. . . . . . . By Richard Melo [This article was written in 2003. While many of its instances have become dated since then, its essence remains relevant.] . . . . . . . So how awful of a movie is O.C. and Stiggs? Ask anyone who’s seen it, if you can find anyone who’s seen it, and even then, it depends on who you ask. The rare yet typical Internet-fueled harangue covers these aspects of the film: * Though it was intended for theatrical release in 1984, it went straight to video in 1987, and this was an era when VCRs were still thought of by many as a luxury item. It was also before the straight-to-video industry found a niche audience, gaining a slim degree of credibility and resuscitating the careers of stars like Gary Busey and Kirk Cameron. * National Lampoon, the same crew who proudly presented National Lampoon’s Senior Trip and from whose loins the concept of the O.C. and Stiggs was originally sprung, never wanted its name associated with the movie in any way. * When art houses play a Robert Altman career retrospective, O.C. and Stiggs is not shown. While it was produced in the same breath as Tanner ’88, an Altman project his fans adore, O.C. and Stiggs is seen as clumsy and clunky -- a scourge on the maverick director’s career. All that said, welcome to a 20-year-overdue review of O.C. and Stiggs, although it might not be fair to call this a review in that the word implies a second looking over, and if anything about the movie is certain it’s that it was never seen a first time. Yet the extreme to which it went unseen is key to the film’s appeal is. You can look around at where we are now, culturally speaking and particularly in regards to the state of Hollywood cinema or anything else in the universe for that matter, and you can’t blame O.C. and Stiggs. (Along a similar line, the emergence of DVD and the decline of videotape will likely push the status of the long-out-of-print VHS version of the film from endangered to extinct). Yet O.C. and Stiggs is a movie worth not giving up on so easily. Simply put, it’s not as terrible a movie as its reputation suggests, or in other words, while it’s not Citizen Kane, it’s not Gigli, either. When it played brief runs in major cities prior to fulfill legal aspects of its video release, the NY Times called it a “lively and colorful satire,” and the LA Times not only wrote that “there’s a lot to enjoy here,” it also suggested that the movie “mounts one of the most sustained assaults on the mythos and values of the 80s that any recent American movie has managed.” Hold that thought. If this is true -- that the film has merit -- then why is it the 80s teen film Hollywood didn’t want you to see?  . . . . . . . Top Gun caught the Navy off guard. They were in no way prepared for the surge in recruiting that the 1986 Tom Cruise flyboy movie spurred on. They quickly mobilized and went so far as to set up recruiting tables in theater lobbies to catch teens walking away in the movie’s afterglow. Scores of 80s kids left the mall multiplex after seeing Top Gun ready to commit years of their life (if not dear life itself) in Navy service just in time for the first Gulf War. Looking back, I am not sure whether this phenomenon was inspirational or pathetic, although I strongly suspect it was one or the other or both, and in the least, it does speak to the inexplicable spell a movie can cast. True or not, anecdotes abound of teens following their own worst impulses in the image of movies, whether it was Rebel Without a Cause, A Clockwork Orange, or Jackass the Movie, or any other. Occurrences such as these are noteworthy because they make the news -- but who’s to say how many Let’s Disco! book and record sets John Travolta inadvertently helped K-Tel sell following his 70s rise to stardom? By the time the 80s rolled around, mainstream music has become passé and provided the teen generation few overarching cultural touchstones. The 60s had the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, the Summer of Love, and Woodstock, while the 80s had a live satellite feed of Phil Collins landing in a Concorde on the tarmac in Philadelphia so he could play both sides of the Atlantic during Live-Aid. It just wasn’t the same. During the 80s, the music scene splintered and kids drifted into diverse subcultures of youth subculture -- punk, hip hop, metal -- characterized as much by clothing, hairstyle, and drug preference as sound. The fascination of 80s kids with movies was the equivalent of getting all made up with nowhere else to go. Hollywood at the time was in a transition itself as the major studios were becoming franchises of media conglomerations. Movies were no longer seen as movies but as product, and a film’s box office receipts were seen as the truest measure of its quality. At the same time, studios discovered that teen movies (as well as any mindless fare starring Chevy Chase) could become cash cows while produced on the cheap. Critics saw them as teen “exploitation” films, but not all of the kids who saw them were sophisticated enough (or cared enough) to notice the difference. While Hollywood merely saw the box office numbers, the kids saw something else. The fascination of 80s kids with Hollywood had less to do with the stars than the characters they played -- partly because the actors weren’t stars yet, even though a few had familiar last names like Sheen and Sutherland. A prototypical teen movie like 1976’s Pom-Pom Girls, while appearing to have no redeeming social value, has something more. It has Robert Carradine’s terrific performance, for one, that carries the movie, and it features young faces in starring roles coping with high school. Whether or not a kid in the audience could relate to the movie’s jock and cheerleader heroes, you could still relate on a generational level -- even if it wasn’t you, you knew kids like that. By the time the clock struck the 80s, studios found another successful teen-movie formula centering on ensemble films featuring lovable outcasts -- weirdoes and geeks with hearts of gold and a profound interest in college radio -- mixed among the traditional jock and cheerleader types. Suddenly, it didn’t matter what social circle white kids traveled in. You could look up on the movie screen and see yourself -- and you were cool. (Worth noting here is the absence of black or other minority kids from the 80s teen movie genre. It was as if the America that Hollywood wanted to project back to kids was with rare exception all the same sheen as Ivory soap.) This is where O.C. and Stiggs come in. Prankish, raunchy, and male American teens, Oliver Cromwell Ogilvie and Mark Stiggs first fell out of the pages of National Lampoon magazine in the early 80s, the creations of Lampoon editors Tod Carroll and Ted Mann. As recurring characters, O.C. and Stiggs gained a steady cult following before commandeering an entire issue dedicated their exploits the summer before their senior year of high school. The magazine pieces are resplendent in the Lampoon’s trademark revolting and irreverent style and are chock full of photos of the characters and artifacts from the teen duo’s adventures. They are the type of pieces that first make you laugh. Then you linger over them and try to figure out why they’re funny. Then you decide they’re not funny, but still you laughed. The knock on the magazine pieces is that they read at times like a film treatment, which is in effect what they became as Carroll and Mann began to shop the O.C. and Stiggs property around Hollywood. (If you hurry and you Google this, you may still find the complete Lampoon exploits of O.C. and Stiggs free and online.) On the heels of hits like 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which confirmed that teen movies were now high stakes, MGM-UA won a bidding war for the O.C. and Stiggs script, and Robert Altman, a director as remarkably accomplished as he was available, was brought in to direct. The rest of the movie’s story is ignominy. . . . . . . . It’s not easy to praise Robert Altman without sounding like you’re dissing him. This is partly because his films are often at their most brilliant when they are at their most flawed. Take, as an example, the shot in Nashville of Shelley Duvall’s character in her bedroom taking off her wig and slumping down onto her bed. Simple yet profound, it’s a shot that’s no one would think of writing and is as much the result of the director forgetting to yell cut! as it occurs by aesthetic design. Where Altman’s art comes into play is in the decision to splice the shot back into the movie rather than leave it on the cutting room floor. Albert Brooks, who happens to be playing a film editor in 1981’s Modern Romance (which he also directed and co-wrote but did not edit) is about to say before he interrupts himself to break up with his girlfriend that some movies are saved in the editing. Editing makes all the difference on an Altman production. On his sets, he often shoots scenes before the actors have had a chance to rehearse or learn their lines. He keeps the camera moving constantly, whether on tracks or through a zoom lens. He shoots actors on the set from a distance as they are preparing for a take and cuts that footage into the film. During the editing of M*A*S*H, Altman discovered that by adding a series of loudspeaker announcements over previously filmed random shots of life at the military medical camp, he could create effective transitions while adding to the film’s atmosphere. It helped make the difference between the movie as an incoherent, unreleasable, and career-ending mess and one of the brightest moments in American cinema. Altman’s movies are as much a result of crafty editing as the director’s moods, which to put it mildly can be mercurial. Why he chose to direct O.C. and Stiggs is anyone’s best guess. According to Patrick McGilligan’s biography, Robert Altman: Jumping Off the Cliff, Altman agreed to direct O.C. and Stiggs not because he liked the script or the material, but because he thought he wasn’t going to be asked. From the perspective of MGM-UA, it seemed like a perfect fit. The director had not had a major hit since Nashville in 1975 and was at a point in his career when he was mostly directing screen adaptations of stage plays. O.C. and Stiggs, twisted and satirical, could have become just the right material to break Altman’s career out of its post-Popeye doldrums. It didn’t matter that Altman loathed the mindless teen genre just as much as he loathed the mindless teens who went to see them, the studio saw him as the director who could give them their Fast Times and then some. MGM hoped for a crossover success, packing them in by day at the suburban Cineplex-Odeon and then again at night in the downtown art house. There was even a possibility that the film would have a second set of legs on the midnight movie circuit. During production, Altman began to badmouth MGM in the press. He also shot the movie in a hurry, fearing that the studio’s regime might change and wrest his artistic control of the project. Then in post production, Altman brought in Louis Lombardo to assist in the film’s editing. Altman had worked with Lombardo before on McCabe and Mrs. Miller, The Long Goodbye, and other films, but on O.C. and Stiggs, when Lombardo went to work, Altman also went to work, re-editing the film behind Lombardo’s back. Lombardo left the project, and Altman submitted a mish-mash final cut to the studio and moved on to other projects. To this day, Altman rarely mentions O.C. and Stiggs in interviews. (By the same token, interviewers rarely ask him about it.) When the film does come up, he usually lambastes the teen movie genre or talks fondly about working with Tina Louise, who plays a small part in the picture. In perhaps his most telling, if terse, comment on O.C. and Stiggs, Altman said in a 2000 Onion A.V. Club interview, “Nobody got it.” This, of course, glosses over that no one saw it. Where O.C. and Stiggs suffers most as a film is in its editing. The pace and continuity never seem to flow. This is too bad because the two unknown actors cast in the title roles, Daniel Jenkins and Neill Barry, pull off performances abounding in the manic, crude, herky-jerky, and zit-ridden energy that makes its way into teen movies far less often than it does through the doors at public high schools. When the studio showed Altman’s cut of O.C. and Stiggs to a test audience in Canoga Park, California, it received the lowest rating the studio had ever seen. It was considered not teen movie enough for the teen movie crowd nor Altman enough for the Altman set. The studio execs at MGM-UA decided to spare the public from O.C. and Stiggs and shelve it indefinitely. There exists a good chance that this is the point when everyone associated with the film (with the possible exception of the two lead actors who could have used the film’s exposure to launch themselves into other roles) would have liked the story to end. . . . . . . Other forces are at play here. It would be easy to say that the reason that O.C. and Stiggs got stiffed was because it sucked. Yet countless movies that suck have ended up with huge advertising budgets wide release. Consider also that when it comes to teen movies in particular, Hollywood has rarely shown a high regard for quality or morality. Hollywood simply will not draw a line against showing teens having a raunchy good time with few exceptions. Dragging a corpse around South Beach is all right in a Hollywood teen movie, as is sleeping with your best friend’s mother. Denigrating racial types or depicting acts of violence against women in teen films are seen as nothing more than pushing the envelope. Incest and cannibalism cannot be far behind. However, the one rule Hollywood won’t allow a teen movie to break seems is simply this: Do not tamper with the belief system of hard-working white Americans in the upper stratum. Someone forgot to tell O.C. and Stiggs. . . . . . . . O.C. and Stiggs spend a lion’s share of their utterly monstrous and mind-roasting summer as they have spent most of their young lives -- engaged in the torment of Randall Schwab, an upstanding community member in Phoenix, Arizona; teetotaler; hater of anything to do with the continent of Africa; insurance magnate; and star of his own schlocky TV commercials whose jingles begin with the line, “Misery loves our company.” O.C. and Stiggs hold him in such contempt that they refer to him as “The Schwab” -- elongating the name into several exaggerated syllables to make it sound as ridiculous and repulsive as possible. The faintest whiff of The Schwab can send O.C. and Stiggs reeling into a fit of teen angst, neurosis, and hyperactivity. To them, The Schwab is more of a phenomenon than a human being, because no human could ever be so thoroughly Schwabian. The Schwab (Paul Dooley) is someone whose favorite ice cream flavor is vanilla because he doesn’t like anything with color. Nor does he like homeless people or drinkers of alcohol. Nor do any members of the Schwab family ever use the swimming pool behind their upscale suburban villa-style family home replete with cactus decor. On a good night, The Schwab will gather his wife and kids to sit around the television and watch the premiere of his new commercial. His wife Elinor (Jane Curtin) constantly sneaks sips of booze from hidden stashes, including a flask disguised as a pair of binoculars, while his son Randall, Jr. thinks his stumbling slurry mother has nothing other than a problem with her inner ear. Meanwhile, O.C. and Stiggs are out back, scaling the stucco-covered walls of the Schwab compound, stealing lobsters off the grill and plugging in a phone to an outdoor wall jack to run up The Schwab’s long distance bill by placing an all-night call to Africa. While the teen duo may seem mean and their target innocuous, don’t let The Schwab fool you. He’s not an innocent victim. He stands for intolerance, hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption -- and O.C. and Stiggs see right through him. The Schwab excuses himself for everything because he is a self-made man and champion of the American Dream, and no matter what lengths O.C. and Stiggs go through in order to expose The Schwab to himself, he never gets it. They spend the entire movie right under his nose and never get caught. Over the course of its history, Hollywood has never woken up from the American Dream. It is the foundation on which Hollywood is built. In the world H-town projects back to its audience, every man is Tom Hanks, every woman Meg Ryan, and every family as upwardly mobile yet quirky as Macauley Culkin’s in Home Alone. Many of its lasting heroes are ordinary folks with big dreams -- the Gary Coopers and Kevin Costners of the world. What right do these two punks (if you can dignify them enough to call them punks) have to come along and insult the way of life of hard-working, upstanding people? The American Dream with Hollywood acting as its agent validates Schwabian values. It makes it so that when The Schwab looks in the mirror, he never sees The Schwab. Instead, The Schwab sees an all-American, all-around great guy -- and everyone else is an asshole. Even among the legion of outcasts who populate 80s teen movies, O.C. and Stiggs stand alone. O.C. and Stiggs don’t dress themselves in typical 80s-teen-movie outcast post-metal-and-punk pre-hipster sensibility. Instead they wear Bermuda shorts, vests, ties, and visors; or they wear tuxedo shirts and glittering top hats; or they wear American flag rodeo-style shirts with feathered fedoras. They do not take themselves seriously and dress to make themselves look ridiculous. Teen movies in the 80s are resplendent in high-status kids falling in love low-status poor kids (Pretty in Pink, Valley Girl); in weirdoes and geeks who have a hip taste in music (and as an aside, the weirdoes and geeks are almost always poor); in tepid rebels, usually males who have a strained relationship at home, who discover that what they need to do is talk more with their dads (Bender in Breakfast Club, Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). Perhaps the most iconoclastic of the bunch is Kevin Bacon’s character from Footloose who turns a staid small town on its ear by inspiring residents to dance. Footloose, however, was less a social statement than it was a commercial for its soundtrack album. (Likewise, the soundtrack album was a commercial for the movie.) If these movies are to be believed, kids in the 80s were far more concerned with the finding the dream prom date than fucking the system. While 80s teen movie antiheroes sustain themselves on an audio diet of Psychedelic Furs and Modern English, O.C. and Stiggs turn their ears toward Africa and the juju music of King Sunny Ade. In perhaps their finest moment, the teen duo upstages opening night of a community theater production with a performance by King Sunny and his African Beats. When King Sunny takes the stage, the audience made up of almost all of the film’s white ensemble cast at first looks on in horror -- not only are all the musicians black, King Sunny doesn’t sing in English. While the film’s characters might not get King Sunny, they can dance to the music, which they do -- and O.C. and Stiggs despite its satire and cynicism sends home an optimistic message not unlike that of Footloose, though with a more encompassing vibe and without the commercial trappings. During the performance, however, The Schwab sits quietly in back -- unamused, unfazed, and still hating all that’s associated with the continent of Africa. O.C. and Stiggs bear more in common with Hawkeye and Trapper John from Altman’s M*A*S*H than typical teen characters played by Andrew McCarthy and Rob Lowe. Like Hawkeye and Trapper, O.C. and Stiggs are trapped in a place that they hate, and the way they cope is by wisecracking, pranking, and in general refusing to take the world as seriously as it takes itself. Yet while Hawkeye and Trapper are reluctant draftees caught up in war-torn Korea (which Altman thought of not as Korea but as Vietnam), they will eventually go home. The problem that O.C. and Stiggs have is that they are home already. They don’t particularly want to stay, but they have nowhere else to go. As strange as Hawkeye and Trapper are in their landscape, they can always flaunt their status as surgeons and con nurses into preparing steak dinners for them. O.C. and Stiggs have no such status to flaunt. In Schwabland, teens are voiceless and inconsequential -- although as far out on the fringe as they are, O.C. and Stiggs are still of a higher status because of their whiteness and maleness than their homeless friends (like Wino Bob), their gay high school teachers, their mentally retarded pal Barney, and the Sluts (which is the term O.C. and Stiggs use to describe two girls they hang out with. Despite their anti-Schwab leanings, O.C. and Stiggs are not politically correct.). As a movie, O.C. and Stiggs, seen or unseen, also stands apart. What other Hollywood movie of the past 20 years has flipped a double flying in the face of upper class American values? Other films that blend social criticism into their aesthetic have met with controversy while still receiving a resounding Hollywood reception, including films with themes that question war (Platoon), dogma (Last Temptation of Christ), corporations (Roger and Me), the government (JFK), American symbols (Malcolm X, which opens with images of a flag burning), and Hollywood itself (The Player). What’s missing among these titles are movies that look critically and directly at the values of the American upper and ruling class -- the SUV generation. Relatively recent films that do address this theme include American Beauty and Woody Allen’s Alice and Crimes and Misdemeanors, but those movies play out on subtle levels. None approach their satire with the bombast of O.C. and Stiggs. This to not to say that O.C. and Stiggs aspires to the level of achievement in any of those other films, but with thoughtful editing and studio support, it could have found its place resting alongside Harold and Maude and Rushmore in terms of audience appreciation and everlasting wonderment. By happenstance, O.C. and Stiggs marks the end of the Post-Watergate era in which satire flourished. I have always thought that style of satire that started with Lenny Bruce in the 60s and reached its apex during the early years of Saturday Night Live received its final blow unwittingly (very unwittingly) with the emergence of Dan Quayle in 1988. All TV news and other media outlets needed to do was show footage of Quayle instructing schoolchildren on how to spell to fulfill the satiric impulse while cutting out the need for the satirist. The Lenny Bruce school of satire -- with its emphasis on replacing vanity with sanity -- was a cure for sick times. Comedians like Bruce helped people see through the absurdity of institutions like segregation, the Catholic Church, the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Vietnam. Newer institutionalized phenomena like the Patriot Act could use a Lenny Bruce. Yet while satire in the post-911 United States appears to be again running at full throttle, it’s driven by a different engine than the old school. Satire today sets its target frequently on political correctness, and while the excesses in the PC movement are ripe for ridicule, the essence of PC is to replace racism with respect. In this regard, both satire and PC have similar aims -- the promotion of stripped down human values. When satire incessantly dogs PC, in effect, the satirists are railing against a purpose that runs along similar lines to their own. Additionally, mainstream satirists today are usually media types poking fun at politicians and other media types. The difference is fundamental; today’s satire is less about bringing down the system than bringing down one another. What’s missing is the sense of the satirist as an outsider, because when it comes to media types, everyone is embedded. Today’s media has even gone so far as to invent a Jay Leno, who is, in effect, an anti-satirist. Traditionally, satire encourages people behaving ridiculously to clean up their acts. A comedian like Leno, however, encourages more of the same -- the more ridiculous people and institutions become, the better it is for Jay Leno. It helps the ratings. O.C. and Stiggs speaks loudly to an audience in 2004 who will in all likelihood never see the film. It comments on the movement that has taken place in satire over the last 20 years, and it creates perspective on the generation of kids who lost it at the movies in the 80s and now may want it back. It speaks mostly, though, on The Schwab. O.C. and Stiggs, as characters, never were a part of us, as studio executives took it upon themselves to make sure 80s teens would not have a chance to see the movie. We may have known kids who were like that or have been kids like that ourselves, but we never saw O.C. and Stiggs on the big screen. The Schwab, however, was with us then in 1984 -- everywhere -- and he is with us now. You could argue that The Schwab is with us more now than ever, occupying the highest seats of power. (Where are O.C. and Stiggs when you need them?) You can also think again why the studio execs who killed O.C. and Stiggs did what they did. You can consider that studio execs are traditionally upwardly mobile white men who engage on a day-today basis in the selling off of the American Dream. They saw O.C. and Stiggs. They didn’t think it was funny. They thought it was clumsy. They thought the kids were mean. They thought the film had no redeeming social value. Rather than release it and try to make money off if it, they decided to write it off and keep it from opening anywhere. Whether or not they would ever admit it, O.C. and Stiggs also appealed to a deeper fear. They knew what Top Gun could do, even if the Navy didn’t, and the last thing studio execs would ever want is for kids to scale the walls of their family home and steal their lobsters.