![]() My mom's friend took a picture of me for LA Weekly, and the casting director saw it. Skye: Every teenager in town who was acting was excited about. We didn't have money to offer it to any of John Hughes' Brat Pack crowd, so we auditioned dozens of young actors. Hunter: We set up shop in an old film production building on Victory Boulevard in the Valley. I thought it was powerful and weirdly funny, and it had a darkness that was rooted in reality in a way that I hadn't seen before. The first time I read the script, I loved it. The final budget, I think, was $1.7 million.Ĭarrie Frazier (Casting Director): They had to hire someone like me who needed the job but wasn't looking for a big paycheck. We were trying to make it as inexpensively as possible. Hunter: It was in pre-production four months later. They really responded to the script and said they would finance it with Tim as the director. Sanford: Hemdale were a small company that made some very good movies, like Salvador and Hoosiers. ![]() All of the sudden, it was possible to submit it to a number of young indie companies that were popping up at the time. Hunter: As part of my lobbying campaign, I said I'd make it for a million dollars. Sanford: I remember somebody saying, "I read the script and I think it's really good, but it's very disturbing and I couldn't get it out of my mind." My thought was, that's why you make a movie. Midge and Sarah had been showing the script to studios in the $5 million range-nobody would touch it because it was so dark. Hunter: There was another director in the running, and I really lobbied hard for it. Sanford: Tim said, "My agent's gonna kill me, but I want to do it." I called them back instantly and told them I had to do it. I didn't want to do another teen picture. We were fans of Tim's, so we sent him the script. But it was already written, so we could see it on the page and imagine it as a movie. If somebody had pitched us this idea in our office or at a lunch, I don't think either one of us would have responded so positively to it because it was so dark. Sanford: We thought the script was really good. He gave it to her and she gave it to the person who became my agent, who gave it to Midge and Sarah. One of them was doing an internship with a production company that Amy Pascal was involved with. ![]() I entered a screenplay contest that was judged by fellow students. I thought it spoke to a mood that young people were feeling at the time-feeling detached from things and wanting to zone out. Most of the characters were based on people I had gone to high school with. I was in a screenplay class at UCLA, and I wrote it for the class. Neal Jimenez (Screenwriter): There was a news story about a kid who dumped a body and took his friends to see it. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of River's Edge, I spoke with six people involved in making the film to get their thoughts, stories, and opinions about its backstory and legacy. The cast featured a combination of young, dynamic actors, and one legendary Hollywood hellraiser in the midst of a monumental comeback after a public downfall with booze and drugs. The film's soundtrack also strayed from most contemporary films, featuring metal and punk bands such as Slayer, Hallow's Eve, Agent Orange, and the Wipers-the perfect soundtrack for a story about alienated young people with no hope and no direction. The film's characters also looked different than the polished mallrats of other 80s films they perfected the "grunge" look years before the American mainstream had even heard of the term. ![]() These young people were the anti-Brat Pack: They drank, smoked weed, popped pills, and seemingly had no moral compass and no role models. ![]() The kids in River's Edge stood in direct contrast to the shiny, plastic teenagers that movie audiences were accustomed to seeing in the mid-to-late 1980s. Working from a script by Neal Jimenez, Hunter's film offered a dark, intense portrait of troubled teenagers. ![]()
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