Page 4 - JIMMY REARDON LETTER TO CHICAGO CRITICS

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But the studio marketers revealed their true intention, that they bought the picture

to sell teen sex and hot oldies from the sixties on a sound track, end of story. They

did this, as the system allows, to make more bucks at the box ofice.

I still dispute that the movie I’m sending you would have fared worse at the box

ofice, but even so, the justiication for the delay of the movie and its effects have

to be included as human and artistic toll. If this were a cinema homicide, and they

killed Jimmy Reardon, and the murder was for money, then these were “Special

Circumstances.”

They said my ilm was more serious than funny – which I don’t deny – and that my

voice-over narration, which later caused River and

Keanu Reeves to cast me in Gus Van Sant’s “My Own

Private Idaho” as the Falstaff character, “sounds like a

grandfather.”

They said Elmer Bernstein’s music was old-fashioned

and a “turn off” to “today’s audiences.”

The movie I’m sending is my challenge to that bottom

line vapidity, so you can judge for yourself. In my view, Mr. Bernstein’s score is

electrically alive, and you can hear it, as Nietzsche said, in your muscles.

As for the voice over: I shall repeat today as I asserted then: my narration was de-

signed to sound like the older novelist I was, remembering his youth, which hap-

pened to be something like my own.

Having an older voice provided a frame for River’s performance, so the voice over

didn’t compete with the dialogue.

More importantly, the narration supplied, you might say, the “conscience” of the

movie, without which the inner life of the character is unknown. Since some

events were fact, this was truth colliding with iction, a ission of layers within lay-

ers, I thought, mirrors relecting backwards and forwards; heady chimerical con-

cepts, maybe, but I thought achievable on ilm.

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