His `Private' Triumph -- `Saint Gus' Has Become A Quirky, Moody Poet Of Urban Alienation

Earlier this month, Newsweek's David Ansen proclaimed Portland filmmaker Gus Van Sant "the freshest new voice working in American movies."

He's been a recognizable name for less than two years, yet with each new movie it's clear that he's established his own territory. Dubbed "Saint Gus" last month by The Village Voice, he's become a quirky, moody poet of urban alienation via what Ansen called his "informal trilogy of the streets."

His first feature, "Mala Noche," a black-and-white tale of unrequited gay love that played only a handful of American theaters, received the Los Angeles Film Critics' Award for best independent film of 1987. First shown here at the 1986 Seattle International Film Festival, it is still just finding its audience. (The Village Voice's Gary Indiana recently praised its Seattle-based leading man, Tim Streeter, as "an actor of unique expressive intelligence. . . . If Hollywood had brains, this man would be a star.")

Van Sant's second film, "Drugstore Cowboy," which starred Matt Dillon as a drug addict in early-1970s Portland and featured a cameo turn by William S. Burroughs as an aging addict, took the National Society of Film Critics' prizes for best film, director and screenplay of 1989.

"My Own Private Idaho," which opens Friday at the Broadway Market Cinemas and the Varsity theater, received three festival awards last month: best actor (River Phoenix) at the Venice Film Festival, the Critics' Prize at Toronto, and first prize at Deauville. On opening day in New York, it sold out every seat in the two theaters where it was playing.

Yet Van Sant has been able to maintain his own maverick sensibility, and he has no plans to move to a California studio. "My Own Private Idaho" is as distinctively a Northwest film as "Mala Noche," and it's just as personal a portrait of Portland street kids in trouble.

The two films share a common theme (Portland gay boy loves someone who can't reciprocate), and there are other connections. The inspiration for "My Own Private Idaho" came partly from something that happened while Van Sant was finishing "Mala Noche.'

"I passed a police tape on the way to filming," said Van Sant, speaking by phone recently from the New York Film Festival. "I found out that this kid had been killed by some other street kids who wanted him to work for them.

"The incident brought back this script about street hustlers that I'd been working on in 1978, and I rewrote most of it between 1985 and 1989. It was always set in Portland, though at one point they were on the road and headed for Mexico."

The character played by Phoenix is based on one of the Portland kids. At one point, when Van Sant was thinking of "My Own Private Idaho" in terms of an ultra-low-budget, black-and-white movie, the boy was going to play himself. He's still in the film, in a supporting role, and other Portland kids turn up in documentary-style interviews that turn up in the early scenes.

Van Sant's next picture, based on Seattle author Tom Robbins' novel "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues," goes into pre-production in Portland in January, and he wants to do a film about Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He may someday release a series of diary-like short films - he shoots one each year in or near his Portland home - but he has compiled only about 25 minutes' worth so far.

Born in Louisville, Ky., Van Sant went to high school in Portland. After working for a Madison Avenue advertising firm and with filmmaker Ken Shapiro in Los Angeles (where Van Sant made the featurette-length satire, "Alice in Hollywood"), he returned to the Northwest in the early 1980s.

"I graduated from high school in 1971, and I spent the summers in Portland and kept in touch with the town," said Van Sant. "I moved back in 1983 and just eked by as a painter and filmmaker. I did some really low-budget commercials, with $800 to $2,000 budgets. I used the money I saved up to make `Mala Noche' a year or two later, but not until `Drugstore Cowboy' could I make filmmaking a full-time job."

He began thinking about the script that became "My Own Private Idaho" 13 years ago. Previously called "In a Blue Funk" and "Minions of the Moon," it ended up incorporating elements of Shakespeare's "Henry IV," with Keanu Reeves playing Scott, the Prince Hal character, and William Richert (a sometime-actor best known as the director of "Winter Kills") as the Falstaff-like Bob Pigeon.

"Scott just sort of stepped out of `Henry IV,' " said Van Sant. Watching Orson Welles' 1966 Falstaff movie, "Chimes at Midnight," gave him the idea. But he stayed away from copying Welles' visual motifs, and made a point of not showing Welles' film to anyone on the crew.

"I had the script finished when I was editing `Drugstore Cowboy,' but no one knew how `Drugstore' would do, so it was a pretty innocent time," he said. "I just wanted to get it going, at first with unknown actors and in 16mm. But `Drugstore' was such a critical success, and it made an OK amount of money, so it looked like we could find the money."

As time went by and "Drugstore Cowboy" picked up more awards, Van Sant found an independent financial source who made it possible to think in terms of well-established actors.

"I didn't write it with River and Keanu in mind, but I thought they'd be great," he said. "It became a lot more high-profile when those two agreed to do it. We weren't signed up with any studio, but the three of us became an attraction - not so much the screenplay - and eventually New Line became involved."

Richert was cast partly on the recommendation of River Phoenix, who had starred in Richert's autobiographical 1986 film, "A Night in the Life of Jimmy Reardon," in which Phoenix played a character based on the teenage Richert.

"River thought Bill would have the Falstaff character's energy," said Van Sant. "Bob is Bohemian-like, a pirate in a way, and Bill's an effusive, loud character who likes to tell stories. I thought he'd be River's mentor, and I was worried that maybe Bill would just take over.

" But he was my greatest supporter, and he was totally reliant taking direction from me. He's a director who hasn't acted for a long time, and he could see things from my point of view."

The opening and closing scenes of River Phoenix on an Idaho road were actually shot about 10 miles from Madras, Ore., where Phoenix was born. Mount Hood is visible in the background. Some sequences were shot in Seattle, although most ended up on the cutting-room floor.

(Phoenix filmed most of "Dogfight" in Seattle in early 1990 and came back about five months later to do the Queen Anne scenes for "My Own Private Idaho.")

New York is Van Sant's fourth festival. The movie would have played at Cannes last spring, but he wasn't finished and the festival wasn't happy with the version New Line Cinema submitted.

"They couldn't figure it out," said Van Sant. "It was a very rough cut, a different cut, and it would have screwed up our mix to try to rush it through. It's just as well it didn't play there."

It's not the first time his work has been rejected by a festival. "Mala Noche" was turned down at the 1986 Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. It won its L.A. award nearly two years later, after it got booked into an L.A. gay festival. Van Sant considers the L.A. award the turning point in his career.

"It's a special prize, but it's presented as part of their regular year-end ceremony," he said. "It's a new artist category for films that aren't very well-exposed, and they bestow it on people they like. It helped make Avenue Pictures want to do `Drugstore Cowboy.'

"Companies like Avenue are very interested after something like `Kiss of the Spider Woman' wins an Oscar and then grosses $15 million. It always gives executives a bit of confidence if you win an award. Every little bit helps when they need to be assured."