The (Original) Adventures of Ford Fairlane
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So how did Ford Fairlane fit into this?
Mutrux: All of the movies I’ve done have been scored with an AM car radio. That process was always in my mind when I’d write a movie that I was going to direct. For me the music was part of my lifestyle. Ford Fairlane fit into that mode for me, in telling this kind of romantic story of a PI with a dark backstory. So I said to Rex, okay—so write the story. We hung around a bit, places like the China Club, a kind of a decadent period in LA, a lot of celebrities, everyone was doing a little cocaine, maybe a little too much cocaine. There was a lost weekend I remember... Listen, everybody from Harry Nilsson to Rod Stewart...it was a different life then, that’s all. Well, that was the eighties. My best friend was Richard Perry, the record producer. Still is. He had a house in the hills. You walked in—John Lennon, they were all there.
Why didn’t Ford Fairlane get made at Columbia?
Mutrux: Rex worked on a draft of the script. Columbia put it in turnaround. A producer I’d worked with, Sidney Beckerman [Portnoy’s Complaint, Marathon Man, Marlowe, Red Dawn, and The Sicilian], well, he came in and we ended up changing studios to Embassy Pictures. I was going to direct and I was going to do it with Mel Gibson. Or Mickey Rourke. Rex would not be involved. I started to write about this new wave detective who lived above a nude bar in Chinatown, drove a Rent-a-Wreck, and the Girl with the Purple Hair. But when it came time to pull the trigger, the studio owner, Jerry Perenchio, sold Embassy. Took his money and bought four or five Spanish radio stations. The movie went into turnaround again. I walked away. At that point, Ford Fairlane went back to Rex.
Did you see the movie, The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, that 20th Century Fox ultimately made?
Mutrux: Didn’t see the film, didn’t read the script. Andrew Dice Clay was the opposite of Mel Gibson or Mickey Rourke. My Ford Fairlane was a real guy. I was doing my own thing with that character. If somebody doesn’t want to do my thing, that’s okay.
Interview by Pat Thomas
About Rex Weiner
Cofounder and publisher of the pioneering New York Ace newspaper (1971–73) and, according to his FBI file, an ant-war activist and founding member of the editorial staff of High Times magazine, Weiner’s articles have appeared in, Vanity Fair, Los Angeles Times Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker, New York Observer, and LA Weekly as well as Rolling Stone Italia and L’Officiel Hommes. A native of Brooklyn, his last New York publishing job was editor of Swank (“The Magazine for Men”) before moving west to Los Angeles. In addition to The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, Rex Weiner’s produced screenwriting credits include Forgotten Prisoners, The Amnesty Files, one of TNT’s first made-for-TV movies. He was one of the first writers brought on board to launch the TV series Miami Vice.
Weiner ruined morning coffee for many entertainment industry executives as a Daily Variety staff reporter from 1993–1997. With Deanne Stillman, Weiner coauthored The Woodstock Census (Viking), a widely hailed survey of the sixties generation’s impact on American society. He has written about LA politics and culture as West Coast correspondent for the Forward, and is an investigative reporter for Capital and Main. He lives in Los Angeles where he serves on the board of Beyond Baroque, the literary center, and in Todos Santos, Baja California Sur, Mexico where he is a cofounder and director of the Todos Santos Writers Workshop.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Pat Thomas, author of Listen, Whitey! and Did It! Jerry Rubin, An American Revolutionary, for interviewing Jay Levin, Andy Schwartz, and Floyd Mutrux, and thanks to those guys for cooperating, as well as being Ford Fairlane’s willing accomplices in the first place. Many thanks to Tyson Cornell and the Rare Bird team for their diligent work and expertise. I am grateful to Deanne Stillman for the use of her photo on the cover (yes, that’s me when I was writing and living these stories), and to my attorney Linda Lichter for safeguarding my work. A salute to my friends John Densmore and Jonathan Shaw for being early readers. My gratitude, always, to my companion author Jeanne McCulloch for her encouragement and support. And to all my amigos at the Todos Santos Writers Workshop—muchas gracias!
—Rex Weiner