Mike's Murder

One of the oddest little films from 1984 is this mystery drama from writer, producer, and director James Bridges (The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Georgia). Mike's Murder came and went without much fanfare in 1984, but it has lingered in the minds of many who saw it for a number of reasons. Some of those reasons are on screen, like the central performance from the always excellent Debra Winger, who was coming off a triple crown of critical and box-office smashes—Urban Cowboy, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Terms of Endearment. There's also a distinctive and unique depiction of gay and bisexual characters almost never seen in Hollywood movies at this point in time. But most of what makes Mike's Murder truly fascinating are the behind-the-scenes stories of how this low-budget drama was made, unmade, and made again.

Watching the film, especially in a year that saw a number of pictures exploring the seedier side of Los Angeles, like Angel, Savage Streets, and Crimes of Passion, you wouldn't necessarily assume that this was a highly personal project by its filmmaker. However, Bridges was compelled to write this movie because he'd known a number of people who were killed due to their direct or indirect involvement in the drug trade and the gay underground of LA. There was one guy in particular whom he didn't know well but whose murder, and the way it was covered in the press, haunted him. Bridges set out to make a picture that would explore the life of someone who could be randomly killed without the public taking much notice or much interest in their life. He was also motivated by wanting to write another film for Winger, whom he'd become great friends with since directing her breakout performance in Urban Cowboy. The notoriously difficult actress had pretty much quit Hollywood and moved to Cleveland, but Bridges was someone she’d stayed close with, and he knew she'd make another film with him if he wrote something good. He also had an ambitious idea about how he would structure this movie, telling the story in an experimental, non-linear fashion. It turned out he was at least ten years ahead of the curve with this last concept, and audiences weren't yet ready for a film that told its story out of order.

The movie centers on Winger's character, Betty Parrish, an attractive thirty-something bank teller from Brentwood who takes tennis lessons from a good-looking guy named Mike. She and Mike have a passionate one-night stand, but then she ends up waiting by the phone for a promised call from him that doesn't come. Over the next few weeks, Betty and Mike casually cross paths, but they don't make the connection she was hoping for. Then, one day, several months later, Mike asks Betty to drive him out of town. He's worried about a drug deal gone bad and is planning to hide out for a while at the home of someone he knows. Unaware that Mike is a drug dealer, Betty is a little concerned, but she drives him where he wants to go. She is happy to know where he is and thinks it might lead to them seeing each other again. But that never happens because Mike gets murdered. Betty is upset by this and a little surprised that the death of someone she knew so little would affect her so deeply. She decides to learn more about who Mike was and starts to investigate what was going on in the days leading up to his murder in the hopes of somehow getting closer to him.

This might sound like the setup for a neo-noir, but the way Bridges depicts Betty's amateur sleuthing renders Mike's Murder more of an existential character study about a woman and the city in which she lives. Betty is motivated by her desire to understand more about a guy she barely knew who was able to cast such a spell on her more than she is trying to solve a mystery, right a wrong, or administer some kind of retribution for Mike's death. During her investigation, she crosses paths with Mike's seedy friend Pete (Darrell Larson) and eventually meets Philip Green, a gay record producer who had been Mike's lover and sugar daddy. Green is played by the always enjoyable actor Paul Winfield (Sounder, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator). The sequence in Philip Green's home, which is well stocked with twinks and fit young men like Mike, is an eye-opener for Betty, as is the casual vulnerability Green shows when expressing how desperately in love with Mike he was. That this mid-thirties white bank clerk and this older, wealthy, powerful African-American gentleman could have such a core thing in common of falling hard for someone who was, when all is said and done, a good-looking but banal, inconsistent, uncommunicative, drifter, is both surprising and revealing to Betty. It's also one of the most interesting aspects of the movie on its face, but it's even more fascinating if you know the picture's extra-textual backstory, which is that Winfield is essentially playing himself in this movie.

Like Bridges, Winfield was a successful middle-aged gay man working in a film business that, at that time, didn't openly acknowledge its large queer community. These men were not closeted, but they weren't exactly out, especially to the public. Mike's character was based on a guy named Mark Bernalack, whom Winfield met in Baltimore when he was shooting a movie there. Mike was interested in possibly working behind the scenes in the film industry, and Winfield invited him to move to LA and stay with him. Bernalack moved in with Winfield and started to crew on film shoots. After saving up some money, he moved out of Winfield's house and took an apartment in a building in Brentwood where Bridges lived with his partner, playwright and former actor Jack Larson (who played Jimmy Olsen on the old Superman TV show). Bridges and Larson became friendly with Bernalack, often having dinner with him and admiring his ability to pick up women. There was a tennis court near their apartment where Bridges and Larson would often see Mark teaching tennis to attractive young women—the same courts used in the film. By their account, Bernalack was both far more attractive and much less of a shady character than the Mike Chuhutsky of this film. Still, one day, Bernalack asked Bridges to drive him to a house in West Hollywood because he'd gotten into some trouble and some guys were threatening him. He told Bridges that he was going to hide out for a while in the tucked-away home of a friend, but that was the last time Bridges saw Bernalack. The next Bridges heard, Bernalack had been savagely murdered in his apartment by two cocaine dealers.

Bridges was haunted by the killing and upset by how it was covered in the press. TV news and the papers always referred to Mark Bernalack as a drug dealer, which everyone who knew him did not believe. But no one who didn't know Bernalack personally seemed to care about his murder because, to them, he was just another potential criminal member of LA's underbelly. This was not the first person of Bridges' acquaintance who had fallen victim to casual violence, often related to drugs or sex, and either didn't make the headlines or, when it did, was treated unfairly. Bridges started to write this screenplay as a way of processing his feelings, much like his main character investigates the murder as a way of working through her complicated emotions. Bridges used a traditional noirish woman-in-jeopardy plotline as a metaphor for his experience as a gay man living on the sidelines of the LA underground. He set out to create an unusual narrative structure that would simulate the experience of watching various mysterious figures of the LA underworld from a detached perspective, portraying the city as a disjointed society by imitating the view from a passing car. His screenplay and the film he shot unfolded in backward chronology, beginning with the aftermath of the murder and Betty's investigation and ending with her taking tennis lessons from Mike. The story was subjective and featured several sequences that took place in Betty's mind as she fantasized about Mike and imagined his brutal killing.

But that all changed after disastrous preview screenings in early 1983 in which not a single member of the 1,200-member audience recommended the picture. The organizers of these previews probably billed Mike's Murder as the next film from the director of Urban Cowboy, reuniting him with the breakout star of that movie. People in attendance were likely anticipating a romantic good time picture, not a dark story about murder, bisexuality, and alienation. Reactions were audible during the graphic depiction of how Betty imagines the murder, and there were hoots and hollers during a scene in which she is on the phone with Mike, and they both start to masturbate. These days, a scene involving phone sex would be beyond innocuous, but it was not a mainstream concept in 1983. Paul Winfield's frank monologue in which he talks about meeting Mike and their first sexual encounter was also met with jeers.

Bridges was understandably shaken and spent a full year recutting the movie. The legendary editor Dede Allen (Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, Reds), who had cut the initial film, was by then off on another project, so Bridges worked with Jeff Gourson (FM, Somewhere in Time, Tron). Together, they re-structured the story, putting it in chronological order, toning Winfield's character down, removing the subjective point of view, flashbacks, and Betty's fantasy sequences, altering the phone sex scene, and turning Mike's Murder into a more traditional thriller. Bridges also shot additional material with Darrell Larson, which made the peripheral character of Pete more of a central character.

Restructuring the film also meant removing most of the Jazz-infused new wave music by singer-songwriter Joe Jackson. The great John Barry (Midnight Cowboy, Out of Africa, and most James Bond movies) was brought in to compose a more traditional orchestral score. A few pieces of Jackson's score and songs still remain in the film, and the soundtrack album was released in '83, more than a year before the film came out, which added to the mystery and controversy surrounding the film's delayed release. By every account, Bridges was happy with the recut movie, which tested much better with preview audiences but died at the box office. We have no way of knowing if this is a case of a movie getting ruined in the editing room or if the film's first cut really didn't work and what was released was a vast improvement. But there's no getting around the fact that a movie that was meant to flow in one direction in a somewhat dreamy, subjective manner doesn't fully work when told chronologically. The film lacks forward momentum, and we're not left with a full understanding of Winger's character. Apparently, Jack Larson kept a print of the original cut, but there have been no plans to reissue or even screen this original version despite many inquiries. Larson died in 2015 at the age of 87, and I have no idea where that print ended up.

Despite all the compromises, Mike's Murder is still interesting on many levels. It is a quintessential LA movie. It focuses on one of the thousands of lonely, single, highly attractive straight women in their 30s who, in almost any other city in America during the early 1980s, would have a boyfriend or husband. In LA, however, there was a far smaller number of stable, heteronormative guys looking to partner up, while there were a lot of small-time hustlers like Mike, who bounced from one thing to another and lived Kato-Kaelin-style off of successful individuals higher up on the food chain. Mike's Murder is also one of those movies that makes sense geographically, where every location is in the exact relationship to every other location on screen as it is in reality. One can actually "walk the movie," and it would make sense where the characters live, work, and go and how long it takes them to get from place to place. The story still retains some of its intriguing peak into the city's hidden but not fully closeted homosexual subculture, with Paul Winfield's character still possessing his stature, prowess, and vulnerability, if not his frank discussions of fucking and falling in love with the guy he and Debra Winger's character shared. The poignancy of her realizing she has something profound in common with this guy but that it's not enough to forge a lasting cross-cultural bond with him is also still present. Mike's Murder is an effective portrait of how people can feel lonelier and more alienated in LA's vast, sprawling metropolis than perhaps anywhere else in America.