"American Flyers" and Other Stories from the Real World

We spend a lot of time here at the Continental Congress analyzing why modern movies don’t land with audiences the way the great movies of the 70’s 80’s and 90’s did… you might even say that is the reason why I started writing these essays in the first place.

Everyone will have a different answer for the “why”, and in the end, none of us will be wrong… Hollywood has a LOT of problems right now. But the one I want to discuss here today has to do with the way movies make us feel. A great movie pulls you in and makes you feel like the story is actually happening… as if it is an event you are witnessing personally, rather than just a movie. And part of the way studios and filmmakers used to do that, in the era before special effects and digital enhancement completely took over the filmmaking process, was to actually shoot movies out in the real world.

Movies like “The French Connection,” “Close Encounters”, “Dirty Harry”, “The Exorcist”, “Ferris Bueller”, “All the President’s Men”, “Superman” (1978), “Big Trouble in Little China”, “Planes, Trains, and Automobiles” and so many others were mostly shot on, in and around actual physical locations. The sense of reality this process created drew us in and connected us to the “world” of the movies in a way that locations created entirely inside a sound stage or a computer struggle to do here in the modern movie era.

“The Exorcist” is one of my favorite examples because it’s a horror movie, one of the few genres Hollywood studios are still willing to make, and it was made on a relatively low budget. In a world where the studios will tell you they prefer controlled sets to locations because shooting in the real world is more expensive and logistically complicated than shooting on a stage or in a computer, “The Exorcist” proved that realism could be delivered effectively, and on a budget.

Besides the fact that it’s just gorgeously shot and scored, everything about this sequence feels real… the fall wind blowing piles of trampled autumn leaves around, the kids running by and laughing, the background actors who aren’t simply walking aimlessly by but are actually doing things real people might do, like loading trucks, riding bikes, walking dogs and carrying heavy equipment… even the motorcyclist, who was probably hired by the production, his appearance choreographed down to the very last detail by Friedkin, feels real and distinctly un-manufactured… as if he really might have just been driving by at that exact moment.

Strictly speaking, the sequence isn’t even necessary to the story. Chris overhears a brief conversation involving Father Karras at the end, but none of the details of that conversation are critical to the plot. It’s a “feel” sequence… one that plays as if Friedkin were simply letting the story breathe for a moment. He is not in a rush to drive the plot here, rather he is giving the audience a chance to live inside the world of the movie for a while, before he puts his characters, literally, through hell.

In this second clip, Father Karras and Chris do a classic walk-and-talk through Georgetown…

Again the modern temptation is to ask why Friedkin shot this sequence in a way which would be considered completely unnecessary in any modern studio production setting. Why not just have them meet on a tightly-controlled set… Karras’ office, for instance, or in Chris’ house where all the shooting conditions could be micro-managed to the last detail? I believe it’s because Friedkin wanted to create a story that lived in our world, not something shot on an endless series of impersonal sets that don’t actually feel “lived in.”

Like the first sequence, this one is extremely messy. Shot across multiple locations, it includes a lot of wide shots, which are much more difficult to control. Buses drive by in the background… the white noise of their engines and their honking horns bleeding into the soundtrack. Pigeons fly through the middle of the shot. It’s chaotic, like real life in a real city. But the things that make it messy also make it feel like much of what is happening was beyond the filmmakers control. In reality, none of it was. Even the pigeons could have been removed by simply going back and shooting the scene again. But Friedkin didn’t do that because the pigeons are part of the magic. That shot could never be captured in exactly that same way ever again. In a sense, the existence of this sequence is something like an unrepeatable miracle.

Now I want you to compare those two sequences with one from the “Captain America” franchise, which takes place in the exact same city… Washington, D.C.

What do you notice?

First we have the opening glamour shots of the monuments at dawn. Gorgeous shots, of course, but entirely staged and sterile in a way that the streets of Georgetown in “The Exorcist” are not. I’m not even sure the two men we see running are actually Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie. And while “The Exorcist” shots are messy… autumn streets full of trampled leaves, overgrown hedges, un-choreographed extras and chaotic backgrounds, all of the shots of The National Mall in this clip from “Captain America” feature streets and sidewalks that are empty of foot traffic and which have been swept completely clean of any debris whatsoever. We don’t see so much as a stray blade of grass on the footpaths or a leaf floating in the reflecting pool. I grew up in D.C., I’ve been on The Mall at all hours of the day and night, on every day of the calendar year, and I have never once seen it this empty, this devoid of life… so completely free of the random chaos of everyday life.

But don’t take my word for it, compare this version of the Lincoln Reflecting Pool to other versions from movies like “In The Line of Fire”, “JFK” or “The Firm.” Those movies were shot under studio-controlled conditions, too… no doubt the area around the reflecting pool was closed for those shoots, just as it would have been for Marvel. But all three sequences feel lived in, like the story is happening in an actual physical place on Earth. The “Captain America” version feels so unreal and manufactured that I’m pulled out of the movie every time I watch it. If you told me that Steve Rodgers and Sam Wilson were actually running through a digital re-creation of D.C. in this sequence, I wouldn’t be surprised at all.

Things don’t get better once the exposition begins, either. The scene doesn’t take place on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial or some other iconic location but rather underneath a random tree in tight shots that make it feel like the scene could be happening anywhere…. the only hint that this wasn’t shot in a park in Beverly Hills is an out-of-focus U.S. Capitol building in the deep background behind Chris Evans, in what amounts to a wasted opportunity.

And while dialogue is outside the scope of this essay, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that none of the dialogue in this scene is memorable in any way. I hate to dunk on the “Captain America” movies because I really do like them, and I love the character, but there’s not one bit of dialogue in this scene which hits as hard as this single exchange between Chris MacNeil and Father Karras in the scene I linked above.

Chris: How do you go about getting an exorcism?

Karras: (long pause) I beg your pardon?

Chris: If a person is possessed by a demon or something, how do they get an exorcism?

Karras: Well the first thing is I’d have to get him into a time machine and get him back to the sixteenth century…”

Classic…

I mentioned a handful of timeless movies above, but the thing about the pre-CGI era is that most studio movies aspired to a certain level of reality. And since one of the things I try to do here at The Congress is to recommend “deep cut” movies that my readers may not be aware of, or may not have seen, I’m going to use a lesser known film from the 80’s to illustrate the point.

The movie is John Badham’s 1985 cycling drama “American Flyers.” Badham may not have been Billy Friedkin, but like most high-profile directors of the period, he had a keen sense of how to make movies that felt real. “American Flyers” is messy in all the ways that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is not. The crowds at the races are real, not computer generated. The race action is practical… shot from moving vehicles, helicopters and cranes, the cameras kept close to the ground to enhance the sensation of speed. The extras look like, and probably were, real people… the kind of strange folk with unusual beards, weird cycling specific rituals and questionable clothing choices who might actually drive out into the middle of nowhere to watch a bicycle race, as opposed to the generic “Captain America” casting-call extras who occasionally speed-walk through the frame in the distant background. And when cyclists tangle up and crash, it’s real bodies hitting the asphalt, not computer generated pixels tumbling away in ways that are creepy and unnatural.

And unlike “Captain America” where not a single thing happens that doesn’t relentlessly drive the plot forward, “American Flyers” features that same structural messiness we find in movies like “The Exorcist.” There is a subplot in “American Flyers” featuring John Amos’s out-of-shape son trying to avoid his Dad’s commandment that he play a real sport that isn’t bowling. This subplot has absolutely no bearing on the story whatsoever, but it is charming and funny, and like the sequence of Chris MacNeil walking through Georgetown in “The Exorcist”, it lets the movie breathe while giving it personality and depth.

The villain is multi-layered and interesting. Unlike what Marvel and DC give us over-and-over… generic Corporate Fat Cat who wants to take over the world for some reason, or generic Military Official who wants to take over the world for some reason, or generic Politician who…. wants to take over the world for some reason, we get Barry “The Cannibal” Muzzin (Luca Bercovici). Muzzin has plenty of mustache-twirling villain moments, but he also has moments of surprising empathy and depth. And in a scene where he loses his cool with a sports reporter after losing the first stage of the Hell of the West race to Costner’s inadvisable mustache, we get a glimpse of his humanity, of the justifiable bitterness that drives him. All of this makes us sympathize with Muzzin, if not exactly like him…. which is the defining characteristic of all the best movie villains.

“American Flyers” came out before Kevin Costner became a bonafide star and the reasons why it only got a limited release have been lost in the mists of time. But whatever the reason, the movie did poorly, barely making a million-and-a-half bucks on a $9 million budget. Still, it has the look and feel of something that a lot of talented craftsmen put real care, love and thought into. It deserved better. You should watch it, especially if you are a man with a brother you haven’t spoken to in a while. I find that it’s impossible to watch this movie and not feel something.

Because of the way the movie was made, to watch “American Flyers” today is to get a pretty good feel for what it was like to live in the America of 1985. Forty years from now, will that be true of any movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe? I doubt it.

It’s not just that nothing that happens in the big budget studio blockbusters is real… we know that… after all, it’s the movies… it’s tinseltown. The problem is that none of it feels real.

And that’s a damned shame.

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