitely a memorable stop on the itinerary…

While I was out there on the road, though, the story of Dudes really changed, quite. Frankly, I had worked up a story that was much more convoluted than the one that ended up being the film, and it wasn’t until I was actually out on the road and really just soaking up the atmosphere that it gelled and I saw it crystal clear how I wanted to do it. I remember calling from… I think it was a phone booth in Zion National Park or Ely, Nevada, someplace like that, and just saying, “Hey, the trip’s going great! The story’s totally changed, but it’s great. I love it, and you’re gonna love it!” And I started telling him all about it, and he said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s changing a lot!” And I said, “I know, but it’s really good, and I feel really strongly about it.” And he said, “Okay!”

Tejada-Flores: When he came back, he had a killer first draft. It needed some work, and it was unusual. It was a lot like what he pitched us, but it was different, and it was a fucking cool movie. I can also say that it was definitely a movie that did not fit into a simplistic genre stereotype, so by doing it, we were taking chances. We thought it was a punk rock western, and how the fuck do you market that? [Laughs.] Well, that’s a whole other question, and to be honest, as a production executive, if I’m responsible, I’m trying to get my company to make movies that will make money.

But if I love movies, then I’m also trying to get them to make movies that will change the filmmaking landscape. And this one felt like that. And it was so fucking cool when it came in, I instantly went to

Herb and said, “Okay, Herb, this is one of the movies I want to produce.” And Herb, God bless him, he liked great stories and couldn’t be pigeonholed into just doing one thing, and he liked the script as much as I did. He saw its potential. So he said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” So the next big issue was to find a director.

“YOU GET A CHANCE TO DIRECT A PUNK ROCK WESTERN, YOU’VE GOTTA GO FOR IT!”

Tejada-Flores: We didn’t have the luxury of being a big company, so it was important to get a filmmaker who could work under potentially challenging conditions with a lot of locations, some challenging action, and could really nail the tone of doing something dark but dramatic and also emotional. Which are all hallmarks of a lot of good directors, but not someone well-known on some big list. One of my jobs as the ranking suit was not only to find and create and develop a bunch of material I liked from writers I liked and that we can afford, but also to either find directors for our projects or woo directors who would bring us their projects. This was the days of video-cassettes, and when you’d get people’s work, their agent sends you a movie and you screen it in your screening room. I remember I saw one of Penelope’s documentaries, Decline of Western Civilization, which was kick-ass and bad-ass. And then I saw this movie she directed with in it

[The Boys Next Door], and…it’s real. You look at that movie, and you go, “Okay, whoa: this is a filmmaker who can pull you in.”

Penelope Spheeris (director): Miguel liked The Boys Next Door – that’s right, I worked with two of the ! – so he called me in to discuss directing Dudes.

Tejada-Flores: In those days, Penelope basically looked pretty much like a metal star. She looked really cool and bad-ass, beautiful in some ways, and certainly striking. She looked opposite of every other female director, who were all trying to look conservative and serious. Not Penelope. And she’s so direct and straightforward, able to get to the essence of something by asking thoughtful and revealing questions and having good instincts. When you work with directors, you start appreciating some of the qualities which the great ones have. And she had all of those in spades.

You have a meeting with Penelope, and you go, “Whoa, she really knows what the fuck she’s doing.”

She talked really intelligently about how cool the script was, how much she loved it, and how she’d like to make a movie out of it.

Spheeris: It was a punk rock western! [Laughs.] You get a chance to direct a punk rock western, you’ve gotta go for it!

Tejada-Flores: What’s funny is that we did a screening of Dudes about a year ago as a benefit up in

Portland, Oregon, and when we did a big Q&A afterward, somebody said, “Well, Penelope, with all your interest in punk rock music, you must have chosen this movie because it had all these themes in it…” She laughed and said, “No, you don’t understand how it fucking works: I was out of work, I needed a fucking job, they were interested in hiring me. It wasn’t like I was choosing the material and developing it. Are you kidding me? I needed a fucking job!” That’s not a literal quote, but that’s pretty close to Penelope’s no-nonsense attitude.

Jahnson: When I heard Penelope was on board, or at least wanted to do it, I thought, “That’s great!”

Because she had street cred because of Decline, and then her prior film, Suburbia… I actually saw it again just recently, and I was just blown away at just how good it was. I think it’s a really great portrait of suburban L.A. at that time that’s rarely captured. There’s a lot of great imagery in it. So, yeah, I was thrilled about Penelope. There were only two directors out there at the time that could’ve done it: it was Penelope, and then there was some talk about Alex Cox, who was either just coming off of Repo Man or else was doing it right around that time. But Penelope had the right sensibility and she obviously knew that scene. She knew it very well.

Spheeris: Word got out that I was directing this punk rock western, and it was back in the day where you couldn’t really just hit somebody up on Facebook or send ‘em an email, so Bob

Richardson showed up at my front door at my house in Laurel Canyon. I hide my address now so people can’t do that. [Laughs.] But I’m looking outside my door, and there’s this guy with white hair.

He’s very ghostly-looking, and he’s got a really weird aura about him. But I opened the door, and he goes, “Hi, I’m Bob Richardson, and I hear you’re doing this movie, and I’d like to shoot it.” So I told the production company.

Tejada-Flores: I was, like, “Fuck, are you kidding? Bob Richardson?” Getting somebody of his caliber… I mean, I knew who all the great DPs were, and he’d been working with Oliver Stone. He’d just come off of Platoon! So I told Bob, “Yeah, we’d love you to shoot it. But we can’t afford you!” And he said, “What’s your budget? I’ll work for it.” Which is almost too fucking awesome for words.

“[JON] CRYER…WASN’T THE OBVIOUS CHOICE.”

Dan Roebuck (“Biscuit”): I had been aware of before doing Dudes. She did a movie for [producer] Sandy Howard called that was out right at the time that they cast me, so I went to see that, and I thought, “Well, that’s pretty fucking entertaining.” By that point, I was a veteran. I had already been in two movies. So I knew everything there was to know about movie acting. [Laughs.] No, but I watched Hollywood Vice Squad, and some stunt man jumps out at a window, and you see that he hits his head on the ground, and then he gets up…and he’s fucking bleeding! And the shot’s in the movie! And nobody went, “Well, that’s , it’s not even the actor,” because you were so thrown by the grittiness of it. And I thought, “This girl’s really a director.” I also thought,

“I’m not jumping out any fucking windows.”

For Biscuit, they looked at everybody, and I know Penelope said once that there was some guy, some fat punk rocker, that she saw on Donahue that she considered, that she was going to try and track down. But then I guess I came into the mix. I…don’t know that River’s Edge had been out yet when I auditioned for Dudes, which would’ve moved me higher up the ranks. But I put my hair in a

Mohawk and sprayed it whatever color hairspray I could find or whatever they had at Hollywood

Costume. It wasn’t a long Mohawk… [Laughs.] But if I was playing a guy with a Mohawk now, I’d do the same thing. Or I’d take in a picture of me in Dudes and say, “Go fuck yourself! I fucking did this already!”

Jahnson: The Biscuit character, who was partly inspired by the lead singer of the Big Boys, an

Austin, Texas punk band. Randy “Biscuit” Turner, he’s passed away now, but…he was a big boy.

[Laughs.] There was just this rough-and-tumble quality about him, and I loved that name, so I wanted to apply that to the sidekick character. That to me was where a lot of the comedy stemmed from.

Roebuck: I was from back east, I was tall and big, and I had a ballsiness to me. And maybe Penelope will say, “Oh, Dan wasn’t our first choice, but the other three said ‘no,’” but I think I quickly became the choice.

Spheeris: I’m not one of those directors that insists that somebody has to be in a certain role. I don’t consider myself the ace casting-director person, so I’m always really open. It was Herb Jaffe who said, “Jon’s gotta do the job.” Because he had just come off of , and Herb was totally convinced that he was gonna be a star. I remember when I did The Boys Next Door, it had

Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield in it, and the producer, Sandy Howard, said to me, “You wanna put a hundred dollar bet on which of these guys is gonna be a star?” And I go, “Um… Maxwell’s the better actor, but Charlie’s the star.” Anyway, I won, but he never paid me.

Jon Cryer (“Grant”): I started getting a bunch of scripts after Pretty in Pink came out, and one of them was Some Kind of Wonderful, which fell through in dramatic fashion for me. Basically, I was cast in the movie. I wouldn’t say I was actually booked, because no deal was made or anything like that, but for a week or so I was supposed to be in that movie with . And then all heck broke loose: they fired Howie Deutch and brought in a new director, and then they fired her and brought Howie back, but by then they’d recast and rewritten the thing completely to make it basically Pretty in Pink but with the genders reversed, and by then I couldn’t be in it anymore!

[Laughs.] So that was that!

But I had gotten a bunch of other scripts, and when Dudes came to me, it stood out because it was just so bonkers. You know, when you get a whole bunch of scripts, you start to notice patterns, and you start to notice that everything is starting to feel the same. Everybody wanted me to play the loveable-loser nerd, and I didn’t want to do that. So when Dudes came over the transom, I thought,

“Oh! Here’s a chance to go in a completely different direction!”

So I had lunch with Penelope Spheeris, and she’s just such a wonderful character of a person, and I admired her indie work. I admired Suburbia and The Boys Next Door. I hadn’t even seen Decline of

Western Civilization at that point. I don’t know, she was just so ballsy, I just thought, “This woman is gonna be great fun to make a movie with.” And I think I wanted to play a leading-man guy. I wanted to try that. I was never comfortable as a leading man…and I still am not! [Laughs.] But I think Dudes was the first movie where I discovered that.

Roebuck: I was actually cast before Jon. They were looking at a number of actors for Grant, and I remember I screen-tested with one actor who told Penelope where to put the light. The minute he said it, I thought, “Well, he won’t be in the movie.” And I was right!

Casting Jon Cryer was a ballsy fucking move, because Jon had come from playing this sweet, loveable… I mean, everybody loves Duckie! So I know exactly why he took the fucking part: ‘cause he could say “fucky” to Duckie. [Laughs.] Me personally, I was extremely excited, because you could see in Pretty in Pink that he was the real deal.

Jahnson: Basically all the names of that generation came out to audition, and Cryer…wasn’t the obvious choice. In my mind, I saw Grant much darker and more brooding. I sat in on some of the readings, and we saw some pretty big names, guys who went on to be pretty big names, but

Penelope wasn’t quite satisfied. I wasn’t there when Cryer came in to read, so when I found about it later, I was, like, “Whoa! Really? That’s…interesting.” [Laughs.] But Jon really surprised me. He just brought a different energy to it. And he went for it. I really loved that about him.

Tejada-Flores: I’m not sure if he was our first choice, but Jon is really interesting because, in his subsequent career, Jon brings a lot of things, including the ability to be self-deprecatingly funny, which he did fucking brilliantly in Two and a Half Men. So he was a really interesting choice. Cryer: This was a bombshell that was only dropped on me recently, but I was told that there was a big difference of opinion between Penelope and our main producer, Herb Jaffe, that basically she wanted me for the role of Grant and he wanted Keanu Reeves. And she won and got me. But you’re going to have to put the word “won” in quotes! [Laughs.] But I only found that out when Penelope told me the story when she was interviewing me for the Blu-ray. So I didn’t know that at the time…and I’m grateful!

Catherine Mary Stewart (“Jessie”): They approached me when I was doing a movie called

Nightflyers – which is now being made into a series, and I’m going to try to get on it, dammit! – and the casting director for both projects, Nina Axelrod, had me meet with Penelope Spheeris at the studio, and they asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. And after I read the script, I just really dug the concept. I thought it was really cool. And I always had a dream to be on a western set, doing the cowboy thing with lots of horses and guns and things like that. It was always my fantasy growing up. And it was a really cool take on a western, so I thought, “This is perfect! I love this!”

Lee Ving: Penelope directed The Decline of Western Civilization, which Fear had a prominent position in, but of course we had been throughout the beginning and early days of the punk rock scene here in . Most people weren’t even aware that punk rock was an item, that it existed or that there was any group of people interested in it. It was primarily on account of people like Penelope and her boyfriend at the time, Bob Biggs, doing Slash Magazine with Claude Bessy.

That was pretty much the start of the scene.

I remember quite specifically when I first met Penelope. I was a few hundred yards north of the

Canyon Country Store on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, a nice little place where people can get a quart of milk on their way home. I was with Derf [Scratch] – rest in peace – with my favorite hammer tacker staple gun and an armful of Fear flyers for a gig. We were working our way down Laurel

Canyon, hitting every vertical thing that would accept staples to hold our posters to it, and we were running down the hill to the service road, so that if we saw cops coming in either direction, they wouldn’t notice what we were doing, because it, uh, wasn’t legal. [Laughs.]

But we’re just about at the Country Store when all of a sudden I look back up the hill, and I see this white mustang convertible – maybe a 1969, maybe 1970 – driven by this real pretty girl, and she’s hauling ass down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, going 50–60 miles an hour. She turns and looks at me and Derf, and she just stomps her foot on the brake, turns the wheel, and… You know how cars go sideways when you do that? She was like a stuntman: she had that car going sideways down Laurel

Canyon Boulevard perfectly. And she looks over at us and says, “Hey, you guys wanna be in my movie?” And that’s how we met Penelope!

Jahnson: As far as casting, I did have in mind for Missoula. I didn’t really have anyone else in my mind for any of the other roles, but Lee… I just thought, “Oh, man, this guy’s gonna make a great villain!” [Laughs.] I’d seen Fear a couple of times, and he had a presence that I knew he could pull it off. He has piercing blue eyes and this biker menace, and I just thought, “I’m gonna use it. I’m gonna use him!” And when Penelope and I had our first couple of discussions about casting, she said, “Oh, yeah, well, I know Lee very well. He’d be great for this!”

Ving: By the time I did Dudes, I had already done some acting. I’d appeared in . And I’d also appeared in , because I can remember Walter [Hill] having to wrap me off of

Streets of Fire in order to get to the first day of shooting of Clue. And what a nice feeling that was, to have two extremely promising-sounding corporate projects going on and having to rush to finish your work on one in order to start the next…especially if you’re some rabble punk rocker from Los

Angeles! [Laughs.] But, y’know, I’d been a rabble rocker in and prior to that, so it wasn’t exactly new territory!

Spheeris: Well, Lee does play a pretty good bad-ass, you know? [Laughs.] And I like to stick with my punk rock friends. I didn’t have a lot of Hollywood friends. I still don’t. I put Lee in the movie because he was bad-ass, and I knew he could do it.

Ving: At the time, I had a major interest in motorcycles, etc., and the character appeared to me to be someone who would’ve come from some social strata like that, so my appearance in the film, what I was wearing… There were several points of disagreement between us. I remember her finally saying, “Well, you got your way: you’re wearing what you want and you have a beard.” If you’re a film actor, when someone hires you to do their film, they generally don’t want you to have a beard if you don’t usually have a beard, because you won’t be recognized. So it was a bit of a departure for me, thinking I knew what this guy would look like, versus what people from the film community of

Los Angeles might think he would look like.

But if you come across the US and you meet some redneck bad-tempered people, they’re gonna look like that. They’re not from Hollywood. That’s not where their world is. Their world is breaking people into pieces if you don’t do what they want you to do…or if they just don’t like you!

But I had a feel for where this guy would be coming from, and Penelope allowed me to use that, so I was grateful for that as well. I wasn’t held to do something that I didn’t believe was reality. Not that this movie is reality in too many ways! [Laughs.] But in some ways it was, and I wanted to bring a little more of that to it. She allowed me to do it, and I think it worked out really well. I was grateful to her for that.

Lee Ving wasn’t the only member of the Dudes cast who could claim to have been a member of Fear:

Grant and Biscuit’s buddy Milo was played by , of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame.

Ving: Flea was with us in Fear for the better part of two years, however in our infinite wisdom we either decided or were guided toward not making any recordings during that time. What a smart business decision that was! [Laughs.] But Flea was always a tremendous human being and a gifted musician, and we were honored to have him.

Cryer: Flea was lovely! You know, he was a rookie as an actor, but he was game for anything. He had a great attitude. And he was very helpful for us, because he had been a part of the punk scene to some extent, and obviously the Chili Peppers were making their own mark as musicians. He had a great attitude about the fact that he was new to this. He didn’t come in and try to bluff his way through it. He would just ask a question if he needed to. Dan and I had to keep it in mind and make adjustments, but he was a lovely guy.

Roebuck: Flea’s a god. I mean, in the first place, he’s as gracious as anybody as you’d ever meet, and in the second place, he’s a talented motherfucker. And I didn’t know how talented he was when we did the movie, of course. I spent a lot of time asking him, “What’d you say?” [Laughs.] I couldn’t understand him! But he was just a terrific guy. We did all that L.A. stuff, and then when his character gets killed, we didn’t really shoot that in Arizona, so we had him and then he was gone. So that was shitty. We really loved each other, but as fast as he was there, he was gone. We worked together for a couple of weeks, tops. But they did bring him to Arizona for one more shot, where he waves goodbye and rides off, so at least we got to see him then.

Jahnson: There’s also another music connection in the cast. The sheriff that Missoula and Blix blow away in Montana in the jail, that’s from The Doors. When I was having my initial interviews for getting The Doors, the first time I met the surviving members of The Doors – Ray

Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, and Densmore – we were chatting, and Dudes was either slated for production or heavily into pre-production at that time. And John, who was doing some acting, said,

“Hey, do you think there’s a part for me in the movie? Do you think you could talk to Penelope about getting me in a part?” And I hadn’t been officially hired on The Doors, but I said, “Well, of course,

John!” [Laughs.] I said, “I’ll call her up right away!” And to her credit, too, she said, “Oh, yeah, I know

John.” Penelope knew everyone. She said, “Sure, we can cast him in a role.” So it was cool. Whether that actually helped me get the job on The Doors, I don’t know. But it didn’t hurt!

THE CAST’S PUNK CRED

Cryer: I was familiar with the punk scene downtown, with CBGB’s. My sister went to Max’s

City, and she was very into all kinds of great music at the time. She was one of the first people I knew who was into rap music and hip-hop. So my sister really knew all that stuff. I, however, was a musical theater nerd, so I would listen to the Ramones and go, “Oh, that is so juvenile.” [Laughs.]

But I had a respect for the Talking Heads – although they weren’t really classified as punk so much – and obviously the Sex Pistols. But I wouldn’t say that it was a genre that I was immersed in at the time. The closest I got was that I loved The Clash, who weren’t really punk by that point. But it was punk-adjacent!

Stewart: I would say no, I wasn’t a punk fan. [Laughs.] I’m pretty white bread. Milquetoast. All those terms. I’m a child of the ‘70s. I was a big fan of guys like The Eagles and stuff like that. I mean,

I was obviously aware of the punk rock scene, but it was a new experience for me. And I loved it!

Roebuck: I still don’t know what punk rock is. I swear to God, I was directing five plays a year and acting in five plays a year, and then I was starring in movies, and…I don’t want to sound like a douche bag, but I didn’t listen to any music in the ‘80s. I like classical music. And I like show tunes.

So the whole punk rock thing was all acting for me. I know this will come as a shock to many of your readers, because I’ve become such a cornerstone of the punk rock movement…

Cryer: I watched Decline before doing Dudes, and to see how Penelope got to know her subjects and got so close to them… I thought it was an amazing piece of filmmaking just on its own, but it was also a window into a life that I’d never really touched on. You know, I had a couple of friends at school who might’ve had something close to it, but I was insulated. I grew up a theater kid, and I grew up amongst kids who… The kids were never hopeless in the theater. We were exactly the opposite of that. You always wanted to put on a show!

Roebuck: When they screened the movie at UCLA and someone asked about the mosh pit, Jon Cryer said, “I don’t believe you understand, but Dan Roebuck and I were musical theater folk.” I particularly liked that he said “folk.”

Ving: I thought Jon and Daniel seemed believable. That’s all I was really looking for. They’re intelligent, very nice people. That shouldn’t be secondary, but when you still have to do a film, it sometimes is. But I thought that, as far as what they were portraying, it sounded as though they knew what that was like. Also, it’s like some college kids deciding they’re going to spread their wings and trek across the country, and whatever happens, so be it. I though they played that quite well: they were a bit naïve, very enthusiastic, intelligent young people. It seemed right.

Roebuck: So I don’t like punk rock, but I played a punk rocker. I also never killed anybody, but I did

River’s Edge. You know what I mean? Thankfully, you don’t have to be what you play. But I certainly watched Decline [of Western Civilization] before we did the movie, and Penelope saw value in punk rock, and that was important enough to me.

HORSEBACK BONDING

Roebuck: Once Jon was cast, they made a point of saying, “You guys should hang out together.”

Where we really got to hang was for the five or six weeks before filming began, we started taking horseback riding lessons. And frankly, we were very drawn to each other at first because, driving to our horseback riding lessons, we could sing the entirety of the Pippin score. You can’t do that with

Charlie fucking Sheen! So we had that going for us. And on the way home we might do Jesus Christ

Superstar or Godspell if it was a Sunday and we were in the mood for something religious.

Cryer: Yeah, we had a good time. And I got to be a pretty decent horseback rider, which then made it tough to pretend I was a lousy horseback rider when I had to do that in the movie!

Roebuck: Not only would we ride the horses, but we learned how to take care of the horses. You’ve got to clean the horse, and you’ve got to get ‘em ready for the next person. Cryer: I thought that was a great idea, to also care for the horse, because it really gets you in tune with the horse, and you develop a relationship with the horse. Or if you’re like me, you discover that you’re incredibly allergic to horses, and you develop a lung infection. [Laughs.] So that made it a little difficult. But I took a lot of Sudafed.

Roebuck: I hear that stuff about actors being put into “boot camp,” but I don’t know that I’m completely sold on, like, the need to shit in a hole to portray a soldier. I could do that just fine and then go shit in my honeywagon. So I knew I didn’t need to become a punk rocker, but I knew I did have to learn how to ride a horse, in case the horse took off and I’m left going, “Help meeeeeee!” But you don’t actually see me on a horse in the movie, so maybe they just sent me to hang out with Jon. I don’t know.

But getting to know Jon… I mean, Jon Cryer is as classy an actor as I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of people. I couldn’t be happier for Jon’s success. But I’ll admit that I was jealous when he got to leave our set to go do IV. He got to leave a day early, and then, like, 30 hours later, he was in the commissary with Christopher Reeve in the Superman outfit and Gene

Hackman, and you think, “Well, that’s pretty great.” So I was a little jealous of that. But only for a day.

Cryer: Dan and I used to go on day trips whenever we had free time, and he only just recently found the videos that we used to take when we did that. Because I had a new Hi8 camera, and I was all about using it at every opportunity. So we went to Bedrock City, the Flintstones theme park. But you have to put “theme park” in quotes, because it’s a bunch of abandoned structures in the desert, basically. That’s all it was then.

There was actually a thing of pipework that they painted like it was a big snake on the outside, but that was the whole thing: you were supposed to climb through the pipe. But I have to figure that animals lived in there. It was a fairly long pipe, and you couldn’t see all the way down it. But I loved that that constituted a ride. [Laughs.] It was the most forlorn theme park. It might be wonderful now, but at the time it was definitely in some amount of disrepair.

Roebuck: When they were scouting locations, they were kind enough to let us go on the scouting to see where we were going to shoot, like, the diner fight, because we had to be there with the stunt man. And I said to Dan Bradley, “What if they throw my head through this glass, and then I go to fight the guy, and they pull me out?” That was all my doing. And the first time I did it, I cut myself a little on the candy glass. And then I had to do it again, and I was a pussy. “I don’t wanna do it again! I don’t wanna put my head through the glass!”

Spheeris: Dan is a little gripe-y sometimes, a little whiny. But it works for him. And it makes me as a director – and a mother – go, “Oh, honey, what can I do? How can I help? Let me make it better for you.” So it works for him. is like that, too. I worked with David and , and then with David and Marlon [Wayans], and David’s always whiny. “I need this, and I need a close- up!” But it works for him. And it works for Dan, too!

ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE MOSH PIT

Spheeris: The mosh pit scene was the very first day of the shoot, so it was like throwing the baby in the river. It’s, like, “If you guys can do this, then you can do the rest of the movie.”

Cryer: I really felt like a pretender in [the mosh pit]. The closest I ever came to being in a mosh pit was when I went to a Public Enemy concert and, basically, the mosh pit came to me. I was in the back. I was not hoping to mosh, as it were. [Laughs.] But the mosh pit just expanded backwards into the back of the auditorium. A friend of mine was trying to protect me from the encroaching mosh pit by pulling me back by the collar, but he actually ended up knocking me on the ground and then stepped on my crotch by mistake. So that’s the closest I ever came.

Roebuck: The very first day of shooting the movie, we’re doing the scene with , where they’re playing “I Wanna Be a Cowboy,” and we’re all excited about it…and those motherfucking punk rockers almost killed us! They were doing this slam dancing, and I was, like, “This is like being a Russian in Fiddler on the Roof: we don’t really fight, we just throw stuff down and stomp around and be all, like, ‘I hate the Jews!’” But, no, these motherfuckers were trying to kill us!

Cryer: That was a new experience for me. And when you’re in it, when you’re just bouncing off everybody and arms and legs are flailing, you can see the appeal of it. It’s like wrestling when you’re a kid. You get into the music, and if you get hurt, you just keep going, and you pretend you’re not hurt and that you’re enjoying it. But it really made me feel like, “I’m not sure I’m the right guy for this part...”

Jahnson: I was there for the Vandals’ performance. They had a pretty authentic dive-y shithole of a club set up, but it was actually in a soundstage somewhere, or some facility like that. I remember it being way downtown. I don’t know exactly where it was. But when I got there, I thought, “Oh, yeah, this looks good.” Of course, I didn’t have to jump into the pit. [Laughs.]

When I got on the set, I vaguely recall Roebuck coming over to me and saying, “Dude! We’re getting our asses kicked out there! This is really intense!” I said, “Yeah, man. Welcome to it!” That was pretty funny. I’ve been to a lot of hardcore shows, and…I was not a guy who was ever a skinhead or someone who was in the thick of the pit. But I always liked to be up close to the band, and you take your life and body up there, you take your chances. You get shoved and pushed around a lot. And a lot of those guys, they were fit. There wasn’t a lot of body fat on some of them. So I knew what to expect. I’d seen Fear, Dead Kennedys, and Black Flag. That was a lot of heavy stuff.

Roebuck: Jon and I went to the first assistant director [Guy A. Louthan], and I’m sure he just had a momentary lack of common sense, but we’re like [In a low, conspiratorial voice.] “Hey, these fucking guys are killing us, man. I don’t know what to tell ya…” And he goes, “Hold on, hold on, I’ll take care of it.” And he pulled out a megaphone: “Okay, all the punk rockers, over here!” Jon and I looked at each other. I didn’t know anything, but I knew that this was gonna be the last fucking thing I hear in this world. And he goes, “With the actors, can we please make sure that you don’t harm them?” So he essentially put the fucking mark of death on us. And the very next time we went in there, they were punching us, kicking us, biting us… And then we came out, and I was, like, “I don’t wanna go back in!” So Dan Bradley goes, “Let’s put in the stuntmen.”

So they put in the stuntmen, and these morons – and if you were on the set that day and you were one of the punk rockers in the mosh pit, I mean you – didn’t know that the stuntmen weren’t us.

Everybody was so stoned and happy to be in the mosh pit that it didn’t occur to them that it was just guys dressed like us. So I know we have on film where some guy punches my stuntman from behind, and my stuntman turns around and punches him in the face…and the guy does down. It’s not in the movie, because you can clearly see that it was the stuntman punching him. But as I’m talking about it, I’m getting a little nervous just thinking about it. That was scary. That was one of the scariest things that ever happened to me in a movie. Cryer: We were a little bit taken aback. There was no mosh pit scene in Godspell. Evita has no whatsoever. By the way, I have injured myself in the theater. It happens! But, no, it was a unique perspective for us, shall we say…

But in the end it was fascinating to me, because I got to actually hang out with a lot of the extras, who were actual hardcore punks from downtown, and they were nice folks. And that actually took a little of my poseur fear off of me, because you realize that, yeah, they’re wearing a Mohawk, and yeah, they’re dealing with a lot of issues with their parents and their schools or whatever. But they’re kids just like everybody else. They’re just dealing with it in a different way.

Jahnson: You know, Penelope demands authenticity, so all those extras that were recruited for that, they were the real deal. They weren’t poseurs. I was, like, “Oh, these guys are the real deal, man.

That’s good.” And to see Bob Richardson go in there with the camera, moving through it… I forget what rig he had, but he was right there in the zone, and I thought that rocked. I just thought that was great, to see that happening.

Cryer: Bob was thrown into the mosh pit with his focus-puller and just basically told to hope for the best. And he had just done Platoon with Oliver Stone, and he confided in me later, “This is worse, man. This is way worse!” [Laughs.]

Roebuck: When you’re on a movie and someone’s playing music, you expect to hear, “5-6-7-8,” and then you’re gonna start dancing. No, these fucking people, they were punk rockers! And, okay, before I was making jokes and trying to be funny, but the fact is, they were committed to a lifestyle that I was not committed to. I was committed to a lifestyle of living through that day and then getting through the movie.

But this was a dangerous situation. When you have people who have no regard for your safety… I mean, one of those guys could’ve broken my fucking arm on the first day! So that’s where you’ve really got to be careful with that stuff. I appreciate that we were in the middle of it, and I appreciate that they were living their life authentically. But I am still mad at all of them. [Laughs.] And if they’d all like to send me an apology, I’m willing to accept it.

CHARACTER EVOLUTION

Jahnson: If you read Jon Cryer’s book (So That Happened), he talks a lot about Dudes, and I guess at some point he felt, like, “I thought I knew what this character was about, and I thought I knew what the punk scene was about, but I wasn’t quite prepared for it.”

Cryer: Grant’s journey as originally written was that he was a brooding, hopeless person who, through the course of trying to get vengeance for his friend, came into his own. That was the original thing. But brooding is just not my strong suit. [Laughs.] So in those first scenes, it’s really hard for me to extinguish all the hope that I have. It’s really difficult. Although Trump is helping.

Spheeris: Going into the movie, I didn’t really know Jon. I didn’t know him as a person. A lot of actors really play it so that they’re in character all the time, and you don’t know who they are. It’s freaky. I think Jon was a little uncomfortable doing some of the things he had to do. But he stepped it up and he liked the challenge of it. Getting to be the “hero” and a little bit of a bad-ass, it was totally off from what he had been portrayed as before. So he was down for it. Actors really love to reach outside the box they’re locked in. And so do directors, really. I mean, I didn’t want to have to keep doing comedies after I did Wayne’s World. But they wouldn’t let me do anything else, so I was stuck with it. Cryer: Once Penelope cast me, I think she ended up with a different movie than was originally written. And I don’t know if that’s for better or for worse. I really don’t! I’m not sure I was the right guy for that. As an actor, I’m generally playful, and that’s part of my strong suit. Also an issue I have as an actor, which directors try to make good use of, is that you can see everything I’m thinking on my face. I’m not holding anything back. is wonderful because sometimes she’s inscrutable, and it allows the viewer to project onto her what she’s feeling. Clint Eastwood’s another one. And , God bless him. But I’m not that. And Grant was written more that.

Penelope realized that she had a couple of jokesters on her hands – and Flea, by the way, is also hilariously funny – I think she realized that she had to go with what she had and make that movie.

Roebuck: I think I played what was on the page. I think I did. Grant was tougher, I believe, and Jon being a fish out of water… The way he was initially conceived was that he was a tough guy in New

York who was also a tough guy in the west. I think why I liked what Jon did so much was because he was a tough guy in New York and then in the west he had to figure it out again. He had to take a step back and earn being a tough guy, which I think made for a much more interesting story.

I hope that I did exactly what Penelope and Randy wanted. I liked both of them very much, and I certainly would have wanted to please them and would want them to still be pleased years later. I mean, you don’t want somebody turning on their movie and going, “Oh, that’s right, I fucking remember now: Roebuck ruined it! I was wondering why I didn’t watch this piece of shit…” But hopefully that’s not the case.

Jahnson: Characters have to evolve. That’s just part of the evolution of any project as the creativity goes into it. You make adjustments as it goes along, and that’s how it evolves and morphs into something. That’s how sometimes screenwriters are shocked to see the final product: because it’s so different from the vision that’s been dancing around in their heads for years prior. But that’s the heat of the kitchen. That’s the nature of the beast, and if you’re not prepared for that, you need to be sweeping floors or writing novels or doing something different. Because it’s going to change.

And that’s part of the beauty of it as well, I’ve discovered. Because there are so many talented people that come in to make a movie, and they’re bringing their creativity and their vision and their resourcefulness to the project, and a lot of times they can bring elements to it that, as a writer, you’d never have imagined, and they only make it better. They only enhance it. They make it bloom. They really make it come to life. And that’s a thrill.

FINDING YOUR INNER NATIVE AMERICAN

Roebuck: Looking back at Dudes now, it’s woefully politically incorrect…and to that I say, “Bravo!

Bra-fucking-o!” But the thing that makes people say, “Oh, my God,” it’s me dressed as a… Native

American. Look, I almost said, “Indian,” but then I stopped myself. Whew, that was close! [Laughs.]

But in 1986, we all said “Indian.” And guess what? I respected and loved the Native American people equally as much then as I do now, even if I said “Indian” then and I say “Native American” now. My respect and regard for them has not changed one iota.

That’s what makes Dudes interesting to me now. Randy and Penelope may disagree, but I think it’s got this thing that everybody would be afraid to put in a movie now, which is Biscuit’s identification with a culture that’s not mine. Now somebody at a studio level would say, “We’re uncomfortable with a white man suggesting that he understands the plight of the Indian.” And that would be fucking stupid, but that’s what they would say. But I like that, back then, Randy was, like, “Dude, I’ve got this great idea! This guy becomes an Indian!” And we were all, like, “Because he has a Mohawk!”

And that was good enough.

Jahnson: I’ve always been a history buff and I’ve always been interested in native American culture, so going back to the tribal notion of this, I thought, “What if Biscuit gets hammered on the head and wakes up and thinks that he’s native American?” I thought it would be an amusing situation as well as something that would be cool.

Spheeris: Biscuit’s vision… It doesn’t make any sense, let’s face it. But I think it had to do with peyote or something. Here’s the thing, though: Randall’s, like, the straightest guy in the whole world. I mean, maybe back in the day he was dropping some L. I don’t know. But I think he was living vicariously or something.

Jahnson: I’ve been accused a lot: “How many drugs do you take? How many psychedelics have you really had?” [Laughs.] But Penelope was right: I didn’t really do psychedelics or much drugs of any kind.

Roebuck: In that dream sequence, I got really sick. The movie smoke then wasn’t like the stuff they use now. If you watch somebody vaping, what they’re really doing is sucking movie smoke into their lungs. But in the old days, it was what they called bee smoke, and it wasn’t something you plugged in, it was something you lit on fire and then wafted. It was really dark, and Bob Richardson really had it looking cool, but all that dancing in circles and breathing in smoke and peace pipes and whatever else was in that scene… That was a little hard.

Jahnson: The three guys who played the native Americans who were in Biscuit’s dream, they were really wonderful. Apesanahkwat was a Miniconjou Sioux from Minnesota, I believe. Arleigh

Bonnaha was Yavapai from Arizona, and he’d been a rodeo clown and was fairly famous as one. And the other was named Redwing. Redwing T. Nez. He was Navajo. Redwing and I stayed in contact for awhile. He’s a really good painter. At one point I was back in Arizona and he took me to some very special sacred places that were on reservation land and weren’t open to the whites. I felt truly honored to be able to do that. I’ve lost contact with him, but I’d love to find him. I know he’s still out in Arizona somewhere. But those guys, we hung out quite a bit, and they were really just a lot of fun and just the coolest people.

Roebuck: The scene when they were pursuing me in the woods, the effects guys showed me how the -shooting worked – they had a crossbow that was held down with sandbags that were moved at the appropriate time – and they were, like, “We’re gonna have you run through here, and then we’re gonna shoot this arrow.” And they built a wall so I wouldn’t overstep the mark, but I look at that now… I mean, if you look at it, you will think, “Only an idiot would let even the most Oscar- winning effects guy shoot a fucking arrow at his head!”

BIG HAIR, BROKEN BONES, SHOOTING GUNS, AND SINGING “HAVA NAGILA”

Roebuck: Okay, so the hair…

Spheeris: It was written into the script that Biscuit had a Mohawk. I think it was, anyway. Now I can’t remember if it was Randall’s idea or mine. But I do know that when Dan came to the audition, he had done his hair up in a fake Mohawk, and I thought, “Oh, that’s pretty cool.” But it caused him a lot of misery through the whole shoot. He complained the whole time. They had to put extensions in. I can imagine it was very uncomfortable. Back in the day, the punks used to use egg whites and

SuperGlue to keep their hair up. It’s not comfy!

Roebuck: I just directed a movie where the lead girl had to shave her head, and I was in the room with her because I remember how freaked out I was when this odd man cut my hair and then dyed it brown and white and yellow. And then I had to go down to this woman who matched what he cut and dyed, and she tied this other hair into my hair. So phase one of my humiliation was the cut, and

I remember the guy who did it was unpleasant. I also remember that at one point I was getting a little air – it was at my apartment that he did all this – and he was, like, “Come back here!” And he started clapping his hands. And I was, like, “I don’t know how they do it in your country, but here we don’t clap our hands or snap our fingers to get people. We just call to them.”

Then I went to this magnificent woman named Sugah off of Wilshire Boulevard, and she did the weaving, as it was called. They say “weaving,” but what they mean is “pulling and fucking tugging.”

That’s what they do. But if they’d called it “pulling and fucking tugging,” then nobody would’ve had it done. But you call it “weaving,” and you’re, like, “Oh, that sounds nice.” It’s not. It’s pulling and fucking tugging, and I swear to God, my bald spot is exactly where that pulling and fucking tugging took place. So I did not cotton to the haircut like other actors, where they’re, like, “Now I can get into character!” I don’t really do that. I don’t really bring that shit home.

Spheeris: Most of the time on a shoot, we have doubles of the cars we use. The Volkswagen was easy to double, which was good, especially since we had to crash it. We didn’t have a double for the

Buick, but there’s an interesting back story on the Buick. I think it’s a ’63 or something, and I wanted that car because when I was just getting out of high school in ’63, my father let me take his brand new ’63 Buick down to the beach to hang out with my surfer friends in Huntington, and I rear-ended somebody and totaled the car. So that’s why I wanted to have that specific car. And we actually found one and put the bull horns on the front of it.

Speaking of the cars, though, that scene in the Volkswagen where they’re singing “Hava Nagila”?

That right there is where the “” scene in Wayne’s World came from. And I’m starting to deduce lately that that’s where Carpool Karaoke came from as well! [Laughs.] I don’t care about the residuals. I’d just like a little credit, you know?

Roebuck: There’s some confusion as to who thought up the idea to sing “Hava Nagila.” We all take credit for it. I thought it was me. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It’s a funny moment in the movie. But I don’t think the crew knew. I think that was part of it. If you watch that, by the way, Flea starts banging his head on exactly where my microphone is…and I hold his head so he stops hitting the fucking microphone!

Jahnson: You know, when you see Catherine Mary Stewart shooting in the film, that’s all her gunplay. She’s very proud of that. And that’s one little regret she has: there wasn’t a full shot of her doing the whole thing, all the spinning of the guns and the target practice. She had really practiced that and was very proud of that.

Stewart: The guy who was in charge of the guns had this apartment in Marina del Ray, in L.A., and I would go out there and practice. He taught me how to shoot properly, he taught me how to twirl the gun so it falls right into the holster… It was fun, and it was a cool learning experience. I also loved doing the horseback riding. I got to do my own riding, which I love doing anyway, so that whole scene where I’m riding with Jon Cryer, that was all me. But that one shot where I just gallop full-out toward the camera, that ended on an interesting note.

Jahnson: The day that I arrived on location in Arizona… I flew into Phoenix, rented a car, and I was driving up to Flagstaff where we were based…and I got a flat tire. And I’m literally in the middle of the high desert out there, and it’s a rental, and I could not find the frigging spare. I’m tearing the whole car up, I could not find it. So I said, “Oh, to hell with it!” I was so annoyed, because I was so looking forward to it. I wanted to get up on the set!

So I ended up hitchhiking – I remember this bus going by and all these kids laughing at me! – and this guy pulls over in a pickup truck and has me jump in, and he has a big crock pot sitting in the cab of the truck! He’s made his chili for the weekend because he’s going to his cabin in Flagstaff. I thought, “Okay, great.”

I finally get up there, I get to the Dudes office, which is at the Holiday Inn, and they get me out to the set, which was out in beautiful high country in Flagstaff. And I’m on the set for about five minutes when Catherine Mary Stewart goes riding by on a horse, and there’s an accident. She’s thrown off the horse, and she broke her arm. And I go, “Oh, my God! I’m a jinx!” [Laughs.] Oh, boy, she really took a tumble.

Stewart: The direction was to make a beeline for the camera and then just go off camera left, and get as close to the camera as you can. So I’m galloping across the field, and I see that somebody has pulled their jeep up right where I’m supposed to exit the frame, right behind the camera. I’m, like,

“Well, what am I doing here? Do I stop and say, ‘We’d better start this again’?” I knew it was a long shot, and I knew they wanted to try and do it in one, so I thought, “Well, I’ll get past the camera and then I’ll just turn off to the left and get out of the way of this jeep.” So I went for it. But when we got to the jeep, this horse… These are trained horses, they know what to do. So instead of following my lead, which was to pull him to the left, he just stopped. And I did not. I went right into the jeep. And I broke my arm!

It was bizarre, because I fell, and I was fine other than using my arms to protect myself, and I thought I was okay. But they said, “Yeah, you’d better get that checked out.” And it really didn’t hurt until I was changing to go to the hospital and I put some weight on that arm when I was leaning against something, and it just went, “WAAAAAAAAH!” And my entire forearm… The bone called the ulna, it was completely broken in half. So for the remainder of the shoot – and I think I only had, like, one more day, so we were really lucky in that regard – I had this cast that you could take on and off, and I was pumped full of drugs.

Jahnson: God love her, what a trooper she was: she was literally back in the saddle the next day, finishing the shots. I thought that was pretty frigging amazing.

Cryer: Oh, my God! That was crazy! To be back up on the horse the next day, I was, like, “I’m not sure that’s right. Has anybody talked to the union?” [Laughs.] But she’s unstoppable.

Stewart: Well, yeah, you know, you’ve got to hang in there, man. It’s all for the good of the movie!

THE HEARTBREAK OF ASBESTOS

Spheeris: When we arrived in Arizona, it was just so jaw-droppingly beautiful. It’s just amazing there at the Four Corners. I had never been there, and I remember saying out loud to Bob

Richardson, “All right! We’re going to kick Arizona’s ass!” And what happened was that Arizona kicked our ass. [Laughs.]

Cryer: We had huge production problems. We had horrible weather problems, we had to cut whole scenes, and we had to do all kinds of post-production, a huge amount of looping and sound work. Spheeris: It was windstorms, sandstorms, rainstorms, snow, everything. Every natural weather event you could imagine, except for earthquakes. We didn’t have an earthquake. We just got closed down a lot by Mother Nature. And I was sure it was because I said that!

Tejada-Flores: When you go in and do this stuff in beautiful, weird, relatively-remote locations and challenging, cold conditions, the metaphor is true: making a film is like making a war and directing a film is like being a general. But Penelope is a fucking great general.

Spheeris: Generally, I was really thrilled to do this movie. The only two real stumbling blocks were the weather and the fact that Lee Ving wouldn’t come out of his trailer for the last scene.

So what do you recall about the scene that had to be rewritten as a result of

asbestos rumors?

Lee Ving: Tell me about that.

Well, I guess you guys were going to film in some location…

Lee Ving: Oh, it’s starting to sound familiar…and I think I figured pivotally in this.

Uh, I would say “yes.”

Lee Ving: [Laughs.] I think I was what you would call the bone of contention!

Cryer: We were shooting in this huge, amazing-looking old building – I think it was a copper- smelting plant – and there was a huge pile of debris on one side of it.

Lee Ving: I remember someone telling me, “Yeah, man, that’s asbestos! All of it!” Somebody in the crew informed me, and I would never say who it was. Not then, especially, because I knew they’d get fired if anything happened over it. I was already committed to the film, so probably getting fired wouldn’t be one of the choices for me. But it’s not some star bullshit that somebody concocted to get the afternoon off or to get back to their dressing room so they could waste more time at the company’s expense instead of working. It’s a logical objection.

Cryer: With all of us tromping around in there, it could well have been dangerous to our health, and

Lee… It was odd to come from him, because this was a guy who used to stab himself on stage and have people just enjoy the bloodletting, so I did have reasons to doubt that he was all about health and wellness. [Laughs.]

Ving: Armed with that information, I’m not going to risk my life or my lungs! I’m a singer. I depend on my lungs! I’m not going to risk that for any film project, I don’t care who it’s for or when or how much I believe in it or what the fuck ever. And it’s not fair to ask people to expose themselves to that.

Roebuck: I appreciate that he didn’t want anything to do with it, but what was confusing was that the building had no windows. They were all broken out. So there was no accumulation of any asbestos substance, because the building had been airing out for, like, 40 years! But no one was going to force him. Ving: I don’t know who among the cast and crew knew about it, but when I found out about it, I spoke to everyone included in the scene, which I think began with Penelope, and said, “That’s asbestos, man, and I just won’t expose myself to it.” And I went back to my dressing room.

Tejada-Flores: Lee didn’t want to cut 20 years off his life by breathing asbestos. And, dude, that’s a totally rational objection which any human being would make. Except if you’re the producer, in which case you’re going, “Hey, fuck, get in there and do it anyway!” [Laughs.] Or you want to, anyway.

Spheeris: You don’t get steam coming out of your ears around Lee Ving. That’s just a bad move. You can either act hurt or try to talk some logic into him, things that are more calm. No yelling or screaming around Lee Ving. You’ll get your face smashed. [Laughs.] No, he wouldn’t actually hit you.

But you’d feel like he did. He’d just kill you with words. So I begged and pleaded with him, but there was no dealing with it.

Cryer: I was willing to take a chance at the time. I was, like, “I don’t know it’s asbestos. It’s just a big pile of crud!” But you’ve got respect his decision: if he thought it was, it wasn’t worth screwing up his lungs. And that’s fair. But that did put quite a crimp into what we could shoot.

Spheeris: So we rewrote the ending. That was…tricky. But it was cool.

Jahnson: I had to leave the sets before they shot that, but I found out later that Lee was upset about the asbestos that was supposedly out there, and… Ugh, it just killed me! It short-changed the climax, which was much more of a showdown, a running gun battle through the interior of this old facility.

Cryer: There was supposed to be a whole cat-and-mouse game inside the copper-smelting plant.

And all we ended up with was two or three shots of us stalking each other, and then – boom! – he gets the drop on me, and that’s that.

Jahnson: So that was a bummer, yeah. I was disappointed about that. But that’s just stuff that happens.

Tejada-Flores: These are problems you face in every movie: how do you get it in the can, and what do you do if you run out of money or time? Given that, we did a really good job.

Ving: Sure enough, we continued filming, but that location was cut from the film, and whatever it was that we were doing in that room, we did it somewhere else later on. But like I said, it wasn’t an attempt to establish some power trip or something. It had nothing to do with that. I was just petrified that some of that could be ingested, and I was angry that I hadn’t been told about it. But we went from there, and from that day I don’t think anybody ever mentioned it again. I think we just moved to a different location and used the same dialogue. I don’t think very many people knew that it had even happened! But it was just one of those things that you have to do. You have to protect yourself.

THE CULT OF DUDES

Cryer: I was in the midst of starting to shoot Hiding Out, I believe, or we were in the midst or rewriting the script or something like that, and I believe I remember hearing that Vista – the company that made it – went under and was selling off its assets, and Dudes was one of them.

I remember hearing that, instead of getting a real release, it was going to get, like, two theaters –

New York and L.A. – because whoever bought it was required to do that. And I remember being sad about that, because even though it was a quirky movie, there were so many things I loved about it.

I was actually in the midst of a bunch of stuff that went wrong. I shot Superman IV, which was just a fiasco, and I had shot Morgan Stewart’s Coming Home, which was originally called Homefront. So when I heard about Dudes, it really brought me down, because it really brought home the crushing truth, which was that right after Pretty in Pink I had made three movies which would barely see the light of day. Because I don’t get into movies that I don’t love. My very first job was on Broadway, and I saved my money. That was my whole thing: I always saved my money, so I never took anything for the money. Say what you will about how these movies came out, but there was always something I loved about them at the beginning. [Laughs.] Either I loved the script or I loved the people. So it’s very difficult emotionally when you see something you love go wrong, something you had high hopes for.

Jahnson: I can’t remember how the news came down. In those days, sometimes a film would get a small release, and they would platform it. If it found an audience, if it was getting some butts in theaters, then they might open it in a few more theaters, and maybe it would roll upward. It was a little bit like rolling uphill. But that didn’t happen. I don’t think they had much left for publicity on it when it was all said and done.

So, yeah, I was disappointed. But you take it in stride. Honestly, I didn’t have much time to feel terrible about it, because I was working too hard on The Doors. This was all in 1986, I think the film came out in ’87, but by that point I was just rolling on to the next couple of things. You try not to look over your shoulder too much. [Laughs.] What’s that lyric? “You keep your eyes on the road and your hands upon the wheel…” Roebuck: Here’s the thing about Dudes: I think it just missed its moment in time. And I don’t mean that as any kind of insult. I think a year or two earlier, when the punk rock movement was hitting its apex, it would’ve been great. Maybe a few years later, when people in the ‘90s were already looking nostalgically back at the ‘80s. Maybe that would’ve made a difference. But you won’t find nicer people than the people who made it. I think we were aware that the company, New Century /

Vista, they didn’t have enough hits to keep going. I just don’t think they had the pull to get their into theaters.

Spheeris: I’m really astounded that, after all these years, this film is finally seeing the light of day, because it didn’t get a release back then. That didn’t get a release, Decline didn’t get a release. I mean, tiny, tiny, little VHS releases or something. The Boys Next Door, too. But now everybody wants to see them. Isn’t that weird? But that’s kind of a trend with my films.

I wasn’t good at knowing how to do it back then. It was before Wayne’s World, and… I have to tell you, by the time I did Dudes, I was kind of used to it. Because I had done Decline, Suburbia, The Boys

Next Door, and a really shitty movie that Carrie Fisher was in, Hollywood Vice Squad. And I didn’t care back then, honestly. All I cared about was making the movie. I don’t think I started caring about box office until Wayne’s World, which was really stupid.

I don’t mean that Wayne’s World was stupid. I mean that caring about box office was stupid. That’s why now people go, “Hey, here’s our target audience, and here’s how much money we think this movie can make…” I’m, like, “Stop talking to me.” Because that’s not why you make a movie. You make a movie because you believe in the subject matter, you think it’s going to help or change the world a little bit, you think it’s going to entertain people for an hour and a half. You don’t sit down and go, “I’ve got to make some money. Let’s do a movie!” It just makes me mad. It’s the punk rocker in me. Punk never dies. It’s like a cockroach. Tejada-Flores: It’s interesting when you create something which is more complex and bigger and interesting than you ever thought it could be. I mean, a fucking punk rock western? Give me a fucking break. How many people have made one of those? [Laughs.] Well, actually, nobody. We made the only one, I think! You can make an argument that Dudes is the only fucking one ever made.

Cryer: I didn’t notice that there was a cult following for the film until very recently, actually. I thought the thing was impossible to find. I had heard that it was on laser disc, and it may have been put out commercially on VHS for a very short period of time, but it was never popular. So I didn’t know that people had had a chance to see it at all. But the guy at my local hardware store said, “Hey, are they ever gonna put Dudes on DVD?” And I said [Startled.] “I have no idea!” But then I realized that I had one of the old VHSs, and I was having all of my family VHSs transferred to DVD, so I just had them do that as well, and I gave him a copy of my somewhat-cruddy VHS, and he was extremely grateful. But that’s about it in terms of my being aware of the cult aspect.

Spheeris: For me, it wasn’t a moment. It was a slow build-up that really came home when I started doing the theatrical tour with the Decline movie a couple of years ago. I would fly all over the

United States to the art houses, and every time somebody brought up Dudes. “Where can we see

Dudes? How can we get Dudes?” That’s when it really hit home. And I thought it had something to do with Jon’s success and his ability, but… I don’t know, I think it’s the weirdness of it all. You know, it’s a weird fucking movie! [Laughs.] And weird is a little more embraced now than it was in ’87.

Roebuck: I think the only thing about it that was disappointing was its reception at the time, so I’m pleased – and I think we’re all blessed – that there’s a resurgence and an interest in it, and people are going to get to see it. Despite whatever lukewarm reception it had originally, I know I bump into people all the time who ask about it, so I think that reception was because they couldn’t get it in enough theaters. Although I know it opened in a second-run theater here in Hollywood. Now that was disappointing…

Ving: The movie didn’t come out and take over the world, but I think it’s made a fair enough splash.

It’s a cult film, and those go on forever. Hopefully it’ll at least keep sending Penelope enough money to be able to stick quarters in the laundry machine at the laundromat. [Laughs.]

Jahnson: It’s interesting: when I moved up here to the Portland area, I’ve met tons of people who are L.A. expatriates or whatever, and I met a guy who used to work in one of the great video stores down in L.A., and he used to work there with Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery, and he said, “Oh, yeah, we used to play Dudes a lot! You know, Quentin really loved it. It was just his type of film.” It’s such a weird mash-up of sensibilities, but he said it was totally something they were playing.

So that was a little bit of an indication that there was life in it, and then with the rise of the internet

I’d occasionally start seeing little clips that people had found somewhere, and people were talking about it occasionally. I’d run into people who’d say, “Oh, I loved that movie when it came out. Where is it? How can I see it again?” And I’d have to shrug and say, “I don’t know!” [Laughs.] So I’d heard these rumblings, and I’d had these little indications that there was a tiny little flame burning out there. Is it a bona fide cult film? I don’t know what the criterion is for that. I’d like to think so.

Stewart: The audience is passionate about it because it’s so weird. That’s what makes these little movies so interesting: going out on a limb, pushing the boundaries, that makes the audience it garners passionate about it. They like odd stuff. They don’t want to have to fit into a box themselves. I’ve done a few movies like that. Night of the Comet is similar: it has an audience that’s passionate about it, but it doesn’t fit into a neat little package, either. I go to these conventions and people come up and say, “Oh, my God, I love Dudes!” And I’m, like, “That’s great!” [Laughs.] So it’s been a slow progression and…almost a rebirth.

Roebuck: It was a strange experience watching it relatively recently. I hadn’t seen it in 20 or 25 years, and Jon and I, when we saw it together at UCLA… I mean, I’ve never laughed so much, only because we were both… [Hesitates.] I don’t want to say “embarrassed by it,” because we weren’t, but it was odd. We were so young – it feels like we were children – and we’re up there saying dirty words. Yeah, it was very odd.

Cryer: Interestingly, in talking with Penelope and Dan when we were doing that panel at UCLA, I realized it was the movie shoot I enjoyed the most, just in terms of sheer pleasure. Even though it was troubled, even though I felt kind of at sea as an actor, Penelope was so much fun to work with, as were Dan and Flea, Randy Jahnson and Miguel Tejada-Flores were lovely, and we were shooting in the middle of Arizona and reenacting all these great cowboy moments… Despite everything, it was just an incredibly joyful time.