By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: director Savage Steve Holland, who helmed Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer and more.
The 1980s are famed for many things, and one of them is teen movies. From the high-water mark set by the oeuvre of John Hughes, and classics like Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Rumble Fish, River’s Edge, My Bodyguard and Heathers through to far more spurious titles like Porky’s, Fraternity Vacation, Screwballs, Private Resort, Private Lessons, Private School, My Tutor, The Last American Virgin and more, adolescents (or often adults playing adolescents) made a happy, often dirt-strewn home for themselves in the cinematic canon of the 1980s.
In amongst that wild 1980s tsunami of gags, goof-offs, sex, pranks, plentiful hair gel, raging hormones, anti-authoritarianism and general bad behaviour were two films penned and helmed by the wonderfully named Savage Steve Holland. Quirky, unconventional, unpredictable and very, very funny, this writer/director’s work didn’t quite click with everything going on around him, and that’s why he’s rarely mentioned when film commentators start reminiscing about their cinematic youth. Savage Steve Holland’s films are unique and singular, and he’s very much an Unsung Auteur.
Savage Steve Holland was born in 1959 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and from a young age had an interest in filmmaking and animation. Holland attended The California Institute Of The Arts, and while there completed a seven-minute short titled My 11-Year-Old Birthday Party. Inspired by his own traumatic experience of throwing a birthday party as an 11-year-old, to which nobody showed up except a drunken clown, the film has the kind of black humour and quirkiness that would become Holland’s trademark.
My 11-Year-Old Birthday Party played some minor film festivals, including what would turn out to be a key showing at The LA Film Festival. My 11-Year-Old Birthday Party was programmed as the pre-feature short before Paul Bartel’s 1982 cult classic Eating Raoul, which was the most talked-about film at the festival. All of the big names in LA saw it, including actor, producer and director Henry Winkler, who really took notice of Holland’s short film…so much so that he reached out to the young filmmaker.
“Henry took me to lunch, and he said that my movie was so funny,” Holland told Fast Company in 2016. “And I’m like, ‘Well, wait a minute…it wasn’t supposed to be funny, it’s a sad story about my life!’ So he asked if I had any more sad stories about my life and I’m like, ‘Of course I do!’”
Just four months out of college, Savage Steve Holland (so named after kicking a kid in the teeth during a childhood soccer game!) had a Hollywood legend in his corner and an office on the Paramount lot. Directly following Henry Winkler’s request for more sad stories from his life, Holland sat down and bashed out the script for what would become his debut feature, 1985’s Better Off Dead. The film is based on a suicidal period from Holland’s teenage years when he became depressed after being dumped by a girlfriend. Yes, Better Off Dead is a youth comedy about teen suicide…and it’s a work of demented genius.
Though Henry Winkler didn’t end up producing the film, he did help get it into the marketplace, and he also recommended young actor John Cusack, who had starred in Rob Reiner’s 1985 classic The Sure Thing, which Winkler produced. Fresh-faced and incredibly talented, Cusack is wonderful in Better Off Dead as nice guy Lane Myer, who hits a downward spiral when his girlfriend leaves him for the captain of the ski team. Depressed and at rock bottom, Lane makes several hopelessly half-arsed attempts at killing himself before eventually getting his shit together.
While the main push of the narrative is certainly wildly against the grain, it’s what Savage Steve Holland puts around it that really makes Better Off Dead so special. Introducing a kind of absurdist surrealism not seen in other teen flicks of the era, Better Off Dead really sings in its bizarre minor comic details: Lane has a series of increasingly strange dreams and visions (a hamburger playing a guitar is one highlight); his mother makes food that is strangely…alive; his eight-year-old brother picks up trashy women via how-to books; he’s constantly harassed by a deranged paper boy; and his buddy snorts jelly and snow because he can’t get any real drugs in their shitty hometown.
“Now that’s a real shame when folks be throwin’ away a perfectly good white boy like that,” remarks an African-American tree trimmer when he spots Lane in a garbage truck in one of the film’s funniest moments. With splashes of warped stop-motion animation thrown in for good measure, it makes for a wonderfully freaky mix. In short, Better Off Dead is an absolute comic belter of the 1980s.
The backers of Better Off Dead liked what they saw, and they pushed Holland to write another film immediately and make them back-to-back. He followed up Better Off Dead with 1986’s One Crazy Summer, with John Cusack again in the lead, this time backed by Demi Moore, Bobcat Goldthwait, Curtis Armstrong, Tom Villard, and Joel Murray. Though Holland and Cusack initially looked like a great director-actor comedy team, that changed horribly halfway through the shooting of One Crazy Summer when Cusack saw an early cut of Better Off Dead.
“The next morning, he basically walked up to me and was like, ‘You know, you tricked me. Better Off Dead was the worst thing I have ever seen. I will never trust you as a director ever again, so don’t speak to me,’” Holland told The Sneeze. “He was just really upset. And I said, ‘What happened?! What’s wrong?!’ And he just said that I sucked, and it was the worst thing he had ever seen, and that I had used him, and made a fool out of him, and all this other stuff. And I was just stunned, because it was as funny as shit. And he was great in it. And he was helping me edit it throughout the summer. It made me not care about movies anymore. I didn’t even want to do One Crazy Summer at that point. I was just gone. It was sort of like the break-up that I made Better Off Dead about. It was so out of left-field that it just floored me. I just don’t know if he was madder that he was in the second movie that was way more absurd than even Better Off Dead.”
One Crazy Summer – with Cusack as a wannabe writer and illustrator who gets up to all manner of hijinks on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts – is indeed just as absurd as Better Off Dead, but in a goofier, more freewheeling way. Holland’s debut is definitely the better of the two films, but they make for a wildly entertaining, eye-popping teen flick double-shot. Perhaps too weird for their time, the films failed at the box office (not helped at all by the angry Cusack’s refusal to do any publicity or interviews), but developed substantial cult followings in the years after their initial release thanks to cable TV in the US and what would become a boon for all teen flicks: video.
Those who were into something a little different soon happened upon these whacked-out wonders, and they stand as ingeniously deranged, but criminally under-celebrated, 1980s classics. By 2013, even Cusack had eased up on Better Off Dead. “I just thought it could have been better, but I think that about almost all my films,” the actor told a fan in a Reddit AMA. “I have nothing against the film…glad people love it still.” They do indeed, but the failure of the two films – and Cusack’s very role in that failure – pretty much sent the supremely talented Savage Steve Holland sideways and out of the film industry.
After his first two films failed, Holland struggled to find work in Hollywood and took on a work-for-hire job directing 1989’s How I Got Into College, after original director Jan Eliasberg was fired five days into production. Though it’s pretty funny and highly enjoyable, the film obviously didn’t germinate with Holland, and thus lacks the anarchic comic brilliance that characterised his previous two films. “We tried to ad lib and make up stuff, but it seemed a little doomed from the start,” Holland told Fast Company in 2016. “I almost felt like we all kinda knew it wasn’t gonna be a hit. And that’s why I was worried about taking the job. I was like ‘Three times failing is a big problem.’ So that was the last straw for Hollywood thinking of me as a director.”
And that, very sadly, was pretty much the end of Savage Steve Holland’s film career…which marks nothing less than one of the most cruelly disappointing and unfair derailings in the teen flick firmament. Thankfully, the subsequent cults around these two bent teen classics is a fitting salve, and very happily, Savage Steve Holland has since built a highly successful career for himself in children’s television, creating and producing Eek! The Cat and The Terrible Thunderlizards for Fox Kids, as well as directing a huge amount of episodic television and small screen films, much aimed at younger audiences.
Savage Steve Holland…the coolly named dark genius of 1980s teen comedy…we salute you!
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Rudy Wurlitzer, Keith Gordon, Alan Metter, Lynne Littman, Chuck Russell, John Derek, Don Chaffey, Harley Cokeliss, Jeannot Szwarc, Craig Gillespie, David Greene, Ernest Pintoff, Paul Williams, Jo Heims, Lee H. Katzin, Christoper Cain, Ken Wiederhorn, Barbara Loden, David Mackenzie, Alan Rudolph, James Lee Barrett, Edwin “Bud” Shrake, Joan Tewkesbury, Jamaa Fanaka, Jack Starrett, Joseph Sargent, Jeffrey Schwarz, George Sidney, Philip Dunne, Zak Hilditch, Luke Sparke, Cyrus Nowrasteh, Morgan Matthews, Tom Laughlin, Diane Keaton, Ed Hunt, Nancy Savoca, Robert Vincent O’Neil, Marvin J. Chomsky, Sam Firstenberg, Jack Sholder, Richard Gray, Giuseppe Andrews, Gus Trikonis, Greydon Clark, Frances Doel, Gordon Douglas, Billy Fine, Craig R. Baxley, Harvey Bernhard, Bert I. Gordon, James Fargo, Jeremy Kagan, Robby Benson, Robert Hiltzik, John Carl Buechler, Rick Carter, Paul Dehn, Bob Kelljan, Kevin Connor, Ralph Nelson, William A. Graham, Judith Rascoe, Michael Pressman, Peter Carter, Leo V. Gordon, Dalene Young, Gary Nelson, Fred Walton, James Frawley, Pete Docter, Max Baer Jr., James Clavell, Ronald F. Maxwell, Frank D. Gilroy, John Hough, Dick Richards, William Girdler, Rayland Jensen, Richard T. Heffron, Christopher Jones, Earl Owensby, James Bridges, Jeff Kanew, Robert Butler, Leigh Chapman, Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
