MIKE'S MURDER 1984

Spoiler Alert. This is a critical essay, not a review, so plot points are revealed for the purpose of discussion.

Falling into the category of favorite obscurities that fascinate as much as they frustrate is James Bridges’ distinctively internal neo-noir, Mike’s Murder. It fascinates because it’s one of those films that slipped through the cracks, released both too late—the ‘70s were over, small, hard-to-categorize movies were out, and ’80s blockbusters and high-concept franchises were in; and too early—personal, quirky movies made a comeback with the indie film boom of the ‘90s. It frustrates me because, as much as I absolutely love this movie, it’s one that, much like the characters in it, is haunted by its past 

Living In Rear-View in Car-Centric L.A. 

Looking back is the only way she can move forward 

My own enthusiasm for Mike's Murder stems significantly, though only partially, from being a huge fan of Debra Winger, whose nuanced, almost delicate performance—arguably one of her best—is the glue holding this melancholy thriller together. But as one of those emotionally insular, urban-set, psychologically dark films of the sort that have always appealed to me (like Midnight Cowboy, Klute, Looking for Mr. Goodbar), it can be said that Mike's Murder—figuratively speaking, anyway—already had my name all over it. 

The real mystery: Was it love or limerence? 

I first saw Mike’s Murder at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard the week it opened in March of 1984. I remember being surprised by the low turnout, considering how popular Winger was at the time. The recently released Terms of Endearment was attracting large audiences, the film for which she had received her second Best Actress Oscar nomination just a few weeks earlier. 

However, part of me wasn't surprised, because Mike’s Murder—a film completed and scheduled to be released before Terms of Endearment—had arrived at theaters under a cloud of poor word-of-mouth and almost a year’s worth of negative publicity related to its troubled production history (it was close to being shelved, the sudio lost faith it, and it and more or less dumped it into theaters in an effort to ride the crest of Winger's fame wave).

 The film's title sequence shows the making of a Big Tomy's chiliburger in such mouthwatering detail that, to this day, seeing just a few seconds of it can set off chiliburger cravings that can last a week. Big Tomy's opened in 1982 and, still in operation, has become an LA landmark.

An early Mike’s Murder casualty was the scrapping of much of the original score composed by ‘80s New Wave artist Joe Jackson and replacing it with a more traditional (and superb) score by Academy Award-winning James Bond composer John Barry.

But nobody weaned on the films of Robert Altman and Joseph Losey pays any attention to bad reviews, so I forged ahead, heedless of the critics calling Mike's Murder a complete waste of time and talent. And that it may well be true, for even after cable-TV and VHS exposure, Mike's Murder never really found an audience. But I fell in love with Mike's Murder from the word go. I was completely won over by everything about it. 

As yet another moody rumination on my time-honored, favorite movie theme: the innate human desire to find connection—not only did Mike’s Murder resonate strongly as a lens held up to the urban “fear of being alone” phenomenon that makes people settle for what’s being offered rather than doing without or asking for what they want; but for a movie with such an assertively ‘80s-vibe, Mike’s Murder genuinely felt like a film made during my favorite, most experimentally exciting period in moviemaking—the New Hollywood Era of the late-60’s-70s. 

Debra Winger as Betty Parrish

Mark Keyloun as Mike Chuhutsky

Paul Winfield as Phillip Greene

Darrell Larson as Steve

Conceived as a uniquely Los Angeles “Cherchez L’homme” crime-mystery and character study told from the tentative perspective of its female protagonist, bank teller  Betty Parrish, Mike’s Murder uses the detached attachments of LA hookup culture and the irrevocable undertow of violence in the Beverly Hills-Brentwood drug scene of the coked-up '80s to explore themes of isolation, ambiguous loss, unresolved grief, and reconciled loneliness in The City of “Whatever.” (A character’s response when pressed to define the status of a relationship -- “New lover, boyfriend, whatever…?” Also, the only appropriate thing to say when a guy like Mike says, "I’ll call. I mean it." ).

When news of James Bridges making a film titled Mike’s Murder first started appearing in the trades, I wasn’t sure whether that possessive apostrophe referred to a murder Mike commits or one he falls victim to. 

Betty Parrish has her life well organized. She has a nice job, a cute house, a cool car (a helluva cool car), caring friends and family, she dates from time to time, and owns a baby grand piano. The only kink—literally and metaphorically—in her otherwise structured life is “The C-scale out of tune,” as she calls him: Mike Chuhutsky. A puppy-dog-cute Ohio-to-Los Angeles transplant and rootless ladies’ man who gets by on occasion. As in, occasionally giving tennis lessons, occasionally dealing drugs, occasionally telling the truth, and occasionally being the live-in, transactionally bisexual object of affection of a wealthy record producer named Phillip Greene.

A character describing Mike: “He had all kinds of stories that he used on different people. He was always preparing a face for the faces that he met.”

“On occasion” is also an apt description of Betty’s dickmatized, casual-to-the-point-of-impromptu relationship with the chameleonic Mike, whose freewheeling life—no phone, no car, no steady address, and disappearances lasting up to six months—leaves their hookups overly-reliant on chance encounters or the odd booty call. 

Although mutually attracted and sharing a strong sexual chemistry, Betty and Mike are very nearly complete strangers (perhaps explaining where all that great sexual chemistry came from). So, when one of Mike’s characteristically flaky no-shows turns out to be due to his having been brutally murdered in a botched drug deal, Betty is thrown into an emotional tailspin. Confronted with the abrupt finality of her present—all unexplored and unresolved feelings now subsumed by grief—Betty grows increasingly, and ultimately dangerously, invested in piecing together the disturbing fragments of Mike’s shrouded past to get a better handle on why this guy has made such an indelible impression on her. 

Debra Winger on Betty being sexually fixated on Mike: “She was brought up well and has a great relationship with her mother. She has a good job and does it well. But she has this other side that people may not see at first. She needs that guy every three months. She and Mike don’t light candles. It's hot stuff. It’s sweaty, fast, and sometimes rough. She doesn’t introduce Mike to her mother. “

Atmospheric, tense, and one of those movies I knew I would return to again and again to pick up details of plot and character, I remember my first thoughts after seeing Mike’s Murder were: 1) Debra Winger is astonishingly good, and 2) this movie is gay as fuck.

Mike’s Murder's innate Queerness leapt out at me years before I even knew its producer/writer/director was gay. Mike's Murder is a labor-of-love passion project by the late two-time Oscar-nominee James Bridges (The Baby Maker, The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy) that was inspired by a tragic real-life event shared by Bridges, his life partner Jack Larson (who produced), and their friend Paul Winfield.

In fact, Winfield’s role has him cast essentially as himself—Winfield, a privately out gay man who was professionally closeted—was tasked with revisiting and reenacting what certainly must have been a very painful period in his life. James Bridges, who became somewhat of a mentor to Debra Winger after casting her in Urban Cowboy, wrote the role of Betty especially for her. 

“The Ephemeral is Eternal” 

Personal favorite Dan Shor (Wise Blood, Strange Behavior), as video performance artist Richard—he's Betty’s “whatever”—reinterprets Baudelaire’s “Extract the eternal from the ephemeral” to endorse his personal philosophy that the present is all that matters. In doing so, he inadvertently offers Betty a bit of cautionary insight: dwelling on the past and mourning the brevity of time spent with someone is futile. The duration of something's existance has no bearing on its significance, as even the most fleeting experiences have the potential to become a part of our lives forever. 

Mike's Murder's Queer aesthetic, I feel, is tethered to the film's non-traditional spin on the mystery genre and on its on-the-fringes perspective. Though critics and audiences at the time were annoyed to distraction by it, I liked that Bridges used the titular murder as a catalyst for exploring themes of urban alienation rather than a traditional mystery device. 

Cinematographer Reynaldo Villalobos supports this by establishing a visual motif wherein much of Mike’s Murder is shot in confined, tightly framed close-ups that convey the sense of its characters—who speed past one other in cars, conduct business from their vehicles (Betty’s job is in one of those hermetically sealed-looking drive-in banks), communicate via phones and answering machines, and peer at one another through cameras and videotape recorders—rarely ever touch and always seem to be alone…even when they’re together. 

Barriers and Separation

The look of Mike’s Murder so fits the story at hand that it almost acts as the visual equivalent of those traditional noir voice-over narrations, drawing attention to the fact that the lens through which Bridges sees the world of Mike’s Murder is so personal that it borders on cinéma vérité. Indeed, Mike’s Murder is easily the most recognizably lived-in, truthfully-realized vision of Los Angeles in the ‘80s I’ve ever seen (rare in movies, even the driving scenes are geographically accurate!) 

This personal touch stamp extends beyond the film’s appearance, as Mike’s Murder finds Bridges—who, like Winfield, was openly gay in his private life but professionally closeted—taking his boldest step forward in integrating his personal life into his professional work. While the homoerotic gaze has long been a hidden-in-plain-sight attribute of several of James Bridges’ movies, Mike’s Murder is the first film by the director to include an entirely out gay character.

September 30, 1955 (1977)

Dennis Christopher (right) played a queer-coded supporting character in Bridges’ semi-autobiographical September 30, 1955 (the date actor James Dean died). The character that Bridges based on himself—the James Dean-obsessed Jimmy J, played by Richard Thomas—is depicted as straight. (Though a case could be made that the character is, like perhaps Bridges at that age, questioning.) 

Of all the films in Bridges’ abbreviated filmography (he made only eight movies in his career), Mike’s Murder is my absolute, hands-down favorite. And I say this knowing that the version I fell in love with isn’t the director’s original vision, but one whose tonal shifts and inconsistent, alternating points of view betray the battle scars of a year’s worth of edits, reshoots, retooling, and tinkering following a legendarily disastrous preview screening. 

Initially slated for a spring 1983 release, Mike’s Murder was sneak-previewed in January 1983 at two Bay Area theaters. Audience response was overwhelmingly negative. Bridges spent a year making changes—much of it funded personally—to address the most frequently criticized elements: the explicit violence and the nonlinear narrative. The revised Mike’s Murder premiered in Los Angeles on Friday, March 16, 1984, at the Vogue Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. 

It always rang false to me when Bridges, in damage-control, PR-speak interviews about the revamped Mike’s Murder, claimed, “This is a better picture than it was.

Mainly because I grew up in the Bay Area and knew that the locations chosen to preview Mike's Murder were two of the most white-bread, conservative suburban enclaves you could find. In short: the audience comprised precisely the demographic least likely to be receptive to—especially in the homophobic, Reagan '80s—a movie as artistically unorthodox and sexually transgressive as Mike’s Murder.

If Bridges hoped to salvage Mike’s Murder by restructuring it to appeal to THIS demographic, you’ll never convince me that his edits made the film "better"—only that they made it less “upsetting” to the multiplex set. The extreme form of hostility expressed at the previews (accounts cite booing, yelling, laughter, walkouts) doesn’t describe the reactions of people bored or confused by a movie. It’s how people react when they’re affronted.

Being as passionate about this film as I am, it's kind of torture to watch the
 theatrical trailer because it’s made up almost entirely of scenes no longer in the film.
Link to the TRAILER 

“Date night” preview audiences expecting another conventional thriller from the director of The China Syndrome, or hoping Winger—by now typed in the public’s eye as a romantic ingénue thanks to Urban Cowboy and An Officer and a Gentleman—to be swept off by the leading man in the final reel, must have gone into apoplexy when confronted with Mike’s Murder’s blunt Queerness (a line from the original cut had Winfield telling Winger about his first encounter with Mike, “Before I knew it, he was in my arms, and my cock was up his ass...”); unfiltered sexuality (the original version of the phone sex scene was said to have made audiences particularly uncomfortable); liberal politics (a critique of the hypocrisy of the Moral Majority); and explicit violence attached to the kind of racial “optics”  (Mike’s retribution murder is carried out by two Black men) apt to trigger both trigger white fragility and claims of racism.

Brooke Anderson as Patty

Since the reedited version of Mike’s Murder ultimately flopped as resoundingly as the original was likely to do (I think it was always going to be too personal and niche a film to ever appeal to a broad audience), it’s a shame that Bridges’ original vision, flaws and all, wasn’t what was released. 

In Mike's Murder, photographs serve as symbols of the attempt to hold onto that which is impermanent, so I have always had a soft spot for this striking, discarded poster artwork, which evokes a still from a photographer's contact sheet with a red edit mark representing Mike's bloody erasure. Fortunately, composer Joe Jackson, compelled to release his album of songs written for the soundtrack early due to the film's changing release schedule, kept the image for his album cover.

William Ostander as Randy

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

One of the great things about Mike’s Murder is that it doesn’t neatly fit into any specific film genre or category. Except one.

Independent of what it was intended to be, meant to express, or how it came to be perceived, looking at it now, Mike’s Murder resonates with me most persuasively and forcefully as an underappreciated work of Queer Cinema. It’s a gay art film, with —if not inauthentically, then perhaps non-essentially—a centered heteronormative perspective. Kind of like a post-Gay-Lib/AIDS-Epidemic-Era throwback to the days when queer artists (Inge, Williams, Capote), prohibited from telling their stories honestly, had to resort to filtering their truths through heterosexual surrogates—most often female characters.

"(Mike) loved having his picture taken. He was impatient
and liked to see the results immediately."

From camera angles foregrounding Mark Keyloun’s rather splendiferous butt, to the introduction of Paul Winfield’s character in a semi-nude state, and the notably extended (and welcome) screen time allocated to the half-dressed muscular physique of wannabe Chippendales dancer Randy (William Ostrander, very good and doing a lot with a mysteriously-written role), the eroticized gay gaze in Mike’s Murder feels both thematically relevant and boldly subversive in a mainstream film.

Each time I watch Mike’s Murder, I’m hit over the head with the conspicuous truth that, for me, the film’s real story, most interesting relationship, and most genuine narrative arc exploring the themes of love and loss in LA, is between Mike and Phillip. 

Phillip’s entrance in the film arrives at a point when the viewer is desperately in need of a clear-eyed, unfiltered sense of who the mask-wearing Mike truly was, and the character of Phillip, middle-aged, sophisticated, and a little world-weary, provides that.

And thanks to the effortless gravitas of Paul Winfield’s performance, Betty's discovery that the one person who really knew Mike—who both knew and loved the sides of him she never saw—is a man, elevates the film’s emotional tension in a way I wanted to see more of. 

Robert Crosson as Sam
A lonely photographer with a paternalistic streak
 whose affection for Mike is channeled into a voyeuristic preoccupation

When the Betty character isn’t coming across like a lone female tourist lost in an androcentric world of drug dealers, Sugar Daddies, father figures, and the opportunistically sexually-fluid young men who love and/or use them; from a strictly neo-noir angle, I do like that her character feels like a (intentional?)  genre callback to the Dana Andrews role in Otto Preminger’s 1944 film noir, Laura.

In that film, a detective falls in love with the dead woman whose murder he’s investigating, and I think something like that is what happens to Betty. 

It’s left up to individual interpretation whether one thinks Betty is in love with Mike at the start of the film (my take is that she only thinks she is). The tragedy is that she only ever “meets” the real Mike after his death. At the end, when she’s at her piano and we hear that she has had that out-of-tune C-scale fixed, I think Betty has indeed fallen in love with Mike. And is slowly learning how to let him go.

No matter how many times I see it, Winger always wrings the waterworks out of me during this scene. She is SO, good. Even in those moments when I wish for a version of Mike's Murder that was less hetero-centric, I can never get past the personal reality that less of Winger is anything is just simply not a good idea.

NO ONE IS INNOCENT

Comparative allusions to Preminger’s Laura and Mike’s Murder don’t stop with Winger’s role, but extend most pointedly to the way the titular characters in both are these dominant figures whose presences are felt throughout the entirety of the film. Influencing the action, whether or not they are onscreen, whether or not they are alive.  

As embodied by the ideally cast Mark Keyloun, Mike Chuhutsky (I love that name. As one reviewer observed, it stands out as the last remnant of his true self; the part of himself he hadn’t yet got around to changing), like all good hustlers, has that complacently nebulous, passive/assertive, all-things-to-all-people quality that makes him the perfect blank screen upon which others can project exactly what they want and need. He can look like an innocent, he can look like a criminal.

Hustler White

“A confused kid who sold a few drugs to pay his rent.” 

Themes related to privilege and the presumption of white innocence emerge provocatively and ambiguously—vacillating somewhere between critique and perpetuation—in the “reckless boys making bad decisions” tone of the scenes showing Mike and his twitchy friend Pete (an excellent Darrell Larson) engaging in criminal activity. 

Physical contrasts—sharky city boy Pete next to cherubic Midwest cornpone Mike—invite audiences to ascribe a naïve blamelessness to Mike. Yet simultaneously, there’s a well-observed undercurrent of personal accountability proffered in the (evenhandedly accurate) depiction of Mike and Pete as the type of guys who, despite untrustworthiness, bad faith, and a tendency to exploit an advantage being characteristic of so many of their interactions with others, are nevertheless entirely uncomprehending of the fact that their actions can have consequences. 

A darkly compelling (and often heartbreaking) look at love, loss, and loneliness in the city of missed connections, Mike's Murder is a more-than-worthy addition to the canon of Los Angeles neo-noirs. It's a film that deserves reevaluation. Better still, Mike's Murder is a film that needs to have its original cut restored. 

Life partners James Bridges (who started out as an actor) and Jack Larson (associate producer of Mike's Murder and, of course, TV's Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman) met when both appeared in the film Johnny Trouble (1957). Bridges passed away in 1993, Larson in 2015

I once described Albert Finney as a movie star with the heart of a character actor. I think James Bridges was a mainstream filmmaker with the heart of a Queer Cinema auteur. And the two worlds come together magnificently in Mike’s Murder, James Bridges' most authentically personal film. 

Clip from Mike's Murder (1984)

BONUS MATERIAL

When I mentioned earlier that Debra Winger’s character drives a cool car, it’s because the moment I saw that silver VW Rabbit convertible, I wanted it. My first VW Rabbit was red, but in 2000, I got the silver model I'd always wanted. 

I actually had the opportunity to observe James Bridges and Jack Larson at work when, about five months after seeing Mike’s Murder, I got a job as a dance extra in Bridges’ next film, Perfect (1985). Filming took place over seven days at the end of summer at the Sports Connection fitness center in West Hollywood.  

Debra Winger signed my Black Widow poster: 
"To Ken, my favorite guy to move with" 

In the mid-‘90s, I worked in Santa Monica as a dance instructor and fitness trainer, and for a brief time, I had the “someone pinch me!” thrill of having Debra Winger as a client. She relayed to me that she selected my class because she couldn’t stand “perky” (my class demeanor was not dissimilar to that of Louis Gossett Jr. in An Officer and a Gentleman). She's such a sweetheart, and I had such a crush. 

The real-life case that inspired Mike’s Murder was the stabbing death of Mark Bernolak in his apartment in Brentwood on October 12, 1980. Bernolak, a former lover of Paul Winfield and an acquaintance of Bridges and Larson, was a part-time tennis instructor who also dealt drugs while trying to get work behind the scenes in films. IMDB lists him as an assistant on the 1979 The Who documentary The Kids Are Alright, and a university archive has seven photos Bernolak took of author Christopher Isherwood and his partner, artist Don Bachardy (both friends of Larson and Bridges). The details surrounding the actual case are tragic and a bit dodgy, but far less sensational than what Mike’s Murder depicts (Those interested can Google: Mark Bernolak and UCLA football). 

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