Details

Release year: 1986

Storyline

Former police detective Matthew Scudder, still recovering from his alcohol addiction, is seemingly drawn into the Los Angeles criminal underworld after stumbling upon a local drug ring.

Top credits

Directors

Hal Ashby

Writers

Cast

Jeff Bridges — Scudder
Rosanna Arquette — Sarah
Alexandra Paul — Sunny
Randy Brooks — Chance

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Did you know

• Director Hal Ashby was fired just after principal photography wrapped, and the studio, PSO Entertainment (whose first major production this was), took over creative control.

• As Oliver Stone was busy in Mexico shooting Salvador (1986) and thus unable to rework his screenplay before production began, Hal Ashby started to write his own script for 8 Million Ways to Die (1986). Ashby worked from both Stone's script and the original novel by Lawrence Block as well as his own research. The fifty pages that Ashby wrote had neither the fiercely evocative color of Stone's screenplay nor particularly exciting dialogue, yet they were the starting point for a much more complex and psychologically interesting film and were consciously designed as a blueprint that the actors and possibly other writers could move forward with later. Ashby gave the fifty pages he wrote to producer Stephen J. Roth (who said he liked them) but abruptly stopped work on his screenplay when he discovered that, without his knowledge, PSO had hired R. Lance Hill to rewrite Stone's script. Ashby, who had confidence in his own screenplay, felt hurt and told Roth, "I don't think I have ever had that one happen to me before." He was further upset on learning that Hill was to report directly to the executive producer, Mark Damon, cutting Ashby out of the rewriting process completely.

• Alexandra Paul said years later that this film taught her something very important: you can have great talent on a movie (Jeff Bridges, Andy Garcia, Hal Ashby, Oliver Stone, Robert Towne), but if you don't have a good script you got nothing. She said the final cut of the movie was totally unfamiliar to her because the script had been rewritten so much during production.