Behind the Scenes With My Favorite Actors: James Woods in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986)

"I am a fucking weasel, there's no doubt about that. But think about this... If I went to church, I haven't been to church in thirty years, but if I went and I took confession, and with the communion together that'd be great! We could go to Archbishop Romero, you know he knows me, he likes me very much. I could become his Catholic worker, that'd be wonderful, I could get a little basket and collect coins..."

'A Sad Wreck of a Woman' and One Hell of a Great Lost Performance

Alexander Main has been dangling from the end of a spiritual rope since turning fifty a few years ago. A Bail-Bondsman with nothing much going for him and even less to lose, Alex can’t remember the last time he faced a day without feeling at least a little bit of dread. He can’t really pinpoint where it all went wrong, but he knows the majority of his trouble can be traced back to the thieving and unreliable gypsy Maritza he spent three feverish months with around that fiftieth birthday. Every time Alex feels like he might be getting one step away from getting over this young woman that is haunting his every waking moment she turns back up, always with trouble tracing her every step. Their most recent time together has been the worst as Alex has layed 30,000 dollars down, and everything on the line, to spring a sure to flee Maritza from jail for four days before she goes to trial for trying to kill one of the men she inhabited after Alex.

Jack Lemmon had a lot of hope in Alex and the Gypsy and months before the film’s release in the fall of 1976 he told family and friends that he felt like it was going to be one of his big ones. Lemmon needed a solid hit to get him back on track in 1976. In the three years since his savage and wrenching Oscar winning turn in Save The Tiger Lemmon had only managed one hit, 1975’s awesome The Prisoner of 2nd Avenue, and he was hungry. Even a re teaming with Matthau and Wilder on The Front Page had proved disappointing, and the film following Alex and The Gypsy, Airport ’77, didn’t instill much confidence with Lemmon or anyone else. Alex and the Gypsy had to hit…it just had to.

The strange saga of Alex and the Gypsy got its start in a short novel from the pen of Stanley Elkins entitled The Bailbondsman which 20th Century Fox had bought the rights to in the mid-seventies. Less than prolific but Oscar nominated screenwriter Lawrence B. Marcus, the man behind both Petulia and The Stunt Man, drafted up a screenplay that was both odd and poetic and Fox brought director John Korty on board to deliver it. Future Oscar winner Korty had an interesting track record with films, television shows and documentaries under his belt. Alex and the Gypsy would mark what seemed to promise Korty’s highest profile film up to that point, although no one could have guessed during the making of it that so few would end up seeing it.


Looking over the talent behind Alex and the Gypsy it is hard to believe it has fallen into such obscurity. In front of the camera joining Lemmon is the always fascinating Genevieve Bujold, and a young but already excellent James Woods among others. Behind the scenes names like composer Henry Mancini and cinematographer Bill Butler will immediately alert film fans that Alex and the Gyspy was not a cheap fly by night production, and that Lemmon wasn’t the only one who thought they had a winner on their hands.

Shot in and around Sonora, California in the early part of 1976, Alex and the Gypsy seemed to have everything going for it until an early critical screening of the film that Jack Lemmon attended with Walter Matthau sealed the film’s fate permanently. Liked by only a few and critically pounded by most, Fox cut their losses and dumped the film in just a few spots before pulling the plug shortly after. A brief European run followed where the film fared just as poorly and then it was all but gone, save for the occasionally television airing. Alex and the Gypsy has still yet to appear on any home video format, and it remains one of the hardest to see films Jack Lemmon ever made, which is a real tragedy because it contains one of his best performances.


Alex and the Gypsy is indeed a flawed film that is a mixed bag at best, but when it works it works big time and Lemmon’s spiritually injured portrayal of bail bondsman Alex Main is extraordinary stuff, and the much missed actor was correct in how initially proud he was of it. The biggest complaint lodged against the film was in regards to the casting of Bujold as the Gypsy and it’s a legitimate one, but it really isn’t that Bujold is bad in the role (as she is really quite good as the 'Sad Wreck of a Woman' Alex describes her as) but it is more a problem with the scripts laziness concerning her character and culture. Honestly though the problems in Alex and the Gypsy bothered me very little and I found myself quite taken with the film, specifically in the powerful scenes between Lemmon and Bujold, which are simultaneously touching, erotic and sweet. I also found the idea of this character willing to risk everything for a girl he will lose either way to be quite moving, and Lemmon’s work as Alex is mesmerizing. Nobody could touch Jack Lemmon at the top of his game…nobody…and, problems with the picture aside, Lemmon knocks it out of the park in every scene of Alex and the Gypsy.

Jack Lemmon would take a break after the disappointing reception that greeted both Alex and the Gypsy and Airport 77. He would return locked and loaded in 1979 and would do some of the best dramatic work of his career in a terrific 4 year run that would begin with The China Syndrome (1979) and end with Missing (1984). Alex and the Gypsy would probably only gather a paragraph or two in a serious biography of the man, but I think that’s unfortunate as there’s some really fine stuff in the film. Much like its title characters, Alex and the Gypsy deserves another chance.

"You're a dangerous man, Mr. Dodd": Remembering True Believer

Eddie Dodd is having trouble looking in the mirror these days. Once a dedicated activist and civil-rights attorney who believed in change and progression through the sixties and seventies, Dodd has spent the best part of the eighties defending drug-dealers and pushers in exchange for whatever cash he can get, and he only sees a shadow of what he used to be each time he catches his reflection. With only a ponytail he refuses to cut connecting him to his youth, Dodd finds a shot at redemption when an idealistic young law student interns at his office and brings him a case that will either change or end his life.

A searing work from 1989 fuelled by a magnificent performance by James Woods, True Believer is one of the great under-the-radar American films from the last few decades. Directed with flair and intelligence by Joseph Ruben from an absolutely killer script from Wesley Strick, True Believer is a stirring film that has haunted me since I first saw it as a teen more than twenty years ago.





True Believer had its origins in a series of articles Pulitzer-Prize nominated journalist K.W. Lee had written on a controversial 1973 San Francisco Chinatown gangland killing. Lee’s writing and the notoriety surrounding the event eventually led to the release of a prisoner on San Quintin’s Death Row, and it inspired the young screenwriter Strick to fashion a passionate and inspired fictionalized screenplay set in nineteen-eighties New York.





New York born and Berkely graduate Wesley Strick was just past his 36th birthday when True Believer briefly played theaters in February of 1989. It was the first major script that the former Rock-Journalist had seen brought to the screen and it would land him an Edgar Award nomination. It also remains the crowning achievement of his career, as none of his subsequent work (as a screen-writer and script-doctor) has come close to matching its intelligence, style and depth.
While True Believer’s storyline had been inspired by that Chinatown slaying from the early seventies, Strick’s inspiration for the burned-out and disillusioned Eddie Dodd was Tony Serra, the famed lawyer who had successfully gotten the acquittal for wrongly accused Chol Soo Lee in the case. Strick’s highly fictionalized version of Serra was a man who had lost his way through the eighties, a dreamer who had been eaten up by a system that simply just didn’t give a damn the way that he had. An actor of limitless talent had to be brought on board to play Eddie Dodd for True Believer, otherwise the film wouldn’t have worked. Lucky for Strick and director Ruben, that very special actor was available in 1988 when the film was shot mostly on location in New York City.



James Woods had been delivering knock-out work since the mid seventies on stage and screen. His career seemed close to exploding in 1986 due to his unbelievably intense Oscar-nominated performance in Oliver Stone’s Salvador, but the films that followed that masterful work had been mostly disappointing. The film that proceeded True Believer, 1988’s The Boost, had gotten Woods back on the right track though and it led the way to, what I think, is his career best performance as Eddie Dodd.




Joining Woods for True Believer in the pivotal role as legal clerk Roger Baron was Robert Downey Jr., one of the most gifted actors that had came out of the eighties. Downey, like Woods, was also suffering a bit of a dry-creative run when he shot True Believer in 1988, but he delivers a typically hypnotic and engaging performance as Baron and elevates what could have been a stock-character in lesser hands.




As far as the film's director went, Joseph Ruben probably seemed an unlikely choice to bring Strick's script for True Believer to life but he turned out to be an inspired choice as well. The New York born filmmaker had been working, mostly in exploitation films, since the seventies and had delivered a future cult-classic in 1987 with The Stepfather. True Believer is Rubin’s best work as a director though, and he manages to make it work as both first-class entertainment, as well as an incredibly provocative indictment of a generation that had sold out its beliefs and values for a luxury swimming pool in their backyard. Everything from his framing to his ability to hold a shot when it needed to be held in True Believer marked Rubin as major-talent in the making. It’s a shame he hasn't been given a script of such quality since.



The late eighties were a tricky time in American cinema. Lightweight crowd pleasing films like Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy were crowding theaters and picking up awards, but it was a slew of cynical and thought-provoking works like True Believer, Running on Empty and Tequila Sunrise that were really telling the story of the day, each focusing in their own specific way on the failings of the eighties as an answer to the strives made in the sixties and seventies (culturally, politically and cinematically).





I first saw True Believer when I was a junior in High School and it had a pretty profound effect on me and I don’t think I have let a year slip by without giving it another look. Certainly one thing that I found so inspiring about the film was Wood’s haunting performance, Roger Ebert spent nearly the entirety of his original three-star review of the film praising it. Technically the film is quite dazzling as well if not at all showy (watch the still breathtaking and wonderfully edited sequence where Dodd and Baron recreate the murder they are investigating), but there was something in the film’s spirit that really moved me more than anything else. It was something about being a teen in the eighties suffering through Reagan, AIDS, The Religious-Right and conformity all the while with the knowledge that the liberal attitudes of the late sixties and seventies were so close and yet so far away. True Believer is one of those pivotal films from the eighties that is working against the decade…it’s not flashy, it doesn’t owe anything to MTV, and it has a real individualistic spirit that goes against the complacent nature of so many films of the time. Brad Fiedel’s score and James Woods' haircut are about the only things that place True Believer as a 'typical eighties film'. It’s a raging, if subtle, work that is a simultaneous throwback and flash-forward.




Not surprisingly True Believer failed when it hit theaters that cold winter of ’89. While it captivated a number of critics who were exhausted with the increasingly sappy and condescending turn American film had made in the mid-eighties audiences didn’t turn out for True Believer upon its release, and it’s never really gotten the fan-base it deserves. Woods astonishing performance alone should have guaranteed a cult around this film but it’s just never happened.




True Believer has always, thankfully, been a fairly easy film to see thanks to home video (and it even inspired a short-lived series called Eddie Dodd starring Treat Williams) and it is currently available on a bare-bones widescreen DVD from Columbia.



Joseph Ruben’s daring and expertly realized film remains one of my favorites from the eighties, and I hope some more folks might seek it out for the first time or give it another look. Re-watching the film recently I was struck with a certain sadness that I, like Eddie Dodd, didn’t fulfill a lot of my early promise, but as the end credits rolled and Lou Reed’s stunning “Busload of Faith” kicked in I was at least happy that I haven’t sold out my core beliefs and attitudes as I am nearing my fortieth year on the planet. True Believer, like Reed's song that was written for it, is just as relevant today as it was more than two decades ago...a reminder that everything, and nothing, has changed.

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)

I am posting this special Friday edition of Images From My All Time Favorite Films to not only salute my favorite David Cronenberg film, but also to alert anyone who might not know that Tim Lucas' long awaited behind the scenes book on Videodrome is out. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Video Watchdog here and Amazon also carries the book. Congratulations to Tim for his new book, I can't wait to give it a read.

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: Arthur Penn's Night Moves (1975)

My visual tribute to Night Moves and its stars will continue over at Harry Moseby Confidential throughout the next week or so for those interested.