Breaking Away
Once upon a time there was a poor Young Playwright who struggled and struggled to get to the Great White Way. When his first play opened off-Broadway to critical raves, the Big Producer swooped in and told the Young Playwright he could make lots of money if he wrote a Movie. Did the Young Playwright have an Original Idea? Dazzled with the vision of Big Bucks, he quickly told a story about an American boy living in Indianapolis who fantasized he was Italian and spent his days riding a bike. Hmmm, purred the Big Producer, his eyes glazing over as he rushed out to Lunch. What the hell, give it a shot.
And he did….
The Young Playwright wrote and wrote, but no one seemed to like his script, except the British Director who befriended him and tried to set up the Deal. Alas, no luck. Fearing that the Young Playwright would become downhearted, the British Director asked: why not write a comedy about the class system in the United States? Why not indeed, thought the Young Play wright, and he sat down and wrote a script about a group of working-class boys who live in Bloomington, under the academic shadow of Indiana University, and how these boys face their future. The British Director loved it, but once again, the Deal eluded them.
Years went by….
Then one day, the British Director called the Young Playwright with an idea: combine the two scripts. It seemed that the Deal Makers on the Coast liked the central character of one script and the setting of the other. The Young Playwright secretly thought the British Director had lost his marbles, but he faced his typewriter again. At least, he thought, both stories take place in the same state.
When the script was done, they traveled to the Coast and this time made the Deal. Granted, it was a small one, a mere $2.4 million, but the British Director and the Young Playwright took the money and made their movie. And it was wonderful. Everyone thought so. In fact, the National Society of Film Critics said it was the Best Film of 1979, and it won the New York Film Critics’ Circle Award for Best Screenplay. And now there is talk of Oscars.
“Well,” says Peter Yates (the British Director), “that’s pretty much how it happened, except you make it sound like we didn’t do anything else for eight years. I directed movies….”
“Ha!” booms Steve Tesich (the Young Playwright). “We all know you were directing movies, but no one knew I was writing plays….”
What an odd pair. We are sitting in Suite 420 at L.A.’s Beverly Wilshire Hotel, the very room where Yates and Tesich holed up to put together the Deal for Breaking Away (the Movie). Yates is sipping white wine. Tesich is chain-smoking. Yates, 50, who now makes his home at New York’s fashionable Dakota, still retains his British accent after more than a decade in the U.S. Dressed in a lime-green cableknit sweater, with gray hair and a slight potbelly, Yates resembles an aging preppie. On the other hand, Tesich, 37, with his intense brown eyes and a strange thatch of brown hair, looks like a composite drawing released by the police department. He lives in the less-fashionable town of Conifer, Colorado, and his voice carries no hint of the fact that he grew up in Yugoslavia.
Both men are as excited as little boys on Christmas morning. Breaking Away copped an unexpected five Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Score Adaptation. Yates and Tesich have their fingers crossed. Winning would be a most fitting epilogue to this classic Hollywood fairy tale.
“When you finish a film,” says Yates, “you take for granted that it will be a huge success.”
“You do,” bellows Tesich, pulling at his hair. “I don’t feel that way at all. I feel that anything I love, people will hate. When I really got to like the film, I figured that was it. Everyone would hate it.”
Breaking Away is a terrific tale, and it so vividly captures bits of Americana — the “townies” in a college community, the subtle class distinctions and that awful, scary feeling of being nineteen and trying to figure out what the hell to do with your life — that it makes you wonder how these two men, one from England, the other from Yugoslavia, made this very American film.
Yates is a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and has directed such plays as Edward Albee’s The American Dream and The Death of Bessie at the Royal Court Theatre. His film credits include Bullitt, John and Mary, The Friends of Eddie Coyle and The Deep.
Tesich’s father was believed to have been killed in the war. But when he was thirteen, his father surfaced and sent for him, his sister and his mother. “There was a meat shortage in Yugoslavia,” says Tesich, smiling, “and when I found out that the meals on the boat were paid for, I looked up the word for meat. I’ll never forget the look on the waiter’s face when he came to our table and I yelled, ‘Flesh, flesh.'” Tesich settled in East Chicago and attended Indiana University, where he actually knew a guy who pretended he was Italian and won the Little 500 Bicycle Race.
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