Page 3 - JIMMY REARDON LETTER TO CHICAGO CRITICS

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Almost immediately the movie got snapped up by Fox and then it was changed

with input from Fox publicity. The changes took almost two years. By the time

the revised movie came out in theaters River had done two other starring roles and

was being advised by his agents and his mother not to talk too much about the Fox

movie, now altered by studio hacks, which by this time Fox had decided was not

worthy to be shown to critics like those of you at the Chicago Film Critics Associa-

tion.

It wasn’t supposed to be like that.

I found out at lunch one day that newly installed Island President Russell Schwartz

had sold the distribution rights to Fox and that Fox was going to do a new cam-

paign. I said I liked the present campaign and didn’t want to delay the release of

the picture. He said that Island was iling for bankruptcy and had no choice and

anyway the deal was done. I thought something like: how bad could this be? Our

low budget on-location indie gets a wide release by a major studio. How bad could

this be?

At irst the front page Variety article about the “Fox pick up” of our Island Pictures

independent ilm seemed good luck. But then the anguish set in. Russell Schwartz

said that Fox President Leonard Goldberg had screened the

movie at home in Malibu and felt that the whole ilm had the

wrong “tone” and that it was a “downer” and he was going to

screen it for his publicity and marketing team to see what

could be done.

After screening the movie for marketing chief Cynthia Wick

and the Fox publicists, Goldberg called Schwartz and told him to get rid of my nar-

ration, Elmer Bernstein’s ‘heavy’ score, and as much of the voice over as possible.

He said they had decided to make it a “teen exploitation picture.”

As the author of the original novel, who actually became a ilm director to assure

the rightful passage of book to screen – which took 20 years to accomplish -- I was

after suburban class satire and adolescent insight, not exploitation. (Very few nov-

elists manage to direct their novels into movies. I happened to meet Norman

Mailer when he was ilming his book, but there are not many others.)

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