In this unsettling time when the
only film about our eternal state of war that could command a Best Picture
Oscar is one whose message is buried deeply inside the rituals of an adrenaline
junkie bomb disposal officer (The Hurt Locker), Shout Pictures is
releasing a disturbing Vietnam era chamber piece which has the definite
potential to scare the horses, if not burn down the stables on the subject of
gays in the military.
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In Streamers, Catholic
educated Vietnam war vet David Rabe constructed an extremely dark and
ultimately bloody comedy/drama around the premise that a shameless gay boy,
Richie, could reek untold havoc among a small group of guys facing a trip to
‘Nam if he attempted the seduction of a naïve, if self-righteous Wisconsin farm
boy, Billy, by feigning interest in a street smart, loose canon inner city
black recruit, Carlyle. In a scene loaded for bear with provocative body
language, Richie (Mitchell Litchenstein) taunts Billy (Matthew Modine) using
the emotionally volatile Carlyle (a riveting turn by Michael Wright) as bait.
“Carlyle likes me, Billy, he thinks
I’m pretty.”
“No, I don’t think you’re pretty. A
broad is pretty. Punks ain’t pretty. Punk – if he’s good – is cute. You cute.”
“He’s going to steal me right away,
little Billy. You’re so slow. I prefer a man who’s decisive.”
“You just keep at it, you’re gonna
have us all believin’ you are just what you say you are.”
This cosmic meltdown where
everything you’ve been told to love about the sixties – identity politics,
monologues that make the political not only personal but poetically unsettling,
stark confrontations between the individual and outmoded institutions – comes
maniacally unhinged leaving bodies all over the stage and no way to separate
winners and losers, is possibly just the ticket for a generation that been
tutored to believe in change without damage.
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The year was 1983 and Mitchell
Lichtenstein remembers being impressed that he had been invited to Robert
Altman’s Central Park South offices to
audition for Richie, a gay soldier, whose calculated flirting results in
disorientation, sexual confusion and mayhem. Fresh out of the Yale Drama
School, Lichtenstein’s only previous film work was a small part in The Lords
of Discipline, adapted from Pat Conroy’s novel about the attempt to
desegregate a Southern military academy. But this was Robert Altman and the
part of Richie was so provocatively etched it would be sure to attract
attention in the business, especially if given a nervy take by an out actor.
Lichtenstein knew he was in good hands auditioning for Altman, a filmmaker who
in the seventies had created a singular body of work – Mash, Nashville,
Three Women – that had transformed American art house cinema.
“You (felt) so encouraged and
protected with him – every actor I’ve ever heard interviewed seems to have the
same comment about how he cast you in this part because you are perfect for it
and now he’s kind of sitting back sitting back and enjoying what you’re doing
and then throwing in perfect direction but in a way in which you think he has
the perfect eye and isn’t missing anything.”
At the time David Rabe’s play had a
reputation among New York audiences for being a uniquely harrowing theatrical
experience. Richie was a flamboyant shit disturber, a juicy role.
“It can be seen that he is the
villain who starts everything that winds up in the hero’s (Billy’s) murder. I
don’t know if it was a great role model but it was a great character to play
and also I don’t know if that was Rabe’s intention.”
For Lichtenstein there was a
special delight in working with the young actor who played the homicidally
inclined black soldier, Carlyle. “I remember great scenes with Michael
Wright just because (he and Richie) had this really intense but weird
flirtation – Richie’s sort of being very seductive – they were so much fun to
play and Michael was such a good actor.”
The fact that Streamers was
shot in a specially constructed claustrophobic set in Dallas gave the cast a
special kind of camaraderie. “We had a pretty intense experience – we slept on
the set a couple of times.”
Streamers, the movie,
resulted partly from a calculated gamble by a temporarily out of work film
genius. Designed as part of Robert Altman’s bid to engineer a Hollywood
comeback by adapting inflammatory stage pieces for the screen – Streamers was
preceded by Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean and
would be followed by Secret Honor about a drunken Richard Nixon’s last
night in the White House -- Streamers was clearly the best thing Altman
had done since 3 Women. In a 1984 interview, to promote the release of Secret
Honor, Altman described filming plays without watering down their texts.
“The only thing missing in Jimmy
Dean, Streamers, or Secret Honor is that we didn’t have another
screenplay. We took the text of the play itself and said, ‘Okay, this is our
screenplay, this is our film.’ And we set off to make a film out of that.
And that’s why it doesn’t look stagy, and yet it’s the same content.
“Streamers, if you took it
out of the confinement of the barracks, you’ve released the pressure on those
characters, because that’s what they were in, and it was important to stay in
there. If I’d cut away to documentary footage of Nixon or made a mixed bag out
of Secret Honor, it would become one of these pseudo-documentaries that
is just propaganda.”
Shout Factory’s release of Streamers
comes with informative extras: A Look Back at Streamers – with
interviews with cast members from the stage production of David Rabe’s play and
Robert Altman’s film.