Category Archives: Backstory

My Own Private Idaho – River Phoenix doesn’t just act – he drifts, aches, and unravels… and now we know that it was real

My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Promotional still (1991)

Scott: I only have sex with a guy for money.

Mike: Yeah, I know.

Scott: And two guys can’t love each other.

Mike: Yeah.

Mike: Well, I don’t know. I mean… I mean, for me, I could love someone even if I, you know, wasn’t paid for it… I love you, and… you don’t pay me.

Scott: Mike…

Mike: I really wanna kiss you, man… Well goodnight, man… I love you though… You know that… I do love you.

***

Watched ‘My Own Private Idaho’ for the first time. Charlie asked me if I’d seen Keanu Reeves recently because he looked old. But he was 61-years-old. River Phoenix still looks exactly the same… but that was how he left things. I remembered that I’d mentioned Phoenix before… but in one of my stories, he had appeared as a ghost.

It wasn’t going to be called ‘My Own Private Idaho’… better than ‘Blue Funk’ or ‘Minions of the Moon’… and named after a B-52s song. Inspired by Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays… Prince Hal and Hotspur and Falstaff… but here it was Scott Favor, privileged bisexual, Mike Waters, narcoleptic gay hustler searching for his mother, and Bob Pigeon, coke-dealing chickenhawk. Gus Van Sant: “My films are usually about relationships. I think you make films about things you lack.”

I can’t stop thinking about River Phoenix because, I guess, I’m in love with yet another dead man.

1987… “Run to the rescue with love and peace will follow.” – River Phoenix.

1989… Star burning bright. Beautiful. Lightness. Creative. Camera object.

1991… Indie moment. ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Realism to fantasy. Challenging the norm. Self-destructive attitudes. Dark themes. Cool culture. Downbeat hustlers. Wanderers. A chance to become an adult actor. Gus Van Sant simply being Gus Van Sant.

Keanu Reeves laying in bed playing with his nipple. What River Phoenix needed after making this movie – a bath, a shave, an exfoliating facial scrub.

“How do you see yourself fitting in with younger Hollywood acting?” (A sweet voice). “I don’t see any of them in the perspective or in the limelight of Hollywood. I really don’t ever want to get that objective or self-consciousness of my place in this world of showbusiness.”

1993… LA nightclub. Halloween. Music blasting. Sitting on a couch. Tired. Intoxicated. Skinny. Bad skin. Ticking time bombs. Heroine. Cocaine. Morphine. Marajuana. Valium. Cold remedies. Addiction is an open secret here. And then the star exploded all over the pavement. Never did anyone move from casual drug use to death so quickly. The night that Fellini died – ‘A director’s sweet life. An actor’s brief life.’

Retrospective.

2025… ‘My Own Private Idaho’. Turning point. A troubling effect. Midnight rock sessions. Alcohol. Uncontrollable drug use. Crystal meth. Hooked. No chance of going back now. Progressive and fatal. Like ‘The Little Shop of Horrors’…if you go too near to the plant it will eat you. The best performance… but from now on he didn’t care enough about himself to look after himself. What about those he left behind? Nobody did anything to help him when he was alive… guilt… and lasting sadness.

Have a nice day!

*My Own Private Idaho. Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix. Movie poster (1991)*

Beauty and politics of desire, a boy who never grew old, and the buttocks of history

Leave a reply

Rupert Everett and Colin Firth in Another Country. Directed by Marek Kanievska (1984)

It’s taken me a long time to watch Marek Kanievska’s Another Country because the thought of Soviet spies didn’t exactly fill me with excitement. It turned out to be a red herring. The film opens with Rupert Everett as Guy Bennett (think Guy Burgess), a wheelchair user in his drab Moscow apartment, who reflects on his schooldays at a 1930s English public school.

“It was delightful, utterly despicable.”

I’d forgotten how incredibly handsome Everett, Colin Firth and Cary Elwes as young chickens were. Well, it’s a gay movie and gloom pervades throughout. The agonies of homosexual love and the even greater agonies of being played with by the power structure.

Afterwards, Everett, flushed with anarchy, and a former public schoolboy himself, looks to have blurred his character with real life. A bit of a nightmare then, but I admire him for it. (I think that Everett is a brilliant memoirist – read his books).

When the film was released in 1984, an American newspaper queried why the biggest question hadn’t been answered. How did the lanky, dishevelled Bennett move from a witty and irreverent schoolboy to become a Soviet spy? We never did find out.

A good film, beautifully shot, if not a bit pedestrian at times.

And so, to the sad story of Frederick Alexander (aged 22), a close friend of Everett, who played Jim Menzies, but was really called Piers Flint-Shipman.

He and Everett were the only members of the original stage cast to appear in the film. “A much subtler and better actor that people at first gave him credit for. Wonderfully arrogant. Great dash and élan. One of the few people who could keep Rupert in order,” said its writer, Julian Mitchell.

In June 1984, while travelling back from France to attend the preview-cum-premiere of Another Country he was killed when a suicidal driver turned into his oncoming car. He would never grow old like Everett, Firth and Elwes.

And a recent anecdote.

Charles Spencer, 9th Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, was a young extra when it was filmed in Oxford, Northamptonshire and London in 1983.

“I bumped into Colin Firth – whose first film this also was – when he was promoting The King’s Speech, and said: ‘Colin, you won’t remember me – but we took a shower together in Another Country’.

“Of course I remember!”, he laughed: “You have fantastic buttocks!”

“Had, I’m afraid”, I replied: “not have…”