Farewell to A Man Obsessed: Brain Dennehy

I once joked with Brian Dennehy that we had him to blame for the whole Rambo franchise. After all, if his small-town lawman hadn’t pushed Sylvester Stallone’s troubled Vietnam vet to the brink during the original First Blood (1982), John Rambo wouldn’t have gone on the rampage in the first place.

“Yeah,” Dennehy responded with a wolfish grin, “they’ll probably wind up putting that on my tombstone: ‘He Pushed John Rambo Too Far!’”

But, then again, maybe not. By the time of his passing Wednesday evening at age 81 — a good 30 years after we shared that exchange at the New York press junket for Presumed Innocent — Dennehy had amassed an amazing number of impressively diverse stage and screen credits, most of them dutifully noted in my Variety colleague Carmel Dagan’s obituary tribute. To put it simple and gratefully: He was too prolific and prodigious to ever be name-checked for a single role.  

The first time I spoke with the late, great actor was at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival, shortly after the world premiere of Peter Greenaway’s The Belly of an Architect. I am posting this interview, which originally appeared in a slightly different form in The Houston Post several weeks before that movie’s U.S. release, not because of his extraordinary performance in that drama, but rather because of what Dennehy revealed about what acting meant to him. I’d be willing to bet he always had that same fire burning inside him.

Brian Dennehy, character actor extraordinaire, currently can be seen as a part-time author and full-time cop in Best Seller, an offbeat thriller in which he co-stars with his friend James Woods. Next year, he’ll be seen in The Return of the Man from Snowy River, in a role Kirk Douglas played in the first Snowy River adventure. “Kirk’s cleft fell out,” Dennehy jokes in his

typically gregarious fashion, “and they had to replace it. So I’m filling in for him.”

But during interviews at film festivals in Cannes and Toronto this year, Dennehy spent most of his time talking about a far more esoteric project: The Belly of an Architect, Peter Greenaway’s bizarrely stylized drama about a middle-aged American architect who loses his dignity, his sense of purpose and his much younger wife while overseeing an exhibition in Rome.

Dennehy stars in the film, which will be released later this year, as Stourley Kracklite, the architect who comes to question the value of everything, and everyone, he has held dear. It’s a character Dennehy could identify with very easily.

“When I read this script a year and a half ago,” he told me at Cannes, “I was going through a period — which I'm still going through, to a certain extent — of trying to deal with the fact of being 48, of having achieved a certain success, a certain celebrity. And having to come to terms with the fact, which everyone has to come to terms with, that's it's all bullshit. It doesn’t really mean anything.

“In other words, you spend 20 years of your life saying, ‘If I ever get to this place, if I ever get what I want, I'll be happy. All the mysteries of the world will be solved, and I will know what’s right.’ Well, you get that. And then you say to yourself, ‘You know something? The mysteries are not all solved. And I’m not particularly happy. And it really doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference that you get what you want.’”

Not that Brian Dennehy is a bitter man. Not at all. He ppreciates the respect and acclaim he has earned in such high-profile supporting roles as the friendly alien in Cocoon, the cheerfully corrupt sheriff in Silverado, and the hard-charging New York cop in F/X. And he is extremely grateful to director Peter Greenaway for casting him in Architect, the first movie where he has received top billing.

But for Dennehy, there's something more important than the billing, the good reviews and the public recognition. For him, the most important thing is simply acting.

“The first thing I noticed about Kracklite is, Kracklite is a man who is obsessed. And I am obsessed — I am obsessed with acting. I'm obsessed with what I do. And I have come to terms with that. There was a time, four or five years ago, when people would say to me, ‘You’ve got to find something else. Get yourself a nice girlfriend, get on your sailboat and sail away, find something else. You can’t just care about this one thing.’ But eventually, I got to the point where I figured, ‘This is the only thing I care about. This is the only thing that interests me. Yes, I am obsessed with it.’

“If you're really lucky, after going to a psychiatrist three times a week for 20 years, the psychiatrist says, ‘You're not changed, but now you know what you are, you know how you are. And you can live with that.’ Well, that’s the way I feel.”

Al Pacino might have played John Rambo. And Rambo might have died in the first Rambo movie. But...

After hearing yesterday’s announcement about the Sept. 20 release of Rambo: Last Blood — the fifth and purportedly final chapter in the long-running franchise featuring Sylvester Stallone as troubled yet tenacious Vietnam War veteran John Rambo — I was reminded of a conversation I had back in 2012 at Fantastic Fest in Austin with director Ted Kotcheff (pictured above with Stallone), the director who helped start it all with the original First Blood (1982).

Kotcheff reminded me that he came to the project after it had been offered to other actors — including, no kidding, Al Pacino — and before the fateful decision had been made to keep John Rambo available for a string of sequels, Yes, it’s true: At one point, First Blood was envisioned as a one-and-done melodrama.

Here are some highlights from my 2012 conversation with Kotcheff.

John Rambo actually dies at the end of the novel that inspired First Blood. And I understand that’s also what happened in early drafts of the script. Have you ever wondered what a different sort of pop-culture impact the character would have had if you’d offed him like that – and not allowed him to survive for sequels?

What happened was, originally, the movie was conceived as the story of this Vietnam veteran who’d been kicked around from pillar to post. He didn’t feel there was any room for him in American society anymore – he was a piece of machinery that was broken. But then something happens. When he returns to that town where he’d been told to leave, he’s on a suicide mission. This was it — he had to die. Because he didn’t want any more of America.

And I take it that’s how the character came across in scripts that went out to people like Al Pacino, who was offered the project before Sylvester Stallone came on board.

When I cast Sylvester, we worked on the script together. And thing about Sylvester is – he has a very good populist sense. While we were shooting the film, we had a pretty good idea what it was all about. But we rewrote the ending various ways – something like 16 times – until we came up with the idea that the colonel, the character Richard Crenna plays, comes in there to put him out of his misery, to shoot him. And when he can’t do it, Rambo commits hari-kari. That’s the “alternative ending” you can see on some of the DVDs.

It’s really quite shocking in its abruptness. Stallone just pulls the gun while it’s still in Crenna’s hand – and pow!

And after we shot that, Sylvester comes over to me and says, “God, we put this character through so much. He jumps off cliffs, he gets shot and has to sew himself up, dogs are sicced on him – and now we’re gonna kill him? The audience is really gonna dislike this.”

And then he said, “Also, looking at it from a crass commercial point of view, I’m sure that whoever distributes this film” – because we didn’t have a distributor yet, we made it independently – “they’re not gonna want him to die at the end.” And I said, “You got a point, Sly. I have an idea – I know how to do this.”

And that’s when you shot the ending where he survives.

And the funny thing is, the producer wasn’t happy. He asked, “What are you doing, Kotcheff? What are you shooting? We already agreed, this is a suicide mission. We can’t have him surviving.”

And I said, “Just leave it to me, it’ll only take two hours, we can shoot this other ending.” And he was like, “We’re already over-budget. We can’t afford two hours of shooting.” But I finally convinced him to allow me to do it.

And then?

We had the first test screening in a suburb of Las Vegas. And I have to tell you, I never had another audience respond like that. They were yelling: “Great! Get him! Get him!” They were so involved with the action, it was just amazing. And then, he commits hari-kari. Well, you could have heard a pin drop in the cinema. And then a voice rang out: “If the director of this film is in this moviehouse, we should grab him and string him up from the nearest lamppost.” So I said to my wife, “Let’s get out of here before they string me up.”

So it was a no-brainer to make the change?

All the response cards we got back had things written on them like, “This is the best action film I’ve ever seen, but the ending…” And all you saw were exclamation marks. Every card had the same reaction. So I just turned to the producers, and said, “Boys, I just happen to have this other ending.” That’s how it happened.

Good-bye to John G. Avildsen, who scored a knockout by directing Rocky

It’s hail and farewell to John G. Avildsen, the Oscar-winning director of Rocky, who passed away Friday in Los Angeles.

To be sure, Avildsen had several other notable films on his resume — including  Joe (1970), his discomfortingly prescient drama (propelled by Peter Boyle’s career-launching lead performance) about the murderous rage of the so-called Silent Majority; Save the Tiger (1973), a powerful portrait of a morally compromised businessman, for which Jack Lemmon received his own Oscar as Best Actor; and, of course, all three of the original Karate Kid movies.

But Rocky is the career-highlight achievement most likely to give Avildsen a fair shot at immortality. More than four decades after the scrappy small-budget 1976 movie about a never-made-it boxer came from out of nowhere to score Oscar gold, top box-office charts and rouse audiences to full-throated cheers, it continues to entertain movie fans – and influence moviemakers – with the undiminished force of an enduring pop-culture phenomenon.

To fully appreciate its vast and enduring popularity, consider this: A decade or so ago, Sylvester Stallone told me about an amazing image he remembered from early news coverage of the Iraq War. “I saw some Iraqi in some town hold up a flag with Rocky on it,” he said. “And I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me! Where did he have this flag for the past 20 years? Under his bed?’

“I mean, what was he thinking? ‘Oh, yeah, the day they come here to free us, I’m gonna pull out my Rocky flag!’?”

When I spoke with Avildsen back in 2014 — shortly before a Texas appearance to promote The Films of John G.Avildsen: Rocky, The Karate Kid and Other Underdogs — I related this anecdote to the director. He was amused — but not surprised.

“That’s another indication,” Avildsen said, “of just how pervasive that movie’s been around the world.”

Here are some other highlights from our 2014 conversation.

It never ceases to amaze me that so many people misremember the ending of Rocky – that they actually think Rocky Balboa won the big fight. Back in the 1980s and ‘90s, I would occasionally get phone calls at The Houston Post from people who wanted me to settle bar bets regarding whether Rocky or Apollo Creed won.

That’s funny. But, really, I never thought it was important whether they knew it or not. And if they thought it was important, they missed the point.

When I interviewed Sylvester Stallone a few years back, he indicated that while you were making Rocky, expectations weren’t very high for the film.

We thought it was going to be on the bottom half of a double bill of a drive-in in Arkansas. There was no expectation of what it became.

Do you think you could get it green-lit in today’s blockbuster-obsessed Hollywood?

It would depend whether George Clooney were going to play Rocky. I mean, seriously, it all boils down to who’s going to play the guy. The people who financed Rocky had no idea who Sylvester Stallone was. And they were shown Lords of Flatbush – a terrific movie, and Sylvester was very good in it. They saw it, and they said, “OK,” and they okayed it.

So now the movie’s being made, and they look at the first dailies. And they say, “So, where’s Stallone?” And I say, “That guy’s Stallone.” And they say, “No, Stallone is a blond.” See, they saw Lords of Flatbush – and they thought Perry King was Stallone. They said yes to Perry King. That gives you some idea how well everything is organized in life.

Do you still re-watch Rocky from time to time?

Oh, if I come across it while I’m channel-surfing and, you know, if nothing else is on, I might. But I don’t go out of my way. [Laughs] I’ve already seen it a few times.

Well, you already know how it ends, right?

It wasn’t supposed to end that way, though.

Really?

Originally, it was written where the crowd carries Apollo out, and the crowd carries Rocky out. And as Rocky’s going by Adrian, who’s at the end of the aisle, he leans down and pulls her up and they go out on everybody’s shoulders. That’s how it was written, and that’s how we shot it with Apollo being carried out.

But then the assistant director came to me and said, “We don’t have enough extras to carry out Rocky.” And Sylvester heard this, and he said, “Well, you know, Rocky didn’t win, so maybe nobody carries him out. Maybe he just walks down the aisle, and he sees Adrian, and they hold hands and they walk off.” And I said, “Gee, that sounds pretty poetic. Let’s do that.” So we did do that. And if you remember, the original poster had the boy and the girl walking away from the camera.

So what made you decide to change that ending?

Well, I’m cutting the thing together, we’re almost done, and (composer) Bill Conti brings me the last cue, the last piece of music for the movie. And I was knocked out by it. I said, “Boy, that is absolutely sensational. But I don’t have any footage to go with that. I’ve got this boy and girl walking away like they’re going to a funeral. And this music is not that.” So what I think we ought to do is, we keep Rocky in the ring, and have (Adrian) battle her way through the crowd. He’s bellowing: “Adrian! Adrian!” And she gets there, and they clinch, and it’s “I love you,” and we’re out.

Well, nobody wanted to hear about that. Because, you know, if they hear that we’re reshooting, people will think you’ve got a turkey. So I played this music and cut the film that I had, and then I told (the producers), “Instead of seeing this, imaging her battling her way through the crowd to get to the man she loves.” And they said, “Well, OK, you have half a day.”

These are the same producers who are about to start shooting on New York, New York, a Marty Scorsese picture with DeNiro and Liza Minnelli. And Marty’s camera package was sitting in their office. So we borrowed it – unbeknownst to Marty, I think. That’s what we shot that ending with.

If we didn’t have that ending, and we didn’t have Bill Conti’s music – I wouldn’t be talking to you right now.

TV Alert: Thanksgiving morning on MSNBC

When it's Thanksgiving, we think of turkeys, right? Which might explain why MSNBC has asked me to come on between 8:30 and 9 am CST Thanksgiving Day to talk about holiday movies -- like, among other others, Creed. Better get that DVR warmed up now.

Rambo: The TV Series?

Yet another iteration of the character introduced to moviegoers in Ted Kotcheff's First Blood? Well, OK. But hasn't there already been a Rambo TV show? Oh, yeah. This one.

Escape Plan: "You hit like a vegetarian!"

OK, I'm sold. Put me down for at least one ticket to Escape Plan. I mean, Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jim Caviezel and Vincent D'Onofrio? And it was shot in my hometown of New Orleans? Damn, I am so there on opening day.

Trailer watch: Bullet to the Head

It's been nearly 30 years since director Walter Hill changed the rules, raised the bar and set the standard for disparate-duo action flicks with 48 HRS.  Coming next February to a theater or drive-in near you: Bullet to the Head, Hill's latest rock-'em, sock-'em extravaganza, starring Sylvester Stallone as a seasoned hit man and Sung Kang (of the Fast & Furious franchise) as a badass cop who join forces to lay the smackdown on the killers of their respective partners. Sounds promising to me. 

Rocky vs. Raging Bull?

Maybe so, if Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro really do sign on to play aging prizefighters who meet in a Grudge Match.

Guilty pleasure alert: Half Past Dead

During the opening minutes of Half Past Dead, we're introduced to Steven Seagal as a character who claims to be a Russian mobster. (Mercifully, we're spared any attempt at an appropriate accent.) Then we're told the other people on screen actually believe he's a Russian mobster.

And then the movie gets really preposterous.

It’s practically impossible to get through this frankly fantastical 2002 by-the-numbers B-flick with just a suspension of disbelief. Rather, you have to wrestle disbelief to the ground, and then apply a chloroform-soaked handkerchief. And yet, if you do somehow manage to restrain your skepticism – or, perhaps better, you just throw up your hands and go with the flow – you can have a down-and-dirty, rock-the-house good time with it. Seriously. Well, OK, not so seriously. But really and truly.

Indeed, it’s particularly pertinent this weekend, as Sylvester Stallone unleashes The Expendables, an ‘80s-style high-testosterone action-adventure that some critics and movie buffs believe would have been even better had Sly somehow managed to fit Seagal (and, for that matter, Jean-Claude Van Damme) into the mix alongside Jet Li, Mickey Rourke, Dolph Lundgren and the rest of the Over the Hill Gang. Fortuitously, H-Town’s KTBU/Channel 55 has scheduled not just one but two weekend airings of Half Past Dead – 10 pm Saturday and 5 pm Sunday – to illustrate just how much Seagal could have contributed to the carnage in Sly’s extravaganza. Take my advice: Pop some popcorn, crack open a beer – and savor the cheese.

Seagal plays Sasha Petrosevitch, a burly hardass who worms his way into an international carjacking ring by earning the trust of bantamweight Nick Frazier (rapper-actor Ja Rule), a pistol-packing thief with an itchy trigger finger. Unfortunately, Nick decides to draw his guns when the FBI raids the crime ring's chop shop. Even more unfortunately, Sasha takes a few bullets during the melee, and very nearly gets embraced by the light – hence, the title – before recovering sufficiently to finish his undercover work.

That's right: Sasha's really a deep-cover agent, assigned to use Nick as his stepping stone to the heavyweights who run the carjacking operation. (Naturally, it's not just a mater of law-and-order business; it's a personal crusade of vengeance for our hero.) Sasha is so determined to stick close to Nick that, when the latter is shipped off to a newly refurbished Alcatraz prison – played, in a bold stroke of casting, by a soundstage in Germany – Sasha gets himself sentenced to the same institution, for a reunion with his new best friend.

Which, of course, means that – in the grand tradition of Under Siege, Seagal's very best movie, and Die Hard, the masterwork that spawned Under Siege and dozens of other imitators – our hero is the right man in the wrong place at the right time when all hell breaks loose.

Sasha arrives at Alcatraz just in time for the execution of Lester (Bruce Weitz), a criminal mastermind who's determined to go to his grave without revealing where he hid $200 million in stolen gold bullion. But before Lester can meet his maker – which he's serenely prepared to do, having experienced a religious conversion that, surprisingly, the movie doesn't exploit for cheap laughs – Alcatraz is assaulted by a commando team led by Donny (Morris Chestnut), a disgruntled State Prison Bureau employee who wants a crack at “convincing” Lester to spill the beans about the bullion. (Damn those pesky bureaucrats.) And just when you think things can't get any more contrived, a Supreme Court justice (Linda Thorson) shows up. She's on hand to witness the execution, which means she's conveniently available for use as a hostage when…

Wait a minute! Wait a minute! You're going to need some more chloroform!

No doubt about it: Half Past Dead is three-quarters past absurd. But the fight scenes (choreographed by Hong Kong master Xin Xin Xiong) are more than passably impressive, and the cat-and-rat games played by Sasha and the prison invaders make for totally predictable but reasonably exciting mayhem. Don Michael Paul, working from his own screenplay, directs like someone who has studied the entire oeuvre of John Woo, and actually leaned a few things about pacing and editing. In fact, the movie bogs down only during a few painfully sincere scenes that are meant to provide, ahem, character development.

With the help of some quick cutting and crafty camera angles, the middle-aging Seagal appears here to be just as fleet-footed and two-fisted as ever. (But perhaps this explains why, eight years later, Sly didn’t draft him for The Expendables – maybe it requires too much post-production effort to disguise any decrepitude these says?) His acting is, as usual, best described as minimalist, though he does have an undeniable screen presence. Throughout long stretches of the movie, though, he's content to recede into the background while more animated co-stars take over.

Much of the movie is pilfered by Ja Rule, who obviously was hired to enhance Seagal's appeal to younger, more racially diverse audiences. Claudia Christian has a few choice moments as a hard-bitten FBI agent who looks great in a bulletproof vest. And Nia Peeples struts through the movie like she's in love with her own bad self as Donny's second-in-command, a leather-clad vixen who obviously took lessons in slo-mo hair tossing and coat swinging from the character Lucy Liu essayed in Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever.

Which reminds me: Hey, Sly, couldn’t you have hired some badass female action stars for The Expendables? What’s the matter? Were Cynthia Rothrock and Shannon Tweed asking for too much money? Huh?

Coming soon: The Expendables

Damn! Why can't get this movie in 3-D?

Death Wish redux

Now that he's finished making new sequels to his own movies -- the new Rambo epic is due in theaters Jan. 25 -- Sylvester Stallone has set his sights on directing and starring in a remake of Death Wish. But, really, is this movie necessary? I mean, didn't we already have two kinda-sorta Death Wish remakes already this year?

Rocky times in Iraq

On Wednesday, I got my first look at the trailer for Rocky Balboa. Later that evening, I heard more bad news about the latest casualty figures in Iraq. Ever since experiencing that bizarre confluence, I've been thinking about something Sylvester Stallone told me in 2003 -- back when many folks thought "staying the course" was a great idea. Stallone was talking about the enduring popularity of his Rocky character. But he also wanted to say something about the global influence of made-in-America pop culture -- an influence, I now fear, may diminish as the U.S. occupation continues. The money quote:

“Something like Rocky eventually gets out of your hands and becomes bigger than you personally could ever be. I’m always taken aback by how long that character has endured. I remember, when I was watching TV coverage of the Iraq War, I saw some Iraqi in some town hold up a flag with Rocky on it. And I thought, ‘You gotta be kidding me! Where did he have this flag for the past 20 years? Under his bed?’ I mean, what was he thinking? ‘Oh, yeah, the day they come here to free us, I’m gonna pull out my Rocky flag!’?”