Slouching toward Hollywood on the set of Search and Destroy

‘I AM A MOVIE director if I say I am,” challenges super-artist turned movie director David Salle, with more than a little irony. “And I dare you to prove otherwise.”

Depending on your point of view, the proof is or isn’t in Salle’s cinematic debut, Search and Destroy, a little noir movie with a big noir cast: Dennis Hopper, Christopher Walken, John Turturro, Griffin Dunne, Ethan Hawke, Illeana Douglas, Rosanna Arquette, and Martin Scorsese, who also executive produced.

Once one of the brightest stars in the white-hot art galaxy of 1980s New York, these days, Salle is more like its supernova. Brazenly appropriating images from the history of art, controversial for his cheeky irreverence (and propensity for populating his paintings with sexually explicit images of nude women), the artist and his constructive painting flew in the face of conventional notions of originality. This made him enormously wealthy. At one point, his paintings sold for upwards of $125,000 each; in 1989, Tennyson was auctioned at Sotheby’s for $550,000. At 34, Salle was the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

All the hoopla also earned him many critics. One archly wrote of a 1982 Salle show, ‘This … would be an Event if catered with a box of Chiclets and held in a subway toilet.”

For Salle the delicate balance between sincerity and irony has deep roots. Born in Norman, Oklahoma, and raised in Wichita, Kansas, the son of a designer of dress-shop displays, he attended the cutting-edge CalArts at eighteen and came to New York when he was 22. After working as a restaurant cook, an art teacher, a critic, and a pasteup artist for the porn magazine Stag, Salle caught the economic upswing of the ’80s. His penchant for self-re-creation even extends to his body, which has been shaped by a rigorous weights regimen and, reportedly. cosmetic surgery. Before coming to movies, he had already worked in several other mediums: illustrating the poems of John Ashbery, and collaborating on a play with Richard Foreman and on a ballet with Mikhail Baryshnikov. For many years he designed sets for his then girlfriend, choreographer Karole Armitage.

But art-world tastes began to change on a seasonal basis, and Salle soon fell out of fashion and began looking around for other avenues through which to express himself. Given his hyperrealistic style, frequently peppered with film images, to say nothing of his famous Hollywood acquaintances—CAA’ s Mike Ovitz owns some of Salle’s work—it wasn’t surprising that the painter found his way into cinema.

Search and Destroy, like Salle’s deceptively simple collagist art, operates on many different levels. A $1.5 million quirky black comedy, it’s in the tradition of Scorsese’s After Hours and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction. Search and Destroy is also an extremely personal movie: the story of a man disillusioned by the shallowness of the ’80s, who is desperately trying to find meaning by making a film.

“I don’t know how far I want to endorse the parallel,” says Salle. He quickly adds, “It’s an undercurrent that certainly extends the meaning of the movie, although perhaps not in a profound or useful way. Look, we’ve reached a point in the culture where things have gotten so twisted around that actors become presidents, where up actually is down, and black is white.”

Salle is not the only artist turning to filmmaking. Robert Longo’s first cinematic effort, Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren, will be released next month; Julian Schnabel is pursuing a film about the life and death of Warhol protégé Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although Salle had never so much as laid eyes on a set before Search and Destroy, he knows a lot about film history and is especially drawn to the dark melodramas of Douglas Sirk and the wry humor of Stanley Kubrick. While critical opinion may differ about his art, his business acumen has never been in doubt, and Salle has intelligently surrounded himself with consummate professionals and a talented cast.

“If it turns out that making movies is his real métier, then good luck to him. I frankly never thought that painting ever was,” says Hilton Kramer, editor of The New Criterion and a longtime Salle critic. “For painters of his generation, becoming an artist was a second-best choice. They certainly didn’t grow up looking at El Greco. Their deepest satisfaction is in movies, and now that they are rich enough and know the right people, they can fulfill their childhood dreams.”

Even Salle’s less charitable critics will agree that he has at the very least proved that a successful artist is perfectly positioned to attract good actors. Given the number of CAA clients in Search and Destroy (Scorsese, Hopper, Hawke, and Douglas), rumors circulated that Ovitz had put the project together. They were denied by all those involved; but still, the idea struck a chord. “David sure did a hell of a job packaging this movie,” Hopper offers jokingly. “Maybe in his next career he should go and work for CAA.”

THE STORY OF making a movie about the story of making a movie makes a good story. First performed in 1990 and then in 1992 as a successful off-Broadway play by Howard Korder, Search and Destroy was optioned by producer Dan Lupovitz, who took the project to his friend Ruth Charny, an independent producer in New York. She thought that Search and Destroy‘s dark humor would appeal to her friend Salle, with whom she had worked on an earlier project. Also, as this would be Salle’s first movie, he’d be cheap. “When you are doing a low-budget movie like this,” says Lupovitz, “you need a director who is either on his way up or on his way down. I prefer the former.”

Salle agreed to do it and immediately contacted his friend Hopper. Hopper signed on, and then suggested Michael Almereyda to write the screenplay. “At that point we had Salle, Hopper, a good writer, but no money,” explains Charny. “Then I showed the play to Martin Scorsese, who agreed to executive produce, and suddenly we were getting calls from agents trying to get their clients—Kevin Kline, Kyle MacLachlan. ‘et cetera—into the movie.” Scorsese, who saw Search and Destroy as something of a sequel to After Hours, insisted that Dunne, who had played the lead character, Martin Mirkheim, off-Broadway, resume the role onscreen.

Walken, after requesting a few changes in the script (says Charny, “He didn’t want to play just another garden-variety psychopath”), took the role of Kim, a chilling, adventure-seeking businessman who helps Martin raise funds for the movie. Learning that Walken was on board, Turturro, who’d always wanted to work with the actor and who knew both Salle and Scorsese, immediately committed. Douglas, who had worked with Charny on the movie Grief (and who was also Scorsese’s girlfriend), was one of the first to be cast, and brought in her friend Ethan Hawke to play a small role as Hopper’s sleazy personal assistant. Arquette, who had acted with Dunne in After Hours, signed on as Martin’s beleaguered wife.

Now all they needed was financing. Lupovitz had brought several projects to Avi Lerner, the Israeli-born chairman of Nu Image, a production company that had recently backed such highbrow fare as Cyborg Cop and Cyborg Cop II. Nu Image was looking for something to boost its cultural profile without costing much money. And Search and Destroy, with Scorsese attached, seemed to fit the bill. Because of the limitations of its budget, the movie was shot on a 30-day crash schedule. Virtually every scene—set in Boca Raton, Dallas, and other places—was shot in the streets or suburbs of New York. All the actors worked for union-scale wages. They carpooled. Salle says that when his own agent learned how little his client was going to make, Salle had to beg him not to renegotiate the contract.

Aside from the obvious recognition his name would lend the movie, Salle was also brought on with the hopes that his artist’s eye would give Search and Destroy a distinctive look. Certain scenes make you feel like you are actually living in a David Salle painting, such as a lengthy cross-country travel montage in which old western railroad footage is spliced together while huge silhouettes of objects—a saltine cracker, a glass of water—that Dunne and Douglas use during their train trip float across the screen. The movie opens with an unnerving close-up of the face of Dennis Hopper—Dr. Luthor Waxling, a power-mad, late-night television self-actualizing guru—looking out at his audience, strained through a kaleidoscope of brilliant, acid-drenched colors. A scene in a tailor shop involving Walken, Dunne, and Turturro is set to music and choreographed like a modern ballet against walls that are swathed in a variety of pinstriped fabrics. Salle really cranks up his palette for the short vignettes based on Waxling’s book, Daniel Strong, that punctuate the movie. There is even a brief musical interlude in which Walken does a song-and-dance number in a karaoke bar.

“With Search and Destroy I wanted to do something that would go against the grain of the typical noir movie, which is always dark and brooding, by making it very bright and flat and pop, as well as humorous and ironic,” Salle explains. In order to create this effect, he hired cinematographer Michael Spiller, who had shot Hal Hartley’s films. But after seeing the first week’s footage, the producers were worried that Salle and Spiller’s combined aesthetic would overwhelm the rest of the movie. A new cinematographer, Bobby Bukowski, was brought in. “The person they probably really wanted to get rid of was me, but Mike was the scapegoat. I’m sure there was a lot of talk about firing me,” Salle says. “I think the level of unconventionality we were striving for made them nervous. They couldn’t quite see the film I had in mind, and then there were times when they just didn’t like what they saw.”

The combination of Hopper, Walken, and Turturro does put the paranoid-neurotic index dangerously high. “It’s a screwball tragedy punctuated by arbitrary violence that is so horrific it’s actually funny,” says Dunne. “But it’s also one of those movies where the audience will probably walk out of the theater and ask itself, Jesus, what was I just laughing at?”

Scorsese, who has made several movies fitting that description, thinks that Search and Destroy is articulating a larger impulse.

“It has more social implications than After Hours,” he explains in his clipped New York accent. “It is dealing with the debris of the ruthless, materialistic ’80s and exploring the possibility of putting ourselves back together morally. It’s good that there is a generation of directors like Salle and Tarantino who are willing to criticize what we hold valuable and try to find some coherence. It’s healthy.”

Is there any particular reason these kinds of movies are being made now? Scorsese stops to think for a moment. “I don’t know,” he muses. “Maybe they’re all just depressed or in a bad mood. Hey, I’ve been in a bad mood for 25 years.”