Rumble Fish

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Rumble Fish is a 1983 film directed, produced and co-written by Francis Ford Coppola, based on the novel by S.E. Hinton (ISBN 0440975344).

The film centers on Rusty James, the dull-witted leader of a small gang in an industrial town (which, although never named in the film, is Tulsa, Oklahoma in the book). Rusty James idolizes his brother, "The Motorcycle Boy", who has given up the gang scene and has recently returned wiser and maturer from a trip to California. Smokey is Rusty James' friend who is growing weary of the gang violence himself, and Dennis Hopper plays Rusty James' single-parent alcoholic father.

The movie is notable for its avant-garde style, shot on stark high-contrast black-and-white film, using the spherical cinematographic process which allusions to French New Wave cinema. It also contains homages to Larry Clark's photography book Tulsa.

Coppola wrote the screenplay for Rumble Fish with Hinton on his days off from shooting The Outsiders. He even went so far as to make the films back-to-back, retaining much of the same cast and crew. Actual filming began on July 12, 1982 on many of the same Tulsa, Oklahoma sets used in The Outsiders.

To get Rourke into the mindset of his character, Coppola gave him some books written by Albert Camus and a biography of Napoleon. The Motorcycle Boy's look was patterned after Camus complete with trademark cigarette dangling out of the corner of his mouth--taken from a photograph of the author that Rourke used as a visual handle.

The striking black and white photography of the film's cinematographer, Stephen Burum, lies in two main sources: the films of Orson Welles and German cinema of the 1920's. Coppola envisioned a largely experimental score to compliment his images. He began to devise a mainly percussive soundtrack to symbolize the idea of time running out. As Coppola worked on it, he realized that he needed help from a professional musician. And so he asked Stewart Copeland, drummer of the musical group The Police, to improvise a rhythm track. Coppola soon realized that Copeland was a far superior composer and let him take over. The musician proceeded to record street sounds of Tulsa and mixed them into the soundtrack with the use of a Musync, a new device at the time, that recorded film, frame by frame on videotape with the image on top, the dialogue in the middle, and the musical staves on the bottom so that it matched the images perfectly.

Before filming started, Coppola ran regular screenings of old films during the evenings to familiarize the cast and in particular, the crew with his visual concept for Rumble Fish. Most notably, Coppola showed Anatole Litvak's Decision Before Dawn, the inspiration for the film's smoky look, and Robert Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which became Rumble Fish's stylistic prototype. Coppola's extensive use of shadows (some were painted on alley walls for proper effect), oblique angles, exaggerated compositions, and an abundance of smoke and fog are all hallmarks of these German Expressionist films. Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, shot mainly in time-lapse photography, motivated Coppola to use this technique to animate the sky in his own film.

The result is an often surreal world where time seems to follow its own rules. The film, filled with retro anachronisms, seems to portray life in the mid-1950s when Rusty James' hoodlum gang mentality was beginning to give way to the bohemian Beatnik way of life represented by his brother. However, other elements in the film indicate that the story in fact takes place in the present time: Rusty James plays a Pac-Man arcade game in a bar, and contemporary Zydeco musician Queen Ida is performing at an outdoor festival.

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Cast

Actor	Role
Matt Dillon	Rusty James
Mickey Rourke	The Motorcycle Boy
Diane Lane	Patty
Dennis Hopper	Father
Vincent Spano	Steve
Nicolas Cage	Smokey
Tom Waits	Benny
Diana Scarwid	Cassandra
Laurence Fishburne	Midget
William Smith	Patterson the Cop
Chris Penn	B.J. Jackson
Glenn Withrow	Biff Wilcox
Michael Higgins	Mr. Harrigan