Straightforward though it may be, it’s not an easy book to fully grasp. Hinton said as much when Miller asked her about Francis Ford Coppola’s film version.
“Francis,” she said, “was one of the few people I’ve ever talked to who understood the book.”
Coppola shot Rumble Fish in and around Tulsa in the summer of 1982, just after he’d wrapped the Tulsa-lensed Outsiders. Midway through that shoot, after Hinton and Coppola had worked together on the Outsiders script, the director asked her if she had any other possible source material he might look at while he still had actors and a crew in Tulsa.
“I said, ‘Well, I’ve got this weird book called Rumble Fish, and nobody gets it,’” Hinton told me in a 2008 interview for my book Shot in Oklahoma (2011). “One day, he comes running in, waving a copy. He says, ‘I love this book. It’s so weird. We’ll make it weirder. You and I will write the screenplay on Sundays’ – because we were shooting six days a week on The Outsiders. So that’s what happened.”[pullquote]”Overall, the crowded, garish avenue looks nothing like Tulsa, and it won’t be Tulsa on film. The street scene, which was designed by [Coppola’s production designer] Dean Tavoularis, depicts an unnamed urban area in the near future – a place where the film’s rebellious youths go for some action.[/pullquote]
It’s exactly what happened, right down to the “make it weirder” part. Eschewing the flashback narrative of the book, the film version of Rumble Fish could be seen as the dark side of The Outsiders – which, although frequently downbeat, ends on a bright note of hope. Shot in moody black-and-white, with the only specks of color (until a brief flash at the end) belonging to the Siamese fighting fish referred to in the title, the R-rated Rumble Fish features plenty of bad language, brief nudity and sex and a performance by Matt Dillon (as Rusty James) that often seems to be channeling On the Waterfront-era Marlon Brando. Coppola had his crew watch several silent movies – also in black-and-white, of course – to get a feel for what he wanted; one of them was the German Expressionist horror classic Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, with its tilted perspectives and painted-on shadows. Indeed, shadows – painted and otherwise – make up a major visual component of Rumble Fish.
And while those familiar with Tulsa will notice lots of landmarks, Rumble Fish’s milieu is actually supposed to be an unnamed, slightly futuristic city. This not-quite-real setting is especially evident when Rusty James and his square friend Steve (Vincent Spano) travel with the Motorcycle Boy (Mickey Rourke) across a bridge to a loud and dangerous neon wilderness – which was in real life a redressed Greenwood Avenue, the African-American entertainment mecca of decades earlier.
“Overall,” wrote Bruce Westbrook in the Aug. 20, 1982, Tulsa Tribune, “the crowded, garish avenue looks nothing like Tulsa, and it won’t be Tulsa on film. The street scene, which was designed by [Coppola’s production designer] Dean Tavoularis, depicts an unnamed urban area in the near future – a place where the film’s rebellious youths go for some action.”
Rumble Fish radiates with other offbeat touches, including Rusty James’ out-of-body experience during a near-fatal beating in that “unnamed urban area.” Expanded from the scene in the book, it features the character literally floating through the air, past the home of his estranged girlfriend (Diane Lane) who’s now mourning for him. But, like his brother the Motorcycle Boy boomeranging back after a trip to California, Rusty James has no choice but to return.
Unlike The Outsiders, the Rumble Fish movie was not a hit. It may have simply been too strange and depressing to be popular with the moviegoing masses. However, as is the case with a quirky film made by smart people, it has its defenders. I’m one of them, and so is Susie Hinton.
“[P]eople either love it or hate it,” she wrote on her website. “I love it.”
