ANDREW DAVIS RETURNS TO STONY ISLAND
By Alex Simon
Director Andrew Davis made his name with hard-hitting action blockbusters like The Fugitive, Under Siege and The Guardian, but like most filmmakers, his first effort was a small film with a modest budget and a lot of heart. Davis’ directing debut Stony Island was shot in 1977, helmed by the then 30 year-old who had made a name for himself as a cinematographer, and conceived as a love letter to the South Chicago neighborhood where he grew up. Based loosely on the story of Davis’ younger brother Richie (starring as a fictionalized version of himself), who grew up as one of the few white kids in a largely African-American neighborhood, Stony Island follows a group of young musicians who try to form an R&B group in their racially-mixed neighborhood. Featuring the film debuts of now-notable names such as Dennis Franz, Susanna Hoffs, Rae Dawn Chong, Meshach Taylor, Natalia Nogulich, legendary musical figures Gene “Daddy G” Barge and Ronnie Barron, Stony Island also boasts the first and only film appearance of Edward “Stoney” Robinson, who died shortly after the film was released.
Stony Island, which Davis co-wrote and produced with Tamar Simon Hoffs, arrives on DVD and VOD from Cinema Libre Studios on April 24 and will have a special screening at The American Cinematheque at The Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles that evening. Andrew Davis sat down recently to discuss his memories of Stony Island, as well as a few memories from a remarkable life behind the camera.
I’ve noticed that about 75% of your movies feature the city of Chicago as not only the setting, but almost as a supporting character.
Andrew Davis: (laughs) Well, the ones that I shot in Chicago, sure.
Which is about 75% of them. You even shot all of The Package there, part of which was supposed to be in Germany.
Let’s see…well, it’s actually seven out of thirteen, so about 50%, but I get your point. Chicago is a great place to make a movie: great crews, incredible visuals, and it’s home. I’m able to get a lot of cooperation and since I was born and raised there, I have a strong visual memory of what would be great locations to shoot in.
Plus, it’s got the greatest concentration of native actors of any city in America. New York and L.A.’s talent pool is largely from out of state, whereas in Chicago, most are home-grown.
Yeah, we’ve got the Goodman and Steppenwolf and an amazing theatrical legacy in Chicago. My mother and father were part of the Chicago Repertory Group. Studs Terkel was involved in it, along with all kinds of interesting people in the ‘30s. When they got married, the maid of honor in their wedding was Viola Spolin, who was a legendary figure in the theatrical world, and the mother of Paul Sills, who started The Second City. The history of that then leads to Alan Arkin, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, John Belushi, and so on.
And it’s also from that spirit that Stony Island was born, in many ways.
Yeah, the beginnings of Stony Island really go back to my younger brother, Richie, who was a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood. A lot of people didn’t have the point of view that what my parents did, which was to stay in their old neighborhood after the demographic had changed, was okay. So I thought that would be a very rich setting to talk about things and to set a story in. Richie is actually interviewed in Studs Terkel’s book Race, where he was asked to talk about his experience. He’s a very interesting guy because of that. He’s been the core of a band called The Chicago Catz for years now because of that, and they’re a very racially-mixed group. So his life became what the movie was about.
The other thing it brought back was how different race relations were back in 1978, particularly in a very ethnically-segregated city like Chicago was then: blacks didn’t mix with whites, whites didn’t mix with browns, and Jews weren’t considered “white” at all.
The sixties preceded the seventies and were an opening up. But after Vietnam there was a real clampdown on all kinds of things and led to this very conservative era. But Chicago has had a tumultuous racial history going all the way back to the riots that put Daley’s buddies in power during the stockyards strike. In my neighborhood, Trumble Park was a housing project where blacks tried to move in during the ‘50s and there was terrible strife for years before it got settled.
So what was it like for a guy who had been a cinematographer for nearly ten years to suddenly be directing his first movie?
I realized by shooting a lot of movies for first time directors that I was learning along with them. I had been around actors all my life because of my folks. I was comfortable around the technical aspects, obviously and also around the story aspects because I was a journalism major. So I had the basis for being very comfortable on the set. The toughest part was raising the money, being the producer, and figuring out how to take care of everybody on the set during the middle of winter in Chicago.
What was the final budget?
It was about $300,000 to shoot it and then we raised another $30,000 or so to finish it up in post-production. We shot on 35mm and recorded all the music live, so it was not easy, by any means. One of the sound guys was Tom Holman, who went on to invent THX sound.
I was very taken with Edward “Stoney” Robinson’s performance, and was very sad to learn he died not long after the picture wrapped. Was he one of those people whose flame simply burned too bright?
I think he had some liver problems. He had hepatitis before that which could have been treated, but wasn’t. He just didn’t look after himself properly. He didn’t do drugs, but he drank, he smoked, he lived hard. If you don’t take care of things in proper time and you get a cold and don’t take care of it, it turns into something else. It was a tragedy, but I told him once “Stoney, if you become famous, you’re going to be dangerous.” I’ve seen it happen to other people. They just sort of come apart.
It’s a shame because whenever he was on the screen, he just owned it.
Yeah, he and Ronnie Barron were two really dynamic characters.
Ronnie Baron was so charismatic that the minute I saw him in Stony Island, I remembered his bit as the bartender in Above the Law.
“Go buy your mama a condominium.” (laughs) That was an improvised line of Ronnie’s, by the way. He was also in Code of Silence. He was the guy in the beginning selling the dope when that big bust takes place.
One of the things I noticed is that most of the people in the movie who are now deceased died really young.
Ronnie was on the road with Canned Heat in Australia, I think, and he had some gum problems, which led to him having a heart attack. Then he had a stroke and they actually gave him a heart transplant before he died, which he paid for with the money he had from SAG insurance. It was an experiment, the first of its kind I think, to see if a stroke victim could handle a heart transplant and it worked. He lived another five or six years after that.
Tell us how you connected with your partner on the film, Tamar Hoffs.
She was a woman whose younger brother Carmi Simon, who’s in the movie, had similar experiences to my brother. Her father was a very prominent rabbi on the South Side who was very connected to Martin Luther King, in terms of being with him days before his murder. He had powerful politicians who were in his synagogue and really helped us out logistically. Tammy had a young family and was really devoted to being an artist. She had just gotten her first break in the movie business by writing a script for Menahem Golan called Lepke, starring Tony Curtis. I shot the picture after John Alonzo recommended me. We started comparing notes about growing up in Chicago and our families and we decided to partner up and write Stony Island.
How much time passed between the time you both conceived the idea of Stony Island to when it was finally finished?
Two or three years, which is actually pretty fast by today’s standards. It was really tough getting the money together.
Let’s go back to the beginning, if you don’t mind. You got your first break working for the great Haskell Wexler on his masterpiece, Medium Cool. Tell us about that.
I had just gotten out of school during the infamous summer of ’68. I had been involved in the anti-war and civil rights movements. I went to Chicago and tried to become an assistant cameraman and was able to go to work pretty quickly for the University of Chicago. Haskell was coming to make Medium Cool and everyone was kind of buzzing about this Academy Award-winning cameraman directing this movie. Haskell used to hang around the theatrical group my parents were involved with and used to ask them advice about his wife at the time, who was an actress. Studs told Haskell that I was interested in film. Haskell, for some wonderful reason, hired me, Barry Feinstein and Alan Pariser to be the “phantom unit,” to shoot documentary footage behind the scenes with a 16mm Éclair camera. We were non-union, no permits, in the streets with the kids shooting riot footage. In fact, we were the only film crew on the other side of the tanks at 14th and Wabash when they opened up the gas on everybody trying to walk to Dick Gregory’s house. So that was a real experience running around with a changing bag while the cops were swinging their batons, trying not to get hit.
Did you get hit?
No, but it was ugly. So after the movie came out, Daly squashed it because Gulf and Western (who owned Paramount, the film’s distributor) was trying to put up a building and Daly said “Get that movie that’s criticizing me outta my town.”
You did some award-winning commercial work after that, which got you another great gig.
I wanted to be in San Francisco, because that’s where Zoetrope was. So I did some more commercial work, some work on “Sesame Street,” and then Gene Corman called Haskell and said “I need a young Haskell Wexler. Danny Melnick and I are going to make black action remakes of The Asphalt Jungle, Get Carter and some other movies.” So that led to me shooting Hit Man, and a few other movies, including Paul Bartel’s Private Parts.
One of the last films you shot was a movie that blew the back of my head off as a kid, Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge.
Jonathan and I had done The Slams together, another Corman action movie. I had just finished Stony Island, and in fact I watched the answer print for Stony Island in a theater in Aurora, Colorado with the crew from Over the Edge. I also met my wife on that movie. Adrianne (Levesque) was the costumer. Matt Dillon was a kid that (casting director) Lou DiGiaimo had found on the streets and we were going to make this crazy movie about kids who burn down their school during a PTA meeting. It was an exploitation picture, essentially, but it was also very scary. At the time it came out, there were two other movies that were sort of “youth in rebellion” movies that got squashed. Walter Hill made one (The Warriors) and I think Phil Kaufman made one (The Wanderers). I guess there were some problems in some of the theaters showing the other pictures, so Over the Edge barely got a theatrical release before they pulled it. The powers that be were scared by it.
Yeah, it resurfaced on HBO in the early ‘80s, where they ran it for what seemed like three times a day, which how it became the cult film it is today. Ironically, you had a similar problem with Stony Island.
Yeah, when it played in theaters in white neighborhoods, black kids would come to see it and the theater owners got nervous. So they tried to remarket it as a so-called “black picture” and retitled it My Main Man From Stony Island. Needless to say, it didn’t work too well. (laughs)
But, enough people saw Stony Island and were impressed by your work, that you haven’t stopped working since.
Yeah, people like Mike Medavoy saw it and said “Okay, the kid can direct.” (laughs)
What was it that made you fall in love with film specifically? Was there one film you saw that lit the fuse?
There were two movies that sort of got me. When I was really young my mother took me to see The Little Fugitive, which is a film made without synch sound about a kid who plays a joke on his little brother pretending that the brother has shot him, and the little brother runs out into Coney Island, lost, thinking he’s killed his brother. It was very emotional, very real and gritty. So that got me. A number of years later, my sister was going to school in Madison, and I went to see The Magnificent Seven with a bunch of her male college friends. But it goes back even further. I remember as a kid asking my mom what she would have done if she hadn’t had us. She said “I would’ve been a photojournalist.” I was the president of the South Chicago YMCA photo club when I was eight. At twelve, I was the projectionist in grammar school. The reason I became a filmmaker is that I was a journalism major at University of Illinois. Roger Ebert was Editor of the Daily Illini. I was on the air on WILL and we would be reading all these wire service reports about Vietnam, which were lies. We realized that we were repeating lies that the government wanted us to say about the war in Vietnam. I was anti-war, so I said “I don’t wanna do this.” So I quit. And that’s when I got the job as an assistant cameraman at University of Chicago. So since that time, I haven’t had a regular job since I worked in the steel mills in college. I’ve been freelancing ever since then. I didn’t want to be stuck like my father, living a Willy Loman life as a wholesale drug salesman, before he went back to the theater.
You saw him as a Willy Loman figure during that time?
Yeah, he was an actor, but he had a family to support, so he became a salesman.
Who are some of your filmmaking influences?
Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, William Friedkin, Federico Fellini, Norman Jewison, Sidney Lumet, Haskell, of course. I remember Jan Troell’s The Emigrants, too. That really knocked me out and Tony Richardson’s The Loved One and also Tom Jones. I don’t know if still holds up today, but when I saw it, it was ‘Wow!’
I watched the restored version six months ago. It feels like it could’ve been shot yesterday since Richardson did it neo-realist style: natural light, very little make-up.
And it looked good? The tape I watched years back looked pretty rough.
Yeah, beautifully restored.
Okay, I’ll have to check that out, then.
You have the distinction of being the only guy to have made a good Chuck Norris movie (Code of Silence) and two good Steven Seagal movies (Above the Law, Under Siege). What was your secret?
(laughs) Well, you try to give them a context that works for them. You try to let them be who they are and surround them with really talented fellow actors. You make the story real. And you don’t make them stretch too far. And, of course, play to their strengths: physicality, clarity of purpose, all that stuff.
The Package is one of the great thrillers of the ‘80s.
Thank you. That was a real challenge making that picture because I was working with one of the masters, Gene Hackman, and he was going through a lot of personal stuff at the time and wasn’t real patient with anybody. The original script took place at Camp David. John Bishop, who was a well-known playwright, had written the script and I said ‘We can’t do the movie at Camp David. Why don’t we do the movie in Chicago?’ So we adapted the whole thing to Chicago. I had been to Berlin and I knew I could substitute Chicago for Berlin, because so much of the architecture is similar. I learned a lot and it was a great experience working with Gene and, of course, Tommy Lee Jones. I had seen him in Back Roads, and wanted him to play that character. We clicked instantly because the quarterback for my high school team, Georgie Lalich, was the quarterback at Harvard where Tommy Lee played. (laughs) So that was the beginning of an important relationship.
That was also where your Chicago crew of actors, Ron Dean, Joseph F. Kosala, and many more, first appeared. A lot of them are ex-cops, right?
Yeah, Joe is an ex-cop but ironically enough, because he usually plays cops, Ron Dean did time as a kid for killing a cop.
What? And the other former cops were still willing to work with him?
Ron was a kid and the cop was beating him up. I don’t know what exactly happened to make it go so out of control. But that group of Juan Ramirez, Michael Nino, Mike James and all these guys were just interesting characters. They were like my team of heavies, of tough guys.
When you did The Fugitive did you have an idea of how great a movie it was going to be and how big a hit it was going to be, or was it just another job?
Well, it wasn’t just another job. I was just coming off Under Siege and I was the cat’s meow at the time. Arnold Kopelson came up to me at the premiere of Under Siege and said “I know what your next movie is going to be.” The next Sunday I got a call from Bruce Berman who said “Harrison Ford just saw Under Siege and he wants you to direct The Fugitive. Can you be in a meeting Monday morning?” (laughs) So I went to the script meeting, and the script was just terrible. It had been developed by three or four different people, and I’m not blaming anybody, but in that script the character of Gerard that Tommy Lee Jones played had hired the one-armed man to kill Kimball’s wife because Kimball had let Gerard’s wife die on the operating table.
Different movie.
Yeah, very different movie. So Harrison had committed somehow and I had to figure out how to make the script work. So I called up my sister, who was a nurse at Cedars, and I said “Josie, what could get a doctor in really deep shit?” She called me back the next day and said “What if there’s a drug protocol going on and the guy disses it? He says this drug isn’t worthwhile and this big pharmaceutical company wants to shut him up.” So that became the basis for Devlin-MacGregor and Provacic. So I owe it to my sister’s insights that we fixed it. The script wasn’t completely finished, so we improvised a lot on the set. Tommy Lee and I had done that a lot on Under Siege. So we’d improvise, write it down and shoot it. A few weeks into the shooting, James Newton Howard came to see me in Chicago and I showed him some cut scenes so he could start the score. That’s when I first said to myself ‘This could be big.’ I had the biggest movie star in the world, a very compelling story about an unjustly-accused man and I saw that grandmothers could take their grandkids to see this movie, so it was a four-quadrant movie. When we finished shooting, Warner Bros. said “We need this movie tomorrow.” So Peter MacGregor-Scott, an amazing producer, got seven editing suites set up at Warner Hollywood Studios and we were cutting around the clock. I was like a dentist, going from room to room. (laughs) We had a preview the day before we were going to show it to the studio. We secretly screened for about seventy people in a little theater by the dubbing stage. And the scores were through the roof. Kopelson let everybody know, of course. (laughs) The next day at the “official” screening, Harrison kissed me after the scene where he breaks down during the interrogation. He was scared to death, because he didn’t know what he was going to see. So Warners loved it, said “Don’t make any changes” and we proceeded to make 1600 changes after that. The film was literally done (with post-production) in about ten weeks. And we went out in August. I think it did about $25 million its opening weekend, but ticket prices were only about four bucks back then, right? Its gross, if adjusted for today’s market, would be around $900 million worldwide.
You were the hottest director in town after that and could have made any film you wanted. Did your life change after that?
Oh, of course it changed. I don’t think I truly realized what I could have done with this newfound success and I decided to make Steal Big, Steal Little. It was based on a land fraud case that happened in Morgan City. I could stay in Santa Barbara, where I was living with my family. I’d been offered this amazing deal by a guy named Victor Kaufman, who founded Tri-Star and had started a new company called Savoy. I had a three-picture put deal with final cut, ownership of the negative, and all kinds of stuff. It was the best deal in town that no studio was going to touch. Then before we’d even finished the movie, they were out of business. In terms of making movie, I probably should have done another action movie right away, with a big star, but in retrospect, it all worked out. I was able to do several other films after that I’m very proud of and you don’t want to get pegged. You don’t want to get put in a box. When I did Holes, they didn’t know what to make of me.
Now you’re doing a film about Depression-era bank robber Pretty Boy Floyd.
We’re trying to put it together. It’s a very interesting script and a very timely story. It’s like The Grapes of Wrath. This was a guy who was robbing banks and paying off mortgages. There’s a couple other things I’m trying to work on, including a modern version of Treasure Island set in post-Katrina Louisiana. That's my real baby. It’s a real populist, Robin Hood kind of story.
It sounds like you’ve got two Robin Hood stories in the works.
Yeah, we could use a little Robin Hood in the world right now.
Andrew Davis was one of the greatest directors of all time, along with Wes Craven, Sean S. Cunningham, Richard Donner, Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, Christopher Nolan, Bryan Singer, Oliver Stone, and John Carpenter.
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