Being the thrilling saga of how the infamous Stallone-Russell buddy disasterfest saw out the 1980s in appropriately chaotic style. First published in Empire Magazine
It is mid Summer, 1989, the offices of Hollywood mega producers Guber-Peters and a production meeting is in full swing.
“I don’t care if it fucking farts I want Peter to fucking shoot it,” Jon Peters is screaming to line producer Larry Franco. “Whatever it is, it’s action or dialogue, I don’t care. You gotta get Peter to shoot it!”
“Jon . . .”
“I hired you to be the policeman,” screams Peters. ”The fucking policeman! You gotta figure it out! You gotta figure out how to make this work!”
Welcome to the daily hellscape that is the life of Larry Franco, line producer on Tango & Cash.
The grunt of the producing fraternity, the line producer’s role is to supervise the day to day running of the film, from managing day-to-day budgets, ensuring locations are lined up, and planning the logistics of the complex, expensive operation that a Hollywood movie inevitably is.
And, as 28-year-old first-time line producer Larry Franco, was finding, on Tango & Cash, it also involved being yelled at. A lot.
“Tango & Cash was the most screwed up show I ever worked on,” Franco, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday, remembers to Empire. He pauses for a moment and then adds.
“And I worked on Apocalypse Now.”
Released on December 22, 1989, Tango and Cash was the last Hollywood movie of the 1980s, and the decade that didn’t so much forget taste as ball-gag it, tie to a gurney and torment it with pliers, couldn’t have chosen a better, or at least more appropriate movie to make its exit with. It was, it is, one of the most deliriously batshit crazy films of all time. Nominally a buddy cop movie in the Lethal Weapon vein, it departs whatever rails it was ever on almost immediately with an opening sequence in which Sylvester Stallone stops a speeding tanker packed with cocaine with nothing but a pistol and a quip. “Fuck you!” the drug goon declares. “I prefer blondes,” is Stallone’s reply. It is typical of the film’s otherworldly dialogue which is composed almost entirely of half-baked zingers and enthusiastic snark, culminating in Stallone declaring “Rambo’s a pussy!” thus further goosing the heady brew with a slug of Fisher-Price postmodernism.
Meanwhile, villain Jack Palance acts in a wholly different movie, one playing it seems entirely in his head, occasionally sniffing rats and delivering lines like: “Ray Tango! How he loves to dance! He waltzes in and takes all my drugs, and then tangoes back out again!”. Stallone dons specs and plays it intellectual. Kurt Russell wears a dress and all the while Harold Faltemyer's synth score twangs and whines, a strange anthem to weirder times.
Jack Palance sniffs rats!.
Tango & Cash began not as a screenplay but as a fevered notion – half story note, half deal memo – that flashed through the unique mind of legendary executive Jon Peters.
“I got a call from my then-agent at CAA,” screenwriter Randy Feldman tells Empire. “He said, ‘You should go over to Guber-Peters. Jon has this idea about two cops and one gets involved with the other one’s sister. It’s kind of like The Quiet Man.’”
The IMDB’s plot summary of The Quiet Man, in which John Ford directed John Wayne in 1952, is as follows: “A retired American boxer returns to the village of his birth in Ireland, where he finds love.”
If there ever was a scene in The Quiet Man in which John Wayne shoots a tanker full of cocaine it ended up on Ford’s cutting room floor. Feldman suspected that whatever was fermenting in Jon Peters’ imagination was unlikely to be anything like The Quiet Man.
“It did seem like something was off,” says Feldman. Nevertheless, he went to meet Peters and asked him what was on his mind. “Jon got kind of angry,” he remembers. “He yelled ‘What, you’ve got no ideas? Why are you wasting my fucking time?’”
“Jon is a very volatile, kind of difficult guy,” explains Feldman. “He can have a single conversation with you that ranges from ‘You motherfucker, I’m going to kill you, you’ll never work again’ to ‘Hey, we’re partners, I love you!’”
Having reminded Peters that it was he that called the meeting, he asked what was on his mind. “He pitched me this thing that was rich cop/poor cop, east/west side. They pal up, they go to jail. The idea didn’t seem that exciting to me. We’d already had Lethal Weapon. . . but there’s this idea of one-upmanship between them that I found interesting. But what it really turns out is that he wants to put Stallone and Schwarzenegger in the same picture.”
(Indeed Schwarzenegger would circle the project briefly. After a brief time with Patrick Swayze attached (he left to star in Roadhouse), the role finally went to Kurt Russell.)
As for the director, Feldman was expecting Peters to name one of the rosters of action-helmers who had refined the 80s action flick to a titanium edge: McTiernan, Harlin, De Bont. Instead, Peters informed Feldman that the director would be Russian director Andrei Konchalovsky.
“So I was flown to Paris to meet Konchalovsky,” says Feldman. “I found him at the Moliers Theatre doing Ibsen, so, you know, it immediately seemed like he was an odd choice to do this.”
Konchalovsky was indeed an odd choice. A respected auteur and collaborator with the legendary Andrei Tarkovsky in his native Russia, he had made a handful of films in Hollywood after but had only had one English language hit, Runaway Train from a screenplay by Akira Kurosawa. Nevertheless, the two hit it off. “He is this very bright guy, very intelligent and erudite. But he was very wrapped up in this idea of almost making light of the kind of iconic hero that Stallone was. I mean he had this idea of Stallone climbing up this huge phallic structure during the prison escape. It was almost a subversive, subtextual agenda he had for the movie.”
But if Feldman had concerns about the director he kept them to himself. And anyway, by the time The Set Up, as it was then titled, was midway through shooting, in the Autumn of 1989, it was doing a pretty good job of deconstructing itself.
Things had begun to go awry from the start. It quickly emerged that almost nobody was entirely happy with Feldman’s screenplay. “The actors were getting along great but [with the crew] there was a lot of groaning and dissatisfaction. Andrei was unhappy very soon into the shoot,” says Randy Feldman ”Actually the happiest guy I saw on set when I visited early on was the DoP, and he’d just been fired.” (The DoP in question was Barry Sonnenfeld, who shot for only a few days.)
Overseeing the second unit was Brit. Peter MacDonald. “Andrei was an odd choice,” MacDonald tells Empire. “I think he thought he was making an art-house piece. But that wasn’t what really on the cards. And, of course, he was Russian. I don’t think he really ever understood the buddy-buddy Lethal Weapon-style film.”
Amid the daily chaos of the production, there were likely three versions of Tango & Cash being shot. There were the remnants of Randy Feldman’s darker, more realistic, cop-buddy tale; there was Andrei Konchalovsky’s critique of the very idea of a Hollywood action movie; there was Jon Peters increasingly gonzo comedy flick, and there was whatever Sylvester Stallone, an Oscar-winning screenwriter himself for Rocky, and thus famously happy to rewrite anyone, came up with during his lengthy sessions at the keyboard in his trailer every morning.
In the middle of it all Larry Franco valiantly tried to hold the show together, piecing together last-second shooting schedules and weathering Jon Peters’ furious tirades. “It was pretty much the most chaotic experience of my life. I was kind of waving my hands saying this is out of fucking control. And nobody’s listening. Jon Peters is running around, showing up on set in his tennis outfit, just off the court, in his big Rolls Royce, or whatever the fuck he’s driving that day. I’ve never experienced anything like that since.”
Barry Sonnenfeld wasn’t the only early leaver. Daphne Ashbrook, who had been cast as Tango’s sister was let go midway through the shoot. “I had to reshoot the nightclub dance sequence with Terri [Hatcher] because they had employed another actress who had shot the scene, and then they decided it hadn’t worked out,” says Peter MacDonald, whose second, nominally action, unit was now frantically picking up incomplete sequences that would normally have been covered by Konchalovsky’s unit which spent the mornings cooling its heels while Stallone reworked the screenplay.
And then there was the third act. Or rather, there wasn’t. “We never really had an ending,” says Feldman. “At one time it was at an airport. Then at a compound. I remember one meeting when Larry and I were at Peter Guber’s house in Beverly Park where all the bigwigs lived. This is Friday, and we’re due to start shooting the scene on Monday. Peter is: ‘So, they get to the airport and they roar onto the tarmac and . . . well we’ll finish the meeting there’. I walked out with Larry and he said, ‘Look, you gotta give me pages for Monday. I know where [ital] we’re shooting but I don’t know what we’re shooting.’ It was this completely crazy process.”
The final straw for Feldman, though, would come with the nightclub sequence. A lightning bolt of inspiration hit Peters about how to further improve the already insane story. Cash was, Peters had informed Feldman, going to escape the club in full drag, an idea pregnant, he declared, with zany comedic possibilities.
“I just said, you know, I don’t really think that’s very funny,” Feldman remembers. “It wasn’t really organic to the thing. I mean it’s not like we’re making Some Like It Hot or something. Jon gave me all this ‘I’m gonna kill you’ stuff so I went down to the set and told Kurt they wanted me to write a scene where he was in drag. He said, ‘Well, I’ve done a lot of stupid things on film, but usually I don’t do them on purpose.’ There was a huge fight and they kind of said well why don’t you just go to Hawaii for a couple of weeks?”
Feldman would do no further work on the screenplay. As well as the ongoing rewrites he had completed no fewer than eleven drafts, though it is debatable how much of his work remains in the released film. “Jon is a volatile character, but the thing about him is that he believed what he was saying when he was saying it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t going to change. And quickly. And he did he had a certain ability to know what the audience wanted. I had no problem with Stallone, he was great to me. But he’s got very definite ideas about what he wanted to do. We would work together on a scene until it made sense . . . and then, unfortunately, he would change it later. Much of the dialogue attributed to me is actually Stallone’s. It was a crazy situation.”
(One of the star’s earliest contributions had been the title. “Sly told me it couldn't be called The Set Up because he just did Lock Up,” says Feldman. “I was like uh oh. Then he remembered he had once known a guy called Tango and he said he wanted his character to be called Ray Tango. So he said let’s call it Tango & Cash.”)
The problem of the missing third act would finally resolve itself when Jon Peters found himself driving past one of the massive roadworks then plaguing the Los Angeles freeway. He was immediately smitten with the giant earthmovers carving their way through the landscape. Like a golden age studio head spotting a promising ingenue, he decided he would make them stars.
“He came in and told me ‘we need to get eight of them,’” remembers MacDonald. “I said, ‘John, they're like half a million each. I can probably get you two’. So really we had to build the end sequence around those earthmovers.”
Deciding to locate the scene in a quarry MacDonald finally presented a beautifully lit model of the proposed set, complete with earthmovers, to Peters and Mark Canton.
“Spartacus!” said Canton and walked out.
Baffled, MacDonald followed him out of the room.”What do you mean ‘Spartacus’?” he asked.
“I always say Spartacus when I’m impressed,” replied Canton.
“I said, ‘Mark, you have to remember in Spartacus they all got crucified.’”
Konchalovsky was, inevitably, the first to get nailed up. “I was shooting the big fight at the prison and I got a call from the studio to go back to Warners immediately,” remembers Peter MacDonald. “I said ‘Well I’ve got the two stars and 30 stuntmen.’ They said no, it’s very important.”
“I walked into the conference room and there’s Jon Peters kind of grabbing hold of Larry and yelling ‘I’m a fucking valley boy! I’m gonna beat the shit out of you!’” remembers MacDonald. “I thought, hmmm, this is a good meeting.”
Amid the chaos, Mark Canton informed Macdonald that they intended to fire Konchalovsky.
“But it’s OK. We’ve got Al to take it over,” Canton had said.
“And I said, ‘Al who?’”
“Albert!,” said Canton. “He’s directing the Batman videos!”
“Perfect,” said MacDonald.
In fact Albert Magnoli was much more than a pop promo director. The director of both Purple Rain and Sign O’ The Times was by then also Prince’s manager and in a meeting at Warner Records when he got the call. “I was told there was a call from Mark Canton and I could take it in the other room,” Magnoli tells Empire
“We’re having some trouble with Tango & Cash,” Canton had said. “We want you to take over.”
Magnoli had asked how soon he would be needed. “Tomorrow,” had been Canton’s reply.
“It was Thursday,” Magnoli remembers. “I said that was impossible, I said by the earliest Monday, but what’s important is that I read the script.” He started reading the screenplay on Friday night. On Saturday morning he called Canton.
“Mark,” Magnoli said, “there’s something wrong. There’s only two acts, nothing after page 85. Who's going to get the third act done?”
“You are,” Canton replied.
In the end, it turned out that Canton had found a man with exactly the right talent set to get Tango & Cash finally finished. Magnoli’s first move was to bring screenwriter Jeffrey Boam onto the project, persuading the writer to work overnight. During the day he and the cast would shoot, from 10 am on the dot, and discuss the next day’s scenes as they filmed. “By two or three in the afternoon I would call Jeffrey with a punch list of what the next day’s scenes would be. He would work overnight and then I would read in the car on the way to work the next day. That was the procedure from day one, and it allowed us to complete this enormously intense schedule that we needed to have completed by October at the latest.”
“At first he seemed an odd choice,” says Larry Franco. ”But he had a lot of energy, much more energy than Andrei did. He broke out the Steadicam and he’s running around. We were gonna get it done.”
“We also needed an editorial army under one general,” Magnoli says. “We needed a guy to come in and make decisions about how this thing is going to be shaped. And that's when Stuart Baird arrived.”
“The studio wanted to know whether they had a picture or not,” Baird, who would become one of Hollywood's legendary fixers, tells Empire from his Los Angeles home. “How much was missing? Did it make sense? I said the only way I’ll know if we can make a film out of what is been shot is for me to sit in the cutting room and go through all the material.”
What Baird watched was an alarming constellation of fragments: action sequences completed but missing framing dialogue, pieces of sequences without reaction shots, whole scenes MIA and little sign of anything beyond white space after page 85, the beginning of the third act.
“When I saw it there were great holes in it. I said, ‘I’d better read the script’. They said, ‘Well, actually we’re still doing the script.’’
Tango & Cash was, then, was a movie that seemed to be in the unconventional position of having been shot before it had been written. “They called me into a big meeting and I had to sit there at the head of the table in the conference room at Warner Bros. and tell them they hadn’t got a picture. Which wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”
“My discussions with Stuart were very simple,” remembers Albert Magnoli. “What do you need that you don’t have? How quickly do you need it? Finishing this movie took a village. The time frame just didn’t allow for any ego. The time frame allowed for people to get together and get it done.”
With Magnoli funnelling footage to Baird, and Baird furiously cutting, Tango & Cash just made its release date of December 22.
For Randy Feldman, as perhaps for everyone since, the experience of finally seeing the completed film was a disconcerting one. “I went with my agent to the premiere at the Grauman’s Chinese,” he remembers. “They played the first scene, which I realised I had nothing to do with. I was just kind of, ‘Who wrote this?’ There was some very odd stuff in there. I mean I didn’t write a scene in the prison shower with the soap. I was a young writer and you want the movie to be very close to the script you wrote. But there was a next time and a next time.”
Feldman pauses. “There is one thing I’d finally like on the record though,” he says.
“The rats. You should know that I had nothing to do with the rats.”
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