Film maudit. It’s a haunting phrase for a haunting concept. Translated as “cursed film,” it refers to a movie spurned by critics and audiences alike, remembered by a coterie of admirers too small to admit it into the more rarified club also boasting a French name, the succès d’estime.
Mike’s Murder (1984) is a near-perfect example of the form, the proof being that odds are very good you’ve never heard of it. This despite it being made by Oscar-nominated writer/director James Bridges, a commercially successful filmmaker then at the height of his powers, and anchored by a performance from Debra Winger that may well be her finest. Following catastrophic test screenings, it underwent an expensive and protracted reediting process. When finally tossed into a handful of theaters, it was with minimal fanfare and paltry box-office returns. It then disappeared for the better part of four decades.
It didn’t deserve that fate. Viewed now, even in compromised form, Mike’s Murder stands out as one of the definitive Los Angeles movies. It presents a compassionate and nuanced understanding of human sexuality, particularly for its era. It feels astonishingly contemporary in its early depiction of hook-up culture. And it is unique among crime dramas for its intimacy, the visceral manner in which it shows how violence can sidle into our lives, and how its impact lingers. Little wonder, given that the movie is based on an actual crime that claimed that life of one of Bridges’ friends and sent shockwaves through his close-knit circle in Hollywood.
Forty years after it vanished from theaters, it’s time to reinvestigate Mike’s Murder.
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Betty Parrish (Winger) moved to Los Angeles for sunshine, not stardom, a bank teller who still calls her parents when she lands a promotion. Part of the easy SoCal vibe is a no-strings dalliance with her tennis instructor Mike Chuhutsky (Mark Keyloun), a looker of modest charm saddled with a name he won’t live long enough to change. Mike’s a happy hustler who does what he can and who he can to get by. Sometimes that means crashing proto-Kato Kaelin-style at the guest house of a minor show biz luminary. Sometimes that means selling small quantities of drugs. Anything to keep alive the dream of flying high in the City of Angels. Mike is a telling gender reversal of a character common in L.A. lore, the young woman who uses sex to get ahead and soon finds herself lost.
The film’s first act unfolds with deliberate haziness, spanning several months without making the passage of time immediately apparent. Bridges’ Los Angeles is a metropolis of low-slung ugly buildings and manicured medians, where life is lived in transit. Betty and Mike cross paths, mix signals, then drift apart for weeks at a time. As Betty’s artist friend says, “the ephemeral is eternal,” and for something to last it has to tap into “the impermanence of life.”
The particulars of Mike’s demise aren’t that clear or even that interesting. What matters is that Betty abruptly feels a void where she didn’t even realize there was a presence.That impermanence is driven home when Mike is brutally executed following a drug deal, during which he and his running buddy Pete (Darrell Larson) impulsively steal a sample of cocaine that’s already been weighed, assuming it won’t be missed. They’re wrong.
The particulars of Mike’s demise aren’t that clear or even that interesting. What matters is that Betty abruptly feels a void where she didn’t even realize there was a presence. It’s here that Winger’s performance occasionally touches the transcendent. She’s mourning Mike not only as a person but a possibility, grieving over the prospect that, at some point, they might have drifted together for good. It’s easy to imagine Betty now, an Orange County matriarch dedicated to charitable causes and her grandchildren, but still occasionally glancing out at her perfect lawn and thinking about a man she met when she was a younger and completely different person.
Betty doesn’t do anything so foolhardy as investigate Mike’s murder herself. She simply wants to know more about the person who is never going to come back into her life, and that interest puts her in harm’s way. The tense ending includes an only-in-California gambit at once completely ludicrous and wholly plausible. The movie leaves Betty and the audience in a liminal place, where the ground beneath your feet can’t be trusted and there are plenty of clear skies but no clear answers. A place an awful lot like Los Angeles.
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That deliberately uncomfortable denouement had always been Bridges’ destination. An Academy Award nominee for his screenplays for the law-school drama The Paper Chase (1973) and the nuclear-fueled paranoid thriller The China Syndrome (1979) as well as an Edgar Award winner for one of his dozen-plus episodes of the anthology series Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he set out to write what his partner in life and frequently in work, Jack Larson (no relation to Darrell), called “a real roman à clef.” Larson, best remembered for his turn as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen, working alongside Clark Kent (George Reeves) at the Daily Planet in the 1950s TV series Adventures of Superman, was an associate producer of Mike’s Murder and knew the movie’s real-life origins. He and Bridges were close friends with Paul Winfield, the magisterial actor whose credits include Sounder (1972), The Terminator (1984), and the Star Trek franchise. In a tribute to the actor upon his death that ran in The Advocate on April 13, 2004, Larson told David Ehrenstein that he and Bridges became acquainted with Winfield’s former lover Mark Bernaleck, whom Winfield had met on a film shoot. “Mark didn’t want to be an actor or anything, and he was certainly more heterosexual than bisexual or whatever, but he liked Paul very much,” Larson said. “After the affair they stayed friends. He had a little apartment in Brentwood, taught the local girls tennis, and drove a cab. He was the handsomest person I’ve ever seen.” (As Ehrenstein noted, “That’s quite a statement coming from someone whose past amours include Montgomery Clift.”) Larson and Bridges became close enough to Bernaleck to help him hide out when he was being sought by “some guys who said he’d burned them in a drug deal. After things cooled down, we were supposed to meet for dinner. But then he was savagely murdered.”
Troubled by Bernaleck’s violent death, Bridges set out to explore his life and world through the eyes of a woman who had been briefly involved with a character based on him. His ulterior motive was to reunite with Winger, who had broken through in their first collaboration, Urban Cowboy (1980). She had had such an unpleasant experience making An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) that, despite its overwhelming success and her resulting Oscar nomination for Best Actress, she had returned to her childhood home in Ohio with plans to change careers. Bridges told film journalist and historian David Thomson in 1983, “I wrote Mike’s Murder for Debra. It’s totally her, beginning to end. She plays a very normal, intelligent girl who has a sexual obsession with a boy. She meets this guy who turns her on in a very unusual way. She thinks of it as a kind of secret sin.” Winger confirmed the story to author Peter Tonguette in his book The Films of James Bridges (2011): “It was based on a real story that had been gnawing at him, although Betty Parrish was a totally made-up character. Oh, her last name was my invention. Otherwise it’s pretty much vintage Jim.” Bridges scripted the character so closely around Winger that Betty’s mother, heard via telephone, is played by Winger’s own mother Ruth.
Casting the charismatic but doomed Mike proved more vexing. Promising candidate Kevin Costner was deemed too mature, while Grease 2’s Maxwell Caulfield was nixed because Bridges felt the character had to be an American. A surprising wild card entered the mix when Larson heard raves for John F. Kennedy, Jr.’s stage performances at Brown University. Larson sounded out JFK Jr.’s aunt, Patricia Kennedy Lawford, whom he knew socially, regarding the prospect. He told the Los Angeles Times in 2011, “When I had finished my proposal, Pat was silent on the other end of the phone and then said firmly, ‘Forget that one, dearie.’” Bridges, after attending a late-night screening of Paul Morrissey’s film Forty Deuce (1982) at Morrissey’s urging, gave the nod to its unknown star Keyloun. The choice would pay unexpected dividends when Keyloun quit acting a few years later to work in I.T. Mike’s Murder would be his primary cinematic legacy, which only intensifies the aura of loss surrounding his character.
The other key role to be filled was that of the Paul Winfield surrogate, record producer Philip Green, who met Mike on the road and brought him to Los Angeles. Winfield insisted on playing this tortured figure himself. Green is initially dismissive of Betty in their scene, having lived too long surrounded by hangers-on, the kind of people who believe an audition to be a Chippendales dancer could turn it all around. But they soon bond over Mike. “Were you in love with him? So was I,” Green says sadly. It’s a powerful moment of connection, heightened by the knowledge that Green’s pained remembrance of Mike doubles as Winfield’s eulogy for Bernaleck.
The film came together quickly, owing to Bridges’ track record. He and Winger cut their salaries by a third to maintain control over the production, which stuck to its shoestring budget. Larson said of Winger, “All during the making of it, she was darling, she was wonderful.”
Nothing about Mike’s Murder would be easy after that.
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The plot of Mike’s Murder may have been simple, but Bridges had given his film a complex structure, latticed with flashbacks and what Bridges described to L.A. Weekly’s Michael Dare in 1985 as “a third level of reality—what (Betty) imagined happened… It was fancy in terms of cinema, but rough going for an audience.” Hopes for the movie were high, with buzz building about Winger’s performance and the turns by newcomers Keyloun and Darrell Larson.
But Bridges’ concerns about the elliptical storytelling were borne out during January 1983 test screenings in the San Francisco Bay area, described by Jack Larson as “disastrous.” The audience reportedly hissed and booed, with at least one person demanding Bridges’ lynching on a preview card. The filmmaker told Rolling Stone’s Christopher Connelly that afterward he could only take an Ativan, lie in bed, and stare at the ceiling.
The biggest problem facing the film was the title act, shown in graphic detail. “We had knives and a cut throat and blood spurting onto the wall, and Debra Winger just ran off the set,” Bridges told Janet Maslin of the New York Times in March 1984. He defended his decision: “I had known five people who had been murdered dealing drugs, people who had touched my life very casually, the way Mike touches Betty’s life in the movie. So I guess I wanted it to be disturbing—I felt it was disturbing subject matter, and it should make people think.” Bridges elaborated to Michael Dare, “I think that what happened is that, unlike the violence of 48 Hours or Scarface—cartoon violence, essentially—Mike’s Murder had sort of a docu-drama feel, a reality that was too close, too threatening.” Even as he reshaped the film, excising the execution in favor of still-harrowing glimpses of its gruesome aftermath, Bridges didn’t shy from its central point, telling Dare, “There is no catharsis in Mike’s Murder, just as there is none in the violence of the city. At the end of the movie, the violence is still there.”
Summer previews continued to tout a June 1983 release date, but no one was fooled. Bridges would spend two years and two hundred thousand dollars of his own money on a revised edit with a more conventional structure that would, in Bridges’ words, transform it “from a subjective to an objective movie,” one incorporating newly-shot material featuring Darrell Larson’s Pete circling closer to Betty as he flees Mike’s killers. Bridges put the best spin on circumstances that he could, telling Maslin “What’s a preview for if you can’t work on your film?” and insisting that his new cut was not only more accessible, but a better movie.
In the interim, Winger appeared in the juggernaut Terms of Endearment (1983), earning her second consecutive Oscar nomination, seemingly boosting the film’s prospects. But the lengthy delay would hobble it in other ways. Bridges had commissioned British musician Joe Jackson to record a complete soundtrack, a decision that Jack Larson described to Tonguette as “a terrible mistake, and Jim is culpable on that one … any place you were, you had a Joe Jackson song. It ruined the integrity of the atmosphere.” Jackson’s songs, composed for specific scenes now absent from the film, were dropped, with Jackson credited “with additional music.” Jackson’s label released the album in September 1983, every review rehashing the film’s troubled history.
Mike’s Murder, now with a lush orchestral score by John Barry, finally opened in March 1984. Critics were unkind. In the New York Times, Vincent Canby cattily observed that, “For perhaps the first 15 minutes … it seems that Bridges might possibly pull off the trick of making a first-class movie about second-rate people, but then stars get in his eyes.” Leonard Maltin, in his Movie Guide, called it “one of the worst movies ever made by a filmmaker of Bridges’ stature … Escapes BOMB rating only because several critics thought highly of it.” Among those critics was the New Yorker’s Pauline Kael, who astoundingly didn’t review the film until two years after its release. After roasting the ersatz Hepburn/Tracy romcom Legal Eagles (1986), starring a straitjacketed Winger, she gives equal time to a film she admits she discovered on HBO. “Its view of the cocaine subculture (or culture) of L.A. is probably Bridges’ most original and daring effort,” she writes, but devotes most of her praise to Winger’s “full-scale starring performance, as a radiantly sane young bank teller.” She singles out Winger’s work in a scene that is among the first to depict phone sex—which prompted walkouts during those fateful test screenings—observing, “I don’t know of anyone besides Winger who could play a scene like this so simply. She’s a major reason to go on seeing movies in the eighties.” The film was well-received in the city where it was set, with Dare’s LA Weekly review calling it “an intense, vital, problematic, and remarkably intelligent portrayal of paranoia, passion, and commitment in the big city,” adding that Darrell Larson’s feckless and opportunistic Pete, who “first appears nonchalantly slithering in the background,” ultimately proves “scarier than Pacino in Scarface.” Dare’s extensive 1985 interview with Bridges was tied to the film’s home video release, Dare suggesting that Mike’s Murder “has all the earmarks of a new underground classic.”
It would never achieve that fate, but it wasn’t because of lack of effort on Debra Winger’s part. She remained on the promotional trail for months, flying to Seattle for a September daytrip to exhort audiences to come to the single theater showing it. The campaign didn’t help. Mike’s Murder faded from memory, essentially falling out of circulation until its DVD-on-demand debut in 2009. As of this writing, the movie is available to rent or buy on Amazon Prime.
What remains is the theatrical version of the movie. Jack Larson possessed a copy of Bridges’ lambasted original cut, saying “It would make a spectacular DVD … Debra loves the film. And it meant so very much to Paul (Winfield).” Its appearance seems even less likely in the wake of Larson’s 2015 death. But no amount of second-guessing and editorial elbow grease was going to transform this film into a box-office sensation. The Mike’s Murder that played to empty houses in 1984—a downbeat story with a seductive, doomy vision all its own, sympathetic to the losers in a city of winners and keenly attuned to the impermanence of life—is, in fact, more than enough.
