Read Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind Online
Authors: Gavin Edwards
Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind (22 page)
After finishing the Aleka’s Attic sessions, River celebrated his twenty-third birthday—on August 23, 1993—and then flew down to Costa Rica with all his siblings and his father. John was opening a vegan restaurant, but his real agenda was to get his children, especially River, to leave behind the corruption of the USA and live by the Phoenix family values again. John explained, “The idea was for them to spend more time here, helping with the cooking, making music, writing, harvesting the organic fruit, and living off the land like we used to.”
John implored River to get out of the movie business before it ate him up. Eventually, River acceded, either because John had convinced him or because he was tired of arguing about it. But he had to fulfill his agreements, he told his father: he had signed contracts to appear in
Dark Blood
and
Interview with the Vampire,
and he had promised William Richert that he would be in his version of
The Man in the Iron Mask
. After he made those three films, he could quit and move down to Costa Rica.
“As it turned out,” John said, “that was too many.”
When River left Costa Rica, he said, “I’ll see you after this movie, Dad”—a commonplace sentiment that nobody would ever have remembered if things had turned out differently.
“Well, he did,” John said. “Only he was in a box.”
George Sluizer, the director of
Dark Blood,
had heard rumors about River’s drug use, but he didn’t worry about them. “I knew of his drug habit,” he said. “The actors in Hollywood, at the top level, all are, I would say, drug addicts in some way or another. I worked with Kiefer Sutherland: he was a whisky addict, two bottles a day. He wanted to compete with me: ‘You drink one bottle, I drink one bottle, let’s see if you’re drunk.’ I never on set noticed that he had drunk anything—in the morning, he was sober.”
Sluizer asked River to come out to the film’s desert location five days before everyone else. “I wanted him to breathe the Utah air, to readjust, and let him remember the relationship we had to build for the next seven or eight weeks,” Sluizer said. Those five days also provided some time for River to detox, but apparently he arrived clean and healthy.
Actor and director went hiking in the Utah mountains, bringing a few sandwiches and spending all day tramping about: breathing fresh air, they attuned themselves to the desert landscape. River was gradually submerging himself in his character. More than ever, he liked shedding the person he had become so he could transform into somebody else’s invention. “That’s the only time I have security,” he said. “Myself is a bum! Myself is nothing!”
The movie was centered on the house of Boy, ramshackle but scenically located. Sluizer had found the location he thought was ideal visually, but it was far from any vestiges of civilization: “Maybe twenty miles from the nearest house and thirty miles from the nearest village,” Sluizer said. The production staff objected—they wanted to be closer to a restaurant and a hotel, and other useful infrastructure. “I’m not an idiot,” Sluizer said. “I’m not like Werner Herzog, saying, ‘There’s a nice tree, but it’s thirty miles away,’ when the same tree is one mile away. But the location was important.”
Sluizer had actually worked with Herzog, the famously uncompromising German director, on his 1982 movie
Fitzcarraldo,
about a European rubber baron attempting to bring a steamer ship across land in the Peruvian jungle. The movie was originally intended to star Jason Robards and Mick Jagger, but Robards dropped out when he got dysentery, and Jagger then had to depart for Rolling Stones commitments. “All the Americans left,” Sluizer said dismissively. “That’s why they lost Vietnam.”
Sluizer took pride in working on that movie, as he did in the documentary he made for
National Geographic
in the sixties that required him to spend five months in Siberia at temperatures reaching seventy degrees below zero (Celsius). “Very difficult, but I loved it,” he said. “There’s something that attracts me to extreme circumstances, the opposite of the Hollywood people who are used to a swimming pool and a shower.”
So Sluizer scoffed at the relatively mild deprivations of
Dark Blood;
the production booked a local motel and rented some nearby houses. Hollywood people being unable to cope with the real world is a major theme of
Dark Blood:
a Hollywood couple drive their Bentley into the desert on a second honeymoon, and get into big trouble when it breaks down. The couple, Harry and Buffy, was played by British actor Jonathan Pryce and Australian actress Judy Davis (Oscar-nominated for her work in David Lean’s
A Passage to India
and Woody Allen’s
Husbands and Wives
).
River played Boy, who takes them in, but develops an infatuation with Buffy, whom he recognizes from her days as a
Playboy
pinup, and becomes hostile when Harry attempts to leave. It emerges that Boy is mourning the death of his Native American wife (a motif overlapping with
Silent Tongue
). She died from cancer, a result of the fallout from the nuclear bombs the U.S. government had tested—and while Boy may be a prophet of the desert, he is also unbalanced. The movie ends in violence and fire. Harry kills Boy with an ax, and Boy’s house burns down.
River revered Pryce: he had starred in River’s favorite movie,
Brazil,
the absurd urban dystopia directed by Terry Gilliam (formerly of Monty Python’s Flying Circus) that River had seen thirteen times. Things were tougher with Judy Davis, who was brilliant, but famously acerbic.
Dark Blood
producer Nik Powell said, “Since David Lean could not get Davis to do what he wanted her to do in his film, it is no surprise that George Sluizer had difficulties.”
“We were not the best of friends, Judy and me,” Sluizer said. “She made my life very tough, and I have never had to deal with a person making it so difficult.” Having agreed to the script, he said, she started demanding various changes; as Sluizer told it, some were to correct what she saw as the screenplay’s antifeminism while others were to cater to her vanity.
River, used to playing the peacemaker, tried to intercede between Davis and Sluizer, only to find himself the object of her scorn: she nicknamed him “Frat Boy.” When River, trying to be friendly, asked Davis when her family would be visiting the set, she snapped, “What is this, Frat Boy’s question time?” She also believed River was using drugs. “I thought he was doing something when I first got there,” she said. “There was one day when he came in so out of it. River said he’d had too much sodium the night before. Okay, I’ve never had a sodium overdose. Maybe that’s exactly what they’re like.”
“He did not use anything during the period we were in Utah,” Sluizer insisted. “I would put my hand in the fire and swear to it.”
River’s difficulty with the script derived from the quantity of Boy’s monologues; he was having a hard time memorizing them accurately, and would sometimes flip the word order. “He had difficulty with certain lines,” Sluizer said. “He asked me a few times in rehearsal if he could change the line—it’s too complicated or too long. I was strict. I said, ‘We’ve been thinking about the story and the character for two years now—we’re not going to change it because you’re dyslexic.’ And that might hurt a little bit—I’m saying, ‘I don’t care if you’re blind. You have to see anyway.’ ” Ultimately, Sluizer said, he consented to the modification of one line.
Davis’s version was that River was having problems with the character: “In my opinion, that was made more difficult by the director constantly telling him how he should play it. Whether he should be angrier, loonier, whatever. It was a difficult part because it could so easily be absurd. He had most of the dialogue in the film, huge speeches; he kept trying to cut the lines down. Any change freaked the director out. River said to me one day, ‘Maybe I should give up acting.’ ”
For the entirety of the shoot, River ate nothing but artichokes and corn: he wanted to look as if he had been living in the desert and eating insects to survive, like a modern John the Baptist. He wasn’t alone in the wilderness, though; accompanying River to Utah were Samantha Mathis and his personal assistant, Abby Rude.
River was delighted to discover that the area where they were filming had a reputation as a hot spot for alien visitations. He would drop the phrase “Thanks be to UFO Godmother” into casual conversation, and tried to convince friends that he had levitated over his bed. Sometimes he would lie down and shout, “Take me, I’m ready! What else is out there?”
Meanwhile, the tension on the set grew. Davis refused to take direction from Sluizer. In scenes with River, she would act in ways that seemed designed to break his concentration, like moving around erratically during his dialogue. “You’re in this picture, so why do you have to make it so difficult for me?” River implored her. He never yelled at her, but between takes he would retreat to his trailer and play Fugazi, the hardcore band, at top volume.
“I had to sometimes say hey, a little less, because it’s loud,” Sluizer remembered.
“We were on this kind of inexorable journey to some disaster,” Pryce said. “Every day there was some kind of difficulty.” After some unseasonable rain, the remote location became muddy, with vehicles careening on the dirt roads. Once, Sluizer’s director’s chair went over the side of a cliff minutes after he had vacated it.
River told Pryce, “Somebody’s going to die on this film.”
Mathis went home, and the only phone line River could use was a party line shared by six people, making it difficult for him to call friends and unburden himself emotionally. River had been clean for almost two months without any real support system. And then one day, about five weeks into the shoot, he snapped.
A scene in the movie featured a dead snake—and when it came time to shoot the scene, River flipped out, locking himself in his trailer and refusing to come out until the production presented a death certificate for the snake.
On the phone with Iris Burton, River ranted, “Iris, they’re killing snakes. They want me to work with murdered snakes. They poisoned them. Or strangled them. I don’t know. They’re liars—they say the snake died of old age. I don’t believe it. They’re liars, fucking liars, all of them. They killed the snake.
They’re murderers! Murderers!
”
Once again, Burton flew to the set, complaining, “I’m not a pet coroner, for Christ’s sake!” The desert shoot concluded without further incident. At River’s request, Sluizer rescheduled the love scenes between Boy and Buffy for the end of the shoot. Tension was so high between River and Davis, he wanted to put them off as long as possible.
River left a message on Richert’s answering machine, saying, “I’m having a hard time keeping my head above water in this crazy business.”
The production moved briefly to New Mexico, and then headed to Los Angeles for its final two weeks, to shoot interiors and close-ups in a studio. River caught a cold and wasn’t needed for a night shoot in New Mexico; Sluizer gave him permission to head back to L.A. a day early. Bidding Sluizer farewell, River told him, “I’m going back to the bad, bad town.”
River came to Los Angeles for the last time on Tuesday, October 26, 1993. He didn’t stay at his usual hotel, the St. James’s Club—the
Dark Blood
production booked him a room at the elegant, Japanese-themed Hotel Nikko. After two months of staying straight on a stressful movie, River took the opportunity to cut loose, and promptly started a drug binge.
He managed to make a lunch appointment the next day with Iris Burton, who was still trying to sell him on the virtues of doing
Safe Passage
. River unenthusiastically agreed to meet with director Robert Allan Ackerman, who could fly in from London, where he was directing a play. When he saw Chris Snyder at Burton’s office, River apologized for calling in the middle of the night and swearing at him. They hugged; River was so skinny, Snyder could feel his skeleton.
“He looked like a corpse,” Snyder said. “His skin was pasty and white, almost as if he’d been ravaged by illness. His jet-black hair looked as if he cut it himself without looking in a mirror.” Some of his appearance may have been attributable to playing Boy—he had dyed his hair for the part, and the artichoke-and-corn diet wasn’t packing on the pounds—but not his shuffling affect.
River returned to the Hotel Nikko, and his old habits.
4:30
P.M.,
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 29:
Safe Passage
director Robert Allan Ackerman, having spent all day flying from London to Los Angeles, had cleared customs and was on his way to the Hotel Nikko to meet with River. That’s when River called Snyder. Barely coherent, he whispered into the phone, “Chris . . . I can’t . . . the . . . meeting. You have to . . . cancel.”
Snyder tried to stave off disaster, getting Nikko room service to send a large pot of coffee to the room of “Earl Grey.” Hollywood indulged substance abusers so long as they still showed up for work—if people found out that River was missing meetings because he was drunk or stoned, he’d be virtually unemployable.
Snyder patched in Burton and Heart so they could hear River’s condition, and they gently persuaded him to take a shower and drink the coffee before Ackerman showed up. After River hung up, they agreed that Burton would supervise River on the
Dark Blood
set the following day, while Heart would fly into L.A. on Sunday. As Snyder remembered it, he told them, “This can’t go on.”
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 30: RIVER SHOWED
up on time for work, but looked exhausted, as if he had pulled an all-nighter. He had taken a Valium to bring himself down for work. “He was not one hundred percent in control of his body movements,” Sluizer said. “But there was no problem with his acting and so there was no reason for me to interfere.” Burton didn’t show up to supervise him.
The scenes that day were set in Boy’s underground fallout shelter, which he had decorated like a religious shrine, with candles, used paperbacks, and handcrafted wooden dolls. Boy gives his visitors a tour; he and Buffy have both consumed datura (an herb with hallucinogenic effects similar to peyote). “Magic’s just a question of focusing the will,” Boy tells her while Harry’s out of the room. “You don’t get what you want because you’re lucky. You get it because you
will
it.” And they kiss by flickering candlelight.
Davis had told River that she wouldn’t be taking peyote to prepare for the scene; she said that he agreed.
3:30
P.M.
: LUNCHTIME. RIVER AND
Sluizer discussed their plans for the following day: Sunday, a day off from shooting. They agreed to meet at 10:30
A.M.
to go over the scenes for the coming week. After that, River had a 2
P.M.
meeting scheduled with Terry Gilliam, the genius director behind
Brazil.
Pryce had arranged it, and River was almost vibrating with excitement at the prospect of meeting one of his heroes.
4:30
P.M.
: RIVER AND DAVIS
returned to the fallout shelter. In their second scene, Boy explains how he has created an archive of human knowledge that can be passed down after a nuclear holocaust: “Took a few thousand years just to invent the alphabet! All gonna be flushed down the john. An entire civilization.”
The stage directions in James Barton’s screenplay say, “He looks deep into her eyes, grasps her hand like a rope.”
Then Boy tells Buffy, “I don’t want you to die!”
She assures him, “Nobody’s going to die.”
When they finished the scene, Sluizer called “cut,” but cinematographer Ed Lachman accidentally kept the camera running until the film ran out. Power was cut to the klieg lights, but there was just enough illumination from the candles that the final feet of film in the reel captured River in silhouette.
“He came up to the camera and became total blackness, because he covered up the lens,” Lachman said. “It was like he created an image of his nonexistence.”