When I was growing up, my uncle — who is about 10 years older than me — got me started on many of the interests I still have today. He gave me my first comic books (a few issues of The Invaders from the 1970’s), let me stay up late and watch The Kids in the Hall, and while he was serving in the Air Force, started my fascination with airplanes. This one drives my wife crazy when I drop everything to run outside to watch World War II bombers from the local air museum fly overhead.
He also showed me a lot of movies when I was growing up. Some were good (Beetlejuice, Batman), some were not (Captain America — the straight-to-video one starring Matt Salinger), and some were classics like Dr. Strangelove, and a movie that is celebrating its 30th anniversary, Better Off Dead.
https://youtu.be/DWTouGjZt6A
Better Off Dead is the story of high schooler Lane Meyer (John Cusack) who is dumped by his girlfriend, Beth (Jennifer Wyss), for the captain of the ski team, Roy Stalin (Aaron Dozier). Lane decides to kill himself, but since this is a comedy, he fails miserably time and time again, all while getting advice from his drug obsessed friend, Charles de Mar (Curtis Armstrong).
Lane decides that he will only win his girlfriend’s love back if he beats Roy in a ski race down the infamous K12. While Lane is preparing for this race, Monique (Diane Franklin), a French foreign exchange student, moves in across the street with Meyer’s nerdy neighbor (Dan Schneider). Monique helps Lane regain confidence before his race with Roy and wins his heart along the way.
While that all may sounds like a fairly typical teen movie from the 1980’s, Better Off Dead is anything but typical. The autobiographical brainchild of writer/director “Savage” Steve Holland, Better Off Dead has achieved cult status by being the bizarro teen movie filled with catchphrases (“I want my two dollars!” “Gee, I’m real sorry your mom blew up, Ricky.”), quirky characters, animation, and by not being a John Hughes movie, starring whichever Brat Pack member was available at the time.
In 1985, Holland was a 25-year-old CalArts grad making short films in Hollywood. Along the way, he created the “Whammy” for the game show Press Your Luck and a series of animations for the first season of Entertainment Tonight. One of his short films caught the eye of Henry Winkler, who gave Holland an office at Paramount for him to write the movie that eventually became Better Off Dead.
With the script finished, Holland began shopping it around Hollywood where it gained some interest from Michael Jaffe at A&M Studios, who had just made The Breakfast Club, but he wanted Holland to rewrite an existing teen movie script for the studio. Holland offered to make Better Off Dead instead, and to the shock of Holland, Jaffe agreed.
In interviews over the years, Holland has mentioned repeatedly how enjoyable an experience it was making Better Off Dead. He let the cast improvise, which led to many of the hysterical lines and quirks that appear on screen. That euphoria was only bolstered by audience test screenings with off the chart numbers, which led to Warner Bros. signing Holland for his next movie, One Crazy Summer, even before Better Off Dead was released in theaters.
While filming One Crazy Summer (which starred Cusack and Demi Moore), Holland decided to host a screening Better Off Dead for the cast and crew. About 20 minutes into the screening, Cusack stormed out of the room and the next morning, confronted Holland about the movie. According to Holland, Cusack felt that Holland had “tricked him” and “made a fool out of him.” Holland believes that Cusack considered himself a serious actor and the absurdist comedy of Better Off Dead was not what the teenage Cusack was apparently expecting. He finished making One Crazy Summer, but rarely speaks about either movie in interviews.
In a Reddit AMA from February 2014, Cusack attempted to diffuse the situation by answering a question about why he hates the movie:
“It’s kind of been blown out of proportion… I feel bad some people think I hate it, I don’t… I’m glad people are so fond of it. I gave an interview where someone sort of misquoted me…”
Cusack even had a little tongue-in-cheek scene in a more recent absurdist comedy, Hot Tub Time Machine, where a skier passes Cusack and his crew on a phone asking someone for “two dollars.” So, maybe he’s warmed up a bit to the movie in recent years, or that line was a little “FU” to Holland.
Today, Cusack’s outburst would have been a day of rumors on Twitter, or Cusack himself would have tweeted out his dissatisfaction with the movie similar to director Josh Trank’s recent trashing of his own Fantastic Four. It would have led to blogs wondering how bad the set was during filming, and if that was possibly the reason that Better Off Dead bombed at the box office.
Of course, Twitter didn’t exist in 1985 and none of that happened, except Better Off Dead was a disappointment at the box office. It opened on a handful of screens on Aug. 23, 1985 before gaining a wider release in October. But Better Off Dead never cracked the top five and made only $10 million during its release. This meant the movie made back its $3.5 million budget, but it wasn’t the blockbuster Holland or Warner Bros. were expecting after those initial test screenings.
Critics weren’t too kind either. Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, “The film doesn’t seem to have much focus. But it doesn’t seem to want one either.” Siskel and Ebert gave the movie “two thumbs down” with Roger Ebert saying, “Maybe the raw ingredients are there in this movie for a funny black comedy about suburbia, but Better Off Dead never, ever finds the right note.” This sounds like a sly reference to Lane’s saxophone playing.
With bad reviews and a poor box office showing, Better Off Dead became a forgotten movie, and when One Crazy Summer was released the next summer and bombed as well, Holland eventually faded from big-budget movies. His last theatrical release was 1989’s How I Got Into College, which made less than $2 million at the box office. With his movie career seemingly finished, Holland moved on to creating a teenage spy show, The New Adventures of Beans Baxter, and the animated Eek! The Cat for Fox. Holland now writes and directs kids’ television shows and movies for Disney.
Ten years after its release, with DVDs becoming popular and cable television in almost every home, Better Off Dead found a new audience with the “slackers” of Generation X. Lane and Charles were the perfect rebuttal against the pristine beauty of John Hughes’ upper middle class Chicago teenagers, helping the movie feel right at home next to films from iconic 90’s directors like Richard Linklater and Kevin Smith.
For a generation that skipped class to watch reruns of Saturday Night Live and The Kids in the Hall on Comedy Central, or The State on MTV, the surreal, bizarre comedy didn’t feel out of place even if it was filmed a decade before, and it was hard to believe that the star of Say Anything… and Eight Men Out was in something this strange.
Today, Better Off Dead is considered a bona fide cult classic, and with Lane’s constant daydreaming and deadpan delivery, one of the more honest portrayals of teenage angst. It may never be considered in the same class as Sixteen Candles and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off by critics, but Better Off Dead has built a large and loyal fanbase 30 years after its release.
