Much Ado About Nothing
For a little movie without special effects, dramatic reveals, or cutting-edge sex scenes—a movie about nothing at all, really—Barry Levinson’s 1982 comedy,Diner, caused a tectonic shift in popular culture. It paved the way for Seinfeld, Pulp Fiction, The Office, and Judd Apatow’s career, and made stars of Mickey Rourke, Kevin Bacon, Ellen Barkin, and Paul Reiser. Three decades later, S. L. Price reports how a novice director and his raw cast broke all the rules—and stumbled into genius.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF PAUL REISER.
Nick Hornby knew better, but he didn’t care. Because suddenly there was that face—the upturned nose, the lupine grin, the wary expression barely softened by the passage of, what, three decades now? Everyone else in the London club that December night was flittering around Colin Firth, set aglow by the Oscar buzz for his performance in The King’s Speech. Hornby let them flit. For here stood … Kevin Bacon. Undisturbed. That knowing smirk may have derailed him as a leading man, but it has allowed for a career of darker, richer roles—and allows him still to cruise a cocktail party longer than most boldfaced names without some fanboy rushing up to say how wonderful he is.
God knows, Hornby had seen that too often: an actor friend, eyes darting, cornered by a gushing stranger. This belated celebration of Firth’s 50th birthday was a private bash where artists and actors, people like Firth and Bacon—and, well, Hornby—could expect to relax. After all, between best-selling books such as About a Boy and a 2010 Academy Award nod earlier in the year for his screenplay for An Education, he had been cornered plenty himself.
Yet when he saw Bacon, Hornby couldn’t help it. He edged closer. It was like that scene fromDiner when Bacon’s buddy sees a boyhood enemy in a crowd and breaks his nose: Hornby had no choice. In 1983 a girlfriend had brought home a tape of director Barry Levinson’s pitch-perfect comedy about twentysomething men, their nocturnal ramblings in 1959 Baltimore, their confused stumble to adulthood. Hornby was 26, a soccer fanatic, a writer searching for a subject. Diner dissected the male animal’s squirrelly devotion to sports, movies, music, and gambling. Diner had one man give his fiancée a football-trivia test and had another stick his penis through the bottom of a popcorn box. Hornby declared it, then and there, “a work of great genius.”
Midway through the movie, the ladies’ man Boogie, played by Mickey Rourke, is driving in the Maryland countryside with Bacon’s character, the perpetually tipsy Fenwick. They see a beautiful woman riding a horse. Boogie waves the woman down.
“What’s your name?,” Boogie asks.
“Jane Chisholm—as in the Chisholm Trail,” she says, and rides off.
Rourke throws up his hands and utters the words that Hornby, to this day, uses as an all-purpose response to life’s absurdities: “What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?” And Fenwick responds with the line that, for Diner-lovers, best captures male befuddlement over women and the world: “You ever get the feeling there’s something going on that we don’t know about?”
In all, the scene encompasses only 13 lines of dialogue—an eternity if you’re Bacon at a party and a stranger knows them all. But Hornby wouldn’t be stopped. “I pinned that guy to the wall, and I quoted line after line,” Hornby recalls. “I thought, I don’t care. I’m never going to meet Kevin Bacon again. I need to get ‘What fuckin’ Chisholm Trail?’ off my chest.”
The Invention of Nothing
Hornby could not have planned a more apt tribute: Diner introduced to movies a character who compulsively recites lines from his favorite movie—and nothing else. And Hornby’s subsequent books about a fan obsessed with Arsenal football (Fever Pitch) and another obsessed with pop music (High Fidelity)—two postmodern London slackers who could easily have slid into a booth at the Fells Point Diner—are only the most obvious branches of the movie’s family tree.
Made for $5 million and first released in March 1982, Diner earned less than $15 million and lost out on the only Academy Award—best original screenplay—for which it was nominated. Critics did love it; indeed, a gang of New York writers, led by Pauline Kael, saved the movie from oblivion. But Diner has suffered the fate of the small-bore sleeper, its relevance these days hinging more on eyebrow-raising news like Barry Levinson’s plan to stage a musical version—with songwriter Sheryl Crow—on Broadway next fall, or reports romantically linking star Ellen Barkin with Levinson’s son Sam, also a director. The film itself, though, is rarely accorded its actual due.
Yet no movie from the 1980s has proved more influential. Diner has had far more impact on pop culture than the stylistic masterpiece Bladerunner, the indie darling Sex, Lies, and Videotape, or the academic favorites Raging Bull and Blue Velvet. Leave aside the fact thatDiner served as the launching pad for the astonishingly durable careers of Barkin, Paul Reiser, Steve Guttenberg, Daniel Stern, and Timothy Daly, plus Rourke and Bacon—not to mention Levinson, whose résumé includes Rain Man, Bugsy, and Al Pacino’s recent career reviver, You Don’t Know Jack. Diner’s groundbreaking evocation of male friendship changed the way men interact, not just in comedies and buddy movies, but in fictional Mob settings, in fictional police and fire stations, in commercials, on the radio. In 2009, The New Yorker’s TV critic Nancy Franklin, speaking about the TNT series Men of a Certain Age, observed that “Levinson should get royalties any time two or more men sit together in a coffee shop.” She got it only half right. They have to talk too.
What Franklin really meant is that, more than any other production, Diner invented … nothing. Or, to put it in quotes: Levinson invented the concept of “nothing” that was popularized eight years later with the premiere of Seinfeld. In Diner (as well as in Tin Men, his 1987 movie about older diner mavens), Levinson took the stuff that usually fills time between the car chase, the fiery kiss, the dramatic reveal—the seemingly meaningless banter (“Who do you make out to, Sinatra or Mathis?”) tossed about by men over drinks, behind the wheel, in front of a cooling plate of French fries—and made it central.
Of course, kitchen-sink films had been made before, featuring snippets of halting, realistic dialogue, as epitomized by Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty. And in 1981, Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre elevated one long conversation into an art-house hit. But producers and editors mostly found the imperatives of plot and pacing best served by verbal ping-pong matches where nobody is at a loss for words—snappy His Girl Friday lines that keep the viewer awake until the next thing happens. When making the 1973 Robert Redford-Barbra Streisand hit, The Way We Were, director Sydney Pollack had to argue furiously with producers to keep a scene where Redford and his friend Bradford Dillman lounge on a boat, trying to top each other by ranking the best city, day, and year. But it ended up saying far more about time and regret than did Streisand crooning about memories.
During postproduction on Diner, MGM/UA executive David Chasman complained to Levinson about one of its most famous set pieces, when Guttenberg’s Eddie and Reiser’s Modell argue ownership (“You gonna finish that?”) of a roast-beef sandwich. Chasman wanted it cut because it didn’t advance the story. “You don’t understand,” Levinson explained: between the lines about roast beef lies all you need to know about their fear, their competitiveness, their friendship. The roast beef is the story.
“I wanted the piece to be without any flourish, without anything other than basically saying, ‘This is all it was,’ ” Levinson says. “These conversations that can go on endlessly through the night—bets over the stupid fucking things that you can bet on—is it. Without gimmicks: nothing. Without gimmicks. This is it. Period.” John Wells, the executive producer of the kaleidoscopic 90s hospital series, ER—nominated for a record 122 Emmys during its 15-year run—and former president of the Writers Guild of America, West, was a graduate student at the U.S.C. film school when Diner came out. Mesmerized by Levinson’s “tremendous empathy for those characters even when they were being idiots,” Wells estimates he saw it 30 times in 1982 alone. He still makes a point of watching Diner once a year.
‘It influenced a whole generation of writers,” Wells says, “revolutionizing the way characters talk and how realistic we were going to be. And it was particularly influential with actors—this notion that you could play someone who was extremely real and at the same time be humorous and emotional. It had a complexity that not a lot of movies at the time had—they tended to be tremendously dramatic or broadly comic—and this was landing in a territory between, where somebody could be entertaining and humorous and also make you cry.”
