WINTER’S TALES: DESPERATE DRUG DEALERS AND MISGUIDED CHARITY PART 1
Picture courtesy Millthorpe and District Historical Society. “I do feel somewhat badly that I took the family name and gave it to the most reprehensible character in our script:” Alex Winter’s great grandfather John Frape.
**Editor’s note: For reasons that will become apparent fairly quickly, it’s worth noting this interview was conducted before the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the events that followed**
Read the script for ‘Weed’ here.
When Alex Winter’s feature (co)writing and directing debut, the now-cult classic ‘Freaked’, was unceremoniously dumped by its distributor, Winter decided it was time to shift focus.
The then-28 year old had already amassed several acting credits - in titles as diverse as ‘Death Wish 3’, Joel Schumacher’s still-revered teen horror flick ‘The Lost Boys’ and, most famously, playing Bill S. Preston (Esq) in the ‘Bill & Ted’ films - and had been slowly working up his writing and directing skills through the MTV sketch show ‘Idiot Box’ and music videos for the likes of Ice Cube and the Red Hot Chilli Peppers.
“I’d been so busy with my acting work - I’d been doing it as a child and it had ramped up while I was at film school,” he said.
“It had been kind of job to job, but you don’t say no to movies when you’re getting them. But I hadn’t really had a moment to stop and just work on my own voice since I’d been in school - so I decided to stop acting professionally to focus on my writing and directing. With the rush of the ‘Bill & Ted’ movies and then us going on to ‘Freaked’ right off of ‘Bill & Ted 2’, Tom (Tom Stern, Winter’s writing/directing partner on both ‘Freaked’ and ‘Idiot Box’) and I agreed we wanted to do our own work individually. So I moved out of LA, back to New York and co-founded a production company in London because, by then, I’d been doing music videos and commercials for a while. I’d shoot commercials by day, and by night I’d just write.”
For Winter, the commercial failure of ‘Freaked’ gave him considerable latitude when it came to his writing.
“Tom and I did all this work that culminated in ‘Freaked’ which, for us creatively, was a success - we were very happy with the film,” he said.
“But commercially, it was a disaster - it was abandoned by the studio in a regime change and it was viewed as a titanic flop. While that was stressful, the upside was that there was no onus on me to repeat a success - my slate was wiped clean and I could pretty much do whatever I wanted to do. I was falling over in a way that was very liberating - I could, in a very measured way, just plunge into things that interested me and not so much worry about everything else.”
And, for Winter, that freedom came the ability to tap into a darker mode of storytelling.
“My sensibilities were certainly more edgy and aggressive at that time,” he said.
“I’d been doing ‘Bill & Ted’, I’d been doing ‘Freaked’, I’d been doing these fun, light things that I very much enjoyed and got a lot out of creatively. But, now that I was left to my own devices, I didn’t have to worry about something that was palatable in that way.”
Winter turned to an old friend, Andy Hawkins (co-founder of the band Blind Idiot God, which wrote and performed the title song for ‘Freaked’, to collaborate with.
“Andy’s an extraordinary guitar player, and I’d known him since we were kids,” he said.
“We’d been wanting to write some stuff together... the first thing we write was a straight science fiction script.”
Ultimately, though, the story that really drew their focus was something far more personal for the duo.
“We’d both grown up in Missouri together, and knew a lot about the culture from the Blue Mountains all the way into the Ozarks,” he said.
“We felt like nobody had really done a story around that culture... we were both big fans of ‘Thunder Road’. We wanted to examine the birth of this culture and do a modern-day moonshining movie - a look at disenfranchised and isolated Americans in the heartland in a way that we hadn’t seen before.”
Winter said he and Hawkins weren’t interested in telling a story on a small scale.
“I love those kinds of movies, but we weren’t looking to make a small, indie slice of pastoral life,” he said.
“From a filmmaking standpoint, we were looking to make something operatic - a great, gritty pastoral epic.”
And ‘Weed’ definitely qualifies as epic - a sprawling saga beginning with dope growing Young family patriarch Malcolm Young giving a potted history of his family’s 260-odd years in America, starting with Enoch Young (who’d fled to America from Scotland) battling with local native Americans to eke out a patch of land to call his own, subsequent generations maintaining their distance from the Civil War, fending off tax collectors, turning to ‘moonshining’ during the Great Depression and ultimately turning to harvest weed when bootlegging loses its shine. The story kicks in earnest in what was then the present day (the mid-nineties), with Malcolm killing a couple of intruders who stumble too close to the Youngs’ cash crop. From there, the wheels slowly start to come off the Youngs’ operation.
In an ambitious, DePalma-esque sequence a drug deal goes bad, leading to more deaths, law enforcement pick up renewed interest in the operations of the Youngs and other mountain families and things ultimately come to a head in an ultraviolent shootout - with the Youngs making a last, bloody stand against law enforcement.
Winter said that, from the very beginning, he and Hawkins wanted to tell a story about people who weren’t ideologically ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and instead work with characters that inhabited the ground in between.
“In a way, it’s similar to the documentaries I do,” Winter said.
“I’m drawn to problematic characters, and Andy and I spent a lot of time striking that balance between making them - on some level - empathetic and giving motive to what they’re doing. It wasn’t for us to say that they were right or entirely wrong - there are things they do that are straight up criminal, and we don’t shy away from that.
“But we wanted them to be empathetic, so there was a lot of work in striking that balance - to say ‘This is who they (the Youngs) are, this is the culture they come from, these are their values and beliefs... you may find them deplorable, but there are aspects you’ll undoubtedly be able to comprehend’. I wanted to do something that had something of a political undertone but was not an agenda movie.
“I’d been very well-versed to what was going on in the country with Ruby Ridge and then Waco.
“It felt like there was this growing faction within the United States that was not Libertarian, just rabidly individual and feeling more and more disenfranchised as our society got more sophisticated and urban.”
For research, Winter turned to the then-still-emerging world of the internet for advice on how to make the characters and their actions realistic. We were writing this in 1994/95, and I was already very involved in the Internet, and my research for the film was done over the Internet with actual drug dealers that I was communicating with over encrypted BBS newsgroups,” he said.
“They were dealing massive amounts of pot on a national or global scale, and they’re the ones who told us how you move pot across state lines. I’d learned a lot about the Internet and being able to communicate securely in the late 80s and early 90s, so I knew my way around. I got to a large-scale marijuana farmer through the alt.rec.drugs newsgroup and - funnily enough - he helped me learn how to use encrypted email. I asked him how they prevented dogs from sniffing pot, and he told me - that’s how we wrote that entire sequence… it was given to me by a grower who was running a giant farm, and had been doing it for decades… my guess is he still is.”
Winter found some inspiration for one of the other mountain families - the Frapes, led by the villainous Wayne (described by Malcolm as “the kinda crank-shootin’ hillbilly trash that gives our people a bad name”) from his own history.
“My ancestors were the Frapes - they came from Scotland and settled in Australia,” he said.
“My great-grandfather, John Frape, was instrumental in the early days of Millthorpe (a small, rural town in New South Wales) - the family plot is there, the farms are still there and the stone tavern my grandmother grew up in is still standing there. But I do feel somewhat badly that I took the family name and gave it to the most reprehensible character in our script - only because phonetically I find the same sounds good for a villain. My family wasn’t villainous - they were actually quite noble… and I feel bad that Wayne Frape - this scroungy, grotesque, pathological character is actually named after my family - but there you go.”
Winter said he and Hawkins had developed the lead characters of Malcolm and Wanda Young with two people in mind: Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick.
“We’re huge fans of theirs and - at the time - I’d never seen them act together as a couple,” he said.
“So we really wrote it with the two of them in mind and, to our delight, they responded very positively to the script. The script was quite hot at the time, and we had interest from some pretty big talent. But we really wanted it to be about family - a unified family - so we really wanted Kevin and Kyra… and they liked the idea of working together, as a couple. There was juice in those roles - a couple who are basically king and queen of their own dynasty, and the enormous tragedy of what happens when they become embroiled in what are largely the consequences of their own actions.”
Iconic musician and actor Levon Helm was cast as Malcolm’s father, Gibson, while Winter was also talking to character actor Michael Wincott about taking on the role of Wayne Frape.
“I’d been doing some production design work, story boarding and all of that - sketches of the cave they operate out of,” Winter said.
“Then some of our cast became unavailable, and that put is in a holding pattern.
“After that, there were some issues with our financiers, which prolonged the process of getting started… these are all common in the land of independent film.”
But ultimately, for Winter, it wasn’t a production issue that made him reluctant to pursue ‘Weed’ any further - it events from real life that seemed to tap into the subjects ‘Weed’ dealt with.
“Columbine happened - and I was really concerned about making a film that basically ended with a very violent standoff with a family that’s armed to the teeth and the federal government,” he said.
“‘Weed’ is a ticking time bomb to the last 20 pages - it takes you 300 years of this family to get to that point… and the things I had wanted to explore thematically were suddenly becoming manifest in very real and dark ways.
“We were looking at a form of American mythos, which has this grand, epic mythological quality to it… and I was concerned that it could be perceived as kind of a manifesto for the discontent, rather than an examination of that discontent. I believe a filmmaker needs to be very comfortable with the story before they make a commitment to put it out there into the world, because it does have resonance and it does add to the cultural language. In order to make ‘Weed’, the amount of guns we were going to need and the specificity of the weaponry needed to make the film work… I was very uncomfortable with that after Columbine.”
It wasn’t an immediate decision, for Winter though.
“My thinking at the time was that I’d put it to bed for a year or two, and then come back to it,” he said.
“But then everything took off, and kept taking off, and it became really clear that we weren’t looking at things getting better for a long time, if at all. I remember thinking about ‘Scarface’ and how I had always viewed that film as a scathing satire on capitalism and the American dream, and not at all as a manifesto for gangsterism. “There’s that fantastic monologue that Michelle Pfeiffer has in the middle of the film where she says ‘we’re the losers, we’re not the winners’ … and it’s one of the best indictments of modern western culture I’ve ever seen. I was so in love with that film and I didn’t think that people would miss the boat as to the film’s intentions, which happens sometimes. But it did happen, and it happened again with Verhoeven’s ‘Starship Troopers’ which is a really thinly veiled sendup of American heroism, and the response to that film was a clueless misunderstanding of the central, very obvious conceit. I didn’t have so much hubris to assume we’d kick off some kind of civil war, or even manifest violent acts - but I was concerned our film would be misunderstood. It was an ethical question I had to ask myself about whether I wanted to have that be a possibility. I was concerned with what the cultural response would be - we live in a post Columbine world and I’m hugely involved in gun control legislation, and it could easily be viewed as a gun crazy genre movie.”
Winter would eventually return to feature writing/directing with the thriller ‘Fever’ starring another child actor, Henry Thomas.
“I knew going into all of this that I was really just starting to find my way… I worked hard to get these films made… it wasn’t like it (moving away from ‘Weed’) broke me,” he said.
“I invested a lot of time to try and get it made, but it wasn’t like I wanted to pack up and go home when it didn’t happen.”
After ‘Fever’, Winter set his sights back to politics with a dark satire set in the murky world of foreign aid, entitled ‘Acts of Charity’.
Anotherfilmnerd's earliest cinematic memory was seeing Don Johnson throw up all over a suspect in John Frankenheimer's 'Dead Bang'. Ever since, he's devoted his life to searching out cinema that's weird, wonderful and features vomit in the most unlikely of places.