DUDES: An Oral History of a Punk Rock Western Road Movie [Pt. 1]

The back story on this piece: when I found out that Shout Factory was going to be releasing Dudes on Blu-ray back in 2017, I thought, “Oh, man, I’ve got to do an oral history on this movie.” And I stand by that insane thought, because come on: this is an insane movie! First of all, it’s a punk rock western road movie starring an actor who - at the time - was best known for playing Duckie from Pretty in Pink, and truth be told, it only gets crazier from there. How does that movie get made? I needed to know…and I found out.

Thing is, you’d be surprised how few outlets were interested in paying me to put together the oral history of a punk rock western road movie…and the one outlet that I finally found that did want to pay me to write it, well, they never ended up running it, because they sat on it for so long - and with so few replies to my emails - without even editing it that I finally said, “If you can’t at least give me a tentative run date, then I’m going to need to shop this elsewhere,” to which they replied, with with remarkable rapidity, “Fair enough.”

Thing is, I didn’t have anywhere else to shop it. So I just put it on Amazon as a Kindle single, or some equivalent thereof, and charged a buck for it. That was four years ago, and I’m pretty sure I still haven’t made as much off of it as I would’ve made if I’d just let the outlet run it whenever they got off their ass and finally decided to edit it.

But so it goes.

Anyway, I’ve decided to run it here as a two-part epic, and if you read it, I think you’ll agree that this is a piece that, if you haven’t seen the film before, makes you want to check it out, and if you have seen the film, it makes you want to revisit it. That’s about the best you can hope for with an oral history of a film, no?

Hope you enjoy it!

A SCREENWRITER WALKS INTO A PRODUCER’S OFFICE…

Miguel Tejada-Flores (producer): I started out as a hardcore film nerd. I was a story analyst and I worked for several studios. This was in the days before people knew what a reader was, and it was a great gig, because I actually had a couple of degrees in literature, I went to film school, and I loved movies. So I could do this shit in my sleep. [Laughs.] I was a very good reader at a couple of studios, and then I started moving up, and – after everybody else got fired because they lost too much money – I briefly ran the film division at Lorimar and did a very cool sci-fi movie called The Last Starfighter, which I put together. For various reasons, I left Lorimar, and I started writing – because it isn’t a career choice, it’s a disease – and I wrote a lot.  And then a distinguished, brilliant, and thoughtful old-school producer, Herb Jaffe, who was the classic Hollywood gentleman and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever known or worked with, made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

Herb said he was starting a new company, and he didn’t have a huge amount of financing, but he asked me to come and run his development and some production, because we had a mutual friendship and respect from the other projects I had brought him in on. I said yes, but as part of the deal… We actually made a handshake deal, one which he totally honored, because he was a cool human being. But because I was writing – and I actually had written [Revenge of the] Nerds, which coming out, so I was known as a writer at that point – I said, “The deal is, I want a multiple picture writing deal for myself and my partner, Tim Metcalfe, so he can make some money, and I want to produce a couple of movies.” And Herb said, “Fine,” we shook hands on it, and that was it. It was a simple, classic, old-school way of doing things.

So I went to Herb’s company, and…we weren’t starving to death. [Laughs.] We were okay. We had enough money to develop movies, and then we would get other people to produce our movies. We had a couple of hits and a couple of misses. And after a couple of years of more hits than misses, we had some Wall Street partners that did a public offering and raised us $75-80 million, which paid for financing slates and movies for a couple of years. And I was basically responsible for creating the whole slate, or at least developing it. Not totally always producing it, but I was the boss of all the scripts. We didn’t have enough for me to go out and spend like a drunken sailor, so part of my job as an executive for a moderately well-financed but struggling good indie company was to find good writers who I could afford. And by that time, I’d read enough bad scripts and done enough work with bad writers to know that bad writers can be either well-known or unknown, and the chance of getting a good writer just because somebody had credits was not necessarily carved in stone. So I spent a bunch of my time reading scripts and taking meetings with agents and trying to find good writers. And Randall wrote a really cool script.

Randall Jahnson (screenwriter): I’d gone to the UCLA Film School, I graduated in 1982, and I was inspired and swept up by the independent music scene, particularly the punk and art music scene that was going on in L.A. at that time. So I was out seeing a lot of shows, and I found music just being my primary source of inspiration. Even though I was aspiring to be a screenwriter, music was just blowing me away. I was quite struck by the tribal nature of the whole scene – you had your rockabilly tribe, you had your hardcore tribe, you had your New Romantic tribe – and it all struck me as a metaphor for the Wild West, in a way. So I had some things kicking around in my head.

There were a lot of bands at that time that had a fascination with the American west as well. The Dead Kennedys had covered the theme song for the old TV show Rawhide. A band that was a big influence on me, Wall of Voodoo, they covered Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” they put out an album in 1982 – the one with their big hit, “Mexican Radio” – called Call Of The West, and when I used to see them live, they did a live version of [Ennio] Morricone’s Hang ‘Em High and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly themes. So I was just interested and fascinated by the fact that these bands were interested in the west and all of that, and I had grown up as a big fan of American history and especially western history, so…it was a clash of elements in all these things.

When I first got out of film school, my first attempt at writing something commercial was a horror script called Slaughter Alley, about a stretch of highway that was haunted by a guy who was killed on it back in, like, 1962. That was also inspired by the same scene, in the sense that this was a guy who was probably cruising, sniffing glue, and drinking sloe gin in a hip flask in high school. He was a bad ass who rumbled with a tire iron and chains. But I wondered what would happen if some of these poseur kids that I was seeing at these rockabilly shows, with their cuffed jeans and their pompadours, ran up against a guy like that, the real McCoy, who wants to rumble. How would that go down?

So I wrote that script, it landed me an agent, and I started being sent around to meetings and meet-and-greets. The script was under option with another company, but you use it as a calling card. So I went around to a bunch of different companies, and they liked the writing and they liked the story, but I really wasn’t relating very well to any of the executives. And then I came into the office of the Vista organization and I met Miguel Tejada-Flores. I walked into this office that was just a mess. [Laughs.] It was piled high with scripts and books, stuff all over the place, and then on his desk were science-fiction characters, Godzillas, and toys. I just felt like I’d come into the right place.

Tejada-Flores: [Slaughter Alley] had moments of being brilliant, and Randall is a smart human being with a voice, he’s film-literate, and he’s cool. The other thing is that it’s true that when you make a movie, no matter what you’re doing, you’re spending a bunch of your time doing it, and you don’t just want to work with people who are good, you want to work with people who actually inspire you and who you want to spend time with. And Randall was not only a good writer, he was also a cool human being who was totally film-literate and could have conversations about all kinds of shit. So I did the usual routine: I forced him to come to my office and said, “Man, this is a cool script, but we’re not gonna fucking do it, so…what else do you have?”

Jahnson: It was out of my head before I even really put a lot of thought into it, but I just said, “Punk rockers out in the wilds of Wyoming.”

Tejada-Flores: I said, “Man, that’s fucking cool. That’s really cool. But what’s the story?” So we had to go through the whole mating dance, but we enjoyed it. He had to create enough of a story so that I could pitch it to my boss, because I didn’t have the power to sign any checks myself, and I had to convince both my boss and myself that it was worth spending money on, which I took pretty seriously. And at the same time, I also had to convince myself that he was a writer I could work with, that we could communicate and listen to each other and do all that stuff.

Jahnson: I started working on it, I came back a little bit more, I started meeting with him every couple of weeks, and we kept working the story and working the story until finally they just said, “Okay, I think we’ve got enough. Let’s go. Let’s roll!” But I begged them, I said, “I need some time. I need to go out and see what the modern American west is!” [Laughs.] Because I hadn’t been out there in a long, long time, y’know?

Tejada-Flores: Randall was smart. We actually made a deal right before the writers’ strike and gave him a bit of money to go off and do research.

Jahnson: I rented a Volkswagen Rabbit and I wandered all over the west for a couple of weeks. I was making music videos with Black Flag and Henry Rollins and the Minutemen and all these bands at the time, so SST Records said, “Well, if you’re going out there, you should go visit the Meat Puppets in Phoenix.” So I did. That was, like, my first stop. And that was…memorable. [Laughs.] Yeah, definitely a memorable stop on the itinerary…

While I was out there on the road, though, the story of Dudes really changed, quite. Frankly, I had worked up a story that was much more convoluted than the one that ended up being the film, and it wasn’t until I was actually out on the road and really just soaking up the atmosphere that it gelled and I saw it crystal clear how I wanted to do it. I remember calling from… I think it was a phone booth in Zion National Park or Ely, Nevada, someplace like that, and just saying, “Hey, the trip’s going great! The story’s totally changed, but it’s great. I love it, and you’re gonna love it!” And I started telling him all about it, and he said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa! That’s changing a lot!” And I said, “I know, but it’s really good, and I feel really strongly about it.” And he said, “Okay!”

Tejada-Flores: When he came back, he had a killer first draft. It needed some work, and it was unusual. It was a lot like what he pitched us, but it was different, and it was a fucking cool movie. I can also say that it was definitely a movie that did not fit into a simplistic genre stereotype, so by doing it, we were taking chances. We thought it was a punk rock western, and how the fuck do you market that? [Laughs.] Well, that’s a whole other question, and to be honest, as a production executive, if I’m responsible, I’m trying to get my company to make movies that will make money. But if I love movies, then I’m also trying to get them to make movies that will change the filmmaking landscape. And this one felt like that. And it was so fucking cool when it came in, I instantly went to Herb and said, “Okay, Herb, this is one of the movies I want to produce.” And Herb, God bless him, he liked great stories and couldn’t be pigeonholed into just doing one thing, and he liked the script as much as I did. He saw its potential. So he said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” So the next big issue was to find a director.

“YOU GET A CHANCE TO DIRECT A PUNK ROCK WESTERN,

YOU’VE GOTTA GO FOR IT!”

Tejada-Flores: We didn’t have the luxury of being a big company, so it was important to get a filmmaker who could work under potentially challenging conditions with a lot of locations, some challenging action, and could really nail the tone of doing something dark but dramatic and also emotional. Which are all hallmarks of a lot of good directors, but not someone well-known on some big list. One of my jobs as the ranking suit was not only to find and create and develop a bunch of material I liked from writers I liked and that we can afford, but also to either find directors for our projects or woo directors who would bring us their projects. This was the days of video-cassettes, and when you’d get people’s work, their agent sends you a movie and you screen it in your screening room. I remember I saw one of Penelope’s documentaries, Decline of Western Civilization, which was kick-ass and bad-ass. And then I saw this movie she directed with Charlie Sheen in it [The Boys Next Door], and…it’s real. You look at that movie, and you go, “Okay, whoa: this is a filmmaker who can pull you in.”

Penelope Spheeris (director): Miguel liked The Boys Next Door – that’s right, I worked with two of the Two and a Half Men! – so he called me in to discuss directing Dudes.

Tejada-Flores: In those days, Penelope basically looked pretty much like a metal star. She looked really cool and bad-ass, beautiful in some ways, and certainly striking. She looked opposite of every other female director, who were all trying to look conservative and serious. Not Penelope. And she’s so direct and straightforward, able to get to the essence of something by asking thoughtful and revealing questions and having good instincts. When you work with directors, you start appreciating some of the qualities which the great ones have. And she had all of those in spades. You have a meeting with Penelope, and you go, “Whoa, she really knows what the fuck she’s doing.” She talked really intelligently about how cool the script was, how much she loved it, and how she’d like to make a movie out of it.

Spheeris: It was a punk rock western! [Laughs.] You get a chance to direct a punk rock western, you’ve gotta go for it!

Tejada-Flores: What’s funny is that we did a screening of Dudes about a year ago as a benefit up in Portland, Oregon, and when we did a big Q&A afterward, somebody said, “Well, Penelope, with all your interest in punk rock music, you must have chosen this movie because it had all these themes in it…” She laughed and said, “No, you don’t understand how it fucking works: I was out of work, I needed a fucking job, they were interested in hiring me. It wasn’t like I was choosing the material and developing it. Are you kidding me? I needed a fucking job!” That’s not a literal quote, but that’s pretty close to Penelope’s no-nonsense attitude.

Jahnson: When I heard Penelope was on board, or at least wanted to do it, I thought, “That’s great!” Because she had street cred because of Decline, and then her prior film, Suburbia… I actually saw it again just recently, and I was just blown away at just how good it was. I think it’s a really great portrait of suburban L.A. at that time that’s rarely captured. There’s a lot of great imagery in it. So, yeah, I was thrilled about Penelope. There were only two directors out there at the time that could’ve done it: it was Penelope, and then there was some talk about Alex Cox, who was either just coming off of Repo Man or else was doing it right around that time. But Penelope had the right sensibility and she obviously knew that scene. She knew it very well.

Spheeris: Word got out that I was directing this punk rock western, and it was back in the day where you couldn’t really just hit somebody up on Facebook or send ‘em an email, so Bob Richardson showed up at my front door at my house in Laurel Canyon. I hide my address now so people can’t do that. [Laughs.] But I’m looking outside my door, and there’s this guy with white hair. He’s very ghostly-looking, and he’s got a really weird aura about him. But I opened the door, and he goes, “Hi, I’m Bob Richardson, and I hear you’re doing this movie, and I’d like to shoot it.” So I told the production company.

Tejada-Flores: I was, like, “Fuck, are you kidding? Bob Richardson?” Getting somebody of his caliber… I mean, I knew who all the great DPs were, and he’d been working with Oliver Stone. He’d just come off of Platoon! So I told Bob, “Yeah, we’d love you to shoot it. But we can’t afford you!” And he said, “What’s your budget? I’ll work for it.” Which is almost too fucking awesome for words.

“[JON] CRYER…WASN’T THE OBVIOUS CHOICE.”

Dan Roebuck (“Biscuit”): I had been aware of Penelope Spheeris before doing Dudes. She did a movie for [producer] Sandy Howard called Hollywood Vice Squad that was out right at the time that they cast me, so I went to see that, and I thought, “Well, that’s pretty fucking entertaining.” By that point, I was a veteran. I had already been in two movies. So I knew everything there was to know about movie acting. [Laughs.] No, but I watched Hollywood Vice Squad, and some stunt man jumps out at a window, and you see that he hits his head on the ground, and then he gets up…and he’s fucking bleeding! And the shot’s in the movie! And nobody went, “Well, that’s the stunt man, it’s not even the actor,” because you were so thrown by the grittiness of it. And I thought, “This girl’s really a director.” I also thought, “I’m not jumping out any fucking windows.”

For Biscuit, they looked at everybody, and I know Penelope said once that there was some guy, some fat punk rocker, that she saw on Donahue that she considered, that she was going to try and track down. But then I guess I came into the mix. I…don’t know that River’s Edge had been out yet when I auditioned for Dudes, which would’ve moved me higher up the ranks. But I put my hair in a Mohawk and sprayed it whatever color hairspray I could find or whatever they had at Hollywood Costume. It wasn’t a long Mohawk… [Laughs.] But if I was playing a guy with a Mohawk now, I’d do the same thing. Or I’d take in a picture of me in Dudes and say, “Go fuck yourself! I fucking did this already!”

Jahnson: The Biscuit character, who was partly inspired by the lead singer of the Big Boys, an Austin, Texas punk band. Randy “Biscuit” Turner, he’s passed away now, but…he was a big boy. [Laughs.] There was just this rough-and-tumble quality about him, and I loved that name, so I wanted to apply that to the sidekick character. That to me was where a lot of the comedy stemmed from.

Roebuck: I was from back east, I was tall and big, and I had a ballsiness to me. And maybe Penelope will say, “Oh, Dan wasn’t our first choice, but the other three said ‘no,’” but I think I quickly became the choice. 

Spheeris: I’m not one of those directors that insists that somebody has to be in a certain role. I don’t consider myself the ace casting-director person, so I’m always really open. It was Herb Jaffe who said, “Jon’s gotta do the job.” Because he had just come off of Pretty in Pink, and Herb was totally convinced that he was gonna be a star. I remember when I did The Boys Next Door, it had Charlie Sheen and Maxwell Caulfield in it, and the producer, Sandy Howard, said to me, “You wanna put a hundred dollar bet on which of these guys is gonna be a star?” And I go, “Um… Maxwell’s the better actor, but Charlie’s the star.” Anyway, I won, but he never paid me.

Jon Cryer (“Grant”): I started getting a bunch of scripts after Pretty in Pink came out, and one of them was Some Kind of Wonderful, which fell through in dramatic fashion for me. Basically, I was cast in the movie. I wouldn’t say I was actually booked, because no deal was made or anything like that, but for a week or so I was supposed to be in that movie with Mary Stuart Masterson. And then all heck broke loose: they fired Howie Deutch and brought in a new director, and then they fired her and brought Howie back, but by then they’d recast and rewritten the thing completely to make it basically Pretty in Pink but with the genders reversed, and by then I couldn’t be in it anymore! [Laughs.] So that was that!

But I had gotten a bunch of other scripts, and when Dudes came to me, it stood out because it was just so bonkers. You know, when you get a whole bunch of scripts, you start to notice patterns, and you start to notice that everything is starting to feel the same. Everybody wanted me to play the loveable-loser nerd, and I didn’t want to do that. So when Dudes came over the transom, I thought, “Oh! Here’s a chance to go in a completely different direction!” So I had lunch with Penelope Spheeris, and she’s just such a wonderful character of a person, and I admired her indie work. I admired Suburbia and The Boys Next Door. I hadn’t even seen Decline of Western Civilization at that point. I don’t know, she was just so ballsy, I just thought, “This woman is gonna be great fun to make a movie with.” And I think I wanted to play a leading-man guy. I wanted to try that. I was never comfortable as a leading man…and I still am not! [Laughs.] But I think Dudes was the first movie where I discovered that.

Roebuck: I was actually cast before Jon. They were looking at a number of actors for Grant, and I remember I screen-tested with one actor who told Penelope where to put the light. The minute he said it, I thought, “Well, he won’t be in the movie.” And I was right!

Casting Jon Cryer was a ballsy fucking move, because Jon had come from playing this sweet, loveable… I mean, everybody loves Duckie! So I know exactly why he took the fucking part: ‘cause he could say “fucky” to Duckie. [Laughs.] Me personally, I was extremely excited, because you could see in Pretty in Pink that he was the real deal.

Jahnson: Basically all the names of that generation came out to audition, and Cryer…wasn’t the obvious choice. In my mind, I saw Grant much darker and more brooding. I sat in on some of the readings, and we saw some pretty big names, guys who went on to be pretty big names, but Penelope wasn’t quite satisfied. I wasn’t there when Cryer came in to read, so when I found about it later, I was, like, “Whoa! Really? That’s…interesting.” [Laughs.] But Jon really surprised me. He just brought a different energy to it. And he went for it. I really loved that about him.

Tejada-Flores: I’m not sure if he was our first choice, but Jon is really interesting because, in his subsequent career, Jon brings a lot of things, including the ability to be self-deprecatingly funny, which he did fucking brilliantly in Two and a Half Men. So he was a really interesting choice.

Cryer:  This was a bombshell that was only dropped on me recently, but I was told that there was a big difference of opinion between Penelope and our main producer, Herb Jaffe, that basically she wanted me for the role of Grant and he wanted Keanu Reeves. And she won and got me. But you’re going to have to put the word “won” in quotes! [Laughs.] But I only found that out when Penelope told me the story when she was interviewing me for the Blu-ray. So I didn’t know that at the time…and I’m grateful!

Catherine Mary Stewart (“Jessie”): They approached me when I was doing a movie called Nightflyers – which is now being made into a series, and I’m going to try to get on it, dammit! – and the casting director for both projects, Nina Axelrod, had me meet with Penelope Spheeris at the studio, and they asked me if I wanted to be a part of it. And after I read the script, I just really dug the concept. I thought it was really cool. And I always had a dream to be on a western set, doing the cowboy thing with lots of horses and guns and things like that. It was always my fantasy growing up. And it was a really cool take on a western, so I thought, “This is perfect! I love this!”

Lee Ving: Penelope directed The Decline of Western Civilization, which Fear had a prominent position in, but of course we had been friends throughout the beginning and early days of the punk rock scene here in Los Angeles. Most people weren’t even aware that punk rock was an item, that it existed or that there was any group of people interested in it. It was primarily on account of people like Penelope and her boyfriend at the time, Bob Biggs, doing Slash Magazine with Claude Bessy. That was pretty much the start of the scene.

I remember quite specifically when I first met Penelope. I was a few hundred yards north of the Canyon Country Store on Laurel Canyon Boulevard, a nice little place where people can get a quart of milk on their way home. I was with Derf [Scratch] – rest in peace – with my favorite hammer tacker staple gun and an armful of Fear flyers for a gig. We were working our way down Laurel Canyon, hitting every vertical thing that would accept staples to hold our posters to it, and we were running down the hill to the service road, so that if we saw cops coming in either direction, they wouldn’t notice what we were doing, because it, uh, wasn’t legal. [Laughs.] But we’re just about at the Country Store when all of a sudden I look back up the hill, and I see this white mustang convertible – maybe a 1969, maybe 1970 – driven by this real pretty girl, and she’s hauling ass down Laurel Canyon Boulevard, going 50–60 miles an hour. She turns and looks at me and Derf, and she just stomps her foot on the brake, turns the wheel, and… You know how cars go sideways when you do that? She was like a stuntman: she had that car going sideways down Laurel Canyon Boulevard perfectly.  And she looks over at us and says, “Hey, you guys wanna be in my movie?” And that’s how we met Penelope!

Jahnson: As far as casting, I did have Lee Ving in mind for Missoula. I didn’t really have anyone else in my mind for any of the other roles, but Lee… I just thought, “Oh, man, this guy’s gonna make a great villain!” [Laughs.] I’d seen Fear a couple of times, and he had a presence that I knew he could pull it off. He has piercing blue eyes and this biker menace, and I just thought, “I’m gonna use it. I’m gonna use him!” And when Penelope and I had our first couple of discussions about casting, she said, “Oh, yeah, well, I know Lee very well. He’d be great for this!”

Ving: By the time I did Dudes, I had already done some acting. I’d appeared in Flashdance. And I’d also appeared in Streets of Fire, because I can remember Walter [Hill] having to wrap me off of Streets of Fire in order to get to the first day of shooting of Clue. And what a nice feeling that was, to have two extremely promising-sounding corporate projects going on and having to rush to finish your work on one in order to start the next…especially if you’re some rabble punk rocker from Los Angeles! [Laughs.] But, y’know, I’d been a rabble rocker in Philadelphia and New York prior to that, so it wasn’t exactly new territory!

Spheeris: Well, Lee does play a pretty good bad-ass, you know? [Laughs.] And I like to stick with my punk rock friends. I didn’t have a lot of Hollywood friends. I still don’t. I put Lee in the movie because he was bad-ass, and I knew he could do it.

Ving: At the time, I had a major interest in motorcycles, etc., and the character appeared to me to be someone who would’ve come from some social strata like that, so my appearance in the film, what I was wearing… There were several points of disagreement between us. I remember her finally saying, “Well, you got your way: you’re wearing what you want and you have a beard.” If you’re a film actor, when someone hires you to do their film, they generally don’t want you to have a beard if you don’t usually have a beard, because you won’t be recognized. So it was a bit of a departure for me, thinking I knew what this guy would look like, versus what people from the film community of Los Angeles might think he would look like.

But if you come across the US and you meet some redneck bad-tempered people, they’re gonna look like that. They’re not from Hollywood. That’s not where their world is. Their world is breaking people into pieces if you don’t do what they want you to do…or if they just don’t like you! But I had a feel for where this guy would be coming from, and Penelope allowed me to use that, so I was grateful for that as well. I wasn’t held to do something that I didn’t believe was reality. Not that this movie is reality in too many ways! [Laughs.] But in some ways it was, and I wanted to bring a little more of that to it. She allowed me to do it, and I think it worked out really well. I was grateful to her for that.

Lee Ving wasn’t the only member of the Dudes cast who could claim to have been a member of Fear: Grant and Biscuit’s buddy Milo was played by Flea, of Red Hot Chili Peppers fame.

Ving: Flea was with us in Fear for the better part of two years, however in our infinite wisdom we either decided or were guided toward not making any recordings during that time. What a smart business decision that was! [Laughs.] But Flea was always a tremendous human being and a gifted musician, and we were honored to have him.

Cryer: Flea was lovely! You know, he was a rookie as an actor, but he was game for anything. He had a great attitude. And he was very helpful for us, because he had been a part of the punk scene to some extent, and obviously the Chili Peppers were making their own mark as musicians. He had a great attitude about the fact that he was new to this. He didn’t come in and try to bluff his way through it. He would just ask a question if he needed to. Dan and I had to keep it in mind and make adjustments, but he was a lovely guy.

Roebuck: Flea’s a god. I mean, in the first place, he’s as gracious as anybody as you’d ever meet, and in the second place, he’s a talented motherfucker. And I didn’t know how talented he was when we did the movie, of course. I spent a lot of time asking him, “What’d you say?” [Laughs.] I couldn’t understand him! But he was just a terrific guy. We did all that L.A. stuff, and then when his character gets killed, we didn’t really shoot that in Arizona, so we had him and then he was gone. So that was shitty. We really loved each other, but as fast as he was there, he was gone. We worked together for a couple of weeks, tops. But they did bring him to Arizona for one more shot, where he waves goodbye and rides off, so at least we got to see him then.

Jahnson: There’s also another music connection in the cast. The sheriff that Missoula and Blix blow away in Montana in the jail, that’s John Densmore from The Doors. When I was having my initial interviews for getting The Doors, the first time I met the surviving members of The Doors – Ray Manzarek, Robbie Krieger, and Densmore – we were chatting, and Dudes was either slated for production or heavily into pre-production at that time. And John, who was doing some acting, said, “Hey, do you think there’s a part for me in the movie? Do you think you could talk to Penelope about getting me in a part?” And I hadn’t been officially hired on The Doors, but I said, “Well, of course, John!” [Laughs.] I said, “I’ll call her up right away!” And to her credit, too, she said, “Oh, yeah, I know John.” Penelope knew everyone. She said, “Sure, we can cast him in a role.” So it was cool. Whether that actually helped me get the job on The Doors, I don’t know. But it didn’t hurt!

THE CAST’S PUNK CRED

Cryer: I was familiar with the punk scene downtown, with CBGB’s. My sister went to Max’s Kansas City, and she was very into all kinds of great music at the time. She was one of the first people I knew who was into rap music and hip-hop. So my sister really knew all that stuff. I, however, was a musical theater nerd, so I would listen to the Ramones and go, “Oh, that is so juvenile.” [Laughs.] But I had a respect for the Talking Heads – although they weren’t really classified as punk so much – and obviously the Sex Pistols. But I wouldn’t say that it was a genre that I was immersed in at the time. The closest I got was that I loved The Clash, who weren’t really punk by that point. But it was punk-adjacent!

Stewart: I would say no, I wasn’t a punk fan. [Laughs.] I’m pretty white bread. Milquetoast. All those terms. I’m a child of the ‘70s. I was a big fan of guys like The Eagles and stuff like that. I mean, I was obviously aware of the punk rock scene, but it was a new experience for me. And I loved it!

Roebuck: I still don’t know what punk rock is. I swear to God, I was directing five plays a year and acting in five plays a year, and then I was starring in movies, and…I don’t want to sound like a douche bag, but I didn’t listen to any music in the ‘80s. I like classical music. And I like show tunes. So the whole punk rock thing was all acting for me. I know this will come as a shock to many of your readers, because I’ve become such a cornerstone of the punk rock movement…

Cryer: I watched Decline before doing Dudes, and to see how Penelope got to know her subjects and got so close to them… I thought it was an amazing piece of filmmaking just on its own, but it was also a window into a life that I’d never really touched on. You know, I had a couple of friends at school who might’ve had something close to it, but I was insulated. I grew up a theater kid, and I grew up amongst kids who… The kids were never hopeless in the theater. We were exactly the opposite of that. You always wanted to put on a show!

Roebuck: When they screened the movie at UCLA and someone asked about the mosh pit, Jon Cryer said, “I don’t believe you understand, but Dan Roebuck and I were musical theater folk.” I particularly liked that he said “folk.”

Ving: I thought Jon and Daniel seemed believable. That’s all I was really looking for. They’re intelligent, very nice people. That shouldn’t be secondary, but when you still have to do a film, it sometimes is. But I thought that, as far as what they were portraying, it sounded as though they knew what that was like. Also, it’s like some college kids deciding they’re going to spread their wings and trek across the country, and whatever happens, so be it. I though they played that quite well: they were a bit naïve, very enthusiastic, intelligent young people. It seemed right.

Roebuck: So I don’t like punk rock, but I played a punk rocker. I also never killed anybody, but I did River’s Edge. You know what I mean? Thankfully, you don’t have to be what you play. But I certainly watched Decline [of Western Civilization] before we did the movie, and Penelope saw value in punk rock, and that was important enough to me.

HORSEBACK BONDING

Roebuck: Once Jon was cast, they made a point of saying, “You guys should hang out together.” Where we really got to hang was for the five or six weeks before filming began, we started taking horseback riding lessons. And frankly, we were very drawn to each other at first because, driving to our horseback riding lessons, we could sing the entirety of the Pippin score. You can’t do that with Charlie fucking Sheen! So we had that going for us. And on the way home we might do Jesus ChristSuperstar or Godspell if it was a Sunday and we were in the mood for something religious.

Cryer: Yeah, we had a good time. And I got to be a pretty decent horseback rider, which then made it tough to pretend I was a lousy horseback rider when I had to do that in the movie!

Roebuck: Not only would we ride the horses, but we learned how to take care of the horses. You’ve got to clean the horse, and you’ve got to get ‘em ready for the next person.

Cryer: I thought that was a great idea, to also care for the horse, because it really gets you in tune with the horse, and you develop a relationship with the horse. Or if you’re like me, you discover that you’re incredibly allergic to horses, and you develop a lung infection. [Laughs.] So that made it a little difficult. But I took a lot of Sudafed.

Roebuck: I hear that stuff about actors being put into “boot camp,” but I don’t know that I’m completely sold on, like, the need to shit in a hole to portray a soldier. I could do that just fine and then go shit in my honeywagon. So I knew I didn’t need to become a punk rocker, but I knew I did have to learn how to ride a horse, in case the horse took off and I’m left going, “Help meeeeeee!” But you don’t actually see me on a horse in the movie, so maybe they just sent me to hang out with Jon. I don’t know.

But getting to know Jon… I mean, Jon Cryer is as classy an actor as I’ve ever worked with, and I’ve worked with a lot of people. I couldn’t be happier for Jon’s success. But I’ll admit that I was jealous when he got to leave our set to go do Superman IV. He got to leave a day early, and then, like, 30 hours later, he was in the commissary with Christopher Reeve in the Superman outfit and Gene Hackman, and you think, “Well, that’s pretty great.” So I was a little jealous of that. But only for a day.

Cryer: Dan and I used to go on day trips whenever we had free time, and he only just recently found the videos that we used to take when we did that. Because I had a new Hi8 camera, and I was all about using it at every opportunity. So we went to Bedrock City, the Flintstones theme park. But you have to put “theme park” in quotes, because it’s a bunch of abandoned structures in the desert, basically. That’s all it was then. There was actually a thing of pipework that they painted like it was a big snake on the outside, but that was the whole thing: you were supposed to climb through the pipe. But I have to figure that animals lived in there. It was a fairly long pipe, and you couldn’t see all the way down it. But I loved that that constituted a ride. [Laughs.] It was the most forlorn theme park. It might be wonderful now, but at the time it was definitely in some amount of disrepair.

Roebuck: When they were scouting locations, they were kind enough to let us go on the scouting to see where we were going to shoot, like, the diner fight, because we had to be there with the stunt man. And I said to Dan Bradley, “What if they throw my head through this glass, and then I go to fight the guy, and they pull me out?” That was all my doing. And the first time I did it, I cut myself a little on the candy glass. And then I had to do it again, and I was a pussy. “I don’t wanna do it again! I don’t wanna put my head through the glass!”

Spheeris: Dan is a little gripe-y sometimes, a little whiny. But it works for him. And it makes me as a director – and a mother – go, “Oh, honey, what can I do? How can I help? Let me make it better for you.” So it works for him. David Spade is like that, too. I worked with David and Chris Farley, and then with David and Marlon [Wayans], and David’s always whiny. “I need this, and I need a close-up!” But it works for him. And it works for Dan, too!