John Milius, Hollywood Maverick

Bill Kauffman has written a
good column about writer/director John Milius, the lost
bridge between the New Hollywood of the ’70s and the anti-Communist
flicks of the Reagan era. Here’s an excerpt:

He completed the transition from
colorful character to pariah, the documentary suggests, with “Red
Dawn” (1984), which Milius cowrote and directed. “Red Dawn” is a
Boys’ Life fantasy in which a gang of outdoorsy Colorado
kids (nicknamed the Wolverines, after their high school mascot)
resists the Soviet/Cuban occupation of their town. They run off to
the mountains, sleep under the stars, play football, eat Rice
Krispies for dinner, and draw up sorties in the dirt as if they
were Hail Mary passes. It all sounds like a blast.

Despite the ludicrous premise, the film is filled with entertaining
extended middle fingers (the occupiers use registration records to
locate gun owners, among them the great Harry Dean Stanton, and
throw them into re-education camps) that left conventional
reviewers sputtering.

One of “Red Dawn”‘s only thoughtful notices came from The
Nation‘s Andrew Kopkind, who saw it as a paean to insurgency,
“a celebration of people’s war.” Milius, in this interpretation, is
no jingo; he’s on the side of indigenous people fighting an
occupying army. Kopkind’s essay is so good I can’t help quoting at
length: “Milius has produced the most convincing story about
popular resistance to imperial oppression since the inimitable
‘Battle of Algiers.’ He has only admiration for his guerrilla kids,
and he understands their motivations (and excuses their naivete)
far better than the hip liberal filmmakers of the 1960s
counterculture. I’d take the Wolverines from Colorado over a small
circle of friends from Harvard Square in any revolutionary
situation I can imagine.”

Read the rest
here. One Milius claim to fame that Kauffman doesn’t mention:
He was the model for John Goodman’s character in The Big
Lebowski.

The column’s news hook is the recent documentary
Milius. I’ve seen this film, and it’s pretty good. It’s
also pretty sad: At the end we learn that Milius, by all accounts a
legendary raconteur, suffered a stroke a few years ago that left
him unable to speak coherently. His recovery is underway, but the
movie leaves the impression that he has a long way to go.

Bonus links: I quoted that Kopkind review in an
article
about the Rambo films (a greatly expanded version of which
appears in my book
The United States of Paranoia). Milius also turned up
in my obit
for Dennis Hopper. And way back in 1985—when giants walked the
earth, like Caine in Kung Fu—a profile of
Milius appeared here in Reason. He sounds like a
libertarian until he doesn’t—that is, until he endorses
conscription, minimum wage laws, and the idea that “it might not
have been bad for this country” if Gen. Douglas MacArthur had
“crossed the Mississippi like Caesar crossed the Rubicon and
proclaimed himself Emperor Douglas the First.” He might have been
kidding about that last one.