April 9: You’re With the Band — A movie that has a band cameo. Here’s an article to inspire you.
In 1994, director Tony Scott was sent an article by his business manager Neville Shulman. “My Gun for Hire: Why a Movie Star’s Rebel Daughter Turned Into a Bounty Hunter” by Sacha Gervasi was about Domino Harvey, a bounty hunter working for the Celes King Bail Bond agency in South Central Los Angeles and the daughter of actor Laurence Harvey, who was in Room at the Top, The Manchurian Candidate and Life at the Top, and British fashion model Paulene Stone, who refused to have her name be used for the movie, so she’s called Sophie Wynn and played by Jacqueline Bisset.
After completing a bail recovery agent training course, Harvey began working with her teacher Ed Martinez as one of female bounty hunters in the United States. She didn’t make much money, but did the job for the excitement. Living above her mother’s garage in Beverly Hills, she became friends with Scott, who started to observe her as she tracking her marks.
Scott taped hours of conversations with Harvey over twelve years and she spent three weeks on set, appearing in a featurette that’s on the DVD, as well as contributing to the soundtrack and appearing at the wrap party. There were rumors she was unhappy with how she appeared in the film, but sadly, she didn’t live to see it. While she appears as the end of the cast credits, she would not live to see its release, overdosing on fentanyl after years of drug addiction. The movie is dedicated to her.
The first two scripts for this movie were written by Steve Barancik and Roger Avary, but Scott felt they were too normal. He went to Richard Kelly (Donnie Darko, Southland Tales), who used transcripts of the interviews and wrote what he said was “one of the most subversive films released by a major studio since Fight Club.” As for Scott, he said, “I didn’t let the movie breathe enough. The script was great — Richard Kelly wrote a great script — and I got overcome by the insanity of the world I was touching. I think I fucked up on that one.” He did say it was one of his favorites.
Domino (Keira Knightley) has been arrested by the FBI after the theft of ten million dollars from an armored truck. As criminal psychologist Taryn Mills (Lucy Liu) interviews her, she tells how she went from being a model and society girl to working with Ed Moseby (Mickey Rourke), Choco (Edgar Ramirez) and their driver Alf (Riz Abbasi), an Afghan whose unpronounceable name leads them to name him after the TV character because it’s said he eats cats.
Their boss, Claremont Williams III (Delroy Lindo) is having an affair with a DMV employee named Lateesha Rodriguez (Mo’Nique) who has a daughter suffering from a blood disease. The operation costs $300,000 so Claremont sets up a deal where some criminals will rob an armored truck from his other business and take the money of Drake Bishop (Dabney Coleman), the owner of the Stratosphere Hotel and Casino, the bounty hunters will track down the robbers, get back the money and get a $300,000 finder’s fee which will go to Rodriguez. Yes, it’s complicated. Yes, it gets much more complicated.
That’s because Lateesha has been running a counterfeit driver’s license scheme that the FBI learns all about. They want info on one of the licenses she made for Frances (Kel O’Neill), the son of the Cigliutti crime family. She throws the operation off by blaming them for the upcoming robbery, which she plans on doing with Claremont after she’s on Jerry Springer’s show talking about how she’s a grandmother at 28.
The bounty hunters apprehend Frances, his brother and his two friends and delivers them to Bishop, who learns that they had nothing to do with the crime. Thinking that his sons are dead, their father heads for the casino while Domino takes $300,000 of Bishop’s money and gives it to Lateesha for her granddaughter’s operation.
Meanwhile, there’s a TV show in the works called Bounty Squad — produced by Mark Heiss (Christopher Walken), which brings her into the orbit of Brian Austin Green and Ian Ziering, who speak to the actual bounty hunters and are terrified.
Of course, everything ends up in a Mexican standoff — and blow up — inside the Stratosphere. The money goes to the little girl — and Afghanistan — as Domino is told to retire.
This movie feels very early 2000s — well, of course — but also like you’re on coke when you watch it. That’s no accident. Scott claimed that there was a high usage of cocaine by the actual bounty hunters he consulted while researching the film and he wanted to get that across. As for that goldfish named Sammy that dies, the symbolism of that is pretty simple. Dakota Fanning told Scott during the making of Man on Fire all about her goldfish who had died.
One of the odder things — I mean, other than the constant snap zooms and the camera feeling its closer than its ever been to actors — is The Wanderer, a character who saves the bounty hunters in the desert and shows up to offer spiritual advice. Keep in mind these are the kind of people who would cut the arm off a man and show it to their mother to get her to open a safe. Waits’ songs “Cold Cold Ground” and “Jesus Gonna Be Here” are also on the soundtrack. Beyond his amazing music, Waits was also in the movies Paradise Alley, Wolfen, One From the Heart, The Outsiders, Rumbles Fish, The Stone Boy, The Cotton Club, Down By Law, Iron Lake, Greasy Lake, Candy Mountain, Big Time, Bearskin: An Urban Fairy Tale, Cold Feet, Mystery Train, The Two Jakes, Queens Logic, Night On Earth, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Short Cuts, Mystery Men, The Last Castle, Coffee and Cigarettes, The Tiger and the Snow, Wristcutters: A Love Story, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, The Book of Eli, The Monster of Nix, Twixt, Seven Psychopaths, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, The Old Man & the Gun, The Dead Don’t Die, Licorice Pizza, The Absence of Eden and Wildwood.
Speaking of rock star cameos, Macy Gray also shows up as Lashandra.
On August 19, 2012, Scott jumped off Los Angeles’ Vincent Thomas Bridge. He had been fighting cancer but was supposedly in remission. His brother Ridley said that the suicide was inexplicable. One witness said he had no hesitation while another said he looked nervous and held off for two seconds before leaping near a tour boat. He and his brother both came from commercials. After this film, he made Déjà Vu, The Taking of Pelham 123 and Unstoppable, but is best known for Top Gun. He also directed the music video “One More Try” for George Michael and the love scene in his video “Father Figure.”
Domino seems like a parody of an action movie by being the kind of action movie that gets parodied. But I kind of love it for how ridiculous it is. Yet it also feels like a movie steeped in tragedy and pain. Kelly said, “The film opens with a title card that states: “This film is based on a true story… sort of.” The film is very tongue in cheek in its intentional distortion of the truth. This is part of its design… and this design is something that Domino loved about the project. I made it clear to her when I met her that we would capture her fiercely unapologetic, dystopian and ultimately tragic worldview. She saw America through a very subversive punk rock lens (Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols was a friend of hers), and Tony has captured this worldview in a way that she approved. This is a satirical interpretation of a biopic… one that shifts from fact to fantasy as a way of expressing her rebellious spirit and rejection of traditional values, restrictions and archaic traditions forced upon women.”
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