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Saturday Evening Movie Thread [9/28/2024]

Tony Scott

Tony Scott is synonymous with 1980s and 1990s big-budget action cinema. Mostly through his partnership with Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer, he made a series of high-profile movies like Top Gun, Days of Thunder, and Crimson Tide, meeting success for the most part as his career flourished. He was well known for his work with some of the biggest stars in Hollywood like Tom Cruise, Denzel Washington, and Bruce Willis. He directed the biggest movies of the year in 1986 and 1987 at the box office, and he had a top ten movie in 1996 (Crimson Tide). His films never broke $100 million at the box office from the 90s on, but they did regularly make good investments for the studios that he worked with.

It seems obvious to me that his relationship to his elder brother Ridley really helped him get started. Together, they formed Scott Free Productions in the early 70s, and it was Ridley who got started making features first in 1977 with The Duellists, Tony not starting his feature film directing career until 1983 with The Hunger (unless you really want to count Loving Memory, essentially a student film made in 1971). He ended up with a fairly narrow band of films that he could direct well, though.

So, what do you make of a career like Tony Scotts? Of a career ended early when he committed suicide by jumping off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in Los Angeles? I liked a good amount of what I saw, more than I thought, but I also saw this pattern of derivativeness that made him feel like a vessel for other people's visions, especially Don Simpson's. That's not to take away from his successes, just that he was much more of a chameleon than people seem to think of him. They think of his frenetic editing and camera work as his defining feature, but considering the stories of Don Simpson on set and how controlling he was, Simpson ends up feeling like a coked-up David O. Selznick.

So, when I look over the career of Tony Scott, I see three main sources of influence. I see Don Simpson. I see his elder brother Ridley Scott. And, I see himself.

Don Simpson

Out of the eleven films that Don Simpson produced, Tony Scott directed four of them, more than a third. From the start of their professional relationship (along with Simpson's producing partner Jerry Bruckheimer) in 1986 with Top Gun, Scott directed half of what Simpson produced until his death in 1996. If there was one director that Don Simpson latched onto, it wasn't Martin Brest who directed the first Beverly Hills Cop film, it was Scott, who directed the second.

It's hard to delineate between the two and how they influenced each other without pointing towards later in Simpson's life, particularly around the period that the pair made Crimson Tide together. Scott didn't always work with Simpson over those ten years. He made a few other movies for some other producers like Joel Silver (The Last Boy Scout) or Wendy Finerman (The Fan), but his main working relationship in terms of producer was Simpson. What's evident is that visually the films under Simpson are actually a bit more reserved and in control (relatively, this is Tony Scott we're talking about) while the films outside of that relationship are where he started to experiment, especially with The Fan.

Crimson Tide, Simpson's last film with Scott went into production about 10 months before The Rock, also produced by Simpson but directed by Michael Bay (his second feature after Bad Boys, also a Simpson production), and I find it hard to tell the difference between the two from a visual perspective. They have extremely similar ways of shooting and editing that make it hard to differentiate the styles at the time of Bay and Scott with this connective tissue that is Don Simpson. As Jerry Bruckheimer said in 1985, sitting next to Simpson, "We are as much a part of making the picture as the director."

Simpson lived large and big, his peak probably coming in 1990 with the production of Days of Thunder where he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a gym on the beach, bring in hot girls to work out, and even put himself in the film in a minor role. That minor role got cut out after cost overruns brought the studio in to try and save things in post-production (apparently, it was Tom Cruise himself who demanded the cuts). It got cut so far down that he's in, effectively, one shot with one line of dialogue. Days of Thunder represented the peak of Simpson's power, cut down during post-production, but he wasn't done, making movies for six more years until his death.

His entire career in the 80s was about making himself the front and center of a production to the point where Days of Thunder doubled its original production budget in costs because he, Bruckheimer, and even Robert Towne (who wrote the script) would argue for hours with Tony Scott about camera placement...all the time. He was the coked up David O. Selznick of the 80s, and he wanted the world to know.

So, that's why I feel a certain uniformity to the visual stylings of Scott's films for Simpson, why when he ended up working for some other producer, things felt more open and even experimental (though not always better, I found The Fan to be a real drag). Which makes my feelings about the similarities between Crimson Tide and The Rock seem valid. Simpson had a long history of meddling in the production of his films in a way that Bruckheimer, in the decades since Simpson's death, doesn't seem to share (I get the sense that Bruckheimer was a bit of a follower to Simpson's behavior), so it becomes a question of whose movies are these? These four movies that Scott directed with Simpson? The truth is somewhere in between them, but it's obvious that Simpson is at least as much responsible for the final product as Scott was.

Ridley


Tony Scott's relationship with Don Simpson lasted ten years and for four productions. Overall, he had seventeen feature films to his name from that early film Loving Memory through Unstoppable in 2010. The one relationship that will outstrip all others, that lasted his entire life, though, was his elder brother Ridley Scott, director of Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator, and, yes, Prometheus.

Just because the two are siblings and Ridley is the elder doesn't necessarily mean that Tony was inspired by how Ridley made films...until you watch his first feature film after that long break, The Hunger. The Hunger is made like how Ridley Scott was making movies in the early 80s, especially Blade Runner which came out a year earlier. There are heavy uses of gels to create monochromatic images, in particular blues. There's this heavily reserved approach to the acting. There's a lot of fog effects. It has this reserved approach to the editing that makes it feel like a steady dream, not a thrill ride. It's not what one thinks of as a Tony Scott film. If someone were to tell me that Ridley actually directed and just put Tony's name on it, I wouldn't be able to dismiss the assertion. It feels like a Ridley Scott movie much more than every other film Tony made.

The influence doesn't end there. After the work with Simpson that ended in 1996, Scott had the time and opportunity to actually move in his own directions, in ways that interested him stylistically more. He also had opportunity to work directly with Ridley on films through their mutually owned production company Scott Free Productions which they began in the 70s to make commercials in Britain (and then went through some corporate moves that split the company in two, one for each brother, and then reassembled into one in 1995). The first film that Scott Free produced for Tony was The Fan, followed by Enemy of the State, and then Man on Fire.

Man on Fire is where I want to focus because it came out three years after Ridley's Black Hawk Down, and the two are as close stylistically as the two brothers got outside of The Hunger. It still has moments that distinctly make it Tony's, not Ridley's, including Tony's growing propensity for heavily edited moments of montage that include multiple exposures across several shots, blown out whites because of over-exposures, and distortions on the audio track, something that Ridley has never really done. However, outside of those moments which dot the film from beginning to end, Man on Fire is essentially Tony's Black Hawk Down stylistically.

There's a grittiness that matches the streets of the Mexican city the film takes place in with Mogadishu. There's this overexposed quality to the film that highlights the brightness of the sun. Nights tend to be filmed in similar gel-heavy manners emphasizing blues instead of spare lighting and blacks in both films. The reserved approach to dialogue scenes, in particular the first introduction of Denzel Washington's character to the family who hires him, feels similar to how Scott shoots most of his dialogue scenes. They're not the same movie, by the stylistic overlapping is too much to ignore as coincidental. I don't think it's hard to say that Tony, who called his brother a mentor and father-figure, tried to emulate his brother's filmmaking style to some degree.

Tony


That leaves Tony Scott himself. I don't mean to imply that he was derivative in any sort of pejorative way by highlighting what seemed to be his main influences. Every great artist has their influences, you just have to have the knowledge of the medium to find them. I mean, it's easy to see Ridley's influence in Tony's work because we all know Ridley's work fairly well, but who can see the Michael Powell influence in Martin Scorsese's filmography? It's there. You just have to know Powell to see it, and most people don't know Powell all that well (I don't, but I'll correct that soon).

So, with his influences, where does he start mixing and matching them himself? Where does he feel like he's breaking out in new directions that come from his own desire to make cinema his own way? Well, I don't think there's a pure place for artists where they create something out of nothing, it's about combining what they know and like into something unique for them. And where Tony Scott was unique was his visuals. The best way to demonstrate that is an example, so below is his entry in the early 00s short film series produced by BMW (as well as the two Scott brothers) titled The Hire, his entry titled Beat the Devil:



That extreme effort at visual chaos might be the purest form of what Scott ended up trying to do after Simpson died and while he was in the earlier days of working with Ridley in an official capacity. I find it headache inducing, personally, and he took it to feature length with his movie about Domino Harvey, Domino. This is just endless high-octane editing, never settling down to actually let anyone in the audience see what's going on, never letting actors have a moment to make their own contributions known. It is director and editor at the center, leaving everyone behind, including the audience. I think there's a reason he only really tried this technique at the feature length once. Pretty much everyone rejected it (although Tarantino and Edgar Wright have expressed deeply held appreciation for the film, which I don't get, but whatever).

So, is Domino the purest form of Tony Scott?

The Pure Tony Scott


I don't think it is. Domino seems to represent Tony Scott most at one moment in his life, the mid-00s when he was trying to make himself into something beyond the Simpson tool and Ridley mimic. It's more of a timepiece than a reflection on his work as a whole. The focus on its actors is too diffuse. The quality of its stars is too low (Keira Knightley was more of a flash in the pan in Hollywood, an identifiable face within an ensemble, than a real movie star). The script was too...experimental and unfocused (Domino isn't even the protagonist of a movie named after her).

No, the purest example of Tony Scott as an artist of action, populist cinema is what I think to be his best film, Unstoppable (probably an unpopular opinion, especially with the love that True Romance gets).

Unstoppable is pure formula, essentially a Roger Corman movie made with $100 million and starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine where Corman found a train he could use and made Scott go and build a film around it. It has telltale signs of Simpson influence (the action, the mentor relationship, the bridging of the divide between antagonists in the beginning to become friends in the face of the real antagonist in the end, movie stars), but told in a simpler, more grounded, lower-class way than Simpson ever would have. Simpson's world was a world of the elite's elite in dangerous professions, not working-class guys rising to an occasion to fix a problem.

Visually, the film doesn't have nearly as much of that editing incoherence that defined Domino (it was obvious he'd largely cast if off with his follow-up film to Domino, Deja Vu), but you can still feel that Ridley influence in the visuals because they're so baked in the cake of everything Scott did by that point. It's this combination of him, Simpson, and Ridley told in this surprisingly tight little package of explosive destruction and action that meshed well with his penchant for action-filmmaking but also the tense aspects of the script.

Honestly, Unstoppable feels like everything Scott had been trying to do as a filmmaker since Top Gun. It is the one movie that feels fully his, fully like he made the movie he wanted to make, the movie that his career had been building to. It probably sounds like I'm overpraising it as some sort of masterpiece. I wouldn't go that far, but I do love the film and think it's a great entertainment.

In the End


And Unstoppable was his final film. He threw himself off the Vincent Thomas Bridge in 2012, reportedly because of a cancer diagnosis (though, supposedly, there was no cancer found in his body), and he died. It seems obvious, based on the little that I've read of his relationship with his elder brother, that Tony was a troubled man who leaned heavily on his elder sibling for emotional support. They both had survived their eldest brother, Frank, who died in 1980 due to skin cancer. Ridley had put him on the track that led him to film directing in general by talking him into starting Scott Free instead of working for the BBC because the former would lead him to buying a Ferrari sooner (it worked). The cancer diagnosis must have been something he kept from Ridley and didn't know how to process, leading to despair, which is a terrible thing.

And he left behind a legacy of films that were popular in their day and mostly have aged fairly well. My own opinions don't matter, but Top Gun, True Romance, Crimson Tide, Enemy of the State, Man on Fire, and Unstoppable should all have shelf lives that go on for a few more decades to entertain people with their charms and thrills. That's far from nothing.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Megalopolis

The Wild Robot

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Unstoppable (Rating 4/4) Full Review "So, I genuinely and greatly enjoyed this film. I think it was Tony Scott's best film." [Library]

Domino (Rating 1/4) Full Review "This is something of a disaster from Tony Scott." [Library]

Man on Fire (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, I think the overall package is quite good. It might be Scott's best film. However, I just feel like something is missing in the back half that would give Creasy's actions more immediacy. Also, Scott's visual flare continues to become a headache in increasing intensity, flashing needlessly in sections but, thankfully, not all the time." [Library]

Spy Game (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, it feels like Scott trying to, again, elevate his own material, but he couldn't judge scripts or improve them, and his stylistic excesses were beginning to work against him. He still has qualities to recommend his work, but this script is simply too filled with issues that need to be worked out on the page before pre-production ever got close to beginning." [Library]

True Romance (Rating 3/4) Full Review "There's a sweet core, some solid action, and a lot of fun dialogue along the way. It's quality entertainment from Scott." [Library]

Days of Thunder (Rating 2/4) Full Review "So, the first half is actually quite fun, doesn't take itself too seriously, and is just generally a high-adrenaline good time at the movies. The second half is a hodgepodge of dramatic nonsense that never connects and the movie doesn't actually care about." [Library]

The Last Boy Scout (Rating 3/4) Full Review "This is solid, 90s fun from Scott and Black, buoyed by fun performances, a good balance between comedy, drama, and action, and a smartly written, noir-inspired script." [Library]

Crimson Tide (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, it's fun, but its one foot in realism betrays the rest of the film which isn't terribly realistic." [Library]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 10/19, and it will be very spooky.