Review of Over the Edge (1979) by Chris C — 23 Apr 2012

Its Gotta Be GOOD! Based on real-life incidents in Foster City, California.

Over the Edge: An Oral History.

(Originally appeared in Vice Magazine, September 2009).

"They were old enough to know better, but too young to care. And now this town is . . . Over the Edge." - From the trailer.

In the spring of 1979, a small-budgeted movie with a somewhat corny-sounding name was released in just a handful of theaters in New York and Los Angeles, only to be pulled a few days later due to concerns that audiences would riot. Based (loosely) on a true story about suburban youth gone wild in the suburbs of San Francisco in the early 70s, Over the Edge would never receive a wide distribution. In fact, over the next 25 years, the film would be shown in only a few art houses and on cable TV, until its eventual DVD release, in September 2005.

The film, as certain critics like to label it, is a "lost classic," and yet-unlike the majority of lost or "cult" classics-Over the Edge is actually worth seeking out. Filled with scenes that are difficult to shake, with teen characters played by real-life teenagers (how often does that happen anymore?), and with an authenticity so intense that it appears at times as if the film could very well have been a documentary, Over the Edge remains as thrilling today as it must have appeared three decades ago. While somewhat raw and certainly not without imperfections, it's easy to understand why Kurt Cobain claimed that the movie "pretty much defined my whole personality," and why it so heavily influenced Richard Linklater in making his own ode to restless youth, Dazed and Confused.

Starring a 14-year-old Matt Dillon in his first screen role, as well as a cast of mostly young unknowns (discovered, for the most part, while they were ditching school), Over the Edge manages to highlight a problem that has only grown and become more problematic since the 70s: kids, stuck in the suburbs, far from any city center, with nothing much to do beyond the usual Teen Axis of Evil: drugging, drinking, and petty-criminal acts. (That the film was shot in Greeley, Colorado, less than an hour from where the Columbine High School massacre would take place 20 years later, is, at the very least, a sad, if bizarre, coincidence.).

The plot is simple: Carl (played by Michael Kramer), a decent teen who feels estranged from his distracted parents, befriends a miscreant from the poorer section of the community (Richie, played by Matt Dillon). The two, along with friends, including a druggie and a mute, attend parties, fire stolen guns, and drink in abandoned, half-built houses. Harassed by the local policeman Sergeant Doberman and looking for adventure, Carl and Richie attempt to run away in a stolen jeep. They are caught, and Richie is killed when he aims an unloaded gun at Doberman. Carl escapes back to the development, where, later that night, a group of angry teens attack the junior high school while a parents' meeting on youth violence is taking place. The teens lock the adults inside as they burn cars, fire guns, and cause mayhem in the parking lot. They are subsequently arrested and sent off to "the Hill.".

On this, the movie's 30th anniversary, Vice spoke with nearly 20 of the film's cast and crew, including Matt Dillon, to try to piece together the sometimes arduous making of Over the Edge, the frustrations felt upon its initial release, and how the film, all these years later, still manages to influence a new generation of filmmakers.

BEFORE.

Charles Haas (co-screenwriter): The project began in the early 70s, when Tim Hunter [the other co-screenwriter] showed me an article by Bruce Koon from the San Francisco Examiner called "Mousepacks: Kids on a Crime Spree." It was a sort of sensational piece, and was about young kids who were vandalizing property in Foster City, which was a planned community not too far from the San Francisco airport. Tim saw this article and came over to where I was living. He said, "I think this could be a good idea for an exploitation movie we could both write.".

I had met Tim when he was my professor of film history at U.C. Santa Cruz. I had graduated the year before, and we wanted to work on a project together. This seemed like a good one to start with.

Tim Hunter (co-screenwriter): Foster City was supposed to be an ideal bedroom community. The designers built it with a master plan; it was threaded with little man-made canals and waterways. Outside of some houses were docks that people could use to boat to the grocery store. But there was nothing for the large percentage of teenage kids to do in that town-I think up to 25 percent of the population was below the age of 18. It had the highest percentage of juvenile crime of any comparable city in the country, and it just seemed to me like there might be a movie in that story somewhere.

Excerpt from "Mousepacks: "Kids on a Crime Spree," San Francisco Examiner, November 11, 1973.

Mousepacks. Gangs of youngsters, some as young as nine, on a rampage through a suburban town. One on a bike pours gasoline from a gallon can and sets it afire. Lead pipe bombs explode in park restrooms. Spray paint and obscenities smear a shopping center wall. Two homes are set ablaze. Antennas by the hundreds are snapped off parked cars in a single night. Liquid cement clogs public sinks and water fountains. Street lights are snuffed out with BB guns so often they are no longer replaced. It sounds like the scenario for an underage Clockwork Orange, a futuristic nightmare fantasy. But all the incidents are true. They happened in Foster City where pre-teenage gangs-mousepacks-constitute one of the city's major crime problems.

Tim Hunter (co-screenwriter): It took quite a while to write the script. We started in 1973, and the movie was finally shot in '79. The script was originally called Mousepacks, but that eventually changed.

We spent a long time on research. Both Charles and I went up to Foster City and got a sense of the geographic layout. It was fascinating. All of the houses were built on reclaimed landfill. We visited the community center and started interviewing the kids. They confirmed that all of the incidents described in the Examiner article were true. The kids were bored, so they committed crimes. And they used drugs. And they drank. They told us everything. They were very honest with us.

Charles Haas (co-screenwriter): These kids were bored out of their minds. There was literally nothing for them to do. It was like a theme park without the fun-you'd have these developments called "Whaler's Cove" and these fake pilings and these lame rec centers, with ropes and an airplane and a slide and a sculpture of a whale. Everything was new. Nothing was older than the kids themselves. The place made everyone feel a little disposable.

Excerpt from "Mousepacks: Kids on a Crime Spree," San Francisco Examiner, November 11, 1973.

Last summer the Foster City parks department sponsored 'drop-ins' at a junior high gymnasium. "Within two months the gym had been destroyed-pool tables ripped, ping-pong tables broken," said Juvenile Officer Rick Rivera. "The program had to be cancelled.".

Tim Hunter (co-screenwriter): The only main difference between the film and the article was that our ending was a lot more violent.

When the script was done, I decided to show it to a producer named George Litto. George had originally worked as an agent who specialized in handling blacklisted writers in the 50s, including my father, who had co-written Roman Holiday. George then became a movie producer. He's an amazing character. As a kid in the early 70s, I would hang around George's office as sort of his protégé, and just watch him, as he worked the phones.

So when it came time to find a producer, I gave the script to George, who liked it and bought it. George worked his ass off trying to find a film company willing to make it. Orion, which has just been bought by United Artists, must have passed on the film five times before finally saying yes.

George Litto (producer): Nobody wanted to make this film. I took it to a few studios. Orion finally offered to give us some money, but I went to the bank and borrowed over a million dollars. That's how much I liked the script. I broke the rule; I used my own money. Over the years, maybe I've earned back 90 percent of what I spent, but it was never about the money. I thought it was an important story. It was very ahead of its time: the kids who were going to get into trouble weren't necessarily the ones from the city. They were going to be middle-class kids, suburban kids.

When we finally had everything set up, around 1977, I hired a young director by the name of Jonathan Kaplan. He had one major picture to his name, that had come out in '75, White Line Fever-sort of a modern Western, but with big trucks-and it was very good. I liked that film a lot. That's why I hired him.

Jonathan Kaplan (director): I was only 30 when I was hired to do Over the Edge, but I had some unique experience which helped. I had studied with Martin Scorsese when I was younger. And I had been the director of an infamous Sex Pistols movie called Who Killed Bambi?

What I took away from that experience was the spark and the truth that I saw in the punk aesthetic. And I saw that same spark and truth in the Over the Edge script. I thought, These kids are American punks. They're not as articulate as the English punks, but they're also in a rage.

With that in mind, I decided to attack Over the Edge from a punk angle: keep it simple. No fancy camera moves, visual effects, nothing fancy. I remember when I first saw Super Fly. There were boom shadows, badly shot scenes, and mistakes. But there was a simplicity and an authenticity to it that I really appreciated.

When it came time to cast Over the Edge, we tried to go for that same authenticity: we wanted real teens, as opposed to professional actors-and kids who were also age-appropriate. No twenty somethings playing 14-year-olds.

Andrew Davis (cinematographer): I was a fan of Frederick Wiseman, the documentary-filmmaker. I was a huge admirer of his work, and I wanted to bring his style-as well as the avant-garde European style from the 60s and 70s-to the film, which would only add to the authenticity and the grittiness.

Charles Haas (co-screenwriter): The executives wanted to tone down the violent aspects of the story, but, to George's credit, he held firm. Orion wanted to make a big Romeo-and-Juliet love story, and George would have none of it.

Tim Hunter (co-screenwriter): Both Charlie and I were heavily involved in the casting process, which is rare for writers. We went searching in Colorado and California for real-looking kids, while Jonathan was back in New York, auditioning a bunch of more-professional kids.

Charlie Haas (co-screenwriter): There was no budget for a professional casting call, so Tim and I visited these schools and we'd ask the principal or drama teachers for students they could recommend. And all of the recommended kids were wrong for the parts. They were too actor-y. We wanted kids who looked and acted realistic, and we usually found them behind the school getting stoned. They were cutting classes and doing drugs. These kids definitely weren't in the drama club, believe me.

Matt Dillon was discovered this way. The story is kind of infamous, actually.

Jane Bernstein (talent scout who discovered Matt Dillon): I was a friend of Jonathan's, and I was in graduate school, studying for an M.F.A. Jonathan asked if I would be interested in trying to find non-professional actors. It's funny, but Matt never mentions me when he talks about being discovered. It's always a "couple of guys who found me." But I found Matt at a middle school in Westchester, New York. We were told to look for the new James Dean. Real easy, right? So a friend and I visited different schools. We'd go to the door of a particular classroom, and we'd peer in. If we'd see a kid who looked interesting, we'd ask them a bunch of questions, like "What makes you angry?".

If they had any sort of verve and presence, we'd ask if they were interested in auditioning for the film. We found a lot of cute kids this way, but nobody too special. Then, on our last day in Westchester, we were walking through the crowded halls of this one school, and the bell rang and everyone ran back to class. But there was this one kid-and he really was a kid, like 12 or 13-who was soft and young but who had a toughness about him. He was skipping class, just wandering the hallways. He had this chipped tooth, and he was presenting himself as a tough guy from the wrong side of the tracks. Which was ridiculous. As we later learned, he was from a lovely family in a beautiful section of the suburbs of New York. He was as middle-class as they came.

It was clear from the very beginning that Matt was trying his hardest to play the role of a tough guy. Maybe Rocky Balboa. Or the Fonz, from Happy Days. Or maybe just a punk kid.

Matt Dillon (Richie): I remember Jane well, actually. She was really nice, which was strange. I wasn't used to adults being so nice to me, especially those that confronted me in the hallway. They weren't usually so friendly.

George Litto (producer): I was shown a tape of Matt's audition, and I said, "He's kind of interesting." I just saw electricity. He was raw, but he was very distinctive.

Jane Bernstein (talent scout who discovered Matt Dillon): I remember that someone with the casting department told me that Matt had "good instincts." It was both praise and a conveyed insult. In other words: Is he bright? Is he intelligent? Or is he all instinct, like a jungle animal?

Matt Dillon (Richie): When I look at that film now, I see myself as a little kid-I was 14. Of course, I didn't think of myself as a kid when it was all happening. I just believed in that film and in my role from the beginning. Maybe I was naïve or whatever, but I always thought there was something great in the movie. It really resonated. I wasn't a child actor-I didn't come up that way. If I had gone in and auditioned for a Disney family movie, I wouldn't have connected with that in any way, shape or form. But this role came very naturally for me.

Jonathan Kaplan (director): When I finally met Matt at the audition, I asked what his parents did for a living. He said, "My father is a fucking stockbroker and my mom, she don't do shit." It struck me as funny and ballsy. I liked that. He was definitely raw, but it eventually became clear that he was perfect for the role of the tough kid Richie. Once I decided on him, I then had to fight with the studio to get Matt the job, because he had zero experience.

There were actors who were more experienced than Matt-such as Vinny Spano [who played the bully character, Mark] and Pamela Ludwig [who played Carl's girlfriend, Cory]-but I liked the fact that Matt was completely anonymous. The movie could only work if that was the case.

Pamela Ludwig (Cory): Matt didn't even know what acting was, but it didn't matter. He was a natural.

Matt Dillon (Richie): I wanted to do everything real. So Jonathan would call me Marlon-as in Marlon Brando. I was a Method actor, and I didn't even know what that meant. And I didn't even know who Marlon Brando was, truthfully. I mean, I only knew him as the old guy from The Godfather.

Jonathan Kaplan (director): To direct kids with no experience was exciting, but also kind of scary. Would they be able to handle it? I was pretty confident that they could.

Charlie Haas (co-screenwriter): Once the cast was in place, we decided to shoot the movie out in Colorado, and not in California, because of child-labor laws. In California, the kids' hours would have been cut very short and the budget would have been much more expensive. Shooting b.