Featured preview by Chris Radtke, contributing editor.
Randall Jahnson may not have a huge name in Hollywood, but as one of the minds behind cult classics like The Mask of Zorro and The Doors, he certainly knows his way around a pen. It was for this reason that the developers of GUN (known for their work on the Tony Hawk games), recruited Randall to work on the game's script. We spoke to him about his work on the game, as well as his influences and unique Hollywood experiences.
UGO: How'd you get mixed up with Neversoft working on GUN?
RANDALL JAHNSON: The Neversoft crew (Joel Jewett, Scott Pease, and Chad Findley) read a script I'd written for film director Jonathan Demme based on the true story of William Wells, a red-haired white kid who was kidnapped by Indians in 1784 and taken deep into the Ohio Valley. There he was adopted by Little Turtle, a powerful chief, and grew up to be a fearsome but troubled warrior.
The movie was never made - the script is still sitting on a shelf somewhere at Universal Pictures - but, fortunately, it got into the hands of the Neversoft guys while they were searching for a screenwriter with whom they could develop GUN. It's not exactly a Western, but it apparently had the kind of grit and authenticity they were looking for.
UGO: Briefly, give us the quick and dirty on the main character and what his story is...
RANDALL: GUN is the kick-ass journey of Colton White, the son of a rugged mountain man and scout, who's thrown into a deep mystery after he escapes the brutal massacre that kills his father. Colton's called upon to use every frontier survival skill his father taught him as he makes his way across the vast landscape of the Old West. But he must become even more proficient in horsemanship, gunplay, and the use of explosives in order to stay on the trail of the murderous preacher and others who will provide the answers to his father's death. It's a journey of self-discovery, too, for Colton learns early on that nothing is what it seems - even his own identity.
UGO: From what we've seen so far, the player will have a chance to wear many different hats in GUN - be it outlaw, honorary Indian, sharpshooter and horse wrangler. In the novel, Little Big Man by Thomas Berger, the main character, Jack Crabb, is an outlaw, honorary Indian, sharpshooter and horse wrangler. Was the book an influence at all, if not, what other Westerns - be it novels or films, were inspirations for your work on GUN?
RANDALL: Little Big Man - especially the film version of it - is a classic. I saw it in the theater as a kid and was blown away by the juxtaposition of violence and comedy. (Its director, Arthur Penn, had directed Bonnie and Clyde, which had the same shocking sensibility, a couple years before. That too was an influence.) I also loved the circuitous route of Jack Crabb's journey and the different "phases" of his "career." I liked how he kept stumbling into real-life characters - Wild Bill Hickok and Custer - and weaving actual events like the Washita massacre and Custer's Last Stand into the fabric of the narrative.
In GUN we wanted Colton to have brushes with real-life characters too. For a long time Doc Holliday played an important role as an enemy-turned-ally. But he was eliminated as we began to streamline the story. But other actual personas from the Old West remain: Clay Allison, Hoodoo Brown, "Arkansas" Dave Rudabaugh.
Another novel that was particularly inspirational for me was The Big Sky by A.B. Guthrie.
Also, I really loved an obscure novel called The Homesman by the late Glendon Swarthout (author of The Shootist). It was about this down-on-his-luck drunken scout who is hired to guide a wagon of women from the Plains back to St. Louis. Each woman had gone insane while homesteading and the whole lot of them were being delivered to their respective families or asylums. I loved this book because it's so stark and unsentimental. In very spare terms it conveyed the harshness and emotional toll that pioneers - women, especially - endured. It was also a reversal of the classic westward movement story; the journey was to the East!
In addition to Little Big Man, the Western films that made the biggest impression on me usually had an off-beat, revisionist, or counterculture streak to them. Stuff like Jeremiah Johnson, Will Penny, The Long Riders, The Missouri Breaks, Richard Brooks' The Professionals, and anything by Sam Peckinpah. Though not Westerns by definition, three other films that spoke to me in a big way were Apocalypse Now, Peckinpah's sleazefest Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, and Terrence Malick's debut Badlands. The last two star Warren Oates, arguably the greatest character actor of the late '60s-early '70s.
UGO: What is it about the Old West that gets you all charged up? It's a theme that permeates some of your work, be it the Indian spirituality that Jim Morrison lives through in The Doors, or the swashbuckling rogue hero elements of Zorro...heck, even your first film, Dudes, with John Cryer and Flea had a cowboys and Indians thing going on.
RANDALL: Yeah, it seems to wiggle its way into just about everything I write. And I'm not sure if I can articulate why.
Let me back up to Dudes. I got that writing gig off a one-line pitch to a producer: "Punk rockers out in the wilds of Wyoming." As I began to develop the story which takes place in the modern-day West, I realized I hadn't been to the West since I was about 4 years old. So I took off on a "research" trip in order to see what really was out there.
One of my first stops was a semi-ghost town called Jerome, which was an old copper mining town clinging to a hillside in Arizona near Sedona. Old hippies, cowboys, and a few artists lived there among the crumbling structures. I loved that contrast of old and new, of pot smokers and red-necks, living among the ruins.
From Jerome I headed north into Utah. I visited Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon, and drove a really hairy dirt road called the Moqui Dugway that switchbacked up a high bluff to Natural Bridges National Monument. The beauty and expanse of that landscape amazed and rejuvenated me.
Next, I headed into Nevada. I was driving Highway 50 toward Ely - a really lonely stretch of road - when I had this strange experience. I glanced off to my left and saw what looked like the mouth of a cave on a distant hillside. A moment later I passed an unmarked dirt road that snaked off in that direction. On a whim, I whipped the car around and drove off toward the cave. Twenty minutes later the road came to a dead end and there before me was an old abandoned mine. Its tunnel was what I'd seen from the highway. Rusted ore carts were strewn about. Remnants of machinery too.
When I got out of the car the sky was steely gray from thunderclouds; lightning was striking in the far distance. I could barely make out the highway. This seemed to be the most remote, lonely place I'd ever been.
And that tunnel beckoned. I started to climb up to its mouth, which yawned about thirty feet up the slope. As I got closer and closer to it, the hair on the back of my head began to stand up and goose bumps rose up and down my arms. I suddenly had the distinct feeling that I was not alone. Someone or something was there. About a yard shy of raising my head to peer into the tunnel, the feeling got so overwhelming that I couldn't go on anymore. I turned around and scrambled back to the car and I took off like a bat outta Hell.
Who knows what it was. Maybe I had an instinct that saved me from a close encounter with a rattlesnake or cougar. Maybe it was the ghosts of those miners still guarding their "diggins." Or maybe I'm just a chickenshit with an overactive imagination. Whatever the case, I came away believing the West is a very haunted place. So many destinies were played out there. It's where myth and history, the Mystical and hardscrabble reality intersect. It's as much a state of mind as it is a geographical location. And I find that endlessly compelling.
UGO: Speaking of Dudes, what was it like getting your first movie made? How did it come about? Did you work directly with Penelope Spheeris?
RANDALL: Dudes couldn't have been a more positive experience. It was everything a screenwriter could hope for. And that was due to Penelope. She shot the script word-for-word; no other writer was ever involved (practically unheard of in today's film world). She not only made me feel welcome on the set, she invited me to participate in casting sessions, and, once the film was in the can, to come by while she was editing. She also took seriously my suggestions for locations (they shot in Jerome!), casting (I had written the villain specifically for punk singer Lee Ving), and music (punk band the Vandals in the opening sequence).
If anything, we sparred on the tone of the film. She saw it as a broad comedy - I saw it as more of a drama, the comedy deriving from the absurd situations the two New York punks founds themselves in out in the West.
It came about after I pitched the one-liner to producer Miguel Tejada-Flores. At the time I was heavily into the Los Angeles music scene. I had directed some low budget videos for The Minutemen, Black Flag, and Henry Rollins. Whenever I went to these hardcore shows, I was struck by how tribal the whole scene was. The kids with their mohawks and other regalia slamming in the Pit looked to me like Indians dancing around a bonfire. Western themes and imagery were also being incorporated into the music. The Dead Kennedys recorded the theme song to the old TV series Rawhide, early punkers the Dils reformed as a "cowpunk" outfit Rank and File, Arizona's Meat Puppets were playing their tripped-out country, and Wall of Voodoo often performed the title songs to Hang 'Em High and The Good, the Bad & the Ugly, in their live shows. Voodoo's album Call of the West, a classic of the era, was a big influence on me too.
Miguel got the script to Penelope, who was the sort of godmother of LA punk due to The Decline of Western Civilization and Suburbia. She immediately understood what I was writing about and was very passionate about it. "There are only two directors who could do this movie," she said. "Alex Cox and me." I did one cursory rewrite and away they went, shooting in LA and Arizona.
As luck would have it, I got hired to write The Doors right then, so I couldn't be on the Dudes set as much as I wanted.
UGO: How did The Doors come about? Are you a Doors fan? Did Oliver Stone stick to what you wrote? What was the experience like?
RANDALL: The Doors was the result of one of those extraordinary alignments of luck, good connections, and "heat." Anytime you're fortunate enough to have a script in production, you have some momentum. Thanks to Dudes being filmed, the script was making the rounds at Columbia studios where The Doors project was set up. The exec in charge of it happened to be the girlfriend of my college roommate, and she championed me and arranged for me to meet the producer, who then arranged for me to meet the surviving Doors - keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robbie Krieger, and drummer John Densmore.
I was a Doors fan, not a fanatic. What excited me, I told them, was the potential for telling a rock 'n' roll epic. The project had scope. It was not the Richie Valens or Buddy Holly story; it was beyond that. It was about going to the edge.
That seemed to impress them - plus the fact that I'd worked with Black Flag and Henry Rollins and that music played a large role in Dudes. (Densmore ended up acting a bit part in Dudes too.) They also liked that I had gone to UCLA film school, which was where Manzarek and Jim Morrison had gone. We even had a couple of the same instructors!
So I got the job.
I spent the next year researching and writing the script. The key, of course, was unlocking the enigma of Jim Morrison. There were no biographical materials on Jimbo around at that time save for No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Danny Sugerman-Jerry Hopkins book which we did not have the rights to. So I spent countless hours interviewing the surviving Doors, their producer Paul Rothchild, Jimbo's mom and dad, the parents of Pamela Courson (Jim's common-law wife), and many others who were present in that scene.
It was tough going. There were a lot of conflicting reports, memories. But early on, I began to see a big discrepancy between the public Jimbo and the private one. The film's producer didn't care for some of the stuff I was digging up nor did he like how I was choosing to structure the movie - all around Jim's solo poetry-recording session on his last birthday. After I delivered the first draft I was promptly given my walking papers.
The project chewed up and spit out a couple of other writers before Oliver Stone came aboard and requested to read all the previous drafts by all the previous writers. Manzarek told me later that Oliver then announced in a meeting that he wanted to write his script based on my draft.
So three and half years after being fired from the project, I'm having a meeting with Oliver. You gotta love Hollywood.
Our meeting was brief. He asked me a few questions about my research, choices I'd made in the script. Then he said my draft inspired him a great deal, that he was going to go and do his version and then make the movie. We shook hands. I walked out. And I didn't see him again until the day the movie opened in theaters.
Did Oliver stick to what I wrote? Yes and no. He kept the same structure but rewrote most of the dialogue. He also stuck closely to where I had written specific Doors songs to help push the narrative along, like "The End" being performed at the Whisky and segueing into their psychedelic trip in the desert. That was quite cool.
He did get more literal with the Indian spirituality than I did. In my version, the only time you actually see the shaman was when the Doors are performing live - and tripping on acid - and they look over at Jim and see not their singer but a Native American wearing a mask and draped in skins. This was right on the heels of Jim telling his infamous Indians on the highway story.
Which takes us back to Little Big Man for a second. Like Jack Crabb, Jim Morrison was a storyteller. And just as there was a tall-tale quotient to Jack's storytelling, so too was there to Jim's - the "Indians on the highway bleeding" being the prime example. The story, as he would tell it, was that when he was a boy of five or six years, he was driving across the desert with his family. On a lonely stretch of highway they came upon a scene of great carnage: a pick-up truck had overturned and the blacktop was covered with the bodies of dead and dying Native Americans who had been riding in the back. And the ghost of one of them jumped inside his soul.
When I interviewed Jim's parents years later, I asked them about the incident. They could hardly recall it. They remembered it was somewhere in New Mexico. A truck was parked by the side of the road and a group of Indians was standing around, which had caused the Morrisons to slow down. But there was no carnage. The only thing that was unusual, they said, was that there was some keening or singing going on. Then his mother turned to me and said, "Little Jimmy had a tendency to embellish."
Whether it was true or not or half-true ultimately wasn't important to me. What was important was that Jim perpetuated the story. Like Jack Crabb, he embellished the truth - perhaps even believed it himself - to the point where the reality and myth dissolve into one another.
UGO: Are you involved with the impending Zorro sequel?
RANDALL: No, I was never asked. As far as I know, none of the four writers of the first one were involved. C'est la Hollywood.
UGO: Are you a video game player?
I am not, but I'm gonna become one. After working on and seeing so much of GUN, I can't wait to get on my horse and ride - and that's still with knowing everything that happens. It really makes me want to play. The sound effects, by the way, are awesome. Rifle and revolver reports have that authentic booming sound.
UGO: What's next?
I've written a script called Between Sets that - knock on wood - I'll be directing next year. It takes place about as far from the Old West as you can get - the New York City jazz scene in the early 1960s. It's an ensemble piece with a primarily African-American cast.
Then it's saddling up for GUN 2 and 3 I hope!
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