Sexy women in clinging red satin dresses. The girl next door ready to leap into bed any time you ask. A best friend’s mother who looks like Miss America in tight toreador pants. Lots of beer and shots of booze. Long, heartfelt conversations about life and the future. Indianapolis in the 1950s.
Indianapolis in the 1950s?
Yes, or at least that’s the way Dan Wakefield remembers it and conjured it up in his 1970 novel “Going All the Way.”
Likened to a Midwestern “Catcher In the Rye,” the story follows two high school classmates through a long, lazy summer back home in Indiana after a hitch in the Army. Shy Sonny Burns and super-jock Gunner Casselman look for the meaning of life and search for their future amid the aching familiarity of their hometown.
Now, nearly 30 years after the book was published, the classic coming-of-age story has been transferred faithfully and evocatively to the screen. The movie version of Wakefield’s novel, which opens in the Chicago area on Friday, is the first feature film for director Mark Pellington, who developed his craft working at MTV. But it is a project he has had working in his mind for decades.
“I was 16 when I found it on my father’s shelf,” Pellington, 32, recalled of his first encounter with Wakefield’s novel. “At the time I was lured by the provocative title.”
Sonny and Gunner appear to be opposite sides of a single person waiting to be melded. Thoughtful and introverted, Sonny longs to have Gunner’s confident, athletic grace. A star high school athlete, Gunner rues years he now sees wasted as a mindless showoff and wants to absorb Sonny’s introspection.
That relationship was what first appealed to the 16-year-old Pellington. “Part of me felt like Sonny and part of me felt like Gunner,” he said recently.
Pellington said he was drawn to the story because of the way in which it dealt with male insecurities and by the somewhat dark tone present in parts of the novel. He has read “Going All the Way” at least 50 or 60 times over the years, and that intimate knowledge of the characters helped forge the images that he has brought to the screen.
While the novel’s story of young men feeling their way into a new stage in their lives is timeless, Pellington said he so identified with Wakefield’s description of the Midwest of the 1950s that he had to remain faithful to the original.
“The pictures in my head were so much set in that time and place and so I could not even think about doing the story in any other time, or place,” said Pellington. “It is not just nostalgic. It makes you remember the times, not just in a warm and fuzzy way, but also the way things really were.”
Pellington’s desire to stay close to the original novel led him to invite Wakefield to write the screenplay and to be actively involved in the production. This is unusual in the movie business, where authors and screenwriters usually are exiled once the filmmaking begins.
“I think it was a one-in-a-million experience,” Wakefield said of his participation in the making of the film. “The writer really has something to contribute if he is allowed.”
Wakefield said John Updike had told him about the experience of watching from afar as his novel “The Witches of Eastwick” was made into a movie. “He said he had to go to the theater and buy a ticket in order to see it,” Wakefield recalled, adding that among Updike’s chief regrets was never having had the chance to meet Cher, one of the stars of the film.
In contrast, Wakefield met frequently with Pellington and co-producer Tom Gorai, usually each time he completed another 20 pages of the script.
The film was shot in just 30 days, most of it on location in Indiana. Not only were Wakefield and 12 of his high school buddies, upon whom he based many of the characters, allowed to play small roles in the movie, but key locations where their youthful experiences had unfolded were also included.
Pellington said he went out of his way to encourage the participation of Wakefield and his friends. “Having the real Sonny and Gunner around really helped the actors,” Pellington said. Ted Steeg, who has a minor part in the film as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, was Wakefield’s model for the character of Gunner.
Two little-known actors and two veterans star in “Going All the Way.” The part of Sonny Burns is played by Jeremy Davis, who made his film debut in “Spanking the Monkey,” and Gunner Casselman is played by Ben Affleck, who previously stared in “Chasing Amy.” The role of Sonny’s pious, uptight mother is played by veteran actress Jill Clayburgh, and Gunner’s free-wheeling, sexy mother is played by Lesley Ann Warren.
The feature film form with a traditional story line was something largely new for Pellington.
Named best director at the 1992 Billboard Video Music Awards for his production of Pearl Jam’s “Jeremy,” Pellington has tried to get away from the fast-cut style that characterized his earlier MTV work. While traces of that style lingered in Pellington’s production of “The United States of Poetry” for PBS, only the slightest touches remain in “Going All the Way.”
“After having done more non-linear storytelling, doing a linear story and working with actors was fun,” he said. “It was not that I did not care about the visuals, but the story was more important.”
