“He doesn’t write for pussies. He doesn’t write for women. He writes for men. Cuz he’s a man.”
— Sam Elliott on John Milius
John Milius has had his meaty paws on so many movies that matter to me that it’s hard to really quantify his influence. He wrote the screenplay for the first movie I ever saw in a theater: Jeremiah Johnson. His original screenplay was considered way too violent and gory and was toned down. Waugh!
“The real breaking point where I knew – and it was almost overnight – that I had become a good writer with a voice… When I started working on that, it was called The Crow Killer and I knew that material. I’d lived in the mountains, I had a trapline, I hunted, and I had a lot of experiences with characters up there. So, it was real easy to write that and there was a humor to it, a kind of bigger-than-life attitude… I remember there was a great poem about American braggarts. You know, American liars – ‘I am the ring-tailed cousin to the such and such that ate so and so and I can do this and I can do that better than Mike Fink the river man…’ I just realized that this was the voice that the script had to have. It was as clear as a bell. I knew that writing was particular to me.”
Big Wednesday; Apocalypse Now; Farewell to the King; The Wind and the Lion; The Life & Times of Judge Roy Bean; The Rough Riders. It’s ridiculous.
Like most Robert E. Howard aficionados, I am not a big fan of Conan the Barbarian, because it’s not Howard’s Conan. Milius was indulging his fascination with Genghis Khan and his favorite sport of tweaking hippies. A good movie, just not a good Conan movie.
His Dillinger is superior in many ways to Michael Mann’s more stylish Public Enemies. He was part of the creative team that produced HBO’s Rome, which I dearly love — and I recognize his touch all over the dialogue.
Francis Ford Coppola said that
“Everything memorable about Apocalypse Now was written by John Milius.”
He wrote so many iconic lines:
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
“Go ahead, make my day.”
“The Europeans have guns that fire many times promiscuously and rend the Earth. There is no honor in this – nothing is decided from this.”
“Ask yourself one question, ‘do I feel lucky?’ Well, do you punk?”
The Indianapolis monologue from Jaws.
I didn’t know this before, but apparently he was an instrumental figure in the early formation of UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) mixed martial arts competition. The octagon was his idea. Of course it was.
Milius is considered a right-winger in Hollywood — and he obviously loves being a turd in that punchbowl. But he’s no reactionary. He’s really a counter-cultural figure, committed to a romantic masculine freedom that is actually more threatening to bourgeois values than the politics of the left and far more radical than anything peddled by the hippies he delighted in tweaking.
Milius is famous for his love of firearms — a specified gun is alway a part of his compensation package on a film. I met Milius several times when I worked for the firearms retailer Pachmayr. I managed the proshop at Pachmayr’s trap, skeet and sporting clays range in South El Monte for a while and he was a regular sporting clays shooter. I loaded several cases of shells into his car one afternoon and chatted him up about his unmade screenplay about Kentucky frontiersman Simon Kenton (who is one of the Frontier Partisans profiled in my forthcoming “Warriors of the Wild Lands”).
Like most of us who walk these now-obscure trails, he was thrilled to talk to someone who knew a bit about Kenton. This was in 1992 — and he said the movie couldn’t be made because no modern male lead could play it. Only a young Clint Eastwood. I say dust that thing off and get it made with Chris Hemsworth in the lead. One can hope…
My other encounter has stuck with me all these years. Milius got royally pissed off about something and gave the range manager, an Olympic shooting team veteran, all kinds of hell. It was a towering, stereotypical Hollywood director temper tantrum — and it was unseemly. He got into his expensive car and roared off in a rage. I was crushed. I loved the guy’s manly and noble — and funny — work, and here he was acting like a prima donna dickwad.
Wait, there’s a happy ending.
A few hours later, Milius pulled back into the range compound and asked for the manager. Didn’t know where he was. Milius said he needed to apologize to him for his behavior, which he acknowledged was way out of line. He’d driven all the way out to Santa Monica, then back to South El Monte — no small undertaking in L.A. traffic — because he needed to apologize man-to-man. My esteem not only reset to its previous level, it increased. And there have been a few times that I’ve needed to emulate that example.
The documentary Milius (trailer above) is available through Netflix. It’s a hoot. If it doesn’t inspire you to fire up your keyboard, load your guns, fire up cigar and get down to some storytelling, well…
Hats off to you, Mr. Milius.
Craig Rullman says
I once had the pleasure of zeroing a rifle for Dick Wolfe, the producer. A Noveske N4. He liked that enough that he bought one for our sniper team, adding a semi-auto platform to our load out, and accomplishing in about four minutes what the PD Administrator’s couldn’t get done in over a year. The masculine in Hollywood has been pushed to the edges, for certain, but it is nice to know they aren’t entirely extinct.
JimC says
Good for Wolfe. A real-world assist to “Law & Order.”
That masculine spirit is real-deal “Old Hollywood.” Clark Gable hunted birds in my old stompin’ grounds and of course there’s the Hemingway/Gary Cooper bromance. John Huston…
The way it’s supposed to be.
Saddle Tramp says
[ Walter Huston ] to take it back to golden light even more so…
Yes a revered group for sure!
The era before emasculation took hold.
No apologies needed.
A while back I saw the documentary TRUE GEN all about the Hemingway / Cooper bromance. Worth the ticket. Cooper the real cowboy as well! It seems most of the really good stuff gets such limited circulation. Value not hype! Glad for what I can get.
Ah, but Hemingway was promiscuous as he also had a long affair with Orson Welles. I attended a film of his at The Laemmle where they brought back his CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT last week as part of their Culture Vulture series. This was the one film that Orson said would get him into heaven. God’s own thespian!
Forward into the past…
History. Make it or write it? Hell, maybe I’ll do both with one shot!
— saddle tramp
Corralitos, NM
En route to El Paso…
JimC says
Great stuff ST — I’ll have to track down that doco. Our friend Craig McDonald has featured both Hemingway and Welles in several of his “Hector Lassiter” novels, which are a wonderful window into the era “when Sinatra played Juarez.”
Thom Eley says
Great article and great comments!
Thom Eley says
Hey, I used to shoot there and refereed at skeet shoots. Pachmayr’s trap, skeet and sporting clays range in South El Monte. I still have a Pachmayr’s Cutts Compensator on it!
JimC says
Small world, ain’t it? The Cutts Compensator! Saw lots of those. Pachmayr sold to Lyman, which I’m sure was a good move financially. Unfortunately, I came on board when the business was changing a lot. They closed down their magnificent retail store on Lake Avenue, which was just a mournful tragedy. Classiest joint in So Cal, with a lovely library of Africana that made it exceedingly difficult to go home with an intact paycheck. Despite some corporate issues that made it a less-than-pleasant work environment there at the end, I have fond memories of both the store and the range.
deuce says
Great post, Jim. Sorry for the belated response. As you know, I’m of two minds about Milius. I’ll just say that when he’s good, he’s damn good.
You didn’t mention Geronimo: An American Legend. Despite tampering, Milius’ script shines through and I quote some of its lines several times a year. I still believe Hill is a better director overall (but not screenwriter). He could probably use a post at some point.
Here is an excellent NYT article on “Geronimo”:
http://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/05/movies/film-geronimo-still-with-a-few-rough-edges.html?pagewanted=all
It even mentions Edgar Rice Burroughs.
JimC says
Right you are. And Walter Hill is another”man’s” filmmaker. Look forward to the NYT piece.
john maddox roberts says
When I studied screenwriting at USC in 1978, one of the scripts we were given to study was an early, pirated draft of “Äpocalypse Now.” It was, needless to say, wildly at variance with the finished Coppola film. Only bits got through in the finished film, and Milius’s vision was for a low-budget, B&W film modeled on Sam Fuller’s classic grade-B war movies like “The Steel Helmet”and “China Gate.” One bit of dialogue I dearly wish had made it into the movie was a conversation between Kurtz and Willard in which Kurtz says that western literature never correctly portrayed the true nature of man and came close only once. Willard asks when that was. “Tarzan,” Kurtz replies, “the wild man of the woods who is himself a part of his environment.”
JimC says
Oh, that is wonderful.
lane batot says
Great story! And I had not yet heard/read this one of your experiences with Milius. I’m NOT very fond of the “Geronimo; An American Legend” movie, despite it being a purty good movie in and of itself–it really SHOULD have been titled “Lieutenant Gatewood” because that’s really what it was about! But just TOO many inaccuracies, and not much about Geronimo at all–just a tiny bit of the latter part of an infamous, incredible life! I LOVE Wes Studi, but not much for him in this role. And I think they tried far too hard to mimic John Ford, portraying Apache customs and actual behavior very poorly in the process–it is a decent movie overall, but a poor Apache movie! I think the old 1960’s Chuck Conner’s version of “Geronimo” captured the spirit and character of the last “wild” Apaches far better, hokey as it is now by modern standards(and Chuck Conners stole every scene, blue eyes and all!)….but back to Milius–HE needs to be the one to get Louis L’Amour’s “Last Of The Breed” on film!!!!
JimC says
LoB is a perfect Milius vehicle.
Wayne Williams says
A John Milius film of Simon Kenton’s life? Where do I buy my advance ticket? I agree that Milius’ best work is spectacular. The Man Who Would be King & The Wind & the Lion are two of my all time favorite “watch it every year” movies. Anybody who has had his photo on the cover of the Dixie Gun Works catalog has made it in my book.
Fletcher Vredenburgh says
Great piece. I’ve got to watch that Milius doc. Also, need to dust off my copy of Dillinger this week. Warren Oates just did not get enough lead roles. I don’t know how good a job Johnny Depp does as Dillinger, but I’m pretty much always going to go for Warren Oates over, well, pretty much anybody else.
JimC says
Kim Morgan at Sunset Gun offers up a fine appreciation of Warren Oates.
http://sunsetgun.typepad.com/sunsetgun/2014/11/warren-oates-an-american-original-.html