On this episode, we do our first deep dive into the John Landis filmography, to talk about one of his lesser celebrated film, the 1985 Jeff Goldblum/Michelle Pfeiffer morbid comedy Into the Night.

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TRANSCRIPT

From Los Angeles, California, the Entertainment Capital of the World, it’s The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.

Long time listeners to this show know that I am not the biggest fan of John Landis, the person. I’ve spoken about Landis, and especially about his irresponsibility and seeming callousness when it comes to the helicopter accident on the set of his segment for the 1983 film The Twilight Zone which took the lives of actors Vic Morrow, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, enough where I don’t wish to rehash it once again.

But when one does a podcast that celebrates the movies of the 1980s, every once in a while, one is going to have to talk about John Landis and his movies. He did direct eight movies, one documentary and a segment in an anthology film during the decade, and several of them, both before and after the 1982 helicopter accident, are actually pretty good films.

For this episode, we’re going to talk about one of his lesser known and celebrated films from the decade, despite its stacked cast.

We’re talking about 1985’s Into the Night.

But, as always, before we get to Into the Night, some backstory.

John David Landis was born in Chicago in 1950, but his family moved to Los Angeles when he was four months old. While he grew up in the City of Angels, he still considers himself a Chicagoan, which is an important factoid to point out a little later in his life.

After graduating from high school in 1968, Landis got his first job in the film industry the way many a young man and woman did in those days: through the mail room at a major studio, his being Twentieth Century-Fox. He wasn’t all that fond of the mail room. Even since he had seen The  7th Voyage of Sinbad at the age of eight, he knew he wanted to be a filmmaker, and you’re not going to become a filmmaker in the mail room. By chance, he would get a job as a production assistant on the Clint Eastwood/Telly Savalas World War II comedy/drama Kelly’s Heroes, despite the fact that the film would be shooting in Yugoslavia. During the shoot, he would become friendly with the film’s co-stars Don Rickles and Donald Sutherland. When the assistant director on the film got sick and had to go back to the United States, Landis positioned himself to be the logical, and readily available, replacement. Once Kelly’s Heroes finished shooting, Landis would spend his time working on other films that were shooting in Italy and the United Kingdom. It is said he was a stuntman on Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, but I’m going to call shenanigans on that one, as the film was made in 1966, when Landis was only sixteen years old and not yet working in the film industry. I’m also going to call shenanigans on his working as a stunt performer on Leone’s 1968 film Once Upon a Time in the West, and Tony Richardson’s 1968 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, and Peter Collinson’s 1969 film The Italian Job, which also were all filmed and released into theatres before Landis made his way to Europe the first time around.

In 1971, Landis would write and direct his first film, a low-budget horror comedy called Schlock, which would star Landis as the title character, in an ape suit designed by master makeup creator Rick Baker. The $60k film was Landis’s homage to the monster movies he grew up watching, and his crew would spend 12 days in production, stealing shots wherever they could  because they could not afford filming permits. For more than a year, Landis would show the completed film to any distributor that would give him the time of day, but no one was interested in a very quirky comedy featuring a guy in a gorilla suit playing it very very straight.

Somehow, Johnny Carson was able to screen a print of the film sometime in the fall of 1972, and the powerful talk show host loved it. On November 2nd, 1972, Carson would have Landis on The Tonight Show to talk about his movie. Landis was only 22 at the time, and the exposure on Carson would drive great interest in the film from a number of smaller independent distributors would wouldn’t take his calls even a week earlier. Jack H. Harris Enterprises would be the victor, and they would first release Schlock on twenty screens in Los Angeles on December 12th, 1973, the top of a double bill alongside the truly schlocky Son of The Blob. The film would get a very good reception from the local press, including positive reviews from the notoriously prickly Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas, and an unnamed critic in the pages of the industry trade publication Daily Variety. The film would move from market to market every few weeks, and the film would make a tidy little profit for everyone involved. But it would be four more years until Landis would make his follow-up film.

The Kentucky Fried Movie originated not with Landis but with three guys from Madison, Wisconsin who started their own theatre troop while attending the University of Wisconsin before moving it to West Los Angeles in 1971. Those guys, brothers David and Jerry Zucker, and their high school friend Jim Abrahams, had written a number of sketches for their stage shows over a four year period, and felt a number of them could translate well to film, as long as they could come up with a way to link them all together. Although they would be aware of Ken Shapiro’s 1974 comedy anthology movie The Groove Tube, a series of sketches shot on videotape shown in movie theatres on the East Coast at midnight on Saturday nights, it would finally hit them in 1976, when Neal Israel’s anthology sketch comedy movie TunnelVision became a small hit in theatres. That movie featured Chevy Chase and Laraine Newman, two of the stars of NBC’s hit show Saturday Night Live, which was the real reason the film was a hit, but that didn’t matter to Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.

The Zucker/Abrahams/Zucker team decided they needed to not just tell potential backers about the film but show them what they would be getting. They would raise $35,000 to film a ten minute segment, but none of them had ever directed anything for film before, so they would start looking for an experienced director who would be willing to work on a movie like theirs for little to no money.

Through mutual friend Bob Weiss, the trio would meet and get to know John Landis, who would come aboard to direct the presentation reel, if not the entire film should it get funded. That segment, if you’ve seen Kentucky Fried Movie, included the fake trailer for Cleopatra Schwartz, a parody of blaxploitation movies. The guys would screen the presentation reel first to Kim Jorgensen, the owner of the famed arthouse theatre the Nuart here in Los Angeles, and Jorgensen loved it. He would put up part of the $650k budget himself, and he would show the reel to his friends who also ran theatres, not just in Los Angeles, whenever they were in town, and it would be through a consortium of independent movie theatre owners that Kentucky Fried Movie would get financed.

The movie would be released on August 10th, 1977, ironically the same day as another independent sketch comedy movie, Can I Do It Till I Need Glasses?, was released. But Kentucky Fried Movie would have the powerful United Artists Theatres behind them, as they would make the movie the very first release through their own distribution company, United Film Distribution. I did a three part series on UFDC back in 2021, if you’d like to learn more about them. Featuring such name actors as Bill Bixby, Henry Gibson, George Lazenby and Donald Sutherland, Kentucky Fried Movie would earn more than $7m in theatres, and would not only give John Landis the hit he needed to move up the ranks, but it would give Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker the opportunity to make their own movie. But we’ll talk about Airplane! sometime in the future.

Shortly after the release of Kentuck Fried Movie, Landis would get hired to direct Animal House, which would become the surprise success of 1978 and lead Landis into directing The Blues Brothers, which is probably the most John Landis movie that will ever be made. Big, loud, schizophrenic, a little too long for its own good, and filled with a load of in-jokes and cameos that are built only for film fanatics and/or John Landis fanatics. The success of The Blues Brothers would give Landis the chance to make his dream project, a horror comedy he had written more than a decade before.

An American Werewolf in London was the right mix of comedy and horror, in-jokes and great needle drops, with some of the best practical makeup effects ever created for a movie. Makeup effects so good that, in fact, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences would make the occasionally given Best Makeup Effects Oscar a permanent category, and Werewolf would win that category’s first competitive Oscar.

In 1982, Landis would direct Coming Soon, one of the first direct-to-home video movies ever released. Narrated by Jamie Lee Curtis, Coming Soon was, essentially, edited clips from 34 old horror and thriller trailers for movies owned by Universal, from Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Birds. It’s only 55 minutes long, but the video did help younger burgeoning cineasts learn more about the history of Universal’s monster movies.

And then, as previously mentioned, there was the accident during the filming of The Twilight Zone.

Landis was able to recover enough emotionally from the tragedy to direct Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd in the winter of 1982/83, another hit that maybe showed Hollywood the public wasn’t as concerned about the Twilight Zone accident as they worried it would. The Twilight Zone movie would be released three weeks after Trading Places, and while it was not that big a hit, it wasn’t quite the bomb it was expected to be because of the accident.

Which brings us to Into the Night.

While Landis was working on the final edit of Trading Places, the President of Universal Pictures, Sean Daniels, contacted Landis about what his next project might be. Universal was where Landis had made Animal House, The Blues Brothers and American Werewolf, so it would not be unusual for a studio head to check up on a filmmaker who had made three recent successful films for them. Specifically, Daniels wanted to pitch Landis on a screenplay the studio had in development called Into the Night. Ron Koslow, the writer of the 1976 Sam Elliott drama Lifeguard, had written the script on spec which the studio had picked up, about an average, ordinary guy who, upon discovering his wife is having an affair, who finds himself in the middle of an international incident involving jewel smuggling out of Iran. Maybe this might be something he would be interested in working on, as it would be both right up his alley, a comedy, and something he’d never done before, a romantic action thriller.

Landis would agree to make the film, if he were allowed some leeway in casting.

For the role of Ed Okin, an aerospace engineer whose insomnia leads him to the Los Angeles International Airport in search of some rest, Landis wanted Jeff Goldblum, who had made more than 15 films over the past decade, including Annie Hall, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Big Chill and The Right Stuff, but had never been the lead in a movie to this point. For Diana, the jewel smuggler who enlists the unwitting Ed into her strange world, Landis wanted Michelle Pfeiffer, the gorgeous star of Grease 2 and Scarface. But mostly, Landis wanted to fill as many of supporting roles with either actors he had worked with before, like Dan Aykroyd and Bruce McGill, or filmmakers who were either contemporaries of Landis and/or were filmmakers he had admired. Amongst those he would get would be Jack Arnold, Paul Bartel, David Cronenberg, Jonathan Demme, Richard Franklin, Amy Heckerling, Colin Higgins, Jim Henson, Lawrence Kasdan, Jonathan Lynn, Paul Mazursky, Don Siegel, and Roger Vadim, as well as Jaws screenwriter Carl Gottlieb, Midnight Cowboy writer Waldo Salt, personal trainer to the stars Jake Steinfeld, music legends David Bowie and Carl Perkins, and several recent Playboy Playmates. Landis himself would be featured as one of the four Iranian agents chasing Pfeiffer’s character.

While neither Perkins nor Bowie would appear on the soundtrack to the film, Landis was able to get blues legend B.B. King to perform three songs, two brand new songs as well as a cover of the Wilson Pickett classic In the Midnight Hour.

Originally scheduled to be produced by Joel Douglas, brother of Michael and son of Kirk, Into the Night would go into production on April 2nd, 1984, under the leadership of first-time producer Ron Koslow and Landis’s producing partner George Folsey, Jr.

The movie would make great use of dozens of iconic Los Angeles locations, including the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the Shubert Theatre in Century City, the Ships Coffee Shot on La Cienega, the flagship Tiffanys and Company in Beverly Hills, Randy’s Donuts, and the aforementioned airport. But on Monday, April 23rd, the start of the fourth week of shooting, the director was ordered to stand trial on charges of involuntary manslaughter due to the accident on the Twilight Zone set. But the trial would not start until months after Into the Night was scheduled to complete its shoot. In an article about the indictment printed in the Los Angeles Times two days later, Universal Studios head Sean Daniels was insistent the studio had made no special plans in the event of Landis’ possible conviction. Had he been found guilty of involuntary manslaughter, Landis was looking at up to six years in prison.

The film would wrap production in early June, and Landis would spend the rest of the year in an editing bay on the Universal lot with his editor, Malcolm Campbell, who had also cut An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, the Michael Jackson Thriller short film, and Landis’s segment and the Landis-shot prologue to The Twilight Zone.

During this time, Universal would set a February 22nd, 1985 release date for the film, an unusual move, as every movie Landis had made since Kentucky Fried Movie had been released during the summer movie season, and there was nothing about Into the Night that screamed late Winter.

I’ve long been a proponent of certain movies having a right time to be released, and late February never felt like the right time to release a morbid comedy, especially one that takes place in sunny Los Angeles. When Into the Night opened in New York City, at the Loews New York Twin at Second Avenue and 66th Street, the high in the city was 43 degrees, after an overnight low of 25 degrees. What New Yorker wants to freeze his or her butt off to see Jeff Goldblum run around Los Angeles with Michelle Pfeiffer in a light red leather jacket and a thin white t-shirt, if she’s wearing anything at all? Well, actually, that last part wasn’t so bad. But still, a $40,000 opening weekend gross at the 525 seat New York Twin would be one of the better grosses for all of the city. In Los Angeles, where the weather was in the 60s all weekend, the film would gross $65,500 between the 424 seat Avco Cinema 2 in Westwood and the 915 seat Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.

The reviews, like with many of Landis’s films, were mixed.

Richard Corliss of Time Magazine would find the film irresistible and a sparkling thriller, calling Goldblum and Pfeiffer two of the most engaging young actors working. Peter Travers, writing for People Magazine at the time, would anoint the film with a rarely used noun in film criticism, calling it a “pip.” Travers would also call Pfeiffer a knockout of the first order, with a newly uncovered flair for comedy. Guess he hadn’t seen her in the 1979 ABC spin-off of Animal House, called Delta House, in which she played The Bombshell, or in Floyd Mutrix’s 1980 comedy The Hollywood Knights. 

But the majority of critics would find plenty to fault with the film. The general critical feeling for the film was that it was too inside baseball for most people, as typified by Vincent Canby in his review for the New York Times. Canby would dismiss the film as having an insidey, which is not a word, manner of a movie made not for the rest of us but for the moviemakers on the Bel Air circuit who watch each other’s films in their own screening room.

After two weeks of exclusive engagements in New York and Los Angeles, Universal would expand the film to 1096 screens on March 8th, where the film would gross $2.57m, putting it in fifth place for the weekend, nearly a million dollars less than fellow Universal Pictures film The Breakfast Club, which was in its fourth week of release and in ninety fewer theatres. After a fourth weekend of release, where the film would come in fifth place again with $1.95m, now nearly a million and a half behind The Breakfast Club, Universal would start to migrate the film out of first run theatres and into dollar houses, in order to make room for another film of theirs, Peter Bogdanovich’s comeback film Mask, which would be itself expanding from limited release to wide release on March 22nd. Into the Night would continue to play at the second-run theatres for months, but its final gross of $7.56m wouldn’t even cover the film’s $8m production budget.

Despite the fact that it has both Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer as its leads, Into the Night would not become a cult film on home video the way that many films neglected by audiences in theatres would find a second life.

I thought the film was good when I saw it opening night at the Aptos Twin. I enjoyed the obvious chemistry between the two leads, and I enjoyed the insidey manner in which there were so many famous filmmakers doing cameos in the film. I remember wishing there was more of David Bowie, since there were very few people, actors or musicians, who would fill the screen with so much charm and charisma, even when playing a bad guy. And I enjoyed listening to B.B. King on the soundtrack, as I had just started to get into the blues during my senior year of high school.

I revisited the film, which you can rent or buy on Apple TV, Amazon and several other major streaming services, for the podcast, and although I didn’t enjoy the film as much as I remember doing so in 1985, it was clear that these two actors were going to become big stars somewhere down the road. Goldblum, of course, would become a star the following year, thanks to his incredible work in David Cronenberg’s The Fly. Incidentally, Goldblum and Cronenberg would meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night. And, of course, Michelle Pfeiffer would explode in 1987, thanks to her work with Susan Sarandon, Cher and Jack Nicholson in The Witches of Eastwick, which she would follow up with not one, not two but three powerhouse performances of completely different natures in 1988, in Jonathan Demme’s Married to the Mob, Robert Towne’s Tequila Sunrise, and her Oscar-nominated work in Stephen Frears’ Dangerous Liaisons. Incidentally, Pfeiffer and Jonathan Demme would also meet for the first time on the set of Into the Night, so maybe it was kismet that all these things happened in part because of the unusual casting desires of John Landis.

Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again soon, when Episode 108, on Martha Coolidge’s Valley Girl, is released.

Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about Into the Night.

The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.

Thank you again.

Good night.