Cinema Speculation

Hardcore

(1979)

After Who’s That Knocking at My Door and Boxcar Bertha and Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Scorsese finally got John Ford and The Searchers out of his system.

But Paul Schrader didn’t.

Before the seventies were out, he still had one more thematic Searchers remake to go.

His second film as a director, 1979’s Hardcore.

In the Schrader film, John Wayne’s Civil War veteran—Comanche hating bastard—Ethan Edwards is replaced by George C. Scott’s Michigan-based Dutch Calvinist man of strong moral fiber—Jacob Van Dorn (Schrader based the character on his own father). The way Ethan Edwards searches for his niece Debbie (Natalie Wood) among the Comanche tribes for years is how Jacob Van Dorn comes to Los Angeles to “search” for his underage daughter, who’s lost in the bit-part world of the adult film industry.

Normally, films that deal with this type of subject matter are exploitation flicks (Trackdown, Angel, Avenging Angel, Vice Squad, Kinjite) or TV movie exposés (Little Ladies of the Night, Dawn: Portrait of a Teenaged Runaway, Off the Minnesota Strip, Girls of the White Orchid). Hardcore tells the same old story, but tells it differently, and to different effect. In the above films it’s laughably easy for young girl runways to fall prey to street hustlers. In Trackdown, Little Ladies of the Night, and Kinjite, the pimps have the bus station staked out and can approach a scared young white girl within twenty minutes of her stepping off the bus. And in all of them the young girls are tricked, drugged, or seduced into the prostitution racket. But the mostly told off-screen story of Jacob’s daughter Kristen Van Dorn (Ilah Davis) in Schrader’s script isn’t the same old cautionary tale.

When we first meet sixteen- or seventeen-year-old Kristen at a Grand Rapids Christmas church party, she looks like a runaway even in her own home. One look at her and you can tell she’s either going to be a junkie, a child prostitute, or a suicide victim. So this daughter of Scott’s respected deacon of the church goes to Los Angeles on a church group field trip, and just never returns. Van Dorn hires a private detective, played by Peter Boyle, to find some information about his lost little girl. The detective invites the worried father to a closed movie theatre, and screens for him a degrading 8mm sex film loop of his daughter having a three-way with a couple of skeezy guys titled: Slave of Love.

“Turn it off!” Scott screams as he watches his daughter’s grainy degradation. Columbia Pictures based their whole print campaign on that scene, with the tag line: “OH MY GOD, THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!”

Columbia Pictures cut a dynamite trailer for the picture that featured all the sex-for-sale bright red lights of the milieu, Jack Nitzsche’s terrific hellish electronic theme, George C. Scott’s intense anguished face, and female costar Season Hubley’s cherry-red messy lips pouting around in her silver satin pants.

The trailer’s not only good, it’s too good. You just kind of get the sense that no fucking way is the finished film gonna deliver the way the trailer does.

But Schrader’s film does have a few can’t-miss elements.

He’s got a compelling premise that can’t be denied (a father searching for his daughter in the world of Triple XXX cinema), and a perfect lead for this type of story (Scott). Hardcore is a handsome-looking studio drama that’s meant, for the price of a movie ticket, to take the viewer on a tourist tour of the porn world of Los Angeles in the late seventies. It’s supposed to possess the class of a studio picture, but simultaneously appeal to cinema of sensation viewers. And for the film’s first hour Schrader makes a compelling movie with undeniable power.

For one thing, Schrader completely breaks ranks with those other films by not featuring the degradation of the innocent. The dramatization of the young girl falling prey to flesh peddlers is half the reason they usually made these fucking movies in the first place. No matter how tawdry or obvious as these movies can be, the degradation of the innocent sequence is the one part that’s always effective.

Because it’s impossible not to feel sorry for the poor girl (and often the poor actress).

But Paul Schrader’s Hardcore has different fish to fry. Like he did with Travis Bickle, he makes us see the world from Jake Van Dorn’s perspective. We never see exactly what happened that led his daughter to miss the bus to Michigan and stay in Hollywood. But as the movie goes on, little by little, you start getting a pretty good idea. Which the movie never officially confirms, but insinuates nevertheless. What, in the first half, gives the film weight is that while Van Dorn wants to punish somebody for his daughter being in this world, there is no Sport or Acuna Boys or any other exploitation movie villains to punish. His daughter’s decision to not show up for the bus back to Grand Rapids was just that—a decision.

Obviously, the first chance she got, she ran away from Van Dorn’s strict grotesque Grand Rapids upbringing. She may have been seduced by somebody, but we aren’t given the impression that she was drugged or kidnapped, or held against her will, like Karen Lamm in Trackdown.

But since we watch the movie from Van Dorn’s perspective, we only know what Van Dorn knows, and we learn information about his daughter the same time he does, though we probably come to different conclusions about the information we become privy to.

Also Schrader presents an avenger that is vastly different than in the above movies. In the other runaway movies, the guy who’s working hard to get the girl off the street, no matter how ridiculous he looks (David Soul in Little Ladies of the Night), you’re obviously meant to root for them. In Trackdown, you really want Jim Mitchum to find poor Karen Lamm, and when she dies (without them even getting another scene together) it’s tragic. Everything Mitchum does from that point on is justified.

But we feel different about Scott’s Jake Van Dorn. As he walks the porno district seething, you don’t want him to find Kristen. You want him to just go home.

Schrader wastes no time invoking The Searchers by opening up the film with a—well done—Ford-like sequence of community ritual. The Christmas celebration of a Dutch Calvinist church group in Grand Rapids. With George C. Scott’s Van Dorn acting as one of the church elders (he leads the saying of grace before Christmas dinner, and he doesn’t forget to put in a word for the missionaries spreading the word of God in far-off lands).

There’s a great line in the opening scene that Schrader says comes from one of his uncles. The children at the Christmas party are gathered around the television watching a show, when one of the grumpy elders bitches at them, “Do you know who makes television? All the kids who couldn’t get along here go out to Hollywood and make TV and they send it back here. Well, I didn’t like them when they were here and I don’t like them now they’re there.”

Schrader presents Scott’s Van Dorn, in his snow-covered Michigan cocoon, as a decent man almost comically repressed. When he meets with his interior decorator for his family’s furniture warehouse business, he objects to the shade of blue she uses for his sign, deeming it “overpowering.” But pretty soon afterwards the same man is prowling the streets of Hollywood, filled with their Triple XXX cinema marquees, and their signs for sex-for-sale clubs that are pink, red, and a blue bolder than the one he rejected back in Grand Rapids. He’s repulsed by the openness and explicitness of the sex and material he’s forced to confront in this industry, and sick with grief over the fate of his daughter. And that repulsion turns the decent church deacon into a man of brutal violence. He brutalizes the people he comes across in the porno world the way Ethan Edwards shoots buffalos in The Searchers, out of impotent rage.

Historically, the film offers an interesting glimpse of the adult film industry of 1979. Schrader was given carte blanche by William Margold, sort of the ambassador to the adult film world of the late seventies, who gave Schrader the grand tour and provided him and his production shooting access similar to what Harvey Bernhard and Michael Campus were able to acquire from the Ward brothers on The Mack.

But all the adult entertainment movers and shakers that Schrader met along the way were crying bloody murder when the film came out.

They rightly felt that the adult entertainment film industry was just as legitimate a film industry as the Hollywood film industry (they employed many people, they paid a lot of money in California state taxes, they rented their equipment from the same facilities, they processed their film at the same labs). Yet corrupt Hollywood had no qualms about pointing a finger at them, no qualms demonizing them, and no qualms slandering them to make their point. And frankly, the slander part is what makes Schrader’s film, at the end of the day, a phony-baloney moralistic con job. Despite his self-righteous moralizing, without a shred of conscience, Schrader squeezed in a snuff film subplot. Snuff films weren’t a reality, they were an urban myth (like the mythological white pimp) that the squares used to marginalize the legitimate adult film industry. And at the end of the day Paul Schrader and Columbia Pictures were no different than the Moral Majority when it came to lying to make their negative case.

So all the people who opened their doors to Schrader felt justifiably betrayed.

But in 1979 what wasn’t apparent was that the industry depicted in Hardcore was going to go through a seismic change in the next couple of years that would make the events portrayed in Schrader’s movie seem like a relic from a lost era. At the end of the seventies some people had video recorders (mostly Beta), but not many. The VHS video revolution wouldn’t really get going till 1981–82. At the point when this movie takes place, if you wanted to see a new adult film, you still had to leave the house and go to an adult movie theatre to watch a feature length film that included explicit sex. But the average suburban Dick and Jane had long since stopped seeing dirty movies in dirty movie theatres.

But the video revolution opened up a whole new audience for porno movies. Now you could just rent them from your mom-and-pop video shop (the reason most mom-and-pop video stores could compete with the chains like Blockbuster—for a while—was that they rented XXX tapes, which Blockbuster didn’t).

XXX-rated motion pictures and porn stars were about to go mainstream. This seems a decade away from the tale told in Hardcore. Even though Schrader uses many real (now defunct) sex districts, storefronts, and massage parlors, his depiction of the adult entertainment industry of the seventies never strikes the viewer as completely authentic. Because Schrader’s moralizing of the landscape seems phony, and when he throws snuff movies into the mix it’s downright insulting. Schrader’s tour of the porno world can’t hold a flickering birthday candle next to Friedkin’s tour of the New York all-male S&M leather bars in that same year’s Cruising (which also contains a terrific Jack Nitzsche score). Friedkin’s film not only strikes the viewer as authentic, it’s also a sexy/scary phantasmagorical sensory experience like no other in cinema (not even seventies all-male porn). Nevertheless, like I said, the first half of the film has an undeniable power, and George C. Scott, an actor whose stock in trade was volcanic eruption, makes Van Dorn’s journey compelling. And while at first this journey produces only frustration in the Michigan tourist, towards the end of the film’s first hour, both Van Dorn and Schrader come up with a clever idea.

In order to “Trackdown” his daughter, he tries to locate one of the actors that appeared with her in the sex loop. And to that end he gets the bright idea to stage auditions for his own adult film. The montage of different actors coming in for their casting sessions with Van Dorn (who disguises himself as his idea of a porno producer, phony hair piece, fake mustache, and tie-dyed T-shirt) is the film’s best sequence, and the comedy inherent within is the film’s only relief from its own disgust with itself. Hal Williams, the drill sergeant from Goldie Hawn’s Private Benjamin, brings down the house as irate porn stud Big Dick Blaque.

Then . . . skinny, skeevy Keith Carradine look-alike Will Walker (the actor who we saw fuck Scott’s daughter in Slave of Love) walks in the room, accompanied by Jack Nitzsche’s score sting (its most effective use in the film), and we in the audience notice this an instant before Van Dorn does, making us straighten up in our seat and lean closer to the screen. And it’s at this point Hardcore becomes the movie it wants to be, and the movie the fantastic Columbia Pictures trailer sold.

This scene is where the whole movie has been heading and now we’ve finally arrived. And playing a bit part adult film actor who goes by the moniker Jism Jim, Will Walker is the best casting in the film.

Walker was a weird, skinny, shaggy blond-haired, almost handsome (but not quite) actor who suddenly appeared in the late seventies in a few films, The Driver and Deathsport, and then just as quickly disappeared. Jake Van Dorn is searching for his daughter, but he’s also searching for somebody to punish. Somebody to punish for his daughter leaving Grand Rapids, for being in that 8mm sex loop, and for making him descend to this hell on earth. And when he finally comes face-to-face with a tangible connection to her degradation, a man he actually saw shove his dick inside his daughter (from behind, no less), both the film and Van Dorn boil over.

Yet, like Harvey Keitel’s Sport in Taxi Driver, Will Walker’s budding explicit bit player Jism Jim may be creepy, but he isn’t entirely loathsome. At first he treats Van Dorn’s ridiculous-looking porn producer with audience-impressing savvy skepticism.

But when Scott’s character recognizes him, and tells Jim he’s seen his work, Walker’s reaction is sort of charming. After his initial arrogance, he transforms into an excited budding actor, “Yeah, I’ve done a lot of good work, ya know. Shorts, features—no major roles yet, but it’s all been really good stuff.”

His genuine excitement for a few moments at being considered for a real film—and not just a loop—is slightly infectious. It’s also the only time Schrader drops his moralizing and presents the adult film industry for what it really is.

Not a criminal enterprise.

Not the fourth rung of hell.

But a legal, tax-paying film industry catering to explicit entertainment for adults.

Jism Jim even mentions the guys who made the 8mm sex loop with his daughter were a couple of college kids and they were paid twenty dollars. In other words, Kristen is hardly poor Karen Lamm in Trackdown, she wanted to be in Slave of Love. The reason Kristen is wearing silver pants and fucking on film in Hollywood, as opposed to baking cupcakes for a church bake sale in Grand Rapids, isn’t because of Jism Jim or those college kids who made the loop, or any of the other phony villains Schrader yanks out of his ass in the film’s last half hour. She’s there because of Van Dorn. She chose this life over his strict upbringing.

After Jake experiences a momentary shock of recognition once Jim enters the room, he recovers and keeps his cool for a few moments. Van Dorn brings up he saw the loop Slave of Love, and he inquires about the actress Jim appeared with, mentioning he’d like to track her down for his film. Walker’s Jim complains that girl was a “freaky bitch” and that his prick was sore for a week afterwards. That’s when Jake explodes, attacking the poor kid, beating him till he extracts information in the form of a name so Jake can continue his search and Schrader can continue telling his story. This is Schrader’s most daring move, because when George C. Scott’s impotent rage explodes in the face of this hapless little creep, we’re not on Scott’s side. We even believe what Jim said about his daughter. She probably was a “freaky bitch,” and his prick was probably sore for a week. Unfortunately, after this scene, the film has nowhere else to go, and the rest of the movie takes a turn towards the ludicrous.

Because after Van Dorn vents his spleen on the one tangible face he can blame, and realizes his daughter wasn’t abducted or forced to be in the loop (she did it for twenty bucks), in real life Van Dorn would have probably gone home. But since it’s a movie, Van Dorn goes on searching. And to keep the movie going Schrader throws in a shopping list of unconvincing movie plot contrivances that rob the film of whatever integrity it had in the first part.

Paul Schrader is a magnificent screenwriter, with one gigantic glaring weakness. He can’t write genre films. And either out of inattention or a deep-seated contempt for genre, all of his self-penned genre scripts contain absurd plot contrivances in order to get the story rolling and keep it rolling on their contrived tracks.

At the beginning of Hardcore it’s utterly unbelievable that—with the little information he had—Peter Boyle’s detective was able to track down that particular 8mm sex loop featuring his daughter (forget the absurdity that some random movie theatre in Grand Rapids would have 8mm projection capabilities). How Boyle was able to accomplish this is never even remotely dealt with, even though the entire plot hinges on it. I guess Peter Boyle’s character is just the greatest detective in the world (boy, you coulda fooled me).

In American Gigolo, Julian Kaye’s (Richard Gere) innocence in the murder investigation at its center is obvious. But in order to entwine him into the investigation, Schrader has the police detective on the case (Hector Elizondo), minus any logic, suspect Julian as his number one suspect.

When he tells Julian, “I think you’re guilty as hell,” you wait for Julian to ask him why, but he doesn’t because the only conceivable answer is Schrader’s need to put Gere in jeopardy and turn this character study of a lifestyle into some sort of half-ass murder mystery. Now, there is another reason that is suggested to the audience for Elizondo’s suspicion of Gere, jealousy. But are we really supposed to believe that Elizondo’s police detective is so corrupt he would frame an innocent man for a murder just because he envied his prowess with women? Nothing else we see of his character even remotely suggests this.

But none of his other films pile up the plot contrivances like the last half of Hardcore.

Of course you don’t buy that Walker would have any real information to impart to Scott. But because it’s a movie, and Schrader has to keep the story moving, of course he does.

Then there’s the off-topic detour into snuff films (that strikes me as a more cynical form of exploitation than the type Schrader spends the movie condemning).

Then towards the end—and this is where Schrader’s screenwriting is really the pits—a couple of puny minor characters, Tod (Gary Graham) and Ratan (Marc Alaimo), are unconvincingly beefed up to full villain status in order for Scott’s father and Boyle’s detective to have somebody to combat in the climax (what was good about the film is it didn’t offer up easy villains). Boyle even shoots Ratan dead on a crowded San Francisco street, and of course there’s no repercussions for this out and out murder (when filmmaker Schrader makes these absurd decisions, you wonder where film critic Schrader went).

All of these hackneyed devices turn the last half of Hardcore into a vastly inferior version of Richard Heffron’s similarly themed Trackdown, which was released only a few months after Taxi Driver. The two films not only tell similar stories, they also share similar tag lines.

HARDCORE

OH MY GOD, THAT’S MY DAUGHTER!

TRACKDOWN

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF IT WAS YOUR SISTER?

The big difference between the two is, while the first half of the nuanced Hardcore is undoubtedly better than the obviously exploitation minded Trackdown, the last half of Hardcore is a mess, while Trackdown is a pretty effective Revengeamatic. Also Trackdown just happens to be written by Ivan Nagy—who according to Nick Broomfield in his documentary Hollywood Madam—was Heidi Fleiss’s pimp (finally a real-life white pimp! And he doesn’t look anything like Harvey Keitel, or David Soul, or Wings Hauser. Nor does he hang around on street corners like his black counterparts. Instead he directs episodes of Starsky and Hutch!). In Trackdown, a slumming Anne Archer basically plays a young Heidi. Consequently, the prostitution organization depicted in Trackdown is slightly more credible than the other exploitation pictures with similar subjects (Vice Squad, Angel, Avenging Angel, Streetwalkin’, Kinjite, Little Ladies of the Night, and They Call Her One-Eye).

And, in a telling way, the villains who run the prostitution racket in Trackdown are slightly less villainous than the above titles (when James Mitchum’s sister dies, it’s due to a psycho John, not their doing. And Anne Archer is shown to be distraught at Karen Lamm’s death).

Hardcore’s troubled second half also introduces a female surrogate for Jeffrey Hunter’s Martin Pawley character in the guise of Niki (Season Hubley), a porn actress with a heart of gold that Jake befriends and pays to help him Trackdown his daughter Kristen. Like The Searchers’ Martin Pawley, Niki is a creature of the culture that Van Dorn despises. In the film’s first half, Scott’s character only has one thing on his mind, finding Kristen. And while Peter Boyle’s scummy private detective who (sorta) helps Scott out and Dick (Bewitched) Sargent as a church friend who tries to lure Van Dorn back from the dark side, are both good in their on-the-nose roles, their only real function is to facilitate (Boyle) and illustrate (Sargent) Van Dorn’s savage character arc.

Every actor or extra Scott comes across in the film’s sleazy sideshow of Hollyweird exists only to frustrate, repulse, or enrage this wounded warrior of moral superiority.

That is until Niki enters the picture.

Niki talks like a movie character, is allowed a few whimsical lines (she’s an astrology nut), and is allowed to be more than just a human representative of societal decay. Not only that, Van Dorn (rather quickly) actually likes her, allowing Scott to play more than just the one note he’s been hammering all picture long.

Now, through no fault of Hubley’s, Niki is never really a convincing character. She’s the late seventies sex-worker version of the late sixties kooky hippie screwballs that Goldie Hawn used to play. Nor does she have the depth that Jodie Foster brought to Iris and Linda Haynes brought to Linda Forchet. Schrader had wanted to cast Diana Scarwid, who had just popped from her Academy Award–nominated turn in Richard Donner’s Inside Moves. But, according to Schrader, Columbia Pictures’ head Dan Melnick (more on him later) “put his foot down” and told the director “I don’t want to cast someone I don’t want to fuck.” So Schrader was forced to uncast Scarwid and find Season Hubley, commenting “Hubley, too cute for me but perfect for Danny.”

Nevertheless, Hubley’s Niki does lighten up the proceedings a bit, and she introduces an intriguing new thematic element to Schrader’s paraphrased remake of The Searchers.

While Van Dorn searches for his real daughter, Kristen, little by little Niki functions as his surrogate daughter. She puts a human face that he can’t despise on a world and a culture he does despise. And he puts a human face on a world that she’s never known. Like we in the audience (and Paul Schrader), she finds his Dutch Calvinist beliefs ridiculous, but she respects that he believes in things. And when she tells him at one point, “We’ll find her in a couple of days,” for the first time in the picture somebody offers this poor hopeless bastard some credible semblance of hope.

The scene in the hotel room when Van Dorn tries to explain to Niki the beliefs of his antiquated religious order is the only time in the film when actor Scott is allowed to show any hint of charm, or sense of humor. When he hears his gospel through Niki’s ears, even Van Dorn sort of recognizes its absurdity. Both characters feel the other is completely lost, yet they sympathize and care for the other anyway.

Like Taxi Driver, Hardcore builds to an ending that has been thematically set up all through the film.

In Schrader’s original conception, the script was sort of a cross between The Searchers and Chinatown. After searching the whole movie for his daughter, Van Dorn learns she died in a car accident unrelated to porn. That’s when Peter Boyle delivers the “it’s Chinatown, Jake” news, and Van Dorn returns to Grand Rapids.

However this doesn’t play so tragic.

Because by this time the audience has fallen in love with Jake’s sex worker sidekick Niki, and he takes Niki with him. Though twisted, it is emotionally satisfying. Van Dorn replaces one daughter with another. One he can’t save, for one he can. What’s not emotionally satisfying is the end of the movie Paul Schrader directed. In Schrader’s movie, he finds his daughter, and we wait for her to reject him and send him back to Grand Rapids, when unconvincingly (understatement!) she changes her mind at the last minute. And Van Dorn says his version of The Searchers line, “Kristen, take me home.”

Boo!

When I saw Hardcore on opening night at the United Artists Del Amo Mall theatre, the entire (packed) audience rejected the daughter’s final decision as an unconvincing and contrived conclusion to the story (there were literal boos).

So Van Dorn returns to Michigan with his dishrag daughter leaving the lovable Niki to her own devices and ultimate fate. The very next year Season Hubley starred as another Hollywood sex-for-sale worker (this time a prostitute), in another tour of the Hollyweird jungle in the exploitation cult favorite Vice Squad (which features yet another of these only-in-the-movies white pimp unicorns). Due to how close the release of both Hardcore and Vice Squad were to each other, the latter movie can’t help but play like the final act of Niki’s arc.

In the book Schrader on Schrader & Other Writings, in his DVD commentary, and in an email exchange with me, Schrader blames Columbia Pictures’ head honcho Daniel Melnick for the change to his script’s original ending.

Schrader told me, “Dan Melnick insisted that Van Dorn rescue his daughter.” One of the reasons for the audience’s boos at the opening night screening was not only the picture’s contrived ending, but the unconvincing performance by Ilah Davis as Kristen. I don’t buy Debbie wanting to go home in The Searchers either. But Natalie Wood was a good enough actress to sell the contrived conceit. Ilah Davis isn’t. In fact, she’s fucking awful. Schrader explained that Davis wasn’t an actress, she was cast because of her porn experience. He really only needed her to deliver in the Slave of Love loop, because in his intended third act, she died offscreen. But once Melnick forced this change on him, that required much more of Davis than she could deliver. He recounted, “I had to get Ilah acting lessons and throw this frightened, frail creature in the cage with the notorious drunk, George C. Scott.”

Schrader’s Melnick made me excuse is not backed up by the film’s executive producer John Milius. Three years after Hardcore’s original release, I asked Milius about the production. He described it then as “A wonderful script turned into a lousy movie,” and he laid the blame on Schrader’s direction. When I asked Milius about Schrader’s studio interference excuse, Big John told me, “Nobody made him change anything, he did exactly what he wanted.”

Then, I believed Milius. But today I believe Schrader. I do believe that the head of the studio made him turn his “wonderful script” into “a lousy movie.”

But I still blame Schrader.

I blame him for giving the same spineless excuse a lot of directors of fiascos claim after the fact, the big bad studio made me.

As if they couldn’t say no.

Well, then they wouldn’t have made it.

Good.

Who wants to spend three months making a fucked-up version of their movie? Then spend the rest of their lives making excuses for it, or cringing whenever they watch it, like Schrader does on the DVD commentary?

When I reached out to Schrader, I warned him that, while I liked the film’s first half, I’m very rough on it and him in the second half.

He wrote back, “I don’t think you could be harsher than I am on the second half of the film.”