![]() The third reality, however, was precisely the controversy surrounding these gang films. ![]() This brings a high degree of vérité to Over the Edge, which has more in common with the fly-on-the-wall hang-out aesthetics of Richard Linklater (who has since expressly claimed the film as an influence on his 1993 feature Dazed and Confused) than with other ‘gang films’ released in 1979. ![]() Michael Eric Kramer and Vincent Spano already had some experience on camera, but the other teen leads, including Matt Dillon (discovered in New York, aged 14), Pamela Ludwig and Tom Fergus, were appearing on screen for their first time, while the extras were non-professionals recruited from the Colorado community where the film was shot. All the child actors were, unusually, playing their own age. “Over the Edge’s fans would eventually include Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain, whose music video for ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ was a loose homage to the film’s climax in the school.” As a result, even if Kaplan’s film is ultimately exploitation fiction (with a combustible climax entirely different from anything that actually took place in Foster City), it nonetheless comes with a lived-in naturalism that emerges from all the ground-level research that went into its screenplay. Not only was this real-life story the inspiration for the film’s screenplay, but its writers Charles S Hass and Tim Hunter spent time with the teenagers of Foster City to find out what made them tick. The first of these was an article appearing in the San Francisco Examiner in 1973 about bored local kids in Foster City, California who kept trashing the new planned community where they lived. Three different realities collided to build – and then almost destroy – Over the Edge. Like the ‘botany box’ in the class room of a disgruntled teacher, this community is an ecosystem – and the dysfunction and rot within it are not confined merely to its saplings. The kids’ callous indifference, too, reflects the attitudes of their parents. I don’t make the market, I’m just out on the street like everyone else,” or when Mark tells Carl, “Any time you want to come and say hello, just leave a message with my secretary.” There are several examples of this in the film, but perhaps the most pertinently absurd are when the young dealer Tip (Eric Lalich), seated on a deck chair in the sunny garden of his mother’s home, is heard saying on the phone: “With inflation and the dollar dropping, it could get pretty heavy…. ![]() These kids may be unruly, but their delinquency is learnt: you can see it in the way that they appropriate the language of grown-ups. ![]() As the adults show greater concern for sales and bottom lines and materialism than for the values and living conditions of their community, and the overzealous Doberman, in displaying an open, deeply prejudicial contempt for the junior high schoolers, in fact creates the kind of problems that he is meant to solve, the children too learn to stop caring, and start developing a default disdain for authority. New Granada is set to explode.Īs its opening suggests, Over the Edge is essentially a film about real estate, mapping out in New Granada the tensions between classes and generations that are being built into America’s future. With nowhere to go but a makeshift recreation centre that closes at six o’clock every evening, 14-year-old Carl Willat (Michael Kramer) and his friends the bad boy Richie White (Matt Dillon), stoner Claude Zachary (Tom Fergus) and Claude’s mute brother Johnny (Tiger Thompson) are bored out of their minds, and keep themselves entertained with drinking, drugs and minor acts of delinquency.Īs we follow Carl’s misadventures over several days – his romantic pursuit of Cory (Pamela Ludwig), his rebellious fallouts with his bourgeois parents (Andy Romano, Ellen Geer), his various run-ins with local police chief Doberman (Harry Northup) and with Cory’s boyfriend Mark Perry (Vincent Spano) – we see a young man teetering on the edge of adulthood, criminality, and deep disillusionment, as he finds the adults around him wanting. A large plot of land originally reserved for the construction of a skating rink, a bowling alley and twin cinemas is now being up for sale to become an industrial park. While one part of New Granada still represents the aspirations of a middle-class yearning to leave behind the city’s rougher edges for a more peaceful, crime-free suburban life, the oldest housing development in another part of town has become neglected and impoverished, while new buildings remain unfinished and empty as the money has run out. This planned community was meant to be a utopia, but harsh economic realities have since set in. “Welcome to New Granada,” reads the roadside billboard which opens Jonathan Kaplan’s Over the Edge, with the subtitle “tomorrow’s city… today”. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |