PHOENIX PRESS

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Jump to Ethan Hawke (2020)   Jump to St Petersburg Times (1979)   Jump to Rain Phoenix (2019)   Jump to Samantha Mathis (2018)   Jump to Last Interview (1993)   Jump to My Own Private Idaho (1991)   Jump to Their Own Private Idaho (1992)   Jump to The Lost Boy (2003)   Jump to Phoenix From The Ashes (2007)   Jump to Stephen Fry Podgram (2008)   Jump to Wil Wheaton (2011)   Jump to Remembering River Phoenix (2013)   Jump to Coming Of Age (2015)   Jump to Ethan Hawke (2016)   Jump to Stand By Me: 30th Anniversary (2016)   Jump to Pennywise & River Phoenix (2016)   Jump to River's Edge (1993)   Jump to Portland Walking Tour (2016)

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ETHAN HAWKE ON REGRETS, RACE AND SURVIVING HOLLYWOOD:
'RIVER PHOENIX WAS A BIG LESSON TO ME’ (excerpt)

BY HADLEY FREEMAN - THE GUARDIAN - 16th NOVEMBER 2020 (read the full article)
​Between his parents, Hawke learned to take his job seriously, but to maintain perspective about himself, although the latter took time. When he was 14, he was cast alongside River Phoenix in the kids’ film Explorers. The film bombed and Hawke blamed himself. It didn’t help that he later auditioned for Stand By Me. “You’re really good, but I just gave the part to another kid with a bird name,” the director, Rob Reiner, told him. Gutted, Hawke knew who that was.
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Did he and Phoenix stay friends? “Oh yeah. You know what you asked me about earlier, why I don’t make easier movies? Well, my first screen partner overdosed on Sunset Boulevard, you know? He was the brightest light and this industry chewed him up, and that was a big lesson to me. If I had to put a single reason on why I never moved to LA, it would be I think it’s too dangerous for an actor like me to be in that kind of climate,” he says.
​Below is an excerpt from a St. Petersburg Times article (dated 19th May 1979.) 

A copy of this article found its way to the casting department at Paramount Pictures, and the family received a letter saying the children could be interviewed if they were ever in Los Angeles.... The rest is history.
“Composer James Taylor sang of Fire and Rain, all in the same breath. In Hernando County, folks talk of River and Rain - And it’s all very musical.

River, 8 and Rain, 6 came to the forefront last month with a surprising musical performance at the Hernando Fiesta in Spring Hill.  The children brought the audience to it’s feet when they finished singing, 'You Gotta Be a Baby To Get to Heaven' in five languages - French, Spanish, German, Japanese and English. 

Asked about his feelings of a professional career and possible fame, River said,  ‘I hope I am famous someday, not to be proud of myself, but because I can thank God for giving me my powers.’  This was an 8-year-old talking.  His sister agreed with him when he said, ‘I don’t want to get rich. I want to give money to poor people and some for us. I’d like to give to people who need help.’” 
The photo of River & Rain that was included with the article

RIVER PHOENIX'S SISTER RAIN RELEASES SOLO ALBUM, 'RIVER'
​AS FRIENDS LIKE KEANU REEVES LOOK BACK

BY JULIE JORDAN - PEOPLE MAGAZINE - 31 OCTOBER 2019
With her new album, Rain Phoenix celebrates her brother's spirit and legacy and hopes it will help those who have suffered loss as well
Rain Phoenix is celebrating her brother River‘s life through music.

Twenty-six years after the actor tragically died in 1993 at the age of 23, his sister has released her first solo album, River, on the anniversary of his death.

Rain, 46, who performed with River in their alternative rock band Aleka’s Attic, spoke with PEOPLE for this week’s issue to discuss the record as well as her brother’s spirit and legacy while friends including Keanu Reeves, musician Flea and singer Michael Stipe shared their memories of the beloved Stand By Me star.

How did this album come to be?
​
It first started October 2018. Although I wouldn’t at that time have known that I would be here and have a record called River. But I will say, for lack of a better way of saying it, it cracked opened. I started watching some Aleka’s Attic videos from tour diaries in the years 89, 90, 91 and cutting together a video for one of the first songs River wrote and the process of that was like memory lane.
​And then I just couldn’t stop making music. My collaborator, Kirk Hellie, and I just kept writing. I feel like it’s all been River energy, this whole process. It became so important to me that I recognize and say his name. So I called it River and after that, it was even more easy.”

What made you ready to start looking at the videos?

There was a lot that I just stored away. I think, when we lose people, regardless of the way we lose people, it is traumatic to the human psyche in the sense that one day, this person that you love is there, and the next they’re not. I was also 20 [when River died] and my brain wasn’t fully formed and how I could process and move forward and continue to be okay, was to also stow that away. So I didn’t really look at much footage or watch his movies even. And then time just kept going on.
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When I did have the feeling that it was time, it absolutely became a joyful experience. Then it was like the floodgates opened and I realized that sometimes when we push or lock away the things that are too much for a young mind to handle, there’s less discernment in regard to the positive parts too. They get stowed away, along with those things that are overwhelmingly sad. Now I realize looking back that makes sense.
So it was a really beautiful awakening moment for me with River’s energy to experience it again and the whole process of making this record and connecting to that greater understanding of the universality of loss. While this record is called River, my aspiration is to have it be something for all of us, for everyone who has lost loved ones.

When you think of River, what’s the first memory to pop into your mind?

Tabbouleh [laughs]. We are all huge fans of Tabbouleh salad and we would have Tabbouleh-offs. He was a master Tabbouleh maker. It was a very joyful part of our family dinner, lunch, breakfast. Joaquin is a master Tabbouleh maker as well. River was one of the most humorous people, so much laughter.

​How would you describe him as a person?

He was probably the most generous person that I know and always very much concerned about the quiet person in the room or the person who was misunderstood and that extended to his art and his activism for the voiceless, the animals. He was somebody that was always concerned for those who couldn’t speak for themselves or were afraid to. That was definitely the kind of person he was, just incredibly compassionate and empathetic and generous.

And as a brother?

Very protective. And creative. I think he probably taught all of us a few chords on guitar and hoped that we would follow his lead and maybe be able to play lead, so he didn’t have to. He was such a great older brother.
​How have you found peace with his death?

I think peace is gradual. Finding peace with any major loss in my life has been a gradual experience and it takes time. Grief is a wild animal that has no concept of time. It might be 10 years, three years, one week that you think things are fine or different or you’ve made peace, and then they’re not. There’s no exact timeline. But I will say that, through the process of making this record, I have experienced some of the greatest peace.

What do you think the afterlife might be like?

Part of the mystery and beauty of the afterlife or, if you believe in reincarnation, is that we don’t really know… I believe the most important thing is to spend the precious human lives that we have and the consciousness that we have, living to our greatest potential, helping others and searching for the truth within our soul. So that when we die, we die in peace knowing that whatever comes next, we’ve done the best that we can in this lifetime.

Now there is the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding. What do you hope his legacy will be?
​
I’m really moved by River’s fans who have been inspired by his beliefs and keep his legacy alive. They connect to all the things he cared about, like rain forest preservation, animal rights, human rights, and share often how he helped them to make changes in their lives.
Almost every show Aleka’s Attic played was a benefit concert. He felt so strongly about speaking up, using his voice to activate his activism and using his fame to share things. He was really disturbed by the environmental devastation of his time, clearcutting the rainforests for cattle and factory farming. He visited Brazil and met with tribes; he and a friend bought up land and created a rainforest preserve in Costa Rica.
I hope he’s remembered for championing the preservation of our life support system, which is inclusive of human rights, animal rights, women’s rights, racial justice, and environmentalism. I hope people continue to equate that with who he was as an artist. All those issues were really, really important to him because he believed they were all connected.
​
That holistic approach to the many challenges we face is at the core of the work River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding is doing. Connecting the dots through our shared humanity. River was not about telling people how to live their lives, he was about doing his part, and encouraging others through his example, through his art. It’s just who he was as a person, his generosity, his spirit, his compassion. I really want to thank the fans for keeping all those things very much illuminated as part of his legacy.
​Actor Keanu Reeves:
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Meeting River was a revelation. As a person and an artist. His generous heart and shining spirit along with an intelligence, curiosity, wit and humor inspired. He seemed to hold the sadness and what was wrong in a worldly or beyond worldly way and just wanted to make it better, actively make it better. Whether it was in a conversation, a song, the character’s he played, the stories he told, his friendship, his family, his activism, his love. He was there. He tried. He was trying. A beautiful exceptional soul. Light.
​Actor/brother Joaquin Phoenix:

When I think about it, River introduced me to every experience that helped to form the direction I took in my life. He was always encouraging me and sharing everything he had.
​
Musician Flea:

As well as being hilariously wild, sharp as the freshest razor, and the most eccentric and absurd dancer to ever shake his ass, River Phoenix was the kindest person I ever met. I didn’t know that sort of sensitivity, selflessness, thoughtfulness, compassion and understanding existed before I met him, and it changed my life forever. He raised the bar of humanity for me. He is a part of everything I do and every word I speak. Every atom still vibrates with his infinite presence and I sing his name out loud into the raw and open sky.
Singer Michael Stipe:

River loved music, art, creative people in general. The British band XTC hugely influenced his group Aleka’s Attic. His favorite singer of all time was the astonishing Freddie Mercury. He was obsessed with Terry Gilliam’s film Brazil, and its star Jonathan Pryce — he was so excited to introduce me to Jonathan on the set of Dark Blood. River had a love/hate relationship with fame — if fame could push the greater good or a good idea, he was in 1000%. Otherwise he didn’t have much time for it. His immediate family group was huge, there was always a communal spirit — and a profound sense of fairness, of equality.

Director Gus Van Sant:

River liked to tell stories and liked to listen to stories, the longer the better. You could tell him a story that would last an hour and he would be right there with you excited about every turn in the story, because it allowed him to know you better, and he liked to get to know people very well and consider them his close friends.  He had a large number of very, very close friends.

​Actress/former girlfriend Samantha Mathis:
​
I was instantly taken by River’s spirit — he was so deeply passionate and excited to collaborate in the forum of film making, always seeking truth — and he approached his artistry as a musician the same way, as well as his activism, with the same commitment and zeal. His engage was infectious. And he introduced me to olives. Man, he loved an olive.

COPYRIGHT - PEOPLE MAGAZINE

SAMANTHA MATHIS SPEAKS OUT

THE UNTOLD STORY OF LOST STAR RIVER PHOENIX - 25 YEARS AFTER HIS DEATH
BY HADLEY FREEMAN - THE GUARDIAN - 25th OCTOBER 2018 (see original article)
Phenomenally talented and famously caring, River Phoenix’s death shocked the world. His girlfriend Samantha Mathis talks for the first time about that awful night, and the man behind the myth
On the night of 30 October 1993, River Phoenix, his girlfriend, the actor Samantha Mathis, and his siblings Leaf (now known as Joaquin) and Rain, walked into the Viper Room, the LA club owned by Johnny Depp. Mathis thought they were there only to drop off his little brother and sister, “but when we arrived he said to me: ‘Oh, there are some people playing music tonight in the club who want me to play with them – that’s OK, right?’” she says.
​
It wasn’t OK with her: she thought they would be going straight to her house. “I knew something was wrong that night, something I didn’t understand. I didn’t see anyone doing drugs but he was high in a way that made me feel uncomfortable – I was in way over my head,” she says. But she knew he wanted to stay, and thought it wouldn’t be long – after all, some of his stuff was in the trunk of her car. Instead, she says, starting to cry: “Forty-five minutes later, he was dead.”
Next week is the 25th anniversary of that night, when the young actor who had always taken care to eschew all the usual celebrity cliches died the most cliched death of all, on Sunset Boulevard at the age of just 23. Phoenix had always hated fame but considered its one potential benefit was that he could use it for good and change the world, talking urgently in every interview about vegetarianism and the environment. It is a template many have tried to copy, but none succeeded like Phoenix, because he believed in his ideals more intensely than most people believe in anything.
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This was the boy who once ran out of a restaurant in tears because his girlfriend, the actor and activist Martha Plimpton, ordered seafood. He was never entranced by the glitz of his own celebrity; when he was nominated for an Oscar in 1989, for his performance in Running on Empty, a journalist on the Oscars red carpet said to him “It’s easy to get caught up in the Hollywood hoopla, isn’t it?” “Mmm, not for me, it isn’t,” he replied, looking a little surprised by the question. But reacting against success can be as risky as embracing it, because it can elide into self-loathing and confusion.
“I wish I could go someplace where nobody knows me,” he sobbed in his breakout performance in Stand By Me . After he died, his mother Arlyn (known as Heart) told Esquire magazine that her son shared that sentiment: “As River grew, he did become more and more uncomfortable being the poster boy for all good things. He often said he wished he could just be anonymous. But he never was. When he wasn’t a movie star, he was a missionary. There’s a beauty in that – the man with the cause, the leader – but there’s also a deep loneliness.”
​
Unlike most stars who die young, Phoenix isn’t just associated with early death but also precocious talent. Every young actor, from Leonardo DiCaprio to Timothée Chalamet, who shows early promise gets compared to Phoenix.
“When River came in to audition, it was obvious that he was just an amazing, amazing talent. He could play instruments, he was so bright and brilliant, he could do anything, really,” says Rob Reiner, who directed Phoenix in Stand By Me. Yet as talented as he was, Reiner had to coax the then 15-year-old to show his pain instead of bottling it inside.
“I said to him: ‘I want you to think about a time when someone, an adult who is important to you, let you down.’ He nodded and went away to think for a few minutes. The next take, in which he’s crying, is the one that’s in the movie. He never told me what he thought about – I assumed maybe one of his parents, but I don’t know. And when I watch the movie now, when he disappears at the end, it’s just very, very sad,” says Reiner.

Of the four child actors in the movie, only two – Wil Wheaton and Jerry O’Connell – got to adulthood unscathed. Phoenix and Corey Feldman – who has said he was sexually abused by someone in the film industry – were less lucky. I ask Reiner if he thinks that reflects the fate of child actors in general, that there’s a 50/50 chance they will turn out OK.
​
“I don’t know if it’s reflective of child actors exactly, but more about whether child actors have enough of a familial foundation to withstand the difficulties. When I saw Leonardo DiCaprio in This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? I thought: ‘Wow, this kid is insanely talented, if he doesn’t have some kind of familial moorings, he’s going to fall off the deep end.’ So when we made The Wolf of Wall Street, I told him I’d been worried about him. He said: ‘Even though my parents divorced, I always had a good relationship with both of them.’ So he had that secure foundation,” says Reiner.
Phoenix also seemed to have a strong family connection during Stand By Me, so Reiner didn’t worry about him. “He had his mother there with him, and all his siblings, they were all there,” Reiner says, then pauses. “But I knew his father had problems with alcohol or something. I knew there were problems there.”

It is always a mistake to confuse an actor with his roles, but it is impossible not to notice that all of Phoenix’s best performances involved him playing a character with a complicated family background. In My Own Private Idaho, probably his greatest performance, he played Mike, a street hustler looking for his mother, who says: “If I had a normal family, and a good upbringing, then I would have been a well-adjusted person … Didn’t have a dog or normal dad anyway, yeah. That’s alright. I don’t feel sorry for myself. I mean, I feel like I’m, you know, well-adjusted.” Then there was Running on Empty, about a lonely teenager trapped in his family’s off-grid lifestyle. In The Mosquito Coast, he played the son of a man determined to build a utopia in Central America. In Stand By Me, his character resented being defined by his family’s reputation.

Back in the 1980s, it was known that Phoenix had an eccentric childhood, but, in retrospect, it feels as if few appreciated just how extraordinary it was. His parents, John and Arlyn were travelling counter-cultural hippies and when River was only three, the family joined the Children of God, a Christian cult that believed, among other things, that sex without boundaries was a form of love (Rose McGowan was also raised in the cult). The family moved from Venezuela to Mexico to Puerto Rico to spread the word of the cult, and Phoenix was sent out as a child to busk to raise money for food. He was also, he later said in an interview, sexually abused when he was four years old. Phoenix almost never discussed the Children of God, but his mother quoted him as saying: “They’re disgusting. They’re ruining people’s lives.”
​
The family was so entrenched in the cult that John was designated “the Archbishop of Venezuela”, but eventually they left it and moved back to the US. Phoenix never went to school; instead, his mother contacted the casting director at Paramount, and Phoenix began working at the age of eight. His siblings, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty and Summer, soon followed suit.
“We kinda miss [having a normal childhood] sometimes, missing our friends, but when we go some place we get to meet other people. But then you have to say goodbye to them,” the 13-year-old Joaquin told a journalist in 1987, when a TV crew visited the family home in Florida.

“I think the opportunities [in film] are just amazing, the things they’ve gotten to do and gotten confidence. I think they’re pretty much [normal] children,” smiled Heart.

The family was loving and close, but John was complicated. In photos of him from the 1980s, he is the spitting image of Joaquin, and River reportedly saw him more as a little brother than a paternal figure. John had problems with alcohol and, from an extremely young age, Phoenix felt as if he, not his father, had to support the family.

“River said to me in that last year: ‘I just have to make one more movie to put away enough money so my youngest sister can go to college,’” Mathis recalls. “I don’t know if that was true, but I remember him saying that.”

Mathis is talking to me on the phone from her apartment in New York. So much has been written about Phoenix over the years, but Mathis, who was with him when he died, has never spoken about him in depth before. “Except to my therapist,” she says, with a rueful laugh. Partly this has been out of respect to others who loved him, and partly because she was so traumatised by his death that she blocked out a lot of memories. But she recently saw, for the first time since Phoenix died, The Thing Called Love, in which they co-starred and his last completed film, and it got her thinking about things she hadn’t thought about in decades. So when she got a message from me soon afterwards saying I wanted to talk to her, it felt, she says, “like the universe wanted me to talk about him.
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“We met when we were both 19, and he bummed a cigarette off me in an LA club. This sounds incredibly cheesy but I knew I would be with him one day. It just felt fated between us, and there was such chemistry,” she says. Three years after that first encounter, Mathis’s premonition came true when they were cast in The Thing Called Love.
“I think we recognised something in each other,” she says. Mathis had been raised by a single mother and had been acting since she was a teenager. “We came from very different families, but perhaps there were some broken parts in each other we recognised. We found safe harbour.”

After Phoenix died, various people who knew him talked about how they had seen the famously clean-living actor slipping into drug abuse over the years. Mathis, however, remembers his final year as very simple and happy, recalling the times they stayed with his family in Florida and Costa Rica, where they played music and cooked vegetarian food. “We just hung out with his siblings and got to be kids,” she says, crying again. “He was so good at hanging out.”

Perhaps in the absence of a father figure, Phoenix filled his life with quasi big brothers who tried to help him: Dermot Mulroney was one, Dan Aykroyd another, and Phoenix and Mathis stayed with the latter for a time at his place in Canada. Aykroyd had lost his best friend, John Belushi, to a drug overdose just over a decade earlier, and he reportedly urged Phoenix to stay away from drugs. Michael Stipe was another. “We met through my sister,” says Stipe. “She’d moved to Florida and became familiar with the whole family. I would visit her and hang out with them, and I have two sisters who I love very much, but River was like my little brother. We’re exactly 10 years apart and he really did feel like a brother to me.”
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Phoenix’s mother had moved the children to Florida as they became more successful to keep them away from the seedier elements of LA life. But Phoenix still saw it as his role to save people, and as he started hanging out with various creative people in Los Angeles, he tried to help them come off heroin, going so far as to get one particular individual into rehab. “But when he needed help, they didn’t help him. In fact, in some cases, it was the opposite,” says Mathis. She says Phoenix was – as far as she knows – sober during their time together, “but I was very young then. In the days before he died, though, I knew something was going on.”
According to the 2013 book, Running with Monsters, by Phoenix’s friend Bob Forrest, Phoenix had spent the previous days on a massive drugs binge with Red Hot Chili Peppers’ guitarist, John Frusciante: “[River] stayed with John for the next few days, and probably didn’t get a minute of sleep. The drug routine stayed pretty consistent for all of us. First, smoke crack or shoot coke directly into a vein for that 90-second, electric brain-bell jangle. Then shoot heroin to get a grip and come down enough to be able to carry on a conversation for a few minutes before you start the cycle again,” Forrest wrote.
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On the night of 30 October 1993, when Mathis realised Phoenix wanted to stay at the Viper Room, she went to the bathroom. “I knew he was high that night, but the heroin that killed him didn’t happen until he was in the Viper Room. I have my suspicions about what was going on, but I didn’t see anything,” she says. When Mathis came out of the bathroom she saw what she thought was Phoenix in a scuffle with another man, and the two of them being pushed out of the club’s side door by a bouncer. When she went out on to the street after them, she saw Phoenix drop to the ground and go into convulsions on the pavement. Thankfully, this was before the paparazzi had became ubiquitous so no one took photos, but it also meant no one was around to help.
“What have you done? What are you on?” Mathis shouted at the other man. “Leave him alone, you’re spoiling his high,” he retorted.
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Mathis desperately tried to get back into the club to get help, but the side door was firmly shut. So she ran around to the main door, searched through the club for Phoenix’s siblings and they all dashed outside.
Joaquin called 911 for help in a phone call that would almost immediately be leaked to news stations: “He’s having seizures! Get over here please, please, ’cause he’s dying, please,” sobbed the 19-year-old. Phoenix had already flatlined by the time the paramedics arrived and was pronounced dead at the hospital. He had died from an overdose of cocaine and heroin.

After he died, everyone had a theory about how the beautiful boy with such great aspirations had gone so wrong. Today, Mathis remembers him as “sensitive and obsessive. He felt things on his heart very deeply.” Plimpton said after he died: “He was just a boy, a very good-hearted boy who was very fucked up and had no idea how to implement his good intentions.”

Phoenix was younger than James Dean when he died and his death was at least as seminal for his generation. Before he died, he looked like even more of a sure success than Tom Cruise, and his absence made space for other young actors to emerge – DiCaprio, most obviously.
​
“Leo told me he saw River the night he died, before he went to the Viper Room,” says Reiner. “And that might have been [a warning], because Leo never ever got into drugs.” DiCaprio ended up playing at least two roles that had been intended for Phoenix, taking the lead in The Basketball Diaries and Total Eclipse.

But the reason Phoenix is still revered today is not because of his absence but because he still feels so present. He was such a natural actor that his work remains amazingly undated and while being a missionary/actor might have cost him personally, to a very large degree he succeeded in his mission. One of the biggest ironies about Phoenix is that he hated celebrity and tried to reshape it, but in doing so he inadvertently coined many of the cliches that now define it: rare is the celebrity today who doesn’t talk about vegetarianism and the environment. He also made being an actor with a side project – his band, Aleka’s Attic – look cool instead of indulgent, because it suggested his creativity could not be contained in one artform. It is almost impossible to imagine, say, Kurt Cobain, who died the year after Phoenix, in today’s celebrity world, but it is extremely easy to imagine Phoenix living on a ranch in Idaho or California, acting in occasional indie movies, urging all of us to look up from our phones and think of the land, the sea and the sky.

“I’m looking at a photo of him now, oh wow …” Mathis says, briefly trailing off. “I think if River was still here, I think he’d be acting, directing, saving the environment, just living and hanging out. Oh gosh, wouldn’t that be nice?”

COPYRIGHT - THE GUARDIAN

RIVER PHOENIX - HIS LAST INTERVIEW

BY JEAN-PAUL CHAILLET - PREMIERE (FRANCE) - DECEMBER 1993

A FEW DAYS BEFORE HIS DEATH, ON OCTOBER 31, IN LA., THE AMERICAN ACTOR HAD RECEIVED PREMIERE ON THE FILMING OF HIS LAST MOVIE, DARK BLOOD, IN UTAH. HE WAS 23 YEARS OLD...

THIS ARTICLE WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN FRENCH AND HAS BEEN TRANSLATED TO ENGLISH
He was called River. Like a river. Child of a couple of flower children, pure product of the 70es, he loved nature, animals and rock'n'roll. A teenager become a star, in 1986, with Rob Reiner's "Stand by Me", he showed his blond hair, hollow cheeks and pale face in half a dozen of striking movies. Nominated at 17 for an Academy Award for "Running on Empty", by Sidney Lumet, he would be Harrison Ford's eldest son in Peter Weir's "Mosquito Coast, then young Harrison Ford in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade", by Steven Spielberg. Ecologist with a mystique, he also liked difficult parts and unsettling movies. Drugged-out, prostitute and homosexual in Gus Van Sant's "My Own Private Idaho", he'd then be a hacker in "Sneakers" with Robert Redford. His last movies, Sam Shepard's "Silent Tongue" and Peter Bogdanovich's "The Thing Called Love", are still unreleased. He was set to join Tom Cruise in "Interview With The Vampire". And was achieving, when we met him, south from Salt Lake City, in Utah, an obsessional love story between three characters, with Jonathan Pryce and Judy Davis: "Dark Blood", directed by George Sluizer. River Phoenix has gone at 23. Foolishly. The 90's lose a good-hearted rebel.

Première: Your movies often contain an important social or political message. Is it a deliberate choice from yours?

River Phoenix: What inspires me first is the quality of the written word and script, and not some strategy. At the time of "Mosquito Coast", I didn't choose my parts yet. I went to a casting and I had the chance to join in such a movie.

P: Most young actors seem to make more commercial choices than you, is it right?

RP: Maybe some of my movies would have been successful if I hadn't played in... These commercial stuff, I consider them as a pollution of mind. I don't want to contaminate my work or my convictions with things that won't contribute to my growth or to the development of my art.

P: Generally, how do you deal with a part?

RP: Usually, I write the detailed biography of the character. For me it's the only possible way. To play a sad scene, many will only for example think of their mother's death. I consider it's a mistake for an actor to cross the boundary that separates him from his character. Because then you impose him your own references. That's why I need to have landmarks that only belong to my character. For example, for "My Own Private Idaho" I wrote a lot. And once the movie was done, I burned it all.

P: Why?

RP: Everything was on the screen.

P: Was this also not to use it again?

RP: That's right, even if, as an actor, I'm growing richer and learning with each character. And a new character will then be able to raise from this compilation of parts.

P: What kind of character are you in "Dark Blood"?

RP: Boy is someone in search for absolute, looking for solace in wide spaces. Someone surviving by eating rodents and snakes, drinking from rain and the blood of the animals he killed.

P: You're vegan?

RP: I'm not eating any animal flesh and I don't feel having the right to take the soul of any living creature. But the movie character, on his side, belongs to the natural food chain, like Native Americans or Inuit. He's entitled to live on earth's natural resources.

P: How do you like to work with your partners?

RP: I adjust myself very easily and I never hold any prejudice about them. I try to keep my mind as open as possible towards them. But I prefer to communicate through my character.

P: Could you describe what you enjoy as an actor?

RP: When you look at the movie history, you realize that there are gaps and missing links. My ultimate goal is to try to give in a competent way a voice to characters who haven't had the chance to talk yet, those who never expressed themselves so far. Even if I've not always been able to do so. For me, the ideal recompense, what really fulfills me, is to create something new. Not only to be original at any cost or to be the first one to do it, but because these blanks need to be filled. Besides, I could play the same character again and again, in a different way each time. As many times as I have atoms in my body.

P: Is it important for a young actor needing to compose with the Hollywood system, to plan his career?

RP: Of course, there is pressure, people who'd like to build career's plan for you. But I'm not looking for their opinion. I don't mind because I'm not here to complete my career of fill my bank account. I don't care about my image.

P: You started very early in this career. Do you feel like you've lost your naivety faster than others?

RP: It wasn't really naivety but more ignorance like any beginner.

P: Are you satisfied with what you've achieved at this point in your career?

RP: Honestly, I don't think this way. I never think of me as an actor. I see all of this as new experiences each time, like as many different lives. As many reincarnations. So when I watch my last movie, I'm unable to judge or to be critical. For me, it's past, and I don't feel any connection to it anymore, like if it was somebody else than me that I'm not responsible for. I immersed myself in another life that the character appropriated. He expressed himself through me, not the other way around.

P: It sounds like you've always taken care to separate your private life from your actor's work...

RP: Absolutely. Quite often, when actors have such a strong charisma in real life, eventually it has to affect the characters they play. For myself I'm not charismatic in that way. I'm not a "performer". Ideally I would stay mute as River. That's the reason why, for a long time, I've said the opposite of what I really thought. In interviews, I've also played characters that I wasn't. I've lied and often contradicted myself to dumbfound people. It's all over now, because I have nothing left to hide. Eventually, I'm quite an ordinary person.

COPYRIGHT - PREMIERE (FRANCE)

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

BY GINI SIKES AND PAIGE POWELL - INTERVIEW MAGAZINE - 11 JANUARY 1991
Click image for full view
In My Own Private Idaho, River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves portray a pair of teenage prostitutes, each more victim than vulture. Phoenix is a narcoleptic, Mike, who dozes off at dangerously inopportune moments as he searches endlessly for his long-lost mother; Reeves is a blue-blooded runaway, Scott, who turns tricks as an act of rebellion against his father. "Idaho is the story of a rich boy who falls of the hill and a kid on the street," says writer-director, Gus Van Sant. "I saw a bit of the hill in Keanu's personality and a bit of the street in River's. They played out those extensions of themselves."

Reeves is the first to arrive for dinner at Suite 55 in the Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard. He looks a bit dazed from a run-in with the paparazzi at a Hollywood screening. "I just stopped on my bike to ask the guard, like, what movie was playing," he says. "And suddenly all of the guys around me are yelling ‘Keanu, look up!'" Did he? "No way, man. I beat it out of there. It was weird." He grins, and then offers to grate some Parmesan cheese for the pasta, first asking what side of the grater to use. Soon Phoenix shows up. Immediately, he's at Reeves's side in the kitchen, peeling garlic. Within minutes, though, the two escape to the balcony. Phoenix lights up a Camel. He cocks an eyebrow: "Doesn't figure, huh?" Then he exhales. "I know. I should quit."

Suddenly he and Reeves are off, excitedly exploring the possibility of doing Shakespeare together. They stand nose to nose—Phoenix newly bleached blond as part of his bid to play the young Andy Warhol in a future Van Sant biopic, Reeves dark-haired and tanned—like positive and negative images of each other. They sustain their banter throughout the meal, as one interrupts the other, but only to complete his thought.

GINI SIKES: Keanu, you've said you accepted a part in Idaho first, hoping River would do the film too.

KEANU REEVES: No. We were always together.

RIVER PHOENIX: He was lying. We were doing I Love You to Death, and we both got the Idaho script. We were driving in a car on Santa Monica Boulevard, probably on the way to a club, and were talking really fast about the whole idea. We were excited. It could have been like a bad dream—a dream that never follows through because no one commits, but we just forced ourselves into it. We said "OK, I'll do it if you do it. I won't do it if you don't." We shook hands. That was it.

PAIGE POWELL: River, what were the challenges you face from portraying a character who suffers from narcolepsy? When I first saw your narcoleptic attacks on film, for one tenth of a second they could have been perceived as comic. Then they seemed painful. It's clear that they come out of nowhere. How'd you know to do that?

PHOENIX: Mainly from Gus' descriptions of what Jake would do. Jake was a narcoleptic in Portland who worked with me. I spent a lot of time talking to him about why narcolepsy happens. I understood it completely from the medical and scientific standpoint, though they don't know exactly what it is. But when I was with Jake he never had a narcoleptic attack in front of me. After I'd done a few of the fits, Gus said they were exactly the way Jake had them.

REEVES: Do you think this film will cause narcolepsy? I mean, should parents watch out for their children?

PHOENIX: I would definitely stress that viewers should be very aware of the catching nature of narcolepsy.

REEVES: Should viewers wear special glasses?

PHOENIX: It's like the eclipse. If you look at it too long, you might get it.

POWELL: While we're on the subject of research, did the two of you hang out with the street kids in Portland?

PHOENIX: Totally.

REEVES: Yeah, a little bit.

SIKES: Were there ever times that you felt that asking street hustlers for information was somehow exploiting them?

PHOENIX: I think they were flattered that their story would be told.

REEVES: No, man. I don't feel that this story is a contemporary tale of the street. It's not current in the places or language. The only way this story is contemporary is in a larger sense, in its emotions and perhaps what goes on inside of some people...

POWELL: Aren't emotions timeless?

REEVES: Exactly. But I'm talking about how they're manifested in language, or, you know, in anything that people are doing. I'm just saying this film is not representative of the street scene in Portland.

PHOENIX: That's very true. If a kid from Portland saw this movie, he wouldn't think it was Portland street life. But it's our responsibility to go as deep as we can and to explore all the directions that might even be suggested in a script. Just so we have all the bases covered. Our research was extracurricular, it wasn't necessarily needed.

SIKES: Describe how you went about researching the lifestyle of street hustlers.

PHOENIX: I entered it through friends of Gus' who were already on the street, Scott and Gary. Gary died in a car wreck recently, from what I heard; God bless his soul. Being anonymous also helped us, I think.

SIKES: They had no idea you two were actors researching a role?

PHOENIX: No, no. It was all in character. We were just hangin'. If anything, they thought, This is another cat who's trying to take my spot on the street. There was maybe a little curiosity, but never any animosity or jealousy. Because it's a brotherhood on the street, man. You all watch for each other's backs. Because no one wants to see anyone get stabbed.

SIKES: So nothing was set up?

PHOENIX: Some street kids came over to Gus' house, and we met different people at different places. It was staged, in that sense. But the actual street stuff was just us, working on our own time. Like guerrillas [laughs]. It was very sensational for us. I though our main problem was to find out if we could be the real guys. Gus' choice was to use real street guys or us, so Keanu and I felt a great burden. We wanted to believe in this script and work out the problems.

SIKES: Both of you are very popular among adolescents. In particular, teenagers seem to relate to you, Keanu, because of your Bill and Ted persona. Was there any concern in your camp, say from your agent or manager, that playing a male prostitute would hurt your "image"?

REEVES: Hurt my image? Who am I—a politician? [laughs softly] No. I'm an actor. That wasn't a problem. But shooting was a very intense experience. I had just finished Point Break and was still into my character. I felt a bit of anxiety about Idaho. I was overwhelmed at what I had to do—it was like, Oh, no! Can I do this? I was afraid. But Gus and River made me fit in. Said, Let's do one bitchin' movie. I don't know about you, River, man—but I was introduced to so many elements through the guy I was playing. Real people. My imagination. Gus' interpretation. Shakespeare. It was rich! And it was just bottomless, man. You could go as far as you could go, you know?

SIKES: I remember reading an interview with Robert Downey Jr. after Less Than Zero, where he said he was afraid people would harass him because of his character. Has anyone reacted strongly to your rules?

PHOENIX. Fuck them. That's all I can say. A big capital F, a U-C-K, and THEM. T-H-E-M.

REEVES: Get a clue, man.

SIKES: So you haven't had any negative--

REEVES: No. I get negative shit all the time. I don't care.

PHOENIX: Do you think anyone would have taken this script ten years ago?

REEVES: Porno stars, maybe. Like maybe one of Warhol's crowd.

PHOENIX: Joe Dallesandro?

REEVES: Possibly one of those cats.

SIKES: One of your co-stars is a Warhol actor—Udo Kier, from Dracula and Frankenstein. Which brings me to a prurient question...

REEVES: It's your job!

SIKES: How comfortable were you guys filming your three-way sex scene with Udo?

PHOENIX: Well, I really didn't help matters. While we were doing our scene I said, "Just think, Keanu. Five hundred million of your fans will be watching this one day." Like a stupid idiot. I made him feel completely self-conscious. But Keanu rose above it. Gus scolded me endlessly the night after.

REEVES: Did he really?

PHOENIX: Yeah. He scolded the shit out of me. I almost cried. That was terrible of me. I was just trying to break the ice. You know, I thought it was humorous—I was trying to save Keanu from being freeze-framed by twelve-year-olds at home!

REEVES: Thanks, brother.

PHOENIX: Later on, Keanu was filmed naked with the beautiful Chiara [Caselli, who plays Scott's Italian girlfriend, Carmella]. That scene was really a drag. He was having a great time with this girl, but it was freezing cold and they were dying. So I think they were more worried about the temperature than the nudity. That took five hours.

SIKES: The scene with Udo must have been easier simply because you two were already good friends. How did you meet?

PHOENIX: Actually, I met Keanu through my ex-girlfriend Martha [Plimpton] while they were doing Parenthood—they were sucking face regularly. My brother, Joaquin [Phoenix], otherwise known as Leaf, was also in it. So, Leaf and Martha were his buddies before I was even a friend of his. Then I met up with him on I Love You to Death. And I liked the guy. I wanted to work with him. He's like my older brother. But shorter.

POWELL: Keanu, Scott is a rich kid who wallows in the gutters to rebel against his father, who's the mayor of Portland. Gus based Scott on Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV plays...

REEVES: Yeah, but in the Shakespeare world, Prince Hal turned out to be a good king. To avoid eternal strife he gets into these wars. All the dukes and lords were pretty happy because men were going off to die for a noble cause and people were being fed. But in Idaho, Scott is not connected to the people. He's got his own agenda. He just dogs everybody and goes his own way. So he doesn't have, like, the noble aspect. In the end, his father was perhaps very compassionate and concerned. Perhaps that's what makes it a modern tale.

SIKES: Were you concerned at all that Mike speaks in street vernacular throughout the film, whereas Scott goes in and out of Shakespearean verse? Did you think your switch in speech might seem jarring, Keanu?

REEVES: The Shakespeare stuff was an aspect of the script. Gus said it was something to do and think about it. So that was my game. I wasn't worried. It just seemed challenging and interesting to me.

PHOENIX: I was afraid of it not working.

REEVES: For me?

PHOENIX: No, for the entire film. I felt we needed to be very clear on how we set up the transition scenes between the mock Shakespeare stuff and the docu-drama stuff. There needed to be stepping stones to those scenes—so it wouldn't be like jumping from black to white to Technicolor. It was important to organize our thoughts and to support Gus stylistically.

REEVES: I wasn't aware of all the different styles going on in the film initially, though. You were looking through the camera a lot more than me.

POWELL: The thing I like so much about Gus and his work is his compassion. Mala Noche just ripped my heart out. In My Own Private Idaho, he's dealing with the search from home and family. Was that theme important to you in deciding to do this film?

REEVES: Oh, not for me.

PHOENIX: I have really strong feelings about the search for home and mother. I thought it was very, very touching. You just knew that someone who could come up with this premise would have something to back it with in terms of knowledge and experience. Which Gus has.

POWELL: What was it like working with Gus as a person—living in his house, on location, and so on?

PHOENIX: Gus just has those qualities that we all need to get back. Open eyes, open ears, a kid's stream of consciousness. You know, the things kids do—like putting their fingers up strange pipings in the house or acting all soft because they've screwed up and Mom's mad at them. That's Gus. Just being a kid. He was very collaborative, completely wide open. It was like a family operation—co-op style.

SIKES: How did you two manage on the set?

PHOENIX: Every morning, Matt [Ebert, production assistant] woke us up by singing show tunes. He'd drag us by our ears down the van.

REEVES: No, man. I was always there, prompt and ready.

PHOENIX: But he had to drag me by the ear down to the van. I'm very stubborn about getting up in the morning.

REEVES: Yeah, man. But I knew that Matt would grab me by the ear, too, so I'd just hang out.

PHOENIX: Yeah, Keanu would wait downstairs with his script in hand, ready to get I the van, and I would be upstairs fumbling for my clothes, although I usually sleep with my clothes on.

POWELL: Gus was pretty spontaneous about what scenes you shot each day, wasn't he?

PHOENIX: I have no clue. I don't know what he fuckin' decided to shoot what or where or when or why, man.

POWELL: Well, when you woke up in the morning didn't you know what scene you were going to shoot?

REEVES: Generally, yeah. I'm sure that was other people telling Gus, "You need to know what you're going to do tomorrow." I don't know if that was necessarily his personal impetus, but I think the machine was asking him what we were going to do so that we could be ready.

POWELL: The movie starts in Portland, moves to Idaho, then to Italy. While filming sequentially, did anything develop that you couldn't have anticipated at the beginning?

PHOENIX: The campfire scene was definitely a combination of Keanu and me working together off-set, fucking around with improv, talking about our characters. Getting deeper into it, we discovered a lot about our relationship within the film, and by the time we were ready to shoot the last scene in the States, we had enough insight to go a hell of a lot deeper than the script every told us it would.

SIKES: That's the scene where Mike tells Scott that he loves him.

PHOENIX: There was a lot of deep love [in the film]. You don't know until you see the dailies whether it comes across or not. But because we shot in sequence, we were watching the film unfold before us, and when that scene cam around we could just, like, ad-lib it.

POWELL: That campfire scene is very similar to the one you did in Stand by Me--

PHOENIX: The confession scene. It's also similar to a scene in Running on Empty. Gus did see both movies, so maybe he sampled them.

POWELL: When I visited the set in Italy, I noticed that you were both always really sweet. You'd have gone without sleep and be really tired; yet you were always considerate to the hotel clerks, limo drivers. Everyone.

PHOENIX: Oh, yeah. We're great guys. We are really wonderful people. I think Keanu and I are the nicest guys on the planet—with the exception of George Bush and Ronald Reagan.

REEVES: They are the sweetest guys. They're good to their clan. We should say thank you now that we have the opportunity. "Thanks, guys!"

PHOENIX: [laughs] I'm sorry. You gave us a compliment.

POWELL: O.K. But it's true—you did seem to demonstrate a genuine consideration for anyone you worked with on the set.

PHOENIX: But, seriously, we know what it's like to be on the bottom. The Lord Jesus Christ has given us a chance to be on top. So we're not going to abuse it. We're going to be very thankful for it and gracious about the luck that we had in our positions. We're very lucky young men. We do what we want, we get to be creative and make money.

REEVES: Right on, brother. Right on.

SIKES: So what else are you guys doing now?

PHOENIX: I want to buy a 16mm camera. I'm not committed to the idea of being a filmmaker, but I'd like to try some shorts. I really like documentaries. And I want to drive through the mountains where I used to live when I was doing this TV series [Seven Brides for Seven Brothers] when I was twelve. I'm going with my girlfriend.

REEVES: Every moment is precious. I'm trying to travel. I want to go to Paris. It's probably just a pipe dream. I'd like to read some books. Take some voice lessons.

SIKES: To do more Shakespeare, perhaps?

REEVES: Um, who knows? I really would like to do Shakespeare with River. I think we'd have a hoot. We could do A Midsummer Night's Dream or Romeo and Juliet.

PHOENIX: I'll be Juliet.

COPYRIGHT - INTERVIEW MAGAZINE

THEIR OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

BY JENNY COONEY - EMPIRE - APRIL 1992
River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves, the golden boys of Tinseltown, now team up for My Own Private Idaho, a gritty account of life among the rent boys. Jenny Cooney meets Hollywood's latest odd couple...

God, the physical sensation of ejaculating can be orgasmic," muses River Phoenix, with an embarrassed little chuckle.
Mmmm. This fairly forthright remark is, thankfully, not a comment on the 21-year-old's private affairs, but rather a dissection of the particularly explicit opening scenes of My Own Private Idaho, the independent arthouse hit of last year in the US, finally released in the UK this month. Phoenix, playing homosexual prostitute Mike Waters, head arched back, eyes clamped shut, is, as the receding camera makes all too clear, experiencing just such a "sensation", courtesy of a kneeling male client.

With such, er, unusual goings-on suffusing Gus Van Sant's sleazy homage to the world of male hustlerdom, My Own Private Idaho does seem something of a bizarre vehicle for Phoenix and co-star Keanu Reeves, current holders of that annual title of Hollywood's Hunkiest HeartThrobs. So, did no one - an agent, a loved one, maybe even a fellow thespian - have a quiet word with the lads, advising them that the most astute career decision for a major young movie star may not be to play, well, a rent boy?

"I decide my projects not based on any big strategy or how Hollywood or the critics will see me," explains Phoenix, sporting, like Reeves, tattered jeans, a dishevelled jacket and three-day stubble, Reeves' being merrily decorated with food stains. "If you have a belief in the story, you'll just commit. You don't think, 'What will people think of this?' If you do, you're ruined."

This, it is immediately apparent, will be the way of things during our little chat, with Phoenix opting to answer the questions, ever the thoughtful and talkative counterpoint to Reeves' generally silent, occasional grunter. Suddenly, however, Keanu Reeves, up until this point seemingly fascinated by a tiny piece of dust on the table in front of him, glances up.

"God, no, they'd be fired," he mumbles, apropos of nothing. "No, I mean, when I read it, it was just... I was really... it was... it's an amazing part. It's a weird story, so I was just… so I was just very happy to be there."

Er, right. And how did Keanu Reeves end up being there? Born to a Hawaiian-Chinese father and an English mother on September 2,1964, young Keanu - Hawaiian, he insists, for Cool Breeze Over The Mountains - was brought up in The Lebanon, moving to the US in his teens and almost immediately getting very heavily into various mood-altering substances ("I dug it. I'm so glad I've hallucinated in my life."). A would-be racing driver, inventor, nuclear physicist, conductor, his reasons for taking up this acting lark are typically vague.

"Let's see," he ponders, pushing back his floppy black locks which meet in the general vicinity of his nose. "I became an actor when I was 16... and I don't know why."

Keanu Reeves, in fact, is a young man not unlike Ted, the teenage hero of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey fame, a spaced-out dude who enjoys saying "man" a lot.

"I went through a phase of that self-consciousness a little bit," admits Reeves. "Cos I'm kind of goofy, right? I'd read interviews and go, 'Wow, I'm a pretty goofy dude.' So I got over it and now I'm just hopeless."

If Reeves is Ted, then Phoenix is straight out of a hippy version of The Brady Bunch, though far from happy with his popular image as Hollywood's resident environmentally friendly vegetarian fur-hater, the space cadet brought up by transient hippy parents and once even going on a public fast to protest over the treatment of migrant farm workers in the US.

"When River was nine years old, he caught his first fish," confirms his publicist, in one of the many public utterances to have dogged Phoenix over the years. "It flopped about on a rock for a while, then it died. Right then and there, River had this vision that he had killed a fellow living thing. He cried for three days and vowed never to eat meat or fish again."

It is difficult, is it not, to avoid the planet-earth-calling-River attitude when confronted with California psychobabble such as this?

"I don't care if people call me a goody-goody nature boy," barks Phoenix. "They can just shove it up their ass. The world's falling in on them. They're just gonna be blind ducklings."

The ultimate anti-Hollywood star, Phoenix now lives with his girlfriend of three years, a 26-year-old massage therapist, in their rented house in Gainesville, Florida, a burgh with a population of just 84,770, and home to the rest of the Phoenix clan younger sisters Rain, Liberty and Summer, and little brother Joaquin (formerly Leaf), last seen in Parenthood. So what exactly do the Family With The Strange Names get up to in Gainesville?

"I have some beautiful friends and I like to play guitar and I like to walk in nature," says River. "Life is multi-layered and there's no way I could do my life justice in one pat answer."

And the same for My Own Private Idaho?

"For sensational reasons, people might say that it's about gay street life," he admits, "which is really great for the gay community because it's important to have something to identify with. But it doesn't necessarily represent the gay community. You don't hear about Five Easy Pieces as a film about a guy who works on the oil rigs and he's heterosexual."

Er...

"It might take a few of these films before there's, like, a natural stride with the whole issue and then maybe one day it won't even be an issue, which is what I'm hoping."

Er...

"People just aren't at ease with their own sexuality," he goes on. "They have to call it 'Sex Education' and can't have it just like a course that relates to everything, because what is sex? Sex is mating. Sex is how we're made, that's what it really is…"

Er...

"I think that's because of people that can capitalise on sex and make money off it, and then, you know, fathers feel guilty about watching porno. They can't be open with their kids and explain that there's all sorts of sex and it's really not that bad."

Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Keanu Reeves!

"There's also all sorts of love," says Keanu slowly, still staring at his little speck of dust.

Keanu! Hold on! Now we have your attention at last, care to comment on how Hollywood will react to your involvement in such a potentially controversial movie?

"What is Hollywood?" he demands sullenly. "Is that a conglomeration of points of view?"

Keanu Reeves lets out a loud guffaw.

"Can I talk to Hollywood on the phone please?…"

COPYRIGHT - EMPIRE

THE LOST BOY

BY RYAN GILBEY - THE GUARDIAN - 24 OCTOBER 2003
Ten years ago, River Phoenix collapsed and died from a drug overdose. He was 23 years old, and the brightest in a generation of Hollywood actors that included Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp and Keanu Reeves. But where others have been made more famous by dying young, Phoenix's star has fallen. Why? Ryan Gilbey asks the actor's friends and colleagues where, if he had lived, he would be today.

If it had happened yesterday, you would have read about it on the internet, or received the bad tidings in an email or a text message. But when River Phoenix died from a drugs overdose outside Johnny Depp's Los Angeles club, the Viper Room, mobile phones were still the size of house bricks. In this country, the first announcements of his death appeared in the low-tech, large-print format of Teletext. Its gaily coloured lettering made no concessions to tragedy.

River Phoenix was famous, if not quite a household name. He hadn't yet made an unequivocally great film by the time he died on October 31 1993, but he had given enough accomplished performances to be recognised as an actor with the brightest of futures. He had been rewarded for some of his work - he landed an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a boy on the lam with fugitive parents in Running on Empty, and had been named best actor at the 1992 Venice film festival for playing an itinerant rent-boy in My Own Private Idaho.

Now it is rare to see his name in print unless it is being invoked as shorthand for corrupted innocence or curdled dreams. It has been a long time since his acting style, characterised by an intensity laced with tomfoolery but never entirely dispelled by it, was celebrated or even mentioned by critics. His kid brother Joaquin Phoenix, who excels in the kind of morally ambivalent roles that River had only begun to sample, is reluctant to discuss him: when I attempted to broach the subject once by pointing out that he and his brother had both played son to Richard Harris (River in Silent Tongue, Joaquin in Gladiator), the room instantly acquired an arctic chill.

But then, the media had baldly exploited Joaquin. He had accompanied his brother to the Viper Room at 10pm on October 30, along with River's girlfriend, the actress Samantha Mathis, and friends from Red Hot Chili Peppers and Butthole Surfers. An hour into the evening, River was convulsing on the sidewalk after ingesting a heroin-and-cocaine "speedball"; it later came to light that he had been scoring drugs after finishing his day's work shooting interiors for the film Dark Blood. If you had switched on any US TV or radio station a few hours after his death, you would have heard Joaquin's anguished 911 call being played repeatedly. Small wonder that he now freezes out anyone who trespasses on his memories with a Dictaphone.

The lurid circumstances of Phoenix's death boosted him into the headlines, but they also consumed his achievements. He is the forgotten man of late-20th-century film acting. Do the young fans of Leonardo DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire and Jake Gyllenhaal even know that there was an actor in the recent past who would make their idols look like bantamweights? At the time of his death, it seemed indisputable that his reputation would weather the scandal. Gus van Sant's film Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and REM's album Monster, both carried the dedication "For River", while Michael Stipe declared Phoenix's death to be "the most shattering experience of my life". Red Hot Chili Peppers dedicated a song from their album One Hot Minute to him. Natalie Merchant, Rufus Wainwright and Belinda Carlisle paid their respects in musical form.

Those heartfelt tributes were quickly replaced by hip, detached ones that had about them a vaguely taboo tang. Larry Clark incorporated images of the pubescent Phoenix into his photographic collection The Perfect Childhood. Phoenix's ghost appeared in the VIP queue at the opening of a new club in Bret Easton Ellis's novel Glamorama. Later, the ghost turned up again in Introducing Horror Hospital, a graphic novel by the cult writer Dennis Cooper and the illustrator Keith Mayerson. In that book, Phoenix drops in to pacify the bewildered hero. "If it's any consolation, death's not so bad," he says. "It's kind of laid back." The attention of Ellis and Cooper also helped ratify Phoenix's status as a gay icon, a position to which he had graduated after his tender scenes with Keanu Reeves in My Own Private Idaho.

These days, even those references have subsided; his celebrity has receded into the margins. Where Kurt Cobain became iconic in death, to the extent that his incoherent diaries could be flogged in legitimate bookshops, Phoenix's star dimmed. The sense that the world had been duped by his puritanical image took precedence over his life and work, and the contradictions that they revealed. He had been compared frequently, even before his death, to James Dean, but Phoenix's persona was nowhere near as clearly defined. He hadn't completed an iconic film, a Rebel Without a Cause or a Giant, to sharpen his memory in the popular imagination; only Stand By Me, made when Phoenix was still a child swaddled in puppy fat, came close.

Phoenix was 23 when he died. He had been downhearted when his Sneakers co-star Robert Redford had picked Brad Pitt over him for the lead role in A River Runs Through It, but he had more adventurous projects on the boil. When he died, he had yet to complete filming Dark Blood, a desert-bound horror story in which he played a sinister outsider who upsets the already precarious marriage between a former model (Judy Davis) and her husband (Jonathan Pryce). The shoot was reportedly an unhappy one, with Phoenix intercepting tensions between Davis and the director, George Sluizer. However, the producer, Stephen Woolley, recalls vividly the actor's excitement about making the picture.

"He was very animated and off-the-wall," he says. "And prone to do almost anything - he was skittish like a hyperactive kid. One minute he would be sitting there quietly, the next he'd be jumping up and doing slightly embarrassing things. I remember him kissing Judy Davis's feet at one point." Another of Dark Blood's producers, JoAnne Sellar, was on set throughout the shoot. "River was a very soulful human being," she says. "He always cared about everything around him and was extremely considerate of others - very cautious and concerned about everybody's safety. He seemed much wiser than his 23 years."

Woolley was also producing the actor's next film, Interview with the Vampire, for which he had signed to play the reporter Daniel Malloy, a part that went to Christian Slater after Phoenix's death. It was likely that Phoenix would have followed that by appearing as Susan Sarandon's son in Safe Passage; Sean Astin, later to star in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, eventually took the role. Phoenix had also expressed an interest in playing Rimbaud in Total Eclipse, which was eventually filmed with Leonardo DiCaprio as the scabrous poet. It was possible, too, that Gus van Sant would pick him to play Andy Warhol in a biopic that he had been planning for some years. "It dawned on me that you look a lot like Warhol did when he was, say, 18 to 25," the director told him in 1992. "It would be a stretch, but you could pull off playing the young Warhol."

It was not out of the question that Phoenix would eventually star in John Boorman's film Broken Dream, which Boorman had co-written with Neil Jordan, and to which Phoenix had committed before the movie's funding collapsed. He had been cast as Ben, a young illusionist in a dilapidated futuristic world, who is taught by his father to make objects, and eventually people, disappear.

"I met with River a few times," remembers Boorman. "He was streetwise, but at the same time there was this fragility about him. You felt that somehow he had to be protected. Many people felt that he was vulnerable and open." Woolley expresses the same sentiment. "He had total vulnerability. It was like being in the presence of a kid. When he did silly things you wanted to say, 'Don't do that,' or 'Be careful.'"

Peter Newman produced Dogfight, in which Phoenix starred shortly after receiving his Oscar nomination, and recalls a figure of some modesty. "He was very gentle and polite, and had this real sweetness to him. He brought Joaquin, who was about 14, with him on set the whole time. Unusually for a young, famous actor, there was no arrogance about River - no fancy clothes, no fancy car. He was always concerned about whether people would like his performance. We'd come out of screening the dailies and he would say to me, 'Am I all right?'"

He had been wise in his career choices, guided by his sprawling but close-knit family and his pugnacious agent, Iris Burton. It is likely that Phoenix's natural charisma would have shone through without industry clout - Sidney Lumet, who directed Running on Empty, decided that the actor "couldn't be ordinary if he tried". But with Burton behind him, Phoenix had all the bases covered.

People who knew about movies knew he was special from his daring work with independent directors such as Van Sant and Nancy Savoca. People who didn't care either way recognised his face from well-placed mainstream pictures such as Sneakers and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He had made it on to the bedroom walls and into the hearts of a younger audience, posing and pouting in teenybopper rags, and this initial heart-throb status seemed to vex him as much as the various environmental evils against which he railed tirelessly. It would be easy now to view Phoenix's work through the distorting gauze of his ugly death, but there had been conflict in the actor's persona from the start.

"He was very attractive," recalls Newman, "but he didn't try to enhance his looks. He was always sort of raggedy, his hair dirty and hanging down." Dirk Drake, his former tutor and friend, has said: "River hated being on the cover of [teen magazine] Tiger Beat. Pulling a fancy T-shirt down and exposing a nipple - he was totally ashamed of doing it but he understood that was part of it all: the mission, the purpose, the job. But he found it ridiculous at the same time."

Woolley sensed the same disparity. "River was gifted with phenomenal looks," he says, "and every casting director and producer had him in mind for any film where the pretty boy image was the main ingredient. But he was determined to go against that grain. His philosophy was movie actor, not movie star."

Looking at Phoenix's choice of roles now it is clear that there had been rumbles of unrest for some time. In Stand By Me, Phoenix played a bruiser who knew he deserved better than a dead-end future, but was smart enough to know he wouldn't get it. His final scene, in which he dissolves into air as the narrator reveals that his character later died in early adulthood, was poignant long before life imitated art.

There were other signs that Phoenix would not be nourished by conventional Brat Pack material. He played the title role in Jimmy Reardon, which was marketed like a John Hughes film but featured a scene in which Reardon acts out a rape fantasy for his girlfriend. Ironically for an actor so snug with his own kin, he experimented repeatedly with fractured family structures on screen - as a son paying for his parents' sins in The Mosquito Coast, Little Nikita and Running on Empty, or discovering that his brother was also his father in My Own Private Idaho.

It is an ironic touch typical of Phoenix's thwarted career that his finest performance was scarcely noticed. In Nancy Savoca's little-seen Dogfight, which went straight to video in Britain (and might as well have done in the US for all the attention it received), Phoenix flouted audience sympathies for the first time by playing a callous marine who competes with his pals to woo the ugliest woman in town. The film would be impressive even if it hadn't chafed against Phoenix's persona, but there is a special thrill in seeing him so stretched, so palpably edgy. It remains the most explicit and encouraging sign we have of what the future could have held.

"I'd been trying to get Dogfight made for five years," says Newman, "and it came together when Warners fell in love with the script just after River had got his Oscar nomination. They said, 'We'll do anything with River.' I was surprised he wanted to do the film, and I think it was tough initially for him to find the character because it was so different from who he was. We had the drill instructor who had trained the actors on Platoon; he was putting the cast through a week-long boot camp, which River found very difficult. I remember when he showed up on set after they had all got their Marine haircuts, and he had this very cold look in his eyes - he'd been through boot camp, and all of a sudden a bit of that was ingrained in him."

Newman believes that Phoenix was destined for darker territory. "I think he would have done edgier things, probably disappearing into the films he did rather than being the star. I could even have seen him doing some interesting supporting roles." JoAnne Sellar adds: "Given the kind of material River was drawn towards, I think that had he lived, he would have given the past 10 years over to a mix of independent and mainstream movies."

His friend Keanu Reeves made a successful leap into the mainstream with the Matrix trilogy, neglecting in the process the independent-minded films that launched him. But it is possible to imagine Phoenix clinging on to his idiosyncrasies even in a big-budget context, like his peers Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt.

"I suspect he would have gone on to play harder, more interesting characters," argues Woolley. "Robert Downey Jr is exactly the kind of guy that River would have become had he lived. There's a comparison there in the conflict between what pays the rent and what challenges you creatively, and also, I think, in the way they were both hung out to dry. I was quite surprised at the end when it became apparent that there was no one looking after River. Nobody could - he was a grown man, of course, but in another sense he was still a kid. The way he died was by visiting little sections of friends, none of whom were aware of the other, getting a little bit of this, a little bit of that. He was very cleverly playing everyone. He just had no one in his life who was strong enough to say, 'What are you doing now, where are you going?'"

Boorman was one of a small number of friends and colleagues invited to attend a memorial for the actor held at Paramount. "His mother said that she'd been in labour with River for 48 hours," he recalls, "and that she was convinced he hadn't really wanted to be born. She thought he had struck some sort of deal so that he wouldn't have to stay very long on this earth. People were invited to say things, and I had that feeling that people get at Quaker meetings, where they suddenly start to shake. So I got up and said, 'Why did he have to take all those drugs?'

"People shouted and screamed at me - they were horrified I could ask that question. But it seemed to me that it had been hanging in the air. His girlfriend stood up and said that she thought he could feel people's pain: the pain of the world. And he had to find a way to dull that pain. He simply couldn't deal with it."

COPYRIGHT - THE GUARDIAN

FILM RISES LIKE A RIVER PHOENIX FROM THE ASHES

PAPERMAG - 2007
Once upon a time in the 1980s I did a movie with River Phoenix that was released under the title A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon. I played the older woman who shares a... a... who spends the night with... uh... who seduces... or rather... maybe... who is seduced by... oh well. You get the point. They call these women "cougars" now but I like to think the scenes we had together were slightly more multi-dimensional than just another Kim Cattrall fling in Sex and the City. Certainly the filmmakers had much more in mind than just another Ferris Bueller rip-off. But the studio, hoping to capitalize on River's teen appeal, did everything they could do dumb down the picture and turn it into a run-of-the-mill goofy teen comedy. Which it was not. (The film also features Ione Skye and Matthew Perry -- both barely out of the womb and full of plenty of teen appeal themselves.)

One of the main appeals of doing this movie was working with its dynamic director William Richert. Bill had serious cred and cult status after having directed the amazing film Winter Kills (which I love, love, LOVE!) His enthusiasm and passion for moviemaking was unlike any I'd encountered before (or since). It was that passion that led him to rail against the studio when they took away Jimmy Reardon and tried to turn it into a teen flick. It failed miserably because it was too dark and weird for the 14-year old girls and too convoluted for older audiences. Well, the movie may have a second life -- in the form the director originally intended. If all the critics respond as positively as Nathan Rabin has in his review of the new cut for The A.V. Club we may find there is cinematic justice in the world after all.

I was alerted to the link through a friend of a friend in an email whose subject was "The Past of Ann Magnuson." Needless to say, this scared the bejeesus out of me. Oh Lord, I thought, what NOW? When I read the HILARIOUS piece Mr. Rabin wrote I was pleasantly surprised. Under the heading "My Year of Flops" I wasn't too optimistic at first. But the changes seem to have worked in the film's favor.

Bill Richert's new cut of the film (which is not so new, he showed it to all us surviving cast members several years ago) is now titled Aren't You Even Gonna Kiss Me Goodbye? He restored the original lush and melancholic Elmer Bernstein score (how on earth can anyone strip a film of an original Elmer Bernstein score???) and also restored the original narration, spoken by Bill himself. (Having a wiser, world-weary older man narrate the exploits of his younger self is vastly different than listening to a teenage boy be-bop his way through a series of affairs.) These two elements actually do change the nature and intent of the film dramatically. Happily Mr. Rabin thought so and deemed the film a "Sweet Surprise" rather than abject failure, which has been it's fate until now.

Bill, being the passionate fellow that he is, sent this cut out to the media with a 19-page letter defending his positions and mercilessly railing, again, against the suits at 20th Century Fox. Apparently in the letter it states that I (described as a "Lower East Side Sizzler" -- Ha Ha! Thanks Bill! Where do I sent the fruit basket?) have refused to discuss the movie. Or something like that. That's not true. It was actually one of the most fun movie-making experiences I've ever had. I just refused to talk to the predators who swept down after River tragically died that awful Halloween night at the Viper Room. He was a wonderful kid. So idealistic and sweet. I always thought he should have taken off with a backpack for Katmandu or gone to work in the Peace Corps after that film. Instead he got swept up in the fast lane which did not seem to suit his personality at all. Rest in Peace, River. I'm sure you are somewhere doing something far more important than making movies now.

COPYRIGHT - PAPERMAG

PODGRAM FROM STEPHEN FRY - 07 MARCH 2008 - BORED OF THE DANCE

MENTIONS RIVER - River's bit below - If you want to read the whole podgram click here
Let me tell you about a moment, if you don’t know it, in a most excellent film called Running on Empty, made by the great Sidney Lumet, who has never really known how to make a bad film. It stars Judd Hirsch off of of of Taxi. I don’t know why people say “off of”. “You’re that Stephen Fry off of QI, people say to me.” And once, “aren’t you off of of the telly?” Two ofs. Anyway. Judd Hirsch off of of of off Taxi, Christine Lahti of Golden Globes lavatory fame, Martha Plimpton and the effulgent River Phoenix. Oh and Steven Hill, an actor with whom I’m ever so slightly obsessed, has one scene as Christine Lahti’s father … quite brilliant. The premise essentially is that Hirsch and Lahti, as Arthur and Annie Pope, once blew up a napalm factory as a protest against the Vietnam war, they thought the factory was empty, but there was someone there who was mutilated in the explosion and the FBI has been on their tail ever since. River Phoenix is their musically very gifted son, born on the run, who practises piano on a dummy keyboard, so unsettled are their lives. So, we witness them escape one near FBI bust and they arrive in a new town with new identities, River dyes his hair and enrols in the high school in this new town as Michael Manfield. He is destined to fall in love with the music teacher’s daughter, Martha Plimpton, but that’s later. We see him arrive, slightly late, at the music class. He gives Ed Crowley, who plays the teacher, his registration documents and is told to find himself a seat. Crowley continues with his lesson: he plays two pieces of music through speakers. One is classical, the other is, I think, a Madonna track. Crowley asks the class what the difference between the two is. There is the usual dumb silence you get when you ask a class of teenagers anything. Eventually one kid sticks up his hand and suggests, “one of them is good and the other is bad?” Crowley isn’t having that. “A matter of opinion, surely?” River shyly puts up his hand.

“Yes, Mr …. Manfield?”

And this is River’s answer: “You can’t dance to Beethoven.”

Crowley is delighted by this.

You can’t dance to Beethoven.
COPYRIGHT - STEPHEN FRY

THOUGH I HADN'T SEEN HIM IN OVER TWENTY YEARS, I KNEW I'D MISS HIM FOREVER

WWDN - WIL WHEATON - 21 MARCH 2011
I stood in the lobby of the Falcon Theater in Toluca Lake, and looked at Twitter while I waited for the rest of the guys to arrive. The walls were covered with posters from productions like CHiPs: The Musical and It's A Stevie Wonderful Life. Being in a theater during the day, when it's just a building with a stage, instead of the performance space it becomes when an audience fills the seats makes me feel like I'm getting to see The Haunted Mansion with all the lights on, like I'm in a secret place that few people get to see, and I felt an almost imperceptible longing to perform in a play tug gently but insistently at that thing in my being that makes me an actor.

Someone came over and started talking to me. I made polite conversation, but I don't remember what or who we talked about. This was an emotional day for me (though I didn’t know precisely how emotional it would be until later), and while I didn’t want to be rude, I wasn’t in a particularly chatty mood. It was the first time Corey Feldman, Jerry O’Connell and I would be in the same place since 1986 or 1987. We were technically there to give some interviews to promote Stand By Me’s blu-ray release, but -- for me at least -- it was much more than that. It was a reunion.

We made Stand By Me twenty-five years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, a special blu-ray disc has been produced. Among the obligatory special features is a feature-length commentary that Rob Reiner, Corey, and I did together while watching the movie a couple months ago. On that day, I was apprehensive: what would they think of me? Would our memories match up? Would the commentary be entertaining and informative? …who would be the first to talk about River, and how would we all react to it?

It turns out that I had nothing to worry about then. It was a joy to watch the movie with them, and I was especially happy to discover that, after a very troubled life, Corey seems to be doing really well. Rob made me feel like he was a proud father and we were his kids, and when we talked about River, it was … well, private. I’ll leave it at that.

So as I stood there in the lobby, waiting for a familiar face to come through the door, I was happy and looking forward to our reunion without nervousness or apprehension. This stood in marked contrast to all the times I reunited with my friends from TNG when I was younger (my problem, not theirs), and I was grateful for that.

A few minutes later, the door opened, and an incredibly tall, handsome, well-dressed man walked through it.

“Holy crap,” I thought, “Jerry grew up.”

It was such a stupid thought, but there it was. I see Jerry on television all the time, and I knew that he was tall and handsome and only two years younger than me, but I had that strange disconnect in my mind that can only come from not seeing someone for about twenty years and I simultaneously did and did not recognize him.

I was standing near some food on a table, and Jerry walked up to grab a sandwich. As he reached toward the table, we made eye contact.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi, I’m Jerry,” he said, with a friendly smile.

“I’m Wil,” I said, “We worked on this movie together twenty-five years ago.”

In a few seconds that seemed to go on for minutes, I saw him look at me in disbelief, surprise, recognition, and joy. He flashed a smile that lit up the room and wrapped me in a hug.

“Oh my God, dude,” he said, “I can’t believe it’s … wow! You’re -- I -- Jesus, look at you!”

I smiled back, and strangely noted that my son is taller than him. “Look at you!” I said.

We talked as much as we could, trying to compress two decades into ten minutes, before he had to go to the make-up chair. As he walked away, my brain tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You know, he’s married to Rebecca Romijn. When he’s talking about his wife, that’s who he means.” “I know, brain. I know,” I thought back, “don’t be weird. Be cool, man.” A moment later, Richard Dreyfuss walked into the lobby, followed fairly quickly by Rob and then Corey.

Before I had time to do more than Twitter about how surreal it felt to see them all, we were all gathered together and directed from the lobby into the theater for our first interview. On the way in, I said to Corey, “I feel like there are all these famous, successful people here … and me.”

He laughed and said, “I was thinking exactly the same thing!”

Before I could make a witty zinger, he clarified, “about myself, I mean. Famous people and me, not, like, famous people and you.”

I laughed. “I knew what you meant, man,” I said.

It was the kind of friendly, enjoyable, effortless conversation we couldn’t have when we were younger, and I was glad for it.

There were five chairs set up for us in a semi circle. Our names were on pieces of paper so we knew where to sit. I was between Rob and Corey, and Jerry and Richard sat to Corey’s left. When we all sat down, Rob looked down the row of seats and softly said to me, “it feels like there should be an empty seat here for River.”

People ask me about River all the time. He and I were close during filming, and for about a year or so after filming, but the sad truth is that he got sucked into a lifestyle that I just don’t have room in my life for, and we drifted apart. When he died, I was shocked and horrified, but I wasn’t completely surprised. I didn’t feel a real sense of loss at the time -- the River I knew and loved had been gone for a long time at that point -- but I felt sad for his family, and angry at the people around him who didn’t do more to help him help himself. Since he died, when I've talked about him, I've felt like I’m talking about the idea of him, instead of the person I knew, if that makes sense.

But when Rob said that to me, with such sadness in his eyes, it was like I’d been punched in the stomach by eighteen years of suppressed grief. I knew that if I tried to say anything, all I would do was cry, and I didn’t know if I’d be able to stop. I took a deep breath, swallowed hard, and nodded. “Yeah,” I whispered.

Later that day, when I’d had time to think about it and was recounting the whole thing to my wife, Anne, I said, “I think that having all of us together -- the surviving members of the cast -- made me feel like he really wasn’t there for the first time since he died. I don’t mean to be callous or anything like that, but that’s what it took to make his death and his absence a real thing that I could feel, instead of an event that I wasn’t part of but am forced to talk about more often than I’d like.”

I spent much of the next few days remembering all the things we did together during production, thinking about how much I looked up to him and how much I loved his entire family. I don’t know what would have happened to us if he hadn’t overdosed, if he ever would have come back from the edge, or if we would even have had anything in common … but when he was fifteen and I was thirteen, he was my friend. That’s the person I knew, and that’s the person I miss.

We talked about River in the interview, of course, and I think Richard put it best when he said that there is this monster in Hollywood that everyone knows about. It lurks just out of view, and occasionally it reaches up and snatches someone … and it got River.

Richard also talked about why we are actors, and what it means to him to be creative. It was so poetic and inspiring, that almost imperceptible longing to perform in a play I felt in the lobby turned into an overwhelming compulsion. Distracted by the responsibilities of every day life, it’s easy for me to forget why I love and need to perform. It’s easy to forget how satisfying it is to create a character, to discover something magnificent in a script or a scene, and then bring those things to life with other actors in front of an audience.

The entire interview lasted for close to an hour, I guess, and will be edited down to something between three and six minutes. I hope that the producers will cut together something longer, or even run the entire thing online somewhere, because it was one of the rare conversations that I think a lot of people, especially artists, would enjoy listening to.

When all of our interviews were done, I asked Jerry if he’d like to get together when he was on hiatus to have a proper conversation and really catch up on stuff. He said he’d like that, so we traded e-mail addresses. I didn’t expect him to actually want to see me once the glow of seeing each other for the first time in two decades faded, but we’re actually planning it, which delights me. Rob hugged me and made me feel like he was proud of me, and Richard blew me away with the work he’s doing for The Dreyfuss Initiative.

As I drove home from the theater I was overwhelmed by conflicting emotions. It was wonderful to see those guys again, and especially to reconnect with Jerry, but it was also tremendously sad to truly feel River’s loss for the first time. That turbulent mix of joy and sorrow stayed with me for several days, which is why I haven’t been able to write about it for almost a week.

Most actors will go their entire careers without doing a movie like Stand By Me, or working with a director like Rob Reiner. I got to do both when I was 12. For a long, long time, I felt like I needed to top or equal that, and it wasn’t until I was in my early 30s that I accepted that it’s unlikely to happen -- movies like Stand By Me come along once in a generation.

But getting to spend a few hours remembering the experience with Rob, Jerry, Corey and Richard, free of the burden to prove to them that I was worthy of Stand By Me’s legacy, was something I will cherish for years. I just wish that River was here to enjoy it with us.

COPYRIGHT - WIL WHEATON

REMEMBERING RIVER PHOENIX

BY BILL DEAN - GAINESVILLE SUN - 04 NOVEMBER 2013
In "Stand By Me," he plays a rough-hewn kid whose inner kindness makes him a leader among his friends. In "Running on Empty," he plays a piano prodigy with a chance to attend Juilliard but whose anti-war parents are on the lam for the long-ago bombing of a napalm lab. And in "My Own Private Idaho," he plays a young street hustler, struggling to find his way in an uncaring world.

The first, directed by Rob Reiner, is considered a classic coming-of-age tale of boys growing up in a small town. The second won River Phoenix, at age 19, a Best Supporting Actor nomination from the Academy Awards.

The third remains a critically lauded high point among his 14 films — one that earned him national accolades as Best Actor from the National Society of Film Critics and the Independent Spirit Awards.

Today, those films and others, including roles with Harrison Ford in "The Mosquito Coast" (1986), Sidney Poitier in "Little Nikita" (1988) and Robert Redford among others in "Sneakers" (1992), remain accessible testaments to his accomplishments and acclaim as an actor.

On the 20th anniversary of his death, at age 23 on Oct. 31, 1993, they don't tell the fuller story of a life whose palette of multi-colored hues transcended the silver screen. Phoenix's legacy includes a young life lived beyond the screen with care and concern for others, and involvement in a variety of issues from environmental concerns to human and animal rights.

Such a legacy is one reason his mother, Heart Phoenix, and others began the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding in 2011, a Gainesville-based entity that offers educational opportunities to teach and advance non-violent solutions to conflict, whether bullying in schools or general violence in society.

Heart Phoenix describes her son's ability to see beyond other's outward mistakes or behavior as "one of the most important qualities that he had."

"He could see who people really were, beyond their mistakes or beyond their behavior," she says. "That's kind of what the center is all about, and that's why I feel we have the success we have, because we work in the juvenile justice system. We work with people that have problems. And we don't really look at the problems, we look at the potential."

Potential was something Heart Phoenix's eldest son showed at a very early age. The Phoenix family, which along with Heart and River included her former husband, John Lee, and River's siblings, Rain, Joaquin, Liberty and Summer, were involved in activism and missionary work, moving throughout the United States and to other countries including Venezuela in South America.

From an early age, River showed an ability and talent for music — something that would become a lifelong passion after he taught himself to play guitar at the age of 4.

"As a family, it was part of our life," Heart Phoenix says about music and singing. "But he clearly just jumped on it."

By the time River was 5 and sister Rain was 3, the two began singing for others.

"He and his sister used to enter talent contests. And they would win; they were so talented," she says.

After the family moved to Los Angeles, River, Rain and the other children sang on street corners and began to draw crowds.

"He always loved music, so he always continued singing; all the kids," Heart says. "They'd sing on the streets in Hollywood. They would just practice and sing."

River's talent for music helped pave the way for his acting career; the children's musical performances drew the attention of casting directors. And one of River's earlier appearances in front of a camera was for a TV commercial related to music — in this case, a guitar commercial, when River was 10, Heart says. "It had to be something we believed in. We didn't eat junk food, we didn't eat meat, we didn't eat animal fat, and we didn't drink milk. So it had to be something like a guitar commercial that they would do, because we wouldn't do just any commercials."

Following the commercial, River auditioned for — and won — a role in the CBS TV series, "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," which featured the performers, including River, in musical numbers from 1982 to 1983. River won a Young Artist Award for Best Young Actor in a Drama Series for his work on the show in 1984.

Roles in feature films soon followed for River: First in "Explorers," Joe Dante's sci-fi fantasy in 1985, and then in "Stand By Me," directed by Rob Reiner.

In 1987, the family moved to Florida and established a permanent home in the Gainesville area, when River was 17.

"My parents lived in South Florida, and we loved warm weather and we didn't want to live in L.A.," Heart Phoenix says. "The air was not so good, it was crowded, and it just didn't feel great."

After the family moved to Gainesville, River formed the rock band Aleka's Attic with his sister, Rain, and others. The group, for which River sang, played guitar and wrote material, performed a number of times in the Gainesville area including at the Hardback Cafe in the Sun Center.

"His music was very ethereal, his lyrics were very intellectual and very colorful," says Joseph Saccocci, a Gainesville musician and friend of River's who, at River's request, recorded the performances to have a record of such shows and possibly incorporate some of the musical ideas later in a studio. "I thought his musical phrasing, the way he would put a song together, was extremely ahead of his time and very sophisticated."

Among the band's higher-profile appearances was performing during a presidential campaign rally for Bill Clinton and Al Gore at the University of Florida campus in October 1992.

The performance was just one of many benefit or activist shows that Aleka's Attic participated in, Heart Phoenix says.

"They always did these kinds of benefit shows, for activism or meaningful events. He did 800-people shows to save America's forests. So he was always available and wanted to use his gifts and talents for reasons," Heart says.

And River remained committed to his activism throughout his film career and while playing with the band, she says.

In 1993, River established the nonprofit organization, Eco-Rica Preservation Inc., and some of that group's leftover seed money would later be used to help start the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding in 2011.

"When Robert Redford was rising up as an activist, River was rising up as a kid, and he took it steps further," Heart says. "I don't think anybody ever heard of the word 'vegan' until River came along."

While Aleka's Attic never released a full album while the band was active, some of its songs were included on a PETA benefit album and soundtrack: "Tame Yourself," released in 1991, which included the band's song, "Across the Way." And the soundtrack for River's acclaimed film, "My Own Private Idaho," included the Aleka's Attic song, "Too Many Colors," also in 1991.

"The thing about his music is it was so far ahead of his time that even today it's timeless," Saccocci says. "You can't define it as 'Oh, that's very '80s or '90s' or 'That sounds like this.' It was as unique as he was as an actor."

On Oct. 31, 1993, during a break in making his final film, "Dark Blood," River died at age 23 in Los Angeles from what an autopsy concluded was an accidental drug-related death due to heart failure.

He had gone to perform at the Hollywood club, The Viper Room. And today Saccocci believes River's sensitivity and passion for his music explains something that isn't widely known and wasn't considered at the time.

In film and music circles, actors trying to cross over into music receive far more scrutiny and skepticism than musicians who crossover into films, Saccocci says. Despite the fact that River had always been a musician, and, in fact, had begun his artistic life as a musician, there was a misconception among some that he was simply an actor trying to crossover into music, Saccocci believes.

River likely felt extra scrutiny and pressure the night he arrived with a guitar to perform in a club full of Hollywood insiders, Saccocci says. "River always felt so much pressure being scrutinized that way, that I think that was probably a reason why he maybe overdid it that night.

"I know he dabbled. But the way it went down ... people think he was a lot more involved in drugs than he was. I think that was an isolated incident that night because of the drugs and the pressure."

The year after Phoenix died, Saccocci built a wooden bridge over a river at Kanapaha Botanical Gardens in Phoenix's honor. A plaque on the bridge read "In loving memory of River Phoenix." The bridge lasted about five years before it had to be replaced with a metal bridge, said Don Goodman, who was then director of the gardens. (click here for more information)

Twenty years after her son's death, Heart Phoenix points to the person he was and the things he stood for, and how his legacy continues in a fitting way today, in part through the River Phoenix Center for Peacebuilding.

"I'm proud of him," she says. "As a mother and as a friend, what I loved and what I think is his legacy is his generosity of spirit, and his kindness and his authenticity; the way that he treated people.

"That to me is the most important part of River."

COPYRIGHT - GAINESVILLE SUN

HOW RIVER PHOENIX'S COMING OF AGE ANTICIPATED MY OWN

BY REBECCA BENGAL - VOGUE - 23 AUGUST 2015
River By Bruce Weber - Vogue - July 1990
He was born, hard to believe, 45 years ago today, in Madras, Oregon, which later became a setting for the dreamy, disoriented roadside flashbacks in My Own Private Idaho. He was given the name River Jude; River for Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha, Jude for “Hey Jude.” His last name then was Bottom. So, yes . . . River Bottom. His siblings were Rain, Liberty, Summer, and Joaquin. His parents, fruit pickers and missionaries, took the family to Venezuela where they sang on the street for money; only after splitting from the Children of God movement and stowing away on a cargo ship to Florida did they change their surname to Phoenix, after the Ancient Egyptian symbol of rebirth. Later, in Los Angeles, in a somewhat more settled-down life but still singing on street corners, young River was discovered, cast in commercials and films, eventually Stand By Me, where his performance as Chris Chambers first marked him as one of the most talented and promising actors in Hollywood—a prophecy he would live long enough to only partially fulfil.

Most of the early parts of this biography were chronicled in the terrible magazines I obsessively collected about River Phoenix, along with the standard height and weight and astrological and favorite color info. I didn’t care about that stuff. I was going to cut out all that and pin up his pictures all over my wall. I knew it was beneath River anyway: He said elsewhere that he lied to reporters half the time, and that made me like him even more. The favorite idiotic headline back then was usually some variation on “River Is Deep,” which seemed to me to hit even below the dubious abilities of whoever was running the show at Teen Beat. But River was deep. It was because of him, for instance, that I became a strict vegetarian in my small North Carolina town where no one had heard of tofu; for nearly a decade after he died I still didn’t eat meat. River was older; River was wiser. River was hot.

He was for me, simultaneously idol and crush, cast in the dual role of being both who I wanted to be like and who I wanted to make out with. I didn’t relate to the vapid girlfriend characters that proliferated on screen—the release of The Diary of a Teenage Girl this summer makes all the more apparent the lack of any girl characters at the time who were not only cool and worth aspiring to emulate, but remotely relevant to anything resembling real life. Meanwhile the boys were permitted to be dirty and funny and free.

River had some years on me, sure, but he was just the right age to look up to: older brother, older crush, the first person I saw every morning on the wall of my bedroom. His movies were about my own struggles—growing up, first loves and sex and first heartbreak, rebelling against your family, against the world; being drawn to darkness and escapism, but still, deep down, trying to be a good person. His coming of age anticipated mine.

“Kids lose everything unless there’s someone there to look out for them. And if your parents are too fucked up to do it, then maybe I should,” said River-as–Chris Chambers, tough and baby-Brando cool with his pack of smokes rolled up in his T-shirt, telling off his hoodlum brother Eyeball, his teachers, his parents, running away into the woods and perilously over a train trestle with his three best friends to find “the body of a dead kid.” I spent my own summers building forts in the woods, sneaking through bridge tunnels, desperate for that kind of adventure, as morbid as their mission was. He was sensitive and sage but he also had a pretty stupid, sarcastic, perverse sense of humor that struck a nerve with me, as vital a part of growing up as losing your virginity, gaining a sense of your own mortality, figuring out who your true friends were, and learning how to tell your authorities, now and then, to fuck off. Put me in front of a screening of Stand By Me and I can still recite every line.

In the canon of River Phoenix, the best of which also includes My Own Private Idaho, The Mosquito Coast, Running on Empty, and the underrated Dogfight and The Thing Called Love, there is a lot of learning to tell authorities, parents and otherwise, to fuck off, but that’s mediated within a larger, moral context: How do you simultaneously rebel against your parents while still loving them? How do you stand up to the rest of the world and its deep flaws, while also finding your own way in it?

Here’s River as Charlie Fox, son of eccentric inventor Allie (Harrison Ford), who uproots his family to a Central American jungle in The Mosquito Coast, Peter Weir’s film based on the Paul Theroux novel: “Once I had believed in Father and the world had seemed small and old. Now he was gone and I wasn’t afraid to love him anymore. And the world seemed limitless.”

Running on Empty, directed by Sidney Lumet, for which Phoenix was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, is loosely inspired by the Weather Underground—his character’s parents, played by Christine Lahti and Judd Hirsch, jumpsuit-clad seventies radicals, are in constant hiding from the government for an activist bombing they took part in years prior, and as a result the entire family abides by a code of constant name changes, hair dyes, an implicit agreement to never become close enough to anyone to reveal their true selves and thus incriminate the family. Their tiny homespun parties, dancing around the house to “Fire and Rain” are anonymous, bittersweet ones—“On our birthday, we’re all called Sam,” Danny tells his girlfriend Lorna, played by River’s real-life girlfriend Martha Plimpton. It’s the ultimate overprotectiveness, loving but suffocating. Wanting to go to college is as shattering a rebellion as falling in love, and in the film River does both.

Even My Own Private Idaho, Gus Van Sant’s brilliant 1991 film co-starring Keanu Reeves, is essentially a film about family, as much as it is a gay film, as much as it is a drug film, as much as it is a road movie—“a crazy quilt of family romances” as critic Amy Taubin describes it. River’s narcoleptic street hustler character searches for reconciliation and connection, with such beautifully wrought, homesick desperation that he rebels even against himself. “He’s put his lips as close to any street-gutter ooze as you can,” Phoenix told The New York Times. “His cut-open flesh is as close to a stone brick wall as anything. He’s part of the street. He’s like a rat.” It’s the darkest turn in Phoenix’s career; looking back now, it’s hard not to see it foreshadowing the end of his own life, two years later, and fates that very nearly befell certain people in mine. But by then, he’d gone somewhere beyond me.

“Everyone should survive their first rebellions. Dying defeats the whole point,” wrote Miranda July of River earlier this year in Vogue. If I’d relied upon River during my own coming of age, the sense of loss I felt at outliving his was a distant survivor’s guilt, coupled with a loss that a larger world has publicly acknowledged, in angry and heartfelt and honorific ways, in song lyrics and apologies and speculation.

I don’t want to dwell on the details of River Phoenix’s death—today would have been his birthday after all, and it’s pointless, I think, to endlessly pontificate on what his life would have been had he lived beyond his earliest years to see it. If he were here, I could only thank him for helping me make it through mine.

COPYRIGHT - VOGUE

ETHAN HAWKE STILL STRUGGLES WITH RIVER PHOENIX DEATH

BELFAST TELEGRAPH - 04 APRIL 2016
Actor Ethan Hawke still finds it weird to talk about his former co-star River Phoenix, more than 20 years after his death.

The 45-year-old worked with the late actor as a teenager in 1985 science fiction movie Explorers, the film debut for both stars, and now, 23 years after Rivers' drug-induced cardiac arrest death in 1993, the Boyhood star still laments the loss of his friend.

"It’s weird to talk about River now," he told Vulture. "It’s still hard for me not to think about how great he would’ve been in a role like this one in (his new movie) Born to Be Blue; how wonderful it would’ve been to see more performances; what he would’ve accomplished as an adult."

Ethan's acting career has gone from strength to strength since his debut, but River isn't the only co-star he has mourned the loss of along the way.

In February 2014, his Before the Devil Knows You're Dead onscreen brother Philip Seymour Hoffman died, aged 46, from an accidental heroin and cocaine overdose, and to this day, Ethan continues to use him as an inspiration.

"Anytime I did a play, I would play a game with myself that Philip Seymour Hoffman was in the audience: 'OK, Phil’s out there, so you better do your best'." he confessed. "I also used to have this picture of him - I never told him this - on my desk. It was a New York Times profile whose headline was: 'Portrait of an actor as an artist' with a close-up shot of his face.

"I see it now and he looks so unhappy, but at the time I thought he looked so cool, so deep. And when I’d read scripts I’d think, 'What would Phil do?'"

COPYRIGHT - BELFAST TELEGRAPH

STAND BY ME 30TH ANNIVERSARY - AN ORAL HISTORY

BY BRENT LANG - VARIETY - 28 JULY 2016
‘Stand by Me’ Oral History: Rob Reiner and Cast on River Phoenix and How Coming-of-Age Classic Almost Didn’t Happen

It’s been three decades since “Stand By Me” became the little drama that could, catapulting River Phoenix to stardom, establishing Rob Reiner as a director on the rise, and racking up big ticket sales on a paltry budget.

The story of four friends from small town in Oregon, hiking into the countryside in search of the body of a boy who has been hit and killed by a train, is an unlikely coming-of-age tale. Yet in Reiner’s sensitive hands, it becomes a meditation on mortality — one that transcends its 1950s setting to have a universal appeal.

“Stand By Me” is unique in other ways. For one thing, it rivals “The 400 Blows” in its ability to evoke complex characterizations from young actors. Not only Phoenix as spiritual leader Chris Chambers, but co-stars Wil Wheaton as sensitive Gordie Lachance, Jerry O’Connell as wisecracking Vern Tessio, and Corey Feldman as hot-tempered Teddy Duchamp, provide finely wrought portraits of boys on the cusp of adulthood.

For Reiner, best known at the time for playing Michael “Meathead” Stivic in “All in the Family,” it was a chance to step out of the shadow of his father, legendary comedian Carl Reiner, and to position himself as a director of depth and nuance. It launched a career that would see him directing the likes of “Misery,” “When Harry Met Sally…,” and “The Princess Bride.”

But though it is now considered a classic, “Stand By Me” struggled to make it to screens. Financed outside the studio system after the cult success of “This is Spinal Tap,” after nearly every Hollywood player passed on the script, the film was nearly derailed after its funding collapsed right before filming. It then had to hustle to find distribution. To mark its 30th anniversary, Variety spoke to the cast and creative team behind the film.

Bruce A. Evans, producer and co-writer: Every studio in town had turned us down. The consensus was that no one would be interested in a story about four 12-year old boys on a railroad track. It was dark, there was not a girl in it, no one knew how to sell it. Of course, what attracted us to it was that it was a coming-of-age story without girls or buying rubbers or first kisses or all of that. It was about kids becoming aware of their own mortality.

Raynold Gideon, producer and co-writer: We ended up at Embassy. Embassy at the time was the last station before the desert. After that there was nothing.

Rob Reiner, director: Originally Adrian Lyne was involved in it and he had just finished “9 1/2 Weeks” and he was really exhausted. They sent me the script and I thought, there’s a lot of great characters here, good dialogue, but there’s no focus to it. I spent the next four days riding around Los Angeles, trying to think of a way to make it work. It was giving me headaches trying to figure it out.

Andrew Scheinman, producer: The huge turning point was realizing that the focus on the script needed to be on Gordie and not Chris. It’s a story of a little kid feeling unappreciated by his father and then he realizes that’s his father’s problem, not his.

Reiner: In the initial version, Gordie was just one of the four characters. He was an observer. He wasn’t the main focus of it. Then I was like this is about a kid who has insecure feelings about himself. He’s driven to go see this body, because he never cried at his brother’s funeral and his father always paid more attention to his older brother who died.

Evans: We resisted it at first and then we saw where he was going. Rob does that stuff very well. Maybe it’s part of his personality, growing up with a father who was very famous.

Casting the four young leads was a painstaking process, with the directors sorting through a litany of up-and-coming actors, reading the likes of Ethan Hawke and Sean Astin, before finding the right crew of boys. That wasn’t the only casting headache. Even after shooting much of the film, Reiner became convinced that he needed a different actor to play the older Gordie Lachance, who narrates the story and appears at the end.

Wil Wheaton (Gordie Lachance): It felt like the audition process went on forever. They settled on a dozen potential actors and were mixing and matching us together. A couple years before that, I had been taken to an actor coach, and I remember asking what you do if you can’t cry in a movie, and he said, ‘they’ll just put lemon juice in your eyes or onions.’ It was a terrible answer. It really freaked me out. I remember saying in one of the callbacks, ‘I’m not comfortable crying in movies.’ And then I walked out of the room and one of the writers, Ray Gideon said, ‘you’ve got to go tell the director you’re joking, because that’s an important part of the character.’ I almost lost the role all because of that terrible acting coach.

Reiner: We saw so many people. I can’t remember them all. Mostly, I remember being incredibly moved by River when he came in to read for Chris Chambers.

Jerry O’Connell (Vern Tessio): I was practicing with my mom and dad, and they said, ‘you’re going to have a meeting with the guy from ‘All in the Family.” I thought I was going to meet Carroll O’Connor.

Reiner: Jerry was so good and so natural. He came in and said, ‘hey you’re the guy from Channel 5.’ That’s where they showed ‘All in the Family’ reruns.

Evans: The hardest part to cast was Corey Feldman’s. We couldn’t find anybody that could be that angry. River was so good that we thought at one time about switching him to that part.

Corey Feldman (Teddy Duchamp): When I did it, Rob was impressed a lot by the reality in my delivery. I didn’t have any problem getting to the emotional places. My life was such turmoil and havoc. I didn’t have the best home life. I didn’t lead a normal life. I was aware of that from a very early age. I remember being 7 years and coming home from school thinking, am I going to get abused today? Am I going to get beaten today? Most kids don’t have to think about this kind of stuff. They’re not thinking they’re going to get hit by their parents because they’re not doing well enough in school, which will prevent them from getting a work permit, which will prevent them from being an actor.

Reiner: Finding the narrator was tricky. There was a guy named David Dukes and he did great, but his voice wasn’t what I wanted. It didn’t have the right tone. So I tried other actors, friends of mine that came in. Ted Bessell from ‘That Girl’ came in and Michael McKean, but they never had the right voice. Then I thought of Rick Dreyfuss. He suggested, ‘why don’t I just shoot it. I don’t have to just be the voice. I’ll be the guy at the end too.’

Richard Dreyfuss (Older Gordie, Narrator): I don’t really remember it. It was 30 years ago, if you’d asked me yesterday, did I do the voiceover? I would have said ‘yes.’ Did I appear in it? I would have said, ‘I don’t think so.’

Wheaton: The goal was all about getting us out of our own way, so we could relax.

Reiner: You never know with kids. They have no craft. Sometimes they have great instincts, but they have no craft.

O’Connell: Rob was so great with kids. He was like the fifth boy in ‘Stand By Me.’ For the first two weeks, we didn’t say a line. We didn’t rehearse. He locked us in a room and we just played games and hung out and we became friends.

Reiner: After the two weeks, by the time we got to shooting they were a well-oiled machine. There’s one scene in there, it doesn’t look like anything, because you just watch a movie and you don’t know what’s involved with it. Teddy is going crazy and he’s screaming at the junk man, “my father stormed the beach at Normandy.” They’re walking away and it’s a four shot. And there’s no cuts until the very end. If you look at the way they talk to each other, they all pick up their cues at the right time. The rhythm is just right. There’s a pause at one point and Vern starts singing “Have Gun Will Travel.” It’s like comedic timing. It’s a professional that knows exactly when to come in. We did it in one take.

Wheaton: All four of us were very much like the characters that we were playing. I was a weird kid. I was shy, I was incredibly sensitive, and I was really awkward. It was really easy to make me cry. I was the one they picked on. Corey picked on me all the time to the point of it being like cruel. I remember River telling him to stop, and I remember Rob or one of the producers telling him to get off my back.

I don’t hold any bad feeling towards Corey at all. We’re not close, but I don’t dislike him or wish him ill. He had a really f—ed up childhood and he suffered a lot. As a 44-year old father I can see he was a young person who was in just an incredible amount of pain and didn’t have any way of dealing with it.

Feldman: Wil was shielded by his parents. When River and I were running around the hotel and left to our own devices, Wil was locked away with his parents.

O’Connell: One of my fondest childhood memories is July 4th at River Phoenix’s house. We bought a carload of fireworks, because you can legally obtain them in Oregon. We lit them all night long and we all had a big sleep over.

"Stand By Me” almost never made it out of the station. Days before shooting was to begin, Embassy owners Jerry Perenchio and Norman Lear sold the company to Columbia. The studio at the time was owned by Coca-Cola and executives at the company had no interest in making a coming-of-age story with no major stars and dubious commercial prospects. Lear and Reiner worked together on “All in the Family,” which Lear created.

Gideon: We got the word three days before shooting, close them down. Come home.

Reiner: We were up in Oregon. The whole cast and crew were there and we had built whatever we needed. And they decided they didn’t want the picture. So we had nothing. The whole budget was $7.5 million. It was nerve-wracking because we had all these people up here and we’ve got nothing. We’ve got no financing.

Gideon: [Disney film chief] Alan Horn was the chief financial officer of Embassy. He said, ‘Norman, God, you have no distribution. You have no video deal. You have nothing, nothing. You’re totally exposed. Financially it’s a crap shoot.’ Norman said, ‘I like the script. I like Rob. I like the boys.’ And out of his pocket he gave us seven and a half million dollars to make the film.

With financial catastrophe averted, Reiner and company set about chronicling the boys’ journey across rural Oregon. There would be action sequences, notably one involving a massive train barreling down on the four friends as they cross a narrow bridge, and gross-out scenes, such as a sequence that finds the teenagers stripping down and pulling out leeches from intimate areas after wading through a swamp. Perhaps the biggest challenge for Reiner was getting his youthful actors to open up emotionally at key moments. One difficult scene found Phoenix discussing his family’s bad reputation in town, ultimately breaking down while telling Wheaton about being punished for trying to return stolen milk money.

Reiner: River did [the milk money scene] a couple of times, and it didn’t have that emotion to it. I just took him aside and said, ‘you don’t have to tell me what it is, but think about a time that an adult, somebody important to you, let you down and you felt like they weren’t there for you.’ The next take is the one that’s in the movie. I never knew what he thought about. I assume it was his father or his mother, but I don’t know. He never said it to me.

O’Connell: The first day on set, I’m there and it’s the scene where Corey Feldman gets into the fight with the junkyard guy. We’re standing there and Corey goes to attack him. I didn’t know what it was called back then, but we were doing the master, the big group shot, and Rob Reiner calls, ‘cut’ and he comes up to me. And he went, ‘what are you doing?’ And I went, ‘nothing. I’ve got nothing to do in this scene. I don’t have any lines.’ He said, ‘I don’t care if you don’t have any lines, if your friend was in a fight, what would you do? You’re as much a part of the scene as all the people who are talking. You have to listen and I want to see how you interpret that as your character.’

Feldman: The junkyard scene was my big scene and it was cut down from what it was supposed to be. I was upset, because I thought I’d get to show off my acting chops, but I was insecure because I’d never done actual tears on camera. I kept thinking, how can you make yourself cry? I don’t think I pulled it off. I ended up faking my way through it.

Reiner: One time I lost it. I did it as kind of an act. There was the scene where they’re running on the trestle and the train is coming. The truth is the boys and the train were never on the trestle at the same time. I used such a long lens, and so the boys had jumped off the train track before the train even entered the trestle. It was so far away from them that they weren’t scared.

We had some guys, it was very hot, 90 degrees out, and the guys were pushing this dolly down the track to follow these boys running and they were supposed to be hysterical, just crying and panicking. We did it a bunch of times and they kept not getting worked up. Finally, I start screaming, ‘these guys, the crew, are exhausted because you guys keep messing up and if you’re not worried that the train is going to kill you, I’ll kill you.’ They started crying and we started rolling and then they ran off the track and gave me a hug and said, ‘we did it. We did it Rob.’

Feldman: For the leeches scene, they said, ‘we’ve got a clean lake in the middle of the forest. It’s been made by us and it’s all movie stuff, movie water and movie dirt. We dug a hole, encased it in plastic and filled it up with fresh water.’ The thing they failed to realize was they built this at the beginning of the shoot and by the time we actually got to that scene, it was six weeks later and they’d left it there uncovered. It was no longer man made, as far as all the worms and the bugs and the leaves and the raccoons, they were all in there. Nature took its course.

Wheaton: It was cold and really gross and it skeeved me out. There were water slides in this mall and the day that we shot the leeches, we went to go play on the water slides like we always did, and they wouldn’t let us in because they thought we had open lessions on our skin.

Feldman: You’ve got a bunch of young boys running around in their underwear, reaching into their pants and pulling things off their testicles. That’s advanced stuff and it’s kind of homoerotic. It’s a touchy thing. I don’t know if they’d get away with that in cinema today.

Reiner: In the book, when they have the face-off at the end and they stare down the gang of older boys who want to take back the body, it was Chris Chambers who picks up the gun. As we were going through, Andy Scheinman said ‘What if Gordie picks up the gun?’ Keeping with the whole idea that it’s Gordie’s journey. When we screened it for Stephen King. He says, ‘When you had Gordie pick up that gun, I thought, why didn’t I have that?’

Dreyfuss: I do remember from the novel, a piece of information that’s given away very early, is that Chris dies [as an adult]. I think it’s one of the ways that Rob improved on the story. You don’t know that until the end and it breaks your heart.
After shooting wrapped in the summer of 1985, Reiner and the producers faced another hurdle. The sale of Embassy left them without a distributor for “Stand By Me.”

Reiner: We sent it to every single studio. Everyone turned it down.

Evans: Everybody passes. Paramount passes. Universal head Frank Price walked out half way through. Warner Bros. sensed it wasn’t their kind of movie. [Columbia Pictures production head] Guy McElwaine says to [CAA founder] Mike Ovitz, who was helping us at the time, ‘I passed. Why would I change my mind?’ And Mike said, ‘look I got you the job. You’ll be on the street again. I think you should see the movie.’

Reiner: The last place we went was Columbia, because they had already passed on it originally. We figured, they’re not going to want it, but it was a new studio head that had come in. He wasn’t part of the original decision. He screened it for some friends at his house and he was crying when he saw it. He said, ‘I just want this picture. I don’t know if it will make money or not.’

Evans: What happened was McElwaine wasn’t feeling good, so he had the movie shown at his house. He brought all the marketing people and the executives, but the crucial members of the audience were his two daughters. About halfway through they were in love with River Phoenix.

Gideon: That’s the only way we got distribution. Otherwise we would have opened up at the Vista here and the movie would have been gone in a week.

Reiner: It was the first time that I did anything that was closely connected to my own personality. It had some melancholy in it and also had some humor in it. It was more reflective, and I thought, if people don’t like this, they’re not going to like what I like to do.

Feldman: I remember talking to Michael Jackson at a certain point. It was right after we’d gotten home. He sent me a message, saying, ‘Hey I just saw your movie. Great work.’ They were asking if they could use one of my songs in the film or he was going to write an original song for it, and it was around that time that they decided to go with an all-50s soundtrack.

O’Connell: They didn’t have a premiere for this movie or anything. I went to see it on Fifth Avenue with my grandparents at a noon show. It was kind of an empty house. And the lady selling tickets said, ‘Aren’t you in the movie?’ And my grandfather said, ‘we were all there. We were there for the shooting.’ And she took us back over to the window and said, ‘movie stars don’t pay.’ And she reimbursed my grandfather and grandmother for the money. I’m in a movie that’s about to be a classic and all my grandfather would tell people was about how the lady in the movie theater gave us our money back.

Scheinman: It opened to $3 or $5 million and it did that same thing week after week. It just stuck around.

Wheaton: One of the things that I was unprepared for was coming home one evening with my family and there were three boxes on my doorstep and they were filled with fan mail that had been sent to the studio for me.

Scheinman: We were in London making ‘Princess Bride.’ We weren’t around when it came out. When Rob got back to the United States, he was the director of ‘Stand By Me.’ People treated him completely differently. There was a newfound respect.

On the success of “Stand By Me,” several of the cast members lined up big projects. Phoenix co-starred with Harrison Ford in “The Mosquito Coast” and received an Oscar nomination for “Running on Empty.” Wheaton became a cast member on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” before segueing into writing. Feldman scored with “The Lost Boys,” only to have his career threatened by battles with addiction. Clean and sober, he’s re-emerged as a musician, recently releasing a new album, “Angel 2 the Core.” O’Connell attended NYU and later lined up prominent roles in “Scream 2” and “Crossing Jordan.” He recently guest starred on “Billions.”

Despite emerging from “Stand By Me” with the highest profile, Phoenix abandoned the clean-living image he had maintained as the child of hippie parents. In 1993, he collapsed outside of the Viper Room, a popular Hollywood club, and died of a drug overdose. He was 23 years old.

Gideon: When we shot ‘Stand By Me,’ River wouldn’t drink chlorinated water. He had to be so natural and pure. What the hell happened?

Reiner: I stayed in touch with River. I saw him a couple of times. He was already getting into drugs. I remember him coming to visit me in a hotel somewhere and he was like really high, and I thought ai yi yi, what the hell is going on with this kid?

Wheaton: I stayed mad at him for a long time. He was the one who was going to have the Tom Hanks career. He was the one who was going to be the $20 million a picture movie star. I was so mad because I worked so hard to not even approach the level of opportunity he had, and I was so angry he wasn’t going to use it, and then I was really angry that there was no one around to save him.

I’ve lived my life in this industry and, especially around young people, there’s a group of f—ing parasites that surrounds a person who will let them get close. Those are the people who should help that person and not let them overdose in front of the f—ing Viper Room. But they don’t want to rock the boat. They want to get as much as they can out of it. Because when a person’s sick and you tell them to get help then you’re cut out. I don’t know who was around him at the time, but I hope it woke them up.

Feldman: I ran into my time of troubles and went to rehab. I came out and was told River had a severe drug problem and was at risk of losing things. I was told by an A.D. on a film that I was working on. She’d just done ‘My Own Private Idaho’ with River and said he was not in good shape.

I reached out to help him, because I was much stronger and was sponsoring people in the 12 step program. We did speak on the phone a couple of times. The first time I talked to him, he didn’t believe it was me. He sounded rather out of it. I said, ‘I heard you’re having problems and I’ve been through it and I want to help.’ He was one of the only ones who spoke up when I was arrested. He spoke to People Magazine and said ‘You know Corey’s a really good guy. No one wants to see him in jail for having personal problems.’ I wanted to be able to return the favor. The plan was that we were going to get together in L.A. when I got back from my location shoot. It was only about three months after I returned that he passed away.
​
Dreyfuss: There are certain actors like Philip Seymour Hoffman. When Philip died, what we were grieving about was not only that he died, but that he took a very well known future away from us. We knew he had all these great performances to come. That left a big hole. The same thing is true of River Phoenix. He was, without question, the best of that group of actors that came up at that time. Movie stardom is not just acting talent. It’s not just your ability to move an audience. It’s a combination of a lot of things. And he had it. He died so young that it was a real theft. A real robbery.

In the 30 years since it opened, “Stand By Me” continues to enjoy a reputation as a finely crafted portrait of the often awkward transition from childhood to adulthood. Cast members and Reiner say that hardly a day goes by without someone approaching them to talk about the film’s impact on their lives and the fondness they have for its characters.

O’Connell: I’m married to Rebecca Romijn, a beautiful model. She’s way out of my league, a million times out of my league. About three months into dating, my wife is from Berkeley, and I went up there to met her high school friends. We got a little drunk and her high school best friend said to me, ‘you know, ‘Stand by Me’ is Rebecca’s favorite movie of all time. You know she had posters of it all over her room growing up.’ She never told me that.

Feldman: It’s become a cult classic. It’s brought up all the time, ‘why don’t you do a sequel.’ It could only be made if Rob wanted to do it. I’m not saying there should be one, but it’s certainly something that could warrant one.

Dreyfuss: It’s one of those films that whenever you happen to catch it, you’re caught and you can’t turn away.

Wheaton: It’s complicated. How lucky I am and how wonderful it is that I have this incredible movie in my body of work and it’s been there since I was a kid. There are actors who will go their entire careers without ever having an opportunity to work in a film like ‘Stand By Me.’ The other side of that is that it’s basically turned the rest of my life into a sophomore jinx. For the longest time, I really struggled with figuring out how I could just accept it and let it be its own thing and not feel this obligation and existential need to top it or equal it or best it.

O’Connell: It was magical to make. Just being a kid up there with these guys. It was such a bond. It’s just like the movie says, you never have friends like you did when you were 12.

COPYRIGHT - VARIETY

PENNYWISE AND RIVER PHOENIX - ALT MUSES OF LONDON FASHION WEEK

BY PRIYA ELAN - THE GUARDIAN - 19 SEPTEMBER 2016
From ruffs and puffs to silk pyjamas and Bake Off dresses, the fun side of LFW was underpinned by some unlikely influences.

Was it the proximity to Halloween? The skies turning from furnace-hot sunsets to totes emosh Bronte dark? Who knows, but London fashion week had traded in florals and stateliness for horror-movie dread and creaking-floorboard queasiness. Here are the unexpected influences from LFW ….

Toddlers and Tiaras

With the PA playing A Whole New World from Aladdin, the chairs decked with packets of Turkish Delight and tinsel chandeliers decking the venue, Ryan LO’s show was carved up like a three-year-old’s birthday party. The clothes: oversize bejewelled pirate hats, dresses in chocolate-box golds, pink and orange tiered like a showstopper from Bake Off, silk boiler suits decorated with genie lamps spoke to the idea of kids hitting the dressing-up box hard. While certain outfits, such as the white, tiered doily-like dress worn by a Bambi-ish model with zealishly applied blue eyeshadow and exaggerated, Joan Crawford-ish eyebrows suggested something more specific and creepy: the child beauty pageant show Toddlers and Tiaras.

River Phoenix

The set for Ashley Williams was a tone poem to analogue teenage dreams. Serial Mom was on the telly, a JLS poster hung under a TV chair and a Tracey Emin-like bed sat catastrophically in the middle littered with empty bottles of gin, whisky and gin. It was perfect. The clothes spoke to a sense of adolescent awkwardness and dislocation pinned to her muse, River Phoenix. In the show notes, Williams was said to have “got lost in the place between reality and fantasy that exists in the teenage imagination,” but, she continued “the thing about River was, he just got it.” Phoenix was the oldest of his clan and the logo “First Born” re-appeared on the clothes, written in 80s Kerrang!-font. Of the other clothes, there were lilac pyjamas decorated with angel face prints and fringed with green, oversize denim dungarees worn with diamond buckled shoes, homely grey knitted jumpers featuring a Battenberg-like print, and bags featuring stuffed toy bears and cats straight out of Sonic Youth’s Dirty album sleeve.

Pennywise

Fashion’s obsession with the ruff and the puff shows no sign of stopping. Molly Goddard, J.W.Anderson and Preen were just some of the labels that incorporated it into their collections. While Hannah Weiland’s Shrimps took elements from Tim Curry’s turn as Pennywise in Stephen King’s IT, a masterclass in camp creepiness. The presentation featured a childlike mise en scène with diamond-encrusted sea shells, old-fashioned pyjamas worn with night bonnets and delicately luxurious clown ruffs, fringed with gold and black.

COPYRIGHT - THE GUARDIAN

RIVER'S EDGE

BY JAMES GRANT - DETOUR - JULY/AUGUST 1993
River Phoenix is a rare and uncharacteristic Hollywood bird. In a town where many young stars obsess about image, long term objectives, and political correctness, here is a young actor who willingly sounds off on virtually any topic he can sink his silken hair into. President Clinton. Gays in the military. Global problems generated by the burgeoning power of multinational corporations. Indeed, it is immediately evident that River Phoenix is not some hunk waiting for his next photo opportunity.
​
I first interviewed River when he was 16 years old, in his family's home in Rancho Santa Fe, outside of San Diego. He had just been critically acclaimed for his bravura performance in Stand By Me. Here was a smart, but refreshingly unprecocious kid, completely unaware that he was on the verge of a huge film career. He had grown up in a close-knit family that was more into tofu than climbing the corporate ladder. At one point, River even conducted part of our meeting upside down from a gym bar, fielding questions as the blood rushed to his head, turning his face bright-red.

Times have changed. The River Phoenix of today is smart, still unaffected, and decidedly right side up. At the not-so-advanced age of 23, his distinctive performances in such eclectic roles as a narcoleptic hustler in My Own Private Idaho, and a computer genius in Sneakers, have prompted the inevitable, if unlikely, comparisons to Montgomery Clift and James Dean.

This late, sticky, smog-filled morning, River sits at a cabana near the pool at L.A.'s art-deco-designed St. James Club. Dressed in a green T-shirt and loose burgundy shorts, he tightly squeezes an herbal tea bag between his fingers, watching the water inside his cup turn dark purple.
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He takes one look at the notes and past interviews sitting on the table and asks flat out: "Is that propaganda you've been reading?" When informed that his publicist provided me with the stories as background research, Phoenix looks off into the distance and intones: "She's my publicist. She's not my guru.

Phoenix has just completed filming The Thing Called Love for Paramount Pictures. Playing an aspiring songwriter in Nashville comes naturally for the actor, who has written and performed his own very different brand of music for as long as he can remember. He currently plays with the band Aleka's Attic.

"I've seen a rough cut of the film - which could have easily been trash," he reveals. "But thanks to [director] Peter Bogdanovich, all of the hard work and all of the blood, sweat, and tears, it turned out to be straight up. It tells a tale with very little bullshit. No bullshit from what I can tell."

The Thing Called Love turns out to have been a labor of love. "I took the project because Peter and I had an agreement as to how we were going to best hijack this ship and steer its course, with some wonderful help from [co-stars] Dermot Mulroney and Samantha Mathis. We had the whole bunch there helping us out."

The actor spent long hours working on a variety of capacities beyond playing his role - much to the chagrin of certain studio executives associated with the project. "Sometimes, you deny yourself the sleep you need and you stay up and work very hard on the script. Or you write a song, which everyone is discouraging you to do - I'm speaking of execs, people who don't want to pay an actor for song writing because they figure it's just another political move on my part since all my movies are political. They figure that's where I'm coming from, which has nothing to do with what's really going on."

And that is exactly what? The actor is on a roll.

"It has everything to do with me having the best understanding of the character and the movie. Me and the few people working on it from the creative end are the only ones that really understand what's going on. None of the other people had a clue that this film would be so fucking great."

Phoenix is apparently not worried about ruffling Hollywood feathers. This frankness extends to Nashville feathers. Of spending time down south on location for The Thing Called Love, he recalls. "We spent three weeks in Nashville. I met some wonderful, wonderful people there. Some wonderful song writers." Then, Phoenix lowers the boom. "But I guess you find, as in any town-like Los Angeles, or anywhere else - the ethnic slurring and the bad taste jokes." He looks me in the eye with the intensity of a man who is passionate about his values and who sees no need to censor himself, since he doesn't believe in censorship of any kind anyway. "There is no 'good taste' for these sort of jokes which segregate, that so loftily stomp out your neighbor's brains on the cement because you find them different from you. I'm very tired of living here," he sighs. "It makes me wonder if Paris doesn't have it more together than we do."

Phoenix believes that American provincialism prevails, and that Bill Clinton's ascendancy to the presidency is only the beginning of what needs to change. "Now we are just at a point where we can hope directionally that we will be pointing towards neutrality. To obtain neutrality, it will probably take us fifty years. I mean, just a fair point of neutrality, where we're not destroying the planet we live in. Where we're not corrupting office. Where we actually do as we represent ourselves-as modern, intelligent, and progressive humans. Our claims are just so thinly spread," he says emphatically. "I don't trust any of that. It's really bullshit."

Even the renewed optimism many currently hold following the first hundred days of the new presidency is not enough to lull Phoenix into a false sense of security. "A new administration is just an administration. To get there, you have to go down on the devil a few times along the way," he adds wryly. "I've met [President] Clinton. I like Clinton. I've met Gore. I love Gore. They are very capable. [But] they are entrenched in a lot of manure. They have to get through a lot of red tape. They will have a hard time getting even the basic bills passed. The gridlock is, as usual, very evident."

So he frets. "I hope that as individuals, they are not spiritually so oppressed and discouraged that after a while doing just a little good is enough," he observes. "Because the pain involved in getting what really needs to be done is too great for humans."

His political observations unexpectedly bring us back full circle to The Thing Called Love. "What I'm hoping for with a film like this...I think it will be very good for the South, for everybody, because of the gender thing."

The "gender thing?"

"Yes. The heroic myth very rarely embraces the female, the heroine. Especially in this sort of film. The western world is full of macho, cow-wrangling men strapped in with a bunch of leather; the phallus-the big ol' rifle-and all the stuff that comes with it. The whole shotgun mentality. This sort of film is going to hit a group of people who are very patriarchal in tradition. It's not a put-down. It's just the way things are."

A loud British couple arrive at the next table and Phoenix suggests a move down poolside. The sun is sweltering as he holds the tape recorder and speaks into it. "The truth is so individual. Unless you act on your truth, all you are doing is aiding and abetting someone else's life. You're not even lying to yourself. You're lying to everybody around you."

This, of course, is coming from a man who readily admits that he likes to lie through his teeth during interviews, particularly when discussing his personal life. Asking him about his penchant for fibbing could set him off, but instead leaves him nonplused. "Yes, I feel kind of guilty about that," he concedes. "It depends on who I talk to. I give people what I want to give them, and that depends on the person. I figure that everything I say, [the media] lies and changes anyway. So, maybe if I give them bullshit, maybe for some reason, it will come out truthful. Everyone lies anyway. I'd rather be honest and say: 'I've lied a lot."' He looks me dead in the eye, then smiles. "I probably should have lied more in this interview."

And yet this self-described liar remains remarkably frank - brutally so. To that end, don't hold your breath for the young actor's endorsement of a major product or corporation. One of his pet peeves is the way the media reports a problem and then promptly forgets about it. "We just swallow the pill, don't ask why, and forget about it," he complains.

Indeed, for a young, rich, and in-demand actor, the problems of the world seem to carry unusual weight. "It's not just our country," he continues. "The world is ruled by a tri-lateral, massive, multi-national corporate link up which is the true government above us all. It defies borders and effects us so greatly."

Then there is America, the shark-like buyer of everything extraneous. "We are taught to consume. And that's what we do. But if we realized that there really is no reason to consume-that it's just a mind set, that it's just an addiction, then we wouldn't be out there stepping on people's hands climbing the corporate ladder of success. Why else would anyone want to be filthy rich?"

Never mind that this particular actor happens to be filthy rich himself. "I have my reasons why I want to be filthy rich," he reveals. "It's so I can buy the last first growth forest and turn it into a permanent national park." Apparently, he is well on his way to achieving this decidedly non-Hollywood goal. "I just bought 800 acres [of forest] on the border of Panama and Costa Rica."

Unorthodox choices are a Phoenix hallmark, whether he's saving a wilderness or playing the gay hustler in My Own Private Idaho. When the controversial film began production, the word around Hollywood was that Phoenix convinced the recalcitrant Keanu Reeves to take the risk of also playing gay in the film. Phoenix disagrees. "Convinced him? No. He was gung-ho from the very beginning," he remembers. "Keanu supported me and I supported him. But we did have a sort of thing where if one didn't do it, the other couldn't, since we had decided impulsively at the same time to do it. So the only way we could follow up on such an impulsive notion was if we both did it.
​
Being heterosexual, but playing a gay character, has presumably added some insight into such topical issues as the congressional hearings on gays in the military. "It's more symbolic than anything else," he says. "There have always been gays in the military. I think that there is no excuse for violence against anyone for their beliefs. Period. Do [gay men and women] want to walk in the door and say, 'Hello. We're here.' I don't give a fuck about that. There are more serious priorities to me. It shouldn't be a long-standing issue. It's a waste of time. Bottom line. Case closed."

But the real non-issue to the young actor is his own sex appeal. Admittedly, he is not a teenybopper heartthrob a la Jason Priestly, but he does have a huge following amongst women and men of all ages. But don't expect those lipstick-sealed love letters to be answered any time soon. When informed that thousands have the unadulterated hots for him, he becomes visibly bored, giving a look that one usually reserves for tax deadlines. "I don't ever think about it until people like you bring it up," he replies. "It just doesn't ever enter my mind. I keep it away."

Nor does Phoenix make any attempt to hide his outward disdain for the bubble-headed actors who enjoy such shallow adulation. "They are fuelled by how their ego feels. How good they feel that day depends on how they feel about themselves. It's the character that you have to invest in, not yourself. I invest fully in the characters that I play. That's the only thing that gives me security. Not myself. Myself is a bum! Myself is nothing! I am a peon. I'm an idiot. I'm totally removed. I'm in the closet. I'm out of sight. You can't touch me. My character that I'm living takes me over for a while. I want to be able to believe these characters that I create."

The interview is coming to a close, but not before the young actor drives his observations home one last time. "I woke up from a nap the other night," he confides. "Everyone is cranky when they wake up. I thought to myself: 'I have no right to be cranky. I'm so lucky.' [Later] on my way to go to a restaurant, I get out of the car and I see this person on crutches. His sign says that he has AIDS and that his immune system is low. You know, he's broke, and his family won't talk to him because they can't eat because of the hospital bills. He didn't do this. The system did it - so that when someone has a chronic disease, it sucks him dry. He could have been in that same restaurant two years ago, eating and tipping big."
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River sits briefly in silence thinking pensively of the stranger. "I felt blessed that I could drop a fifty on him."

​COPYRIGHT - DETOUR

A PORTLAND WALKING TOUR OF MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO

Willamette Week - October 2016