"The Outsiders"

Who was blowing who?

Stevie Wonder's STAY GOLD is one of the most hauntingly beautiful songs ever heard in a film. The perfect marriage of song and cinema. It was criminal that it wasn't even nominated for an Oscar.

In Rob Lowe's book he said Tom Cruise bitched and called his agent when he had to share a room while auditioning and then on location Coppola set up a night in the homes of people that were inspiration for the book and Rob and Cruise had to share a sofa bed in some strangers home one night. If he hated sharing a hotel room, I wonder how he felt having to share a bed with 16 year old Rob Lowe?

Are you serious, R2? STAY GOLD is a piece of sentimental shit.

Miss Cruise must have had a permanent erection on that set.

Really, R4? Though I haven't heard it in years, it's one of the few things I remember about the movie.

Tulsa was a buzz when they filmed Tex, The Outsiders and Rumble Fish back to back to back.

all my best work was cut!! (read my book)

I don't get the adults I know who still think that the Outsiders is a marvelous book & film.

Read this book in the seventh grade. Hated it it so bad that I do like em a bit crazy. I need that perfect mixture of nerd and bad boy. I just think he's super dreamy haha

STAY GOLD was schmaltzy and shouldn't have even been there. It didn't go with the time period of the movie, for starters.

Some movies you need to be 12 to appreciate. Why would you watch this now, OP?

"we're doin' it for Johnny......We're doin' it for Johnny!!!!"

I'd take a ride on Pony Boy.

Believe me the acting could have been worse -

Ralph Macchio danced to 'Stay Gold' during "personal story" week on DWTS this year.

I always thought there was alot of behind-the-scenes homosex going on when this film was made.

What an unquestionably awful song Stay Gold is.

so, who won the circle jerk?

Tom Cruise reportedly did not bathe for the entire shoot.

Not exactly "The Godfather, Part II," is it?

[quote] Tom Cruise reportedly did not bathe for the entire shoot.%0D %0D So it's not just his acting that stinks.

Gross

I dated a 32 year old who just loved that movie. Raved about it.

Saw it in the theater and remember it being a leaden bore, that didn't stop me from seeing the equally dull "Rumble Fish" howev!

Diane Lane was smokin.

Saw it when I was twelve loved it. Saw it recently for a project, made me question my so called great taste.

What project r27?

Tom Cruise is a method actor, that's why he didn't bathe.

I think there's more to the story of Rob Lowe's sleepover with Tom Cruise that Rob isn't telling.

I had to bump this thread because I just watched the so-called "Complete Novel" version on dvd last night. Wow. Where to begin.

Age-wise I am a contemporary of most of the cast, and I remember this got mostly bad reviews when it came out and I still remember how baffling Coppola's career had become by the early 80s.

Thank you for OP for calling this Tiger Beat Community Theater. Not only is this incredibly funny to me but it also perfectly captures the bad acting by most of the cast. I mean it's cringe-worthy. Did Coppola know and not care that some of these performances were unintentionally funny? And maybe it's because I know so much about these actors now that I don't see them as tough guys, I see rich Hollywood kids play-acting.

And this new version has horrendously inappropriate rockabilly music that would be more fitting to a light comedy than the so-called tragic story that is unfolding.

And the slavish adherence to every plot point, character and line of dialogue to the original novel is so wrong-headed. There could be a decent movie made from the general storyline of this book but the way it plays out is so paint-by-numbers from the book.

Let's do it for JOHNNY!

As a clueless kid I liked the romantic melancholy feel, but even I knew the acting was really fucking bad. Actually, I seem to remember Leif Garrett being one of the better actors.

Sofia Coppola was very bad in a cameo as a 13-year-old girl begging Matt Dillon's Dakota for money until he tells her to STFU!

This stupid book was required reading back in my day, claiming to be a realistic view of the culture of these kind of people. I don't know on what planet. Maudlin drivel. I've read better slash fan fiction.

R35, it was required reading in my sixth grade class (c. 1992).

Wasn't it by a lesbian in her teens imagining rough boys of her own age?

R37, SE Hinton has been married to a man since 1970, and she wrote the book in high school.

I knew she wrote the book in high school, but I had heard she was gay.

You can tell its written by a teenage girl to some degree because the narrator , Ponyboy, talks an awful lot about the physique and handsomeness of some of the boys.

I was so in love with C. Thomas Howell at the time.

I wish Coppola had tackled Judy Blume instead!

In the scenes between Ponyboy and Cherry, the rear projection "burning skies of Atlanta" background was a nice visual touch to recall the runaways reading "Gone With The Wind" while hiding out in the church.

Outsiders trivia:

Nicolas Cage auditioned to play Dally. When he didn't get that role, he was offered (but turned down) the role of "Two-Bit."

Anthony Michael Hall Auditioned for the role of Ponyboy.

Val Kilmer turned down the role of Ponyboy because of previous commitment.

Mickey Rourke made a good impression during the casting of "The Outsiders" but wasn't quite right for any of those parts. Coppola then cast him for the follow-up "Rumble Fish."

Nicollette Sheridan auditioned for the role of Cherry Valance.

Brooke Shields was offered the role of Cherry but dropped out to do another movie.

Helen Slater was considered for the role that Diane Lane later played

Rob Lowe describes the other young actors of The Outsiders, most of whom would later become major names in Hollywood. Patrick Swayze is “as cool as you want, wearing tight jeans and a tattered, sleeveless Harley-Davidson T-shirt revealing his massive, ripped arms. (This is his uniform, he never changes it, and if I looked like him, neither would I.),” Lowe writes. In Vanity Fair’s excerpt, Lowe goes on to describe his Outsiders co-star Matt Dillon as a young ladies’ man—picking up an ogling young fan in the hotel’s lobby; pins Diane Lane as everyone’s set crush (“At only 16, she already seems like a legend.… I watch as she breezes by with her chaperone. With all the teen testosterone on this movie, she’ll need one!”); and recalls how director Francis Ford Coppola had all the actors perform Tai Chi during rehearsal (“How does a 60s greaser know or care about Tai Chi? But if the world’s greatest living director thinks we should stand on our heads to prepare, we should probably do it”).

Recently re-watched, and contrary to posters here and over at CHUD, liked it better than back when it came out. While it’s still full of clunky dialogue and scenes that are unnecessarily sickly (just like the book), on reflection there seems to be a reason for that. tl;dr to follow..

The tortured Romantic style of it all is about the best thing going for it. The story is an Romantic tale, about how masculine identities & urban sociopolitics become entrapping, forcing young boys and men to sacrifice their individuality, hearts & minds for the sake of a larger military-industrial machine (the novel takes place in 1965, the year the Draft doubled its demand). It's a book about chivalry, the inevitability of human conflict when groups form, the ways in which emotional expression can sublimate violent impulse, and how feelings of passion, grief & rage overpower even the instinct to survive (as in the case of Dillon's character, who, tired of ekeing out a living, essentially lets police kill him).

Teens are maudlin by nature, one can't really expect much else from a teenaged author/protagonist. The prose does swing between fear and awe in sometimes nauseating & clumsy turns, but that befits the intuitive style of a teen, and of a Romantic protagonist with his horror of an encroaching entrance into a society that damns & condemns him to death or conformity. That doesn't excuse Coppola his direction, however. I suppose he realised later that he could have done better and so RUMBLE FISH came to be. Watching THE OUTSIDERS back, it seems Coppola for some reason fights his artistic instincts deliberately so he can produce a film in a formulaic way, and this could be why it rang so false with some audiences and why it got panned on release. Macchio once gave an interview confirming he was a fan of the book when he auditioned and that would have taken a part regardless of direction, but the rest of the cast have not admitted as much.

It's true that long descriptions of our heroes do make for an odd narrative, but it renders the text honest. Boys like the narrator often idolise other men irrespective of their sexual preferences, but are discouraged from giving voice to these feelings. It's not A CLOCKWORK ORANGE by any measure, but Ponyboy's memoirs lead the reader easily into the mindset of a boy moving in awe through the world of young 'Toughs'. Alternatively the book (and the movie, to lesser extent) can be read from the POV of a young gay boy who is only beginning to understand his feelings. Coppola probably read it this way, as his final cut makes strong cinematic suggestion that Ponyboy & Johnny are falling in love.

It's a mystery how they got it done, though. One retrospective/Making Of has it that Macchio and Howell didn't get along, as the much younger Howell (at just 14) wanted to play around on set and meet fans while Macchio (soon to be 21 years old) wanted to rehearse and run lines every spare second to impress his Director. Nevertheless, the two-hander scenes they have work well enough that Johnny visibly grows bolder in revealing his attraction & attachment over the final third (when he curls up to sleep on Pony or cuddles him by the fire they build). It's like the reverse of the campfire scene in MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO - where Scott keeps his distance from Mike and laughs at his confession of attraction, Ponyboy silently accepts Johnny's affections and stays physically close to the other boy. There's certainly a case to say this is trite way to build a relationship on-screen, but to play Devil's Advocate, it may also be a rare earnestness playing out. That said, the decision to show Johnny’s last words lying charred on his hospital bed was overbearing.

[italic]Tex[/italic] was the best film of an S.E. Hinton novel and the first and only Disney film I'm aware of to openly discuss cannabis.

[quote]Watching THE OUTSIDERS back, it seems Coppola for some reason fights his artistic instincts deliberately so he can produce a film in a formulaic way, and this could be why it rang so false with some audiences and why it got panned on release.

Coppola needed the money after [italic]One from the Heart[/italic] totaled American Zoetrope and made him seem like he'd lost his touch. Budgets were getting out of control thanks to the likes of [italic]1941, The Blues Brothers, Annie, Superman[/italic] and his own [italic]Apocalypse Now[/italic], and he was already on thin ice because of the nightmare production of the latter though it ultimately proved a success. So he took commercial projects like this and [italic]The Cotton Club[/italic] where he let others call the shots in post. The latter was particularly poorly edited after he lost control of it.

I hated the book in highschool.

On top of the Tai Chi, Francis Ford had a few other surprises. For example; the Socs were given leather-bound scripts and put up in luxury digs, while the Greasers got battered paperback copies of the novel and scripts second-hand from the crew while sleeping in shared rooms on the ground floor of a motel (or sometimes even on the couches of local residents like R3 describes). I should've guessed it was bargain Budge, R48.

Even if it was a cheap & dirty shoot, it sounds fun for the Greasers. None of them had any business complaining about conditions at the time, as none of them had any Hollywood pull and no better projects under their belt (with the exception perhaps of the Swayze).

Ralph Macchio almost did lose his life shooting this movie, no wonder he looked so done by the ending scenes. When filming of the church fire, Coppola kept getting the hands to build the fire bigger and bigger to fill the shot and up the tension of the scene...into an out-of-control blaze. Legend has it that a timely burst of heavy rain extinguished it before there were any casualties. The world almost lost the Karate Kid!

Loved this movie, and I think I might have written R41 two years ago. I had such a crush on C. Thomas Howell.

According to a Q&A with fans on Tommy's official website:

Ralph is a 'great spooner' (and 'like a rose petal on a perfect spring morning'), and during the runaway scenes they cut each others' hair with real switchblades. At the time of filming Tommy was closest to Ralph and Matt, and nowadays he keeps in contact with Ralph and also Darren Dalton (Randy Adderson, the head Soc).

Matt stank of cigs but was 'a rock star'. Tommy didn't like smoking, but he lit up for real anyway to make Ponyboy authentic (and to fit in with his castmates).

Tommy still thinks of Rob Lowe as his 'brother' in spite of a few unflattering remarks made about him in Rob's book.

Patrick was the most style-conscious Greaser and was forever combing his hair. Tommy re-established contact with Pat during his final years

Tommy and the rest of the main cast called S. E. Hinton (who was present on-set) 'Mom', and she still calls them by their Greaser names ('Pony' for Tommy). Tommy's real father calls him 'Ponyboy' to this day.

Tommy got knocked out cold filming the Rumble, and it left him with a fat lip. He did not enjoy working with Leif Garrett (Bob Sheldon, the Soc that Johnny kills).

Classic film. Maybe you had to see it as an adolescent to appreciate it, though.

I love this film when I was a teenager. Read all of S.E. Hinton books because it. It was the eighties - forgive me. Doesn't age well because we were meant to forget it. It is a useless movie with bad music, lousy poetry, and non- thinking actors. Diane Lane was the best part. She usually still is. Now that's star power. And Tom Cruise's part is so small- much like Cruise. Didn't he roar at some point- weird .

I watched it on cable many years ago. There was more that I liked than that I disliked. It was probably just the eye-candy that kept me enraptured.

Darren Daulton was sooooo beautiful. What happened to his career?(And don't tell me to IMDB him)

Always thought Randy was trying and failing to get close to Ponyboy when they have their private discussion in Randy's car.

And, what exactly was the damn obsession all the other characters have with Pony? His brothers and friends were constantly all over him.

R58, he was CUTE! I would have been all over him too.

Stay Gold was schmalzty but still makes me get teary when I hear it or see the movie. A cult classic, the dialogue in this one was quoted randomly all throughout jr high and high school (along with most of Bill Murray's lines from Caddyshack and Meatballs).

Kim Walker (the lead Heather in HEATHERS) was Cherry Valance in the Fox TV spinoff, and David Arquette was Two-Bit. LeoDiCap is an uncredited extra in a few episodes.

WEHT Boyd Kestner? He was gorgeous. Sad about Harold Pruett, didn't know he died so young.

Oh shit, I just realised something!

Remember Julie Brown's awesome "The Homecoming Queen's Got a Gun"?

This movie is probably where she got the "I did it...for Johnny!"

idk R59. It's hard to prefer Ponyboy when the elegant perfection/bone structure that is 18 y.o. Rob Lowe is right there, fresh out of the shower, glowing teeth-tits-and-tan. Or foxy black-eyed beauty Matt Dillon is sashaying around fucking shit up, all dishevelled after just getting out of bed. Or Hell, when you could enjoy the fascinating and godlike Patrick Swayze at his most manful and sensual stage of life, his thighs threatening to burst out of his Levis. Were you by any chance a preteen when you saw it first? This movie boasts a plethora of grown young men in their prime that you get to see body and soul, it's a gay fantasy we see through Ponyboy's eyes. Was he desirous? Now I'm curious to know if gay boys were attracted to him over associating with him. To each their own.

Thinking about it more, it makes sense the other guys would want to coddle and smother Ponyboy like they do, since he's the only one with a hope of getting out of the Neighbourhood and making good. It's actually sweet how tactile the brothers are when you remember their parents are dead and they have no other family.

Btw in case anyone cares, that scene was re-cut into the extended edition along with the new OST. It was initially cut because test audiences thought it seemed too gay and incestuous, but is in fact a canonical scene (iirc Ponyboy and Sodapop converse in bed more than once in the book). The brothers cuddle because they're emotionally starving and poor as shit (can't afford heating/extra room), but somehow Rob Lowe was just too gorgeously unable to put this across in a platonic way and Coppola said fuck it.

Is Coppola bi? I know he's a porn aficionado, showing up a few times at the Adult Movie awards. I wonder if he did the casting couch routine with his delicious cast on this movie?

Apparently Nic Cage auditoned for Darry and Anthony-Michael Hall auditioned for Ponyboy. How weird would that version of Outsiders have been?

Emilio co-wrote a memoir with Martin Sheen and about THE OUTSIDERS, everyone in Hollywood was trying to get a role. Sean Penn introduced Tom Cruise to the Sheens, post-TAPS, and Cruise stayed in them in Malibu for a while.

Sean used to climb into Emilio's bedroom window, drunk, and complain that FFC refused to let Sean audition for the Patrick Swayze role.

[quote]Apparently Nic Cage auditoned for Darry and Anthony-Michael Hall auditioned for Ponyboy. How weird would that version of Outsiders have been?

It probably wouldn't have, as that's the version that people would have known.

Isn't Nick Cage the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola?

R69 yes, and FFC's father originally composed the score. Lots of nepotism in that family.

Incidentally, why was there new music/score for the 2005 DVD? That was a trip, watching that version, after having watched the original for many years.

I watched the whole 1990 TV series adaptation on YouTube. It wasn't bad at all. The cast in the TV series included Jay R. Ferguson, Boyd Kestner, Robert Rusler, David Arquette and the late Harold Pruett, Rodney Harvey and Kim Walker. I liked it, they fleshed out the characters far better. The cast was equally hot to me as the movie. Jay R Ferguson is very cute and pretty, Rusler and Kestner are hunky and sexy, David is cute and Rodney and Harold were drop-dead gorgeous.

Jay R Ferguson managed to have a successful sitcom career and David Arquette became a Hollywood actor (though he had connections). The rest of the cast of the TV adaptation kinda fizzled out or died tragically. Jay is still handsome

Rodney Harvey was beyond gorgeous until... he wasn't.

R73 Gus taking this pic of River and Rodney is weirdly prophetic. Both would die from terrible drug addictions.

It isn't that weirdly prophetic if the reported drug use during the making of Idaho is accurate.

Wasn't Jay Ferguson one of DiCaprio's "Pussy Posse." They ambushed Elizabeth Berkley's boyfriend. One of the guys had been blowing up her phone and the boyfriend pulled up.

I saw it as a tween girl and hated it. Of course we were meant to drool over the man meat, but I preferred Socs to Greasers. I didn’t like those grungy trashy boys living in that dirty poor-person house without any women to civilize them. Diane Lane was delectable, though.

R76 I found this article.

Thanks, r78. He was also Sara Gilbert's merkin, for a time.

I have to also say, the original cut of the movie is much better than the extended version. Some of the scenes didn't really needed to be there and the soundtrack change is jarring.

[quote]I watched the whole 1990 TV series adaptation on YouTube. It wasn't bad at all

I have to check it out to see if it still holds up. I remember liking it. When Billy Bob Thornton's career blew up, I just thought, "The guy from "The Outsiders?" Out of everyone in that cast, I would not have imagined him b

[quote]Wasn't Jay Ferguson one of DiCaprio's "Pussy Posse."

He was interviewed while on Mad Men and mentioned still being friends with Leo.

Unlike Kevin Connelly, Tobey and Lukas, he rather spend time with his wife and kids.

R79 Jay definitely partied hard in his youth, probably under the influence of different drugs. At least he seemed to mature (at least from the interviews I have seen of him recently) and he's probably embarrassed by that past. Poor Elizabeth Berkley.

[quote] It launched the careers of Ralph Macchio, C. Thomas Howell,

And what a rocket blast C. Thomas Howell's career turned out to be!

I've only seen the TV series (on YouTube) after reading up on Rodney Harvey here. It's not very good. Patty Arquette guest stars in one episode.

R81 Leo actually was in extra in the first episode. He was the kid fighting Scout, some new character they added for the TV series. That's probably how he and Jay met.

Did DiCaprio live at that apartment complex that all the kid actors live at? Ferguson did. I believe DL fave Froy did as well.

R83 C Thomas did great in The Drifter, an underrated thriller film. Secret Admirer was also a hilarious teen romcom. But Soul Man was the stupidest career move ever, he must been high on something when he signed on to that.

It didn't hurt RDJ in Tropic Thunder, did it?

[quote]Did DiCaprio live at that apartment complex that all the kid actors live at? Ferguson did. I believe DL fave Froy did as well.

I doubt it. DiCaprio was born and raised in L.A. It's almost always people from out of state who lives in the Oakwood.

Actually C Thomas Howell's filmography is ridiculously long, he works multiple projects a year including voice acting, film and TV. He always does rodeo and has a ranch. So he's not a big movie star but he works a lot.

He is booked.

Both C Thomas and Jay R both made hot Ponyboys and Rob Lowe and Rodney Harvey were both hot Sodapops.

Rodney with Corey Haim

I think the TV show was cursed. Harold Pruett also died from drug overdose. He was also gorgeous.

Cursed? Bad parenting and exploitation, more like.

Jay R and Rodney.

Also the late Kim Walker who was famous for playing Heather Chandler, also played Cherry in the TV version of The Outsiders. She died of a brain tumor in 2000.

Speaking of S.E. Hinton, my favorite book of her's was That Was Then, This Is Now. I can't remember why I enjoyed it the most, but I think it had a loose connection to The Outsiders. The film adaptation starred Emilio Estevez and I couldn't bring myself to watch it because I thought it would be TERRIBLE. Has anyone ever seen it? It seems to be the most obscure S.E. Hinton adaptation, so I assume it's actually horrible.

R98–I’ve seen it. I don’t remember too much about it, but I thought Emilio had good chemistry with Craig Sheffer (looked great.)

I think Rumble Fish with Matt Dillon, Vincent Spano, Mickey Rourke, Dennis Hopper, Nicolas Cage and Diane Lane was so underrated. I loved the black-and-white film style, the characters, the script and pacing. Everything about it. Coppola struck gold with that and he's also is responsible for Nicolas "Cage" Coppola's career too. Matt and Mickey were sexy as hell in this movie. Matt and Vincent are still good friends, I figure since they are both New Yorkers who both got their start as kids in Over the Edge.

C. Thomas Howell was crazy sexy in The Hitcher. He was definitely a hottie when young.

R89 Leo apparently grew up poor with a single mother in Los Feliz in East LA. I remember hearing how he identifies as being from "the hood". I noticed a lot of white Angelenos seem to be into the hip-hop and hood thing. Brian Austin Green, Shia LaBeouf and Billie Eilish. Maybe because LA's local culture is heavily influenced by blacks and Hispanics.

C. Thomas and Jennifer Connelly. Their eyes are very similar.

The one thing the TV show did better than the film is that the actors in the TV show had more believable Southern accents. It helps Jay R Ferguson is from Texas, he also played a boy with Southern accent in Evening Shade.

Rumble Fish is a great film about adolescence. One of Coppola's underrated. Also Over the Edge, River's Edge, Heathers and Pump Up The Volume were all great. All very refreshing from the wish fulfillment fairy tales that were John Hughes films.

The Outsiders is very similar to Gone With The Wind in the sense that you can only really enjoy it if you're a romantic who likes romantic reading. If you don't like romanticism you won't like those books.

It's clear it was written by a teenage girl too. What "gang" acts like this? Income inequality is an important topic but the resolution was too fairy-tale. I think Rumble Fish was the superior film and Tex was pretty good.

But Outsiders is enjoyable because of its good cinematography and use of score and also the male eye candy like Patrick Swayze, Emilio Estevez, C Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon and Rob Lowe.