Random film of the day — "Miracle Mile" (1988) by Steve De Jarnatt. On the surface — a standard genre thriller rated 6.9: a guy accidentally picks up a phone in a booth, learns that in 70 minutes Soviet warheads will hit Los Angeles, and spends the whole night trying to get his girl out of the city. But the first glance at the director's filmography reveals a strangeness impossible to unsee: this is his second feature film — and his last. After 1989, De Jarnatt didn't shoot a single movie, only TV series. For thirty-seven years, a man with a cult masterpiece under his belt simply didn't come back to big cinema.
The film itself is alive: 91% on Rotten Tomatoes, a special effects prize at Sitges, and fame as "one of the most underrated films of the decade." And the story of its path to the screen — an eight-year siege of Hollywood, buying back his own screenplay with money paid to him for refusing to direct, and a studio boss who personally cut out the happy ending — turned out tastier than any plot summary.
The screenplay was born from a very specific fear. De Jarnatt grew up in the small lumber town of Longview, Washington, practiced "duck and cover" drills at school in the 1950s, and suffered nightmares about the end of the world. "I was absolutely convinced that this war would happen," he recalled thirty years later. He finished the first draft in late 1979 — before "Testament" and "The Day After," two 1983 TV movies with which Hollywood finally got serious about the nuclear theme.
The story's kernel itself — almost an urban legend in miniature. De Jarnatt left a 24-hour Preston Sturges comedy marathon at four in the morning, stood on an empty Los Angeles street — and was frightened by a lone payphone ringing into nowhere. "Lone phone booths ringing on empty streets scared me." Hence the film's main nerve: a man picks up the receiver, hears the voice of a soldier who dialed the wrong area code — from a silo where they'll turn the key in minutes — and never knows for sure whether it's real or a prank. The entire picture is built on this "what if": the viewer, like the hero, gets no confirmation until almost the very end.
The screenplay landed on Warner Brothers' desk in 1980. Mark Rosenberg, head of production — a former radical from the SDS student movement — caught fire. Then began an eight-year story that Hollywood had time to make legendary: the studio wanted to "rework" the screenplay with big names, soften the ending, inflate the budget. De Jarnatt dug in.
The point where his career could have gone completely differently looks like a joke. In 1983, De Jarnatt was invited to direct "Strange Brew" — a comedy about the Canadian McKenzie brothers with Rick Moranis. He had the directing contract, but in the end the stars shot it themselves, and the studio paid De Jarnatt fifty thousand dollars for NOT making the film. He took that money — all of it, to the last cent, after taxes and agent fees — and gave it to Warner Brothers, buying back the "Miracle Mile" screenplay. Right before someone else would have bought it.
Then — silence, in which Hollywood bureaucracy worked in his favor. A couple years later, Rosenberg wanted the screenplay back and offered four hundred thousand — a sum at the level of Robert Towne and William Goldman rates. Refused. Warner at some point wanted to fold the material into a "Twilight Zone" anthology with one edit: let Harry wake up, it was all a dream — and it all starts again. Refused. The only deal De Jarnatt was willing to sign sounded mocking: sell the screenplay if George Miller would direct, fresh off "The Road Warrior." They couldn't get Miller.
In 1983, American Film magazine included the screenplay in its first list of "ten best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood" — alongside Total Recall and "Jacob's Ladder." This was the prototype of the future Black List, which Franklin Leonard wouldn't launch until 2005. Meanwhile, casting wandered through a whole decade: Harry was originally a forty-five-year-old trombonist returning to his ex-wife — a role for Paul Newman or Gene Hackman. Then there was an almost-assembled version for two million with young Nicolas Cage, killed by a call from Cage's lawyer (the same one as Coppola's): Nick's going into "Peggy Sue Got Married," your "little film" can wait a couple years. They couldn't reach Cage himself — "he's on Catalina, no phone, such is life."
Salvation came from a man with a reputation you'd need saving from. John Daly, head of Hemdale — producer of "The Terminator," "Platoon," and "The Last Emperor," taking the Oscar for Best Picture two years running. He was also infamously known for taking films away from directors and recutting them, and for not paying debts: he owed Cameron and Stone millions. He owed De Jarnatt three to four hundred thousand — and didn't repay it until the studio went bankrupt. But it was Daly who gave the film $3.7 million and, seeing that the filmmaker had invested all his own money in the picture, said a phrase De Jarnatt quotes to this day: "If you care about it that much — I won't touch you."
Almost didn't touch. In the film's finale, the helicopter with the heroes crashes into the La Brea Tar Pits, and as the cabin fills with asphalt, Harry consoles Julie: one day their fossils will be found and placed in a museum, and maybe they'll be lucky enough to turn into diamonds. De Jarnatt shot a two-second shot where white light curls into two diamonds and floats into the sky — a micro-finale, a hint that they're together after all. Daly watched and delivered a verdict impossible for a Hollywood boss: "Too optimistic. Cut it. Break their hearts." The diamond ending was later found — it sits in the Blu-ray extras as a monument to how little it took to blur the film's main punch.
Shooting — seven weeks (in other interviews — six), all night shoots, spring 1987, with a mandatory sunrise shot each morning: numbers in sources vary, but all agree on one thing — it was madness on the edge of schedule. The insurance company first declared the plan impossible and appointed a shadow replacement: "two days late — you're fired." De Jarnatt made it. And after the main period, he spent another year shooting connective shots on his own credit cards — went a hundred fifty thousand dollars in debt and paid it off over several years.
Formally, before "Miracle Mile" was "Cherry 2000" — an insane post-apocalyptic action film about a man hiring a mercenary to retrieve a sex doll from a dead desert. De Jarnatt took it on because of the collapsed Cage deal, arrived on a train that had already left, and calls the result himself "jumping onto a moving train I never caught up with." After "Mile," no more offers of that kind came. Box office — a measly million and change, drowned by "Indiana Jones" and "Field of Dreams"; though cumulatively with foreign sales and VHS the film brought in ten to twelve million — meaning it technically broke even, but the "flop" label had already stuck.
And then De Jarnatt himself explains with rare candor why there was no second film. "What kills me is not the shooting. What kills me is finding the money, all those meetings, everything you need to do just to launch a film. It crushes the soul." The eight-year siege of "Miracle Mile" burned that mechanism out of him completely. Television turned out to be fast and humane: fifteen pilots written (four shot), episodes of "The X-Files" and "ER," about fifty series episodes. In the 2000s he went into prose — his story "Rubiaux Rising" made it into the "Best American Short Stories" anthology of 2009 — now he's a professor in the film department at Ohio University.
From this same story grew three refused dishes of cinema history. De Jarnatt was invited to direct the first Pee-wee film — he considered the screenplay weak, and it was shot by "some Timmy Burton." He refused "Police Academy." He left a project about D.B. Cooper, refusing to meet with Henry Winkler. Fate kept score with irony to the end: the man who spent ten years refusing to compromise his vision remains in history with one film — but one they couldn't ruin.
The cult reputation grew legends, and one of them fell apart right in the process of this investigation. For years the claim has circulated that "Miracle Mile" is Leonardo DiCaprio's all-time favorite film. Checking his own lists (for Esquire and Golden Globes) doesn't confirm it: there's Kubrick, Scorsese, De Sica, Miyazaki — no "Mile." But there's an honest and even touching reverse case: after "Shaun of the Dead," journalists for years confidently asked Edgar Wright what it was like being a "Miracle Mile" fan, and Wright admitted the film simply never crossed his path in theaters or video stores — in the pre-internet era that meant never. He watched the picture only on reissue, twenty years after the premiere, and was impressed.
The story's final rhyme — beyond the screen. Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham, who played lovers for one night before the end of the world, went their separate ways after shooting for thirty years of ordinary life — each with their own family. In 2015, preparing the Blu-ray release, De Jarnatt convinced them to record a joint interview. After recording, they called him from a taxi: they're together, they're in love, they won't part again. The director calls them "his diamonds" — that very image from the cut ending, which life reshot for the studio. The film that Daly refused to console received consolation after all.