A young female director takes on a Vietnam movie called "Dogfight." With River Fhoenix as a Marine you know this is not your run-of-the-mill war flick BY Randi Sue Coburn

It's Easy to see why Bob Comfort's Script ffor Dogfight knocked around the studios for five years before it was produced. Well-written as it is, Comfort's semiautobiographical tale of a Marine on leave in 1963 would leave hook-hungry production executives at a loss for the bait. It's the story of a night in the life of Eddy Birdlace and his date with an overweight would-be folksinger. The titular dogfight is a wild party for which Marines kick in money. The one who brings the ugliest girl to the bash wins the plot.
What would the poster say? "A touching love story based on the premise that Marines are assholes and fat girls are fun"? If the script weren't rejected out of hand, the girl would undoubtedly turn into Joan Baez, the Marine would develop a heart of gold overnight, and still no one would want to make this movie. Such, at any rate, was the bulk of Comfort's experience.
Apart from a reasonably low $8 million budget, what Dogfight needed to come to life here in Seattle was a big-name actor and a director with a proven feel for the subtleties of a character-driven plot. Which brings us to River Phenix, who is sitting in his trailer between setuops at 2 A.M., meditatively rolling around a pair of oversize ball bearings in the palm of his hand.
"It's a dichotomy in that we've got a woman director," says the 21-year-old actor. "The norm would be to think, 'What's a woman doing directing a film about Marines?" He's talking about Nancy Savoca, who made an impressive debut last year with the low-budget independent feature True Love. But considering the foul mouths of Savoca's working-class characters in True Love, which prompted her crew to form a pool to guess how many times the word "fuck" was used in the movie, it's less of a surprise to find the Bronx-bred director dealing with Mrines than it is to find Phoenix playing one.
After all, Phoenix is known largely for his on-screen portrayals of sensitive boys and his off-screen passion for vegetarian food. He hasn't changed his diet. While we talk, he picks at a plate of the trail mix that, as a Marine, he has learned to call "twigs and bark and foo-foo shit." And with some effort,his manners on the set are beginning to lean toward those of his character. Phoenix's hair is cut in what the Marines call a high-and-tight, a style so generically unflattering that Warner Bros., which has so far given Savoca a remarkably free hand, requested that blond highlights be added to it to lend compensatory allure. (She agreed-though there's so little hair, they're hardly visible.) Between takes, Phoenix sometimes marshals maximum insensitivity to oink at costar Lili Taylor, who, with the help of a high-calorie diet and additional padding, plays the over-weight Rose. Phoenix tends to stand around somewhat stiffly, arms folded or angled out in parade-rest position, because even when wearing civilian clothes, a Marine never puts his hands in his pockets. He smokes, too- real cigarettes, not those lettuce-leaf things provided by the prop department.
"There are things in the film that Birdlace does that if that were me, I'd be so embarrassed," says Phoenix. "But it's not me. It completely belongs to him." Still, no matter what he does, Phoenix is hard to disguise. Folksinger Holly Near, who plays Rose's mother, observes: "If you had more young men like River than Eddie Birdlace, you wouldn't have a Marine Corps."
Along with the other actors cast as his Marine buddies in the film, Phoenix attended an abbreviated boot camp before production began: two former drill instructors put them through their paces for five grueling days. What's funny about this is not the relatively short duration of their torment, which was certainly long enough for the film's purposes, but that it occured on nearby Vashon Island, a rural haven for liberals, latter-day hippies, and others who thrive on twigs and bark and foo-foo shit.
Even though there's not a single scene in Dogfight that shows Marines on the battlefield, Savoca felt the training was important. "It was a way for me to get these young guys who would probably never want to be in the military at all to understand the pride that Marines take in their survival of boot camp," she says. "They came out of there an incredible unit. I mean, it was scary, the way they bonded. And it was exactly what was needed. I wanted to get those details right."
The bulk of the story takes place at a time when vietnam is so dimly understood that even though Birdlace is going there, he describes it to Rose as "a little country over by India...We'll just be advisers more than anything. You know, teach 'em how to take care of the Commies." Unlike the recent slew of Vietnam films, Dogfight is about the war mainly by implication. Comfort means to draw a parallel between the cruelty of a dogfight and the way Marines are conditioned to care only for one another's survival. "We were trained to be aliens," he explains. "That's how you get to slit throats so easily."
Savoca went on a viewing spree of Vietnam movies after accepting the job. But oddly, the films she mentions as most influential are personal and subjective and have nothing to do with Vietnam: The Last Detail and Marty. She wants the gritty realism of the former and the simplicity of the latter.
Accordingly, she resisted pressure to turn the ugly duckling Rose into a full-fledged swan when she and Birdlace are reunited in 1966. For producer Peter Newman, who shepherded Dogfight through two two different studio deals before Warner's came on the scene, it was an old story. He recalls one film executive saying, "Can't she just think she's fat?" Taylor, who auditioned for three different directors during three different incarnations of the film, admits it was weird to play a character who is so unattractive. But, she says, "I get to have a catharsis. Those other women who are asked to the dogfight don't get one. I get to slap him and punch him and regain my dignity. But in one of the old scripts, Rose became a beautiful talk-show host. It was so stupid- that Hollywood saccharine bullshit."
Much like Rose, the 30-year-old Savoca, with her generous smile and wild nimbus of curly red hair, is attractive in a completely unpretentious way. "There was some feeling that audiences would accept Rose better is she changed more at the end," Savoca says, "but I consider myself the audience, and I get pissed off when I see stuff like that. What are you saying then? That you can't have a relationship unless you physically transform yourself?
In the course of tonight's shooting, Taylor is transformed as much as Savoca will allow. First she appears on an ersatz Mission street before the dogfight, delightedly ignorant of the true nature of the evening. With her hair teased into the shape of a lopsided dinner bell, she wears a hideous yellow prom dress that bulges at the sides, baggy stockings, and ghoulish pink lipstick. "You look great," Phoenix chirps at her from behind the camera. "I do?" she replies with some surprise. The next outdoor scene, shot out of sequence, takes place at 2 A.M., the same night. Rose has changed into what Taylor calls her "perky-girl outfit": a plaid skirt with matching sweater and headband. The rats are out of her hair, which is a definite improvement, and except for three strategically applied pimples, she seems to be wearing no makeup. Still, Rose has a long way to go to embody the folksinger she longs to be. In this scene she and Birdlace are talking in fronto of Rose's Cafe, where Rose workds with her mother, before tiptoeing upstairs to Rose's bedroom.
According to the script, she's already gotten drunk, thrown up, slugged Birdlace, forgiven him, and eaten a fancy dinner, his treat. For the actors, there's such a dramatic shift in time and tone between this scene and the one they've just finished shooting that they decide to sit for a moment in the meticulously detailed cafe, replete with a newspaper headlining Kenney's trip to Dallas the next day, to reconstruct their evening.
"Okay," Taylor tells Phoenix. "It's 2 A.M. and we've had two hours of frolicking and talking." "Yeah. We felt good, and we kissed." "And now what? What about you?"
"Well..." Phoenix begins exhibiting signs of the uneasiness that his character might feel at being cut off from his buddies, left alone with a woman who demands the truth. "I guess I'm curious to see how far it'll go."
When Comfort wrote Dogfight, he had someone older that Phoenix in mind for Birdlace. "The way he is now, he kind of stumbles across Rose," he explains. "I had him more the gimlet-eyed weael looking a a nice fat chicken." Phoenix came to the picture before Savoca, which limited the age range of the actress who whould play opposite him. But Savocca felt that it was important that both Birdlace and Rose still be in their teens. "Otherwise, what' this pacifist aspiring folksinger doing with a Marine? If she were older she'd say, 'No fuckin' way.'"
Perhaps the toughest scene for the director was the dogfight- not technically so much as, well, spiritually. It's a tough business, informing other women that they've been chosen to be contestants in a dogfight, especially when, unlike Lili Taylor, they have no cathartic scenes. They're just supposed to be funny-looking. Savoca says, "There's a great line the script describing one of the girls at the party: 'You'll laugh when you see her and feel bad for laughing.' That's exactly what I want to have happen in the scene." When Savoca talked to these extras, she told them something a male director couldn't: "Listen I could be in this scene, too." Nancy's point," says script supervisor Mary Cybulski, "was that we all have dog potential." To show solidarity with the dogfight contestants on the night that the party was shot, some of the women working behind the camera decked themselves out in ways designed to earn them black slashes in a fashion magazine Dos and Don'ts spread.
Such behavior is very much in keeping with a crew that comes largely out of independent filmmaking, where $8 million constitutes a big-time budget. Like Savoca and her husband, Richard Guay, who cowrote True Love with her and is coproducing Dogfight, a number of those hired got their start working for John Sayles on The Brothers From Another Plant. Savoca and Guay are something of aliens themselves in Hollywood, retaining their outsider status as they navigate the system.
Throughout their initial negotiations with Warner Bros., they were so skeptical that, as Savoca says, "I had one foot out the back door the whole time we were talking to them." Even now, several weeks into production, Newman finds that he sometimes has to act as an interpreter with the studio executives who arent' accustomed to their straightforward style.
Savoca is the sort of director who would be hard for a stranger on the set to identify. In her pink Converse All Stars, baggy sweater, and jeans, she could easily be mistaken for just another member of the crew. Her talks with the actors are generally quiet little huddles, and she's turned dailies into a community affair. She is hot to the mark the halfway point in the production with a talent show, the only requirement being a marked lack of ability at whatever is performed. Savoca dresses up in a miniskirt and fishnet stockings to sing a Shangri-las song with Taylor, Cybulski, and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski, ostensibly choen for his inability to be a girl.
According to Newman, Warner Bros. plans to plug Dogfight into the same release pattern the studio used for Driving Miss Daisy, another "special small movie." Nobody says so, but it seems reasonable that the studio might also expect millions of gawky adolescent girls to be drawn by the prospect of River Phoenix's falling for someone who's less that perfect. That he already has quite a following among them is obvious to anyone on the set. Straining for a glimpse of the young star, one heart-struck fan--with perfect hair and makeup--inches as close as she possibly can to the action. She's in luck. Phoenix ambles by only a few feet away with the unmistakably awkward air of a military man in civilian clothes. Plus he's wearing the glasses doesn't generally wear in his films. Perhaps if he snatched them off in emulation of the corny old scene Savoca is determined to avoid in Dogfight, this girl would have all the excitement of recognition that she came here for. As it is, in a neat little twist on one of the movie's major themes, she looks right through him.
Randi Sue Coburn is a writer living in Seattle.

The article is accompanied by two small clor photos of Nancy Savoca at the Dailies and River Phoenix with his High-and-Tight; A ninth page color photo of River in Marine uniform, kissing Lili as Rose, and a slightly smaller photo of Lili as Rose, sitting on the fender of a yellow Edsel while talking to River as Birdlace- After the Dogfight, Eddy and Rose (Phoenix and Lili Taylor, find each other- and a bit of themselves; and a small color photo of Eddy and Rose seated at a table with beers- Eddy and Rose at the Dogfight.