Created by Rex Pickett
Struggling actor JACK HAYNES (played by Jim Haynie) and failed mystery novelist RAYMOND SAVAGE (Scott Paulin ) have both seen better days, and their new career as private investigators isn’t exactly setting the world on fire either. But when a sleazy Hollywood studio offers them $25,000 to track down Lana Dark, a missing starlet who just walked off the set of a big-budget production, they feel maybe their luck is turning. That’s the basic set-up for From Hollywood to Deadwood, a low-budget 1989 flick.
And then… not much. I hate to say it, but this one’s a real turkey, scoring way up there on the ol’ GobbleMeter. No lame cliche is left unused. Inept, illogical, and too dull to even be funny. Yet some have suggested this is a spoof. A parody. A satire.
Unfortunately, that’s the usual kneejerk defense whenever somebody attempts a genre exercise and it belly flops.
Aren’t spoofs actually supposed to be funny? The only humour here is almost entirely unintentional.
But if we’re supposed to take it straight up?
Nobody seems to act with much urgency, or I had no sense that anybody was in any real peril, with muck of the “action” occurring offscreen. The “trail of bodies” promised in the promos never really materializes, and the odd couple don’t so much follow the “clues” as meander in the general direction of them, ending up in the next-to-nowhere town of Deadwood, South Dakota. The acting’s okay, if not spectacular (Lana is played by Barbara Schock, the writer/director’s wife at the time), and everyone seems to hit their cues, but there’s just not much else going on. The relationship between the mismatched sleuths starts out promising, but wanders off into the weeds. And the film-within-a-film schtick is more arty than effective, that prompted Chris Hillman of the Los Angeles Times to snark about the film being “the work of a major film fan, not a major film maker.”
Ouch.
I’m not usually this harsh about films, but this was WAY BAD. I usually love this stuff, and cut a lot of these films a lot of slack, but this one really disappointed me. Someone should track down writer/director/editor Pickett and stop him, before he fowls up the screen again… we’re talkin’ serious turkey here.
The cock-eyed allusion to a Neil Young song (if that’s what it was) in the film’s title amused me, though. And was probably what originally enticed me to pull it off the video store shelf.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Fortunately, Rex Pickett did go on to bigger and better things. I’m happy to report that his 2004 novel Sideways was made into a very successful film that even an “asshole… cyber jerk” like me (see below) could enjoy. But it’s also worth noting that, beyond writing the novel that served as source material, Pickett had nothing to do with the actual film.
LETTERS, WE GET LETTERS…
- “Fuck you, asshole! I just wrote a film that won an Academy Award! I just sold a novel to one of the hottest directors in Hollywood to be his next movie. It’s one thing to criticize a movie and trash it, but to say someone should “track me down before I fowl up the screen again” is the height of puerile. Why don’t you crawl off your stupid little Web bully pulpit and go back into the hole from where you came. “From Hollywood to Deadwood” may be a failure, but it was made under extraordinarily difficult circumstances on an extremely low budget, was butchered by the distributor… etc., etc. But it got made, got released, and shockingly garnered some okay reviews. Hardly the embarrassment that most films are. What a little cyber jerk you are!”
–Rex Pickett, in a November 2001 letter to the editor
FILMS
- FROM HOLLYWOOD TO DEADWOOD | Buy this video
(1989, Palm Pictures/Island Pictures)
96 minutes
A Nightfilm Productions Picture
Screenplay: Rex Pickett
Director: Rex Pickett
Producer: Jo Peterson
Executive Producer: Bill Byrne
Starring Scott Paulin as RAYMOND SAVAGE
and Jim Haynie as JACK HAYNES
Also starring Barbara Schock, Jurgens Doeres, Chris Mulkey, Tom Dahlgren, Mike Genovese, Norbert Weisser, Campbell Scott, Irene Miracle, Renn Woods, West Buchanan, John Achorn, Tom Maguire
FURTHER INVESTIGATION
- This Turkey for Hire
The Worst and Most Disappointing P.I. Films
Respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith (original report, May 1999).
