Yeah, there was a new Bond movie with a new Bond actor released 35 years ago today, but there was also The Lost Boys. Let’s take a look back…
On this date in 80s movie history, two new wide releases would join three New York City exclusive openings in theatres.
Of all the movies released on this date in 1987, the Bond film The Living Daylights would get the most favorable reactions from the contemporary press, in large part because it was not just a damn good Bond film but a damn good film, period. Timothy Dalton was the best Bond since Connery, and is still the best Bond after Connery and Craig (and I will fight you on this). Dalton was devastatingly handsome and cut an imposing figure on screen. He was easily the best actor to portray Bond, and I will forever be mad at 1980s moviegoers who rejected two of the better Bond movies and one of the best Bonds, because they couldn’t handle the tonal switch from the silliness of the last few Moore Bonds to something closer to the Bond of the Fleming books.
On its opening weekend, The Living Daylights would gross $11.1m, which would place it at the top of the box office charts. It would remain in first place for two weeks, and finish its five-month theatrical run in America with $51.2m. It would gross another $140m worldwide, and ensure another Bond movie got into production in time for a summer 1989 release.
The Lost Boys was supposed to be Richard Donner’s follow-up to The Goonies, but he would decide to make Lethal Weapon instead, opening the door to Joel Schumacher to direct this vampire allegory to Peter Pan. In the original screenplay, the Lost Boys were thirteen or fourteen year olds, and the Frog Brothers eight, but once Schumacher became involved, he wanted the movie to be “sexier,” so out went the direct Peter Pan connections.
Making extensive uses of local Santa Cruz locales for 95% of its shoot, the film was HUGE in town when it was released. That opening night was one of the few times I had ever seen the 600-seat main screen at the Aptos Twin, sold out. All weekend, matinee or evening show, if the theatre wasn’t completely sold out, it was damn near sold out. Not sure if it had the highest single theatre gross for the movie nationwide that weekend, but it was probably very close. The film would open to second place in its opening weekend, after The Living Daylights, with $5.24m in ticket sales from 1027 theatres. It would play in theatres for about four and a half months, but its final box office gross of $32.2m, slightly more than The Princess Bride and Can’t Buy Me Love, but less than Adventures in Babysitting or Like Father, Like Son.
Fun fact #1: the comic book store run by the Frog Brothers and their parents in the movie was a real comic book store, Atlantis Fantasyworld.
And from June 1982 to October 1989, it was MY comic book store. As a teenager, there were few thrills greater than throwing open the doors to Atlantis and browsing their selection of comics, playing a game or two of pinball, and just talking to Joe Ferrera, the co-owner of Atlantis, and the other people in the store about comics and movies and such. For years, it was the only place in all of Santa Cruz that carried movie magazines like Fangoria, Starlog and Cinefantastique.
The store was destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but it still exists to this day a few blocks north of its original location. If you ever find yourself in downtown Santa Cruz, do yourself the favor of hitting Atlantis Fantasyworld up. You won’t regret it.
Fun fact #2: A number of my friends appear in the movie as extras (two of them featured in the opening credits)… while another one, a former co-worker at the Del Mar Theatre, was the punk who Keifer Sutherland bit in the head. (RIP Jerry.)
A Man in Love should have made Greta Scacchi a star. Hell, there were a lot of movies that should have made her a star, but she really does shine in this French-Italian drama film directed by Diane Kurys. She plays a French/British actress who is considering giving up acting for writing, who gets a small role in an American movie and ends up in a passionate love affair with her married lead actor, played by Peter Coyote. The cast is great, with Peter Reigert, Claudia Cardinale and Jamie Lee Curtis doing some great work in supporting roles.
But when the movie came out, it would really divide critics, and the film would not be able to ride critical word of mouth to any kind of theatrical success. It did well in its first weekend in New York City, when it grossed $40k at the Cinema 1, but after three months in theatres, it would leave cinemas with only $949,451 in ticket sales.
Of all the movies featured in today’s history, Singing on the Treadmill will be the most obscure to everyone, including cinephiles. A musical-fantasy satire from Hungary, Gyula Gazdag’s 1974 film about four couples who compete to restore a ramshackle house was, like most of his movies of the 1970s, banned from playing in its native country by the government for years, due to its skewering of communism and its role in the lives of Hungarian citizens at the time. For more than a decade, Gazdag was not allowed to show his movies outside of Hungary either, or travel to any film festivals outside of Hungary.
Singing on the Treadmill wouldn’t screen in America until May 1987, when the UCLA Film Archives was allowed to screen Treadmill and two other Gazdag films, The Resolution (1972) and The Whistling Cobblestone (1971). The film be allowed a one-week special engagement in New York City starting July 31st, 1987, at the Public Theater, a non-profit off-Broadway live theatre that occasionally screened movies back in the 80s. (Amongst the shows that would premiere at the Public Theater before moving on to bigger and better things included Eric Bogosian’s Talk Radio in 1985 and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton in 2015.)
Broadway producer Joseph Papp, who started the Public Theater in 1954, would be the “distributor” of the movie at his own theater, and didn’t even create posters for the one-week event, which is why a Polish poster from a recent revival of the film is used above. No box office grosses were ever reported for the run, and there appear to be no other public screenings of the film after this run.
If you would like to check Singing on the Treadmill out for yourself, it is occasionally available on the Mubi streaming service, but one can rather easily find a beautiful trasnfer of the 72-minute film (with English subtitles) on a rare film repository website under its original title, Bástyasétány Hetvennégy.
The Wolf at the Door is a movie I should know more about than I do. Donald Sutherland, who should have won like three or four Oscars by now, plays Paul Gauguin, the 19th Century French Post-Impressionist artist who, like his friend and fellow Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, would not truly be discovered by the art world until after his passing.
This Danish-French co-production, with stunning natural photography by Mikael Salomon (Oscar-nominated for his work on The Abyss and Backdraft), would co-star Max von Sydow as Swedish writer August Strindberg, who helped to support the struggling painter after he returns to Copenhagen after two years of work in Tahiti.
Opening in four theatres in major markets including the Cinema 3 in New York City, The Wolf at the Door would gross $39,712, on its way to a final gross of $583,800 after fourteen weeks of theatrical playdates.
As for the national top ten that weekend:
1) The Living Daylights (United Artists)
$11,051,284 from 1728 theatres.
$11.05m after three days.
2) The Lost Boys (Warners)
$5,236,318 from 1027 theatres.
$5.24m after three days.
3) La Bamba (Columbia)
$5,187,778 from 1249 theatres.
$14.38m after two weeks.
4) Robocop (Orion)
$2,590,344 from 796 theatres.
$14.27m after three weeks.
5) Summer School (Paramount)
$4,621,229 from 1366 theatres.
$16.51m after two weeks.
6) Snow White and the Seven Dwarves [reissue] (Disney)
$3,619,505 from 1684 theatres.
$27.11m after three weeks.
7) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Warners)
$2,891,836 from 1511 theatres.
$11.23m after two weeks.
8) Full Metal Jacket (Warners)
$2,736,128 from 974 theatres.
$31.47m after six weeks.
9) Dragnet (Universal)
$2,224,292 from 1036 theatres.
$47.79m after six weeks.
10) Adventures in Babysitting (Disney)
$1,863,332 from 909 theatres.
$25.67m after five weeks.