O.C. and Stiggs (1987): What Did I Just Watch? (Review)

Radiance continues its run of unearthing movies that have spent too long neglected and in the shadows. What is usually the case with Radiance, is that these movies are European, foreign language productions. Not so this week, were they have dusted down two Hollywood movies from a rightly much acclaimed autuer that have somehow escaped notice for too long. The autuer in question is Robert Altman, and the movies Radiance release this week are Thieves Like Us and, what I’ll be discussing here, O.C and Stiggs.

It’s hard to know where to start with O.C and Stiggs. And I mean that literally. The first thing I do when sitting down to write a review is to type in the headline, which is inevitably the film’s title followed by its release date in brackets. But a release date for O.C. and Stiggs is a bone of contention in itself. Made in 1983, it was left to languish on the shelves at MGM for five years. It’s premiere I think was in 1987 at some festival or other, before it was granted a limited release the following year. Yet Letterboxd holds 1985 – the film’s copyright date. This quibble will argubaly come to define O.C. and Stiggs as no one can seemingly agree on anything about it. Some say it is Altman’s worst film, a fifty-something director making a teen movie – a genre he is on record as hating – based on a National Lampoon piece he did not comprehend. Others say it is a film in Altman’s canon that is worthy of reappraisal. A film that elevates the source material by becoming not just a brilliant satire of the John Hughes teen comedy but of Reagan’s America itself. I’m going to put my cards on the table right from the start and say I don’t know what the heck it is. But bear with me, and I’ll try to explain as much as I can.

The characters of Mark Stiggs (“I want you to call me Stiggs. It sounds more ridiculous”) and Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie (“O.C. for Out of Control”) were brought to life at the dawn of the 1980s by National Lampoon staffers Ted Mann and Tod Carroll. Following the success of Animal House in the cinemas, the pair realised that the magazine was beginning to appeal to a younger readership – the very demographic that they were beginning to despair of. Determined to wrest control of the wheel of a runaway vehicle (America’s next generation) heading towards the oblivion of thought-free commercialism, Mann and Carroll deliberately set out to create teenage protagonists that the readership could not only identify with, but be inspired by. O.C and Stiggs are Arizona-based teenage anarchists. Cunning sociopaths who shelter behind the false impression their victims hold regarding feckless, thoughtless juveniles. Their primary victims are the Schwab family, a middle-class, conservative dynasty led by insurance salesman Randall Sr. With the Schwabs firmly in their sights, the duo set off on a reign of terror that began in 1981 and culminated in their ‘Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer’ which hit the shelves in the October of 1982. Across this lifetime, the National Lampoon readership took the characters to their hearts and Hollywood’s attention was soon captured.

Mann and Carroll personally adapted Utterly Monstrous Mind-Roasting Summer into a screenplay that became Hollywood hot property, with no less than Mike Nichols (who suggested Eddie Murphy for one of the lead roles) and Sylvester Stallone (!) expressing an interest in directing. The honour ultimately went to Robert Altman who said that he “agreed to do it because I hated teenage movies so much”. It perhaps ought to have been the first warning sign for MGM but, given that Robert Altman had been responsible for M*A*S*H* back in 1970 (which, coincidentally, opened just a month before the first edition of National Lampoon) perhaps they believed that his adaptation of Mann and Carroll’s screenply would be anarchic, counter-cultural match made in heaven. It proved to be anything but. One of the first actions Altman undertook as filming commenced was to ban the writers from the set, along with the studio exectives whome he referred to as ‘The Enemy’. Ted Man would later say “Altman’s movie is not an adaptation of my work. The screenplay I wrote with Tod Carroll was not shot. Carroll took his name off because it was not his work. I chose to leave my name on, on the chance it might do me some good. It did not. I consider Altman’s film of little interest and believe that the chatter of an ordinary street corner schizo is of equal weight and consequence.” It seems that the issue between the creators and Altman lies in the characterisation the latter developed for the movie. The original O.C. and Stiggs were nihilists, terrorising the Schwabs seemingly on a whim. Altman’s version gave the pair (played by newcomers Neill Barry and Daniel Jenkins) an M.O. – Randall Schwab (portrayed in the film by Altman regular, Paul Dooley) has refused to pay out a premium to O.C.’s destitute retired cop grandfather (Ray Walston) which means the pair will likely be split up; a nursing home for him and a one-way ticket out of Arizona (and Stiggs’ life) for O.C. But if you think this is handled with any sentimentality, think again. It really is just a minor subtext to the obnoxious chaos and carnage that follows. What makes the conflict of opinion so peculiar is that, at heart, both the director and writers had a shared vision for cultural anarchy against conservative America.

The first thing that struck me about O.C. and Stiggs is that it is very meta. It’s an approach that is immediately apparent, before the first shot in fact, as the famous MGM lion opens its maw not to roar, but to croak the film’s title and eponymous protagonists “O.C.” *pause* “Stiggs” At first, I didn’t think much of this to be honest, it seemed the right approach when your movie is about two anarchic teens. It signposts how this unruly pair have come to hijack Hollywood, forcing their way into somewhere they’re not invited or welcome. This idea is expounded throughout the movie, as both characters seem to up the ante in terms of how characters are supposed to appear or act on screen. Their wardrobe seems to be highly exagerrated and garish, like characters dressed with the understanding that they are characters in a movie. This is further exemplifed in their choice of wheels. 80s cinema and TV was very much fixated on what vehicle its protagonists would drive, and Altman trumps them all to the nth degree with the junkyard Studebaker behometh O.C. and Stiggs get around in; a rusting, fat-tired Gila monster on hydraulics that raises them some ten feet off the road. The Gila Monster is, as Stiggs proclaims the ideal combination of “really frightening noise with the uglyiness off poverty”

Fair enough then, Altman is presenting us with a highly stylized take down of the teen movie. But pretty soon I began to see other little details that made me wonder just how much the director wanted us to consider the artifice of his movie. In the film’s opening sequence, O.C. and Stiggs have tresspassed onto the grounds of the Schwab home, whereupon they seize the telephone and plan to dial some far-flung country in order to hit Randall Sr hard in the wallet. With Spain dismissed as “not far enough”, the next country they hit upon is Malta, but neither can be sure where it is. Altman of course would know – he had filmed Popeye there in 1980 and the purpose built set, Popeye Village, became a tourist attraction that I routinely visited when we had family holidays there in the mid to late 80s. The Popeye connection continues later in the movie when the character is witnessed as a pineta. Is Altman deliberately choosing to reference his own movies? It would appear to be the case when you consider that Randall Sr’s idol, an all-pervading southern neocon called Hal Philip Walker. Devotees of Altman will remember that Hal Philip Walker is the equally all-pervading southern neocon that is heard but never seen in 1975’s Nashville, and Thomas Hal Philips returns to reprise the role here, memorably appearing on the TV in the Schwab’s nuclear bunker. It’s a chilling thought for audiences to consider; all that will survive of us in a nuclear holocast are cockroaches and right-wing paranoiac pundits.

But Altman isn’t just content at slyly referencing from his own back catalogue either. When O.C. and Stiggs head out to purchase an Uzi from some deranged Vietnam veterans they know, a man steps out of a hut to greet them to the strains of The Doors. He wears a bandana across his forehead and a camera dangles around his neck. The vet is none other than Dennis Hopper, seemingly reprising his role as the burnt-out photojournalist from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Later, when he sets out to join the duo on their raid of the Schwab house, he takes to the skies in a helicopter as Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries swells upon the soundtrack. It’s a series of neat little sightgags, but what does it actually add to the movie? Personally, I think it’s Altman commenting on the shallow pool of culture references that were beginning to be repeatedly mined by Hollywood. But it’s undeniable to counter that, in doing so, he’s having his cake and eating it. Given that many hold O.C. and Stiggs up as a satirical attack on Reaganomics, yet concludes with its protagonists making a fortune on an African-themed fashion range for plus-size ladies, I’d say there’s form here.

It’s this hypocrisy, combined with the attitudes of the central pair, that I found problematic within O.C. and Stiggs. Someone recently pointed to M*A*S*H*‘s Hawkeye and Trapper John, smashing their sacred cow status as counter-cultural screen heroes to reveal them as the very inception of Donald Trump and the boomer generation. The jack is now out of the box, and their ‘grab ’em by the pussy’ mentality and total unprofessionalism is hard to tolerate today. Despite Altman (and arguably Mann and Carroll) clearly viewing O.C. and Stiggs as revolutionaries against the neoliberal order, sharing an affinity towards the homeless, the drug users, the veterans, the Afro-Americans and Africans (Stiggs is obsessed with President Bongo of Gabon, OC with Nigerian musician King Sunny Adé, who not only provides the film with it score but also appears in a concert staged by OC at ther pair’s high school), and Asians (Victor Ho plays Schwabs much maligned son-in-law Frankie Tang), it would be remiss of us not to consider who they spurn within society. O.C. and Stiggs are unmistakable misogynists; they dismissively refer to their middle class girl friends (including a pre-Sex and the City Cynthia Nixon) as “the sluts” and snigger at the fatphobic commentary of their clothing magnate fixer-hero Pat Coletti (Martin Mull) whose business is to make “hog couture” – a fashion range for the larger lady that ultimately makes the boys their money and saves the day. They’re also deeply homophobic, terrorising their teacher Garth Sloane (Louis Nye) for no reason other than he’s an effeminate gay man and seem oblivious and uncaring to what appears to be learning difficulties in their classmate Randall Schwab Jr (Jon Cryer, later to play Ducky in Pretty in Pink and one of the men in Two and a Half Men). They may show support and affection for their friend Wino Bob (Melvin Van Peebles) but the depiction of alcoholism in Schawb’s wife Elinore was so unforgiving that the actress portraying her, Jane Curtin, is said to deeply regret her performance. Likewise, I’d query how effective any film is in offering solidarity to an Asian character (Victor Ho’s Frankie Tang) when he’s spent the entire movie as a doormat for Randall Schawb’s racist hectoring to deliver just one line in its climax. To be fair to Altman though, if all this sounds bad, it is nothing compared to the printed page where Mann and Carroll had their heroes blackmailing and rolling gay man, believing “the sluts” deserve all they get because their privileged upbringing had them “fucking and eating breakfast in Paris when they were about ten” and wearing pig masks to tranquilise and rape female patients at a local mental institute.

Ultimately, I wish I had a clear appreciation of O.C. and Stiggs, whether I liked it or hated it. There seems to be two camps here and I don’t fall into either of them. One camp is of the view that it is a flop because it is is Altman making a teen movie so appalling simply because he hated the genre, the other is of the belief that it is a triumph because it is a satire of neoliberalism misconstrued as a ‘just another teen movie’, or that it uses the genre as a trojan horse. But I dont belong to either camp. I just think it’s a misfire really. I can appreciate what Altman was intending, but I don’t think it really worked. Watch Heathers instead would be my verdict. Whatever your view of the film though, it’s undeniable that Radiance have pulled out all the stops with their release, especially with Hunter Stephenson’s mammoth two hour ten documentary on the movie – it’s almost thirty minutes longer than the film itself!

Mark’s Archive: O.C. and Stiggs (1987)