Stolen Cinematic Kisses for Santa Barbara

Santa Barbara has been a setting and location for many films over the decades, but only a few truly showcase our beloved region as a central atmospheric landscape and character of its own. Ivan Passer’s dark — and darkhorse — 1980 film Cutter’s Way (which inspired star Jeff Bridges to later move here), dealt with criminal connivances of the ultra-rich in a gritty but arty neo-noir fashion. Alexander Payne’s Sideways is a paean to the Santa Ynez Valley wine country, which actually nurtured the growth and mythos of said wine country.

But the most Santa Barbara–steeped Hollywood film to date — although underrated upon its release and still deserving wider recognition — is longtime local director Andrew Davis’s satirical sweetheart Steal Big Steal Little, a big little project from 1995 which is rich in local lore and scenery. 

It makes perfect sense that a special live screening of this small wonder kicks off a new Granada Theatre series “Santa Barbara Home Movies: Films by Artists and Performers Who Call Santa Barbara Home,” this Saturday, July 20. Davis will speak after the screening, with Andy Garcia and other cast and crew members in house. 

Granada Centennial producer Scott Seltzer was the series “early agitator/lobbyist,” but he confirmed that “it wasn’t too difficult to get folks enthusiastic about the idea.” With Davis as a “terrific partner,” the series includes two more of his films — Holes and The Fugitive — and five by director Robert Zemeckis: Romancing the Stone, Back to the Future, Who Framed Roger Rabbit and Forrest Gump, and in December, The Polar Express. (More info here.) 

Based on a true story of tangled inheritance foibles in West Virginia, Davis — who here with his family in 1984 — concocted an often madcap and sometimes improvised tale of corruption in a rich-getting-richer malfeasance and immigration issues (one of many currently relevant subjects in the film).  We follow the exploits of Garcia — twice over, as alternately evil and earthy twin brothers — and the late Alan Arkin in a deliciously freewheeling performance. 

The scenic sweep and bubbly action zooms across the county, bouncing around State Street and framed by scenes of the Summer Solstice Parade. Proud Chicagoan Davis has often found ways to feature his birthplace in his films, but Steal Big’s only “Chicago scene” is actually a used car lot next to where Ralph’s is downtown Santa Barbara. “You can actually see some Spanish Colonial roofs in the background,” Davis laughed. “But we just let it go.”

The film’s anchor locations take place at Montecito’s Lotusland and especially on the idyllic and sprawling Rancho San Julian close to Lompoc, which is the home compound of Independent editor Marianne Partridge and her husband Jim Poet and family.

(This just in from the full disclosure department: I was involved in the film as an early consultant when Davis was first devising his Santa Barbara saga, as an extra at the ranch — a morally dubious real estate agent — and also as a guitarist on one track from the soundtrack, brought in by musical hero Randy Tico, one of the film’s composers and on-screen musical performer in a few of the film’s celebratory music scenes.)

In a real way, Davis’ lovably quirky and personal side project was made possible by his previous film, The Fugitive, which gave him enough Hollywood clout to pursue an independent film of his own devising and control. Although Steal Big landed with a veritable thud, commercially and critically (what do critics know?), a fresh watch reveals its kinetic and hard-to-describe charms and renewable legacy. 

Although he has been looking nostalgically back recently, as with last fall’s release of The Fugitive in 4K restoration, Davis’ ever-active creative energies are leaning forward. He will publish the book Disturbing the Bones, written with Jeff Biggers with a future film version in mind; is adapting a Gene Wilder period piece novel and script, My French Amour; and has long dreamt of filming his own contemporary version of Treasure Island, the muse and financing machinery permitting.

We recently connected with Davis to discuss his close-to-home movie of nearly three decades back, deserving a new look and screen life. 

It was an unusual pleasure for me to watch this film again after almost 30 years, which brings back a flood of memories. I loved it when I first saw it and like it even more now. What are your reflections about it, in retrospect?

It’s interesting because I got my ass kicked when I made this movie. You know, the response was “what is this guy doing? He did The Fugitive and is now doing this goofy movie? It’s too long. It’s too complicated. What is it about?” But I always loved it. First of all, the experience was so much fun.

Victor Kaufman, who started Tri-Star pictures, later got independent money to make the film. They ran after me right after The Fugitive, signing “the director of The Fugitive.” They raised money based on that. I had all this independence to make three movies, you know, and own the negatives. So I had this chance to do whatever the hell I wanted. Didn’t have to do an action movie.

And you took an actual story about corruption and family infighting from West Virginia and had the idea to transplant that to your new hometown of Santa Barbara?

Yes, I made Santa Barbara as crooked as Chicago or as crooked as West Virginia. So that’s the only thing I’m sort of sad about, ’cause it’s not that crooked. But there probably have been some deals that we don’t even know about with land and people getting screwed. I thought “this is really an original idea.” And then it blossomed from there. 

How long did it take you and your writing partners to actually write the script?

I don’t really know. We went through phases. I hired a guy named Lee Blessing, a playwright who wrote Walk in the Woods, and there was Teresa Tucker Davies, my partner in Chicago Pacific (Davis’s Santa Barbara–based production company and facility, then behind the Riviera Theatre), she’s one of who found Holes (a later Davis-directed hit, which is also part of the Granada series). 

Then there was Frankie Perelli, this comedian who was Lenny Bruce’s roommate. Frankie, it turns out, was from Chicago. He grew up on the West side near my father, where the Italians and the Jews would fight each other. His mother was friends with Capone. He’d tell all these great stories about growing up in Chicago as a kid, and he wrote some very funny screenplays and stories. A writer named Terry Khan also worked on it with me. 

So it was just a process. I don’t think we improvised that much, but there was certainly some improvisation, especially between Alan (Arkin) and Andy. I’ve invited Adam Arkin (Alan’s son) to the screening. He can’t make it, but he wrote back and said that his father loved doing the movie. He really thought it was great. And he loved the way everybody got along with each other and appreciated all the improvisation. I think it’s one of his best characters and performances.

There are a lot of great lines in this movie. You must have had fun, coming out of your action period, taking a hard left into broad comedy.

Yeah (laughs), and I didn’t spend my own money. I didn’t make any money on it, but I didn’t spend my own money. 

It went from my being the big action director to a flop as a comedy director, but I recently have been thinking about Coppola and what he’s going through (with his self-financed One from the Heart and the new Megalopolis) and Kevin Costner (his current Horizon project) and all these people putting all their lives into it. 

I didn’t do that. I wasn’t rich enough to do it (laughs). It didn’t get that much attention, but if you think about it, it’s very relevant to it in terms of greed and immigration.

Your action films are embedded with social commentary and political subplots. You did the same thing here, but in a comedic direction. I wondered about the meek response. Maybe the general audience didn’t know how to read the film, which is almost halfway to the art house model. Is that a possibility?

It will be interesting to see how this audience (at the Granada) reacts to it. I want to show it with subtitles in Spanish. I was invited a few years ago to a film festival in Guadalajara, and they paid for the subtitles to get put on it. I want to explore ideas about how to reach out to the Hispanic community. There’s a discount for tickets, 10 bucks for two.

We can feel the element of improvisation in the mix and so much of an ensemble energy going on. I kept thinking of Robert Altman. Was his work a touch point for you?

It’s funny, I grew a very warm spot for Altman because I didn’t get nominated for Best Director with The Fugitive. And he got nominated for Cookie. When it all came out, he said, “They’re giving it to me. ’cause I’m an old man, Andrew Davis should be one of the nominees.” I had a lot of friends who worked with him. He was a maverick. He tried to do different things and worked with ensembles. 

My mother and father were in the Chicago Repertory Group, with Studs Terkel and Nelson Algren and all kinds of lefties in the thirties doing political theater. And one of the women involved was Viola Spolin, who’s the godmother of improvisational theater. She wrote the book on it. She was the best woman at my parents’ wedding. Her son is Paul Sills, who started Second City. And Alan Arkin was in Second City. There’s a big Chicago connection there.

Andy Garcia is perfectly cast for the lead twin roles, given his gift for both nasty and romantic characters. Was he the natural choice?

He was. I wanted someone Hispanic of some sort. I don’t remember what the chronology was, but Denzel Washington got the script and wanted to do it after I sort of committed to Andy. He told me he had some history in West Virginia with his family. He understood this whole thing. But then the whole thing with the La Migra and rounding up workers in the fields and everything else wouldn’t have worked as well.

For Santa Barbarans, especially as someone who grew up here, it’s a special treat to see the legendary locations you made good use of, some of which are no longer around, such as EJ’s and Papagallo’s. I forgot how much of it took place at Lotusland. 

The interiors were not Lotusland. They were created at another place. Marianne and Jim Poett’s ranch was a real blessing. The adobe was melting at the time and we put a new roof on it. The movie paid for a new roof, brought it back to life. And the old Dibblee was still around [patriarch Thomas Dibblee, 1911-2004, who grew up on the ranch].

That’s a very soulful property, with deep roots.

Yeah. Literally.

I don’t know if you remember this, but I was an extra, as a real estate agent illegally peddling the property. 

You’re in the scene with the balloons, right? So Rita Taggart was your boss. She’s Haskell Wexler’s widow. She didn’t understand what I was doing. She thought I was crazy. There’s this scene where they’re yelling at each other and everything. I think she appreciated it later. Joey Pants (actor Joe Pantoliano), too. He said, “I don’t know what this movie’s about,” but he created this great character.

You once told me that making a movie is like being in a traveling circus. There is definitely a circus quality to this movie, and you didn’t have to travel very far to do this one. Is that fair to say? 

It was wonderful to, for instance, go out to La Purisima as a stand-in for Mexico. We had the horses available. Those horse wranglers were terrific, and I remember the day before we shot one of those balloon sequences, we had access to the horses. And when riding out there, it was at San Fernando Rey, 14,000 acres owned by a local English family. They own about five or six of those kinds of places around the world. They sold iron to the Chinese after World War II.

Your family, with your wife Adrianne and children Gena and Julian, moved to town in 1984, and it seems you quickly dug into the community. You never seemed like one of those Hollywood people who hides away in their Montecito mansion and disregards the community.

I didn’t have a mansion then (laughs). We lived on the Mesa for two years before building this house (in the Riviera area). We became involved in the community because of the kids, going to Waldorf School and the Oaks Preschool and all that stuff, meeting locals. Your kids become your ambassadors.

Given your filmography, you are not entirely fairly typecast as an action director, but there are anomalies such as Holes, a great film for all ages. And Steal Big is something of a little gem that needs to be polished off and rediscovered.

It’s interesting because legally I own the negative, but the domestic rights are with Universal until next year. So the question is, how do I get it out into the world? I think it’s got a huge possible audience in South America, in Central America. Andy Garcia is so handsome, young looking, for one thing.

Speaking of which, the very last scene we see in the film is a brief inserted shot after the end credits, with Andy Garcia dancing alone on State Street before parade goers who probably didn’t realize the star factor dancing in the streets. I should know this: what do you call those end credit pop-up shots?

Director’s whim (laughs). If you look at my website, www.andrewdavisfilms.com, there’s a sample reel of things I’ve done, and that’s how I ended it.

Steal Big Steal Little kicks off the Granada Theater’s new film series, “Santa Barbara Home Movies: Films by Artists and Performers Who Call Santa Barbara Home” with a screening on Sat., Jul. 20, 7 p.m. Click here for tickets.