The Rise and Fall of the Golden Age of Action Heroes
Episode Stats
Summary
In 1980s America, gritty streets were filled with crime, the threat of Cold War hovered in the air, and action movies starring tough guy heroes dominated the box office. This was a time in cinema when muscle, martial arts, and the perfect weapon were the keys to saving the day. When the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the silver screen, and their on-screen carnage was only rivaled by their off-screen competition, why did this golden age of action movies emerge when it did? And why don t they make films like that anymore? Here to chart the rise and fall of the Golden Age of Action movies is Nick DeSimilion, author of The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood s Kings of Carnage.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Hey, before we get to today's show, quick announcement.
00:00:01.920
We are opening up an enrollment for our online program, The Strenuous Life, next week.
00:00:06.440
The Strenuous Life is an online program that we developed to help you put into action all
00:00:09.700
the things we've been talking about and writing about on the Art of Manly's podcast and website
00:00:16.060
We provide weekly challenges that are going to push you outside of your comfort zone,
00:00:21.080
We also have 50 different badges based around 50 different skills that you can earn.
00:00:24.640
We have badges that cover hard skills like building a survival, rucking, and badges
00:00:28.460
that cover soft skills like social skills and public speaking.
00:00:31.820
And we provide daily accountability for physical activity and doing a good deed so you can
00:00:37.200
Head over to strenuouslife.co where you can learn more about the program.
00:00:40.120
And while you're there, make sure you get your email on our email waiting list so you can
00:00:43.020
be one of the first to know when enrollment opens up next week.
00:00:54.700
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:58.460
In 1980s America, gritty streets are filled with crime, the threat of Cold War hovered
00:01:03.520
in the air, and action movies starring tough guy heroes dominated the box office.
00:01:08.020
This was a time in cinema when muscle, martial arts, and the perfect weapon were the keys
00:01:13.100
When the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone ruled the silver screen,
00:01:17.180
and their on-screen carnage was only rivaled by their off-screen competition.
00:01:21.340
Why did this golden age of action movies emerge when it did?
00:01:24.120
And why don't they make films like that anymore?
00:01:25.760
Here to chart the rise and fall of the golden age of action movies is Nick DeSimilion, author
00:01:30.780
of The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood's Kings of Carnage.
00:01:36.200
Today on the show, Nick shares the stories behind the larger-than-life stars of the action
00:01:39.500
genre, including Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Chuck Norris, and Steven Seagal, and the iconic
00:01:46.280
He also discusses why the action genre fell out of favor in the early 90s, why its movies
00:01:50.460
nonetheless continue to endure in popularity, and the three action films he most recommends
00:01:56.100
After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash lastactionheroes.
00:02:26.760
So you got a new book out called The Last Action Heroes, The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds
00:02:33.760
And this is all about the golden age of the action hero that happened in the 1980s and
00:02:40.720
So we got stars like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, and the mysterious
00:02:48.820
What was going on in American and Western culture at this time that led to this proliferation
00:02:54.500
of these big action-packed movies starring tough guy action heroes?
00:03:01.340
Like, obviously, you don't need me to tell you that, but coming out of the 70s into the
00:03:04.500
80s, a lot of bad things were happening, you know, abroad Vietnam and then at home with
00:03:09.520
And it was just a very kind of dark and gloomy and complicated time.
00:03:12.820
And then, you know, that was reflected in the movies of the 70s as well, which were generally
00:03:17.380
downbeat and often depressing with very complex heroes who were trying to do stuff and, you
00:03:23.520
know, having Chinatown happen to them and stuff like that.
00:03:25.860
And then you got this really just amazing group of larger-than-life people who came along
00:03:34.680
They were upbeat in the sense that they would just kill anyone who tried to stop them, whatever
00:03:38.720
And, you know, they brought like a very simple philosophy and I kind of have Rocky really
00:03:46.580
The first one of those that really, even though it's not your typical action movie, it's about
00:03:51.220
It was really the first kind of version of that one-man army movie with an upbeat ending
00:03:57.180
that kind of made you want to cheer for one of these guys.
00:03:59.620
And then, you know, Schwarzenegger came after Stallone.
00:04:02.240
And then, as you say, this armada of sometimes quite bizarre action heroes, definitely in
00:04:08.880
the case of Seagal and Van Damme, just coming in their wake.
00:04:12.420
But I think there was just something in the water in America and abroad that just made
00:04:16.940
things the perfect kind of conditions for these guys to arrive with their big bombastic
00:04:27.420
The movies in the 70s, you look at Francis Ford Coppola, his movies like Apocalypse Now,
00:04:33.700
There's no, it's kind of murky and you kind of feel cynical.
00:04:36.360
Or with Martin Scorsese, you had like, you know, Taxi Driver and even The Godfather,
00:04:43.400
And then these guys, simple story, there's a good guy and a bad guy.
00:04:46.320
It was kind of almost a return to like the 1950s, you know, black hat, white hat, cowboy
00:04:53.500
It was a return to that very simple black and white storytelling.
00:04:57.380
And it's interesting, the year Rocky came out and was at the Oscars, it was up against
00:05:00.980
Carrie, Network and Taxi Driver, three very brilliant, but very depressing films.
00:05:05.600
And it was Rocky that triumphed that night and changed everything, even though he doesn't
00:05:09.740
technically win at the end of that film, which some people forget, you know, the first one
00:05:14.180
didn't have the traditional, you know, triumphant ending, but it still definitely felt a lot
00:05:19.820
And it had a lot more montages than Taxi Driver, that's for sure.
00:05:22.920
And besides the storylines about, you know, good guy versus bad guy, underdog story, these
00:05:27.960
guys also changed the game in terms of like special effects, like they were just blowing
00:05:35.160
And that was another thing they brought to this genre of film as well.
00:05:42.520
I mean, it's, you go back and they look quite quaint.
00:05:44.880
The stuff these guys were starting with, like the first few Rockies and Conan, and it's
00:05:49.120
a guy with a sword or a guy in a boxing ring, and then over the next 15 years, the genre
00:05:53.840
just kind of went berserk and they were all trying to one up what they had done.
00:05:57.660
But also you've got these guys getting into pissing contests with each other and, you
00:06:02.220
know, insanely competitive, these stars and trying to outdo what the others were doing.
00:06:06.820
So, you know, you get these action movies turning into big sci-fi things with Predator
00:06:14.020
And you can see it even like within a franchise like Rocky, where it starts with a guy in Philadelphia
00:06:19.800
And by the time you get to the fourth one, he's going up against the whole Soviet Union.
00:06:24.400
And, you know, you see the same thing happen with Rambo.
00:06:26.340
So it was like this thing where they were just getting pumping these movies up and up and
00:06:30.460
And you've got some very bizarre and often outrageously entertaining things as a result.
00:06:35.760
So you mentioned earlier that you pinpoint Rocky as the starting point of this genre or
00:06:45.180
And this was, again, this is Sylvester Stallone.
00:06:49.860
And what's interesting about Stallone is that if you look at his early life and his early
00:06:54.140
career, I don't think you would have pegged him to become one of the brawniest tough guy
00:07:04.300
I mean, forget being one of the biggest stars on the planet.
00:07:06.200
I don't think anyone would have pinpointed him to be a successful actor, like a working
00:07:09.780
He had such an amazing kind of Cinderella story that his early life was, you know, he was
00:07:20.880
And, you know, I kind of opened the book with him in one of his many terrible early jobs
00:07:25.540
where he's at Central Park Zoo getting pissed on by lions.
00:07:28.280
And he had like year after year of just the most grueling, kind of humiliating circumstances.
00:07:35.900
But the thing about Stallone is he just does not give up.
00:07:41.520
Like even when everything is absolutely against him, he just keeps going and going.
00:07:45.080
And so I think Rocky really is like a, you know, it's a kind of biographical character
00:07:50.320
But he's a kind of fascinating guy to write about Stallone because he's this real study
00:07:55.560
in contrast that he, this action star, but he's also, you know, he's obsessed with Edgar
00:08:00.840
Allen Poe and he writes poetry and, you know, he wouldn't have got Rocky made had he not
00:08:07.260
And that kind of sets him apart from any of these other action stars is that he just did
00:08:12.120
And he was like, I'm going to make myself a movie star no matter what happens.
00:08:18.780
Yeah, the story behind, you know, why he's got that sort of distinct look and the way
00:08:23.540
I didn't know this until I read your book and also on Wikipedia.
00:08:26.820
I guess when he was born, the doctor was using forceps to get him out and he like squeezed
00:08:30.620
too hard and just basically destroyed a nerve, I think.
00:08:36.580
So, I mean, see, another thing about him is he's, he's very self-deprecating.
00:08:45.880
And I think another thing that I was impressed by, Stallone, that I didn't know about that
00:08:50.200
you bring out in the book is unlike a lot of these other action stars, he seemed more
00:08:57.880
He wanted to write this film about Edgar Allan Poe.
00:09:02.540
I mean, he was larger than life, but his personality wasn't like a Schwarzenegger.
00:09:08.240
Like, no, I mean, it's been said about Schwarzenegger, he never reads a book unless it's directly
00:09:13.260
Like he cuts out, eliminates anything kind of wasteful.
00:09:15.920
And I think that includes, you know, the great art and sitting down with a book or looking
00:09:20.400
Whereas Stallone, as you say, like he was very in touch with his artistic side and I think
00:09:26.160
kind of became an action star partly against his will.
00:09:30.900
If you look at the movies that he did after Rocky, he could have done anything.
00:09:33.960
You know, he was even in talks to play Superman.
00:09:36.680
He made some really strange films and experimental, kind of more dramatic, risky films like Paradise
00:09:43.500
Alley and Fist, which I'm not sure I recommend either the title or the film.
00:09:47.320
But he didn't just follow action movie after action movie.
00:09:53.620
It took him quite a long time to become comfortable with being Rocky.
00:09:58.980
So this is part of the Western pop culture collective consciousness.
00:10:06.080
People play that to get pumped up when they're at the gym or playing a sport.
00:10:10.060
The story behind Rocky is really interesting, the making of it.
00:10:14.860
So where did he get the idea of this underdog boxing movie?
00:10:19.380
He went to a boxing match, Chuck Wepner, who was a kind of Rocky Balboa type guy, like a
00:10:25.580
real life underdog who wasn't hugely successful, but he just kept going and going.
00:10:32.300
And that was kind of the element that Stallone admired about him.
00:10:37.800
And Rocky was just one of many, many scripts that Stallone was writing.
00:10:42.740
He was just writing because he wasn't getting anywhere with being an actor.
00:10:46.640
So he was like, right, I'm going to have to make this happen.
00:10:49.060
So he would paint windows black of his apartment and just stay in there and write on these marathon
00:10:59.340
It didn't have much resemblance to the movie that ended up getting made.
00:11:02.320
But he took it into Winkler Chartoff production company and they weren't massively impressed,
00:11:10.720
It was kind of a lucky break for him and they didn't want to cast him.
00:11:17.700
He said, I'm going to, you can only have the script if I play the main role.
00:11:22.660
And yeah, it was like nobody, including the people making it, thought it was going to
00:11:32.520
It was really kind of put together haphazardly almost.
00:11:38.160
They didn't really have any money for, you know, there was no catering.
00:11:44.640
The guy who invented the Steadicam, Garrett Brown was there.
00:11:47.540
And so he got that iconic Steadicam shot up the stairs of the Philadelphia library.
00:11:51.900
But yeah, it was, it was a real kind of ragtag shoot that nobody thought was going to amount
00:11:58.800
But it's, it's, you know, a big part of that is Stallone's performance that he just put
00:12:03.980
And he was like, this is going to be a success.
00:12:07.480
Didn't he have to sell his dog to make this movie happen?
00:12:11.640
Yeah, famously, he sold his very badly behaved, rather stinky dog, Buttkiss, to somebody and
00:12:19.880
So Buttkiss was back in Stallone's keeping by the time the movie actually was being shot.
00:12:25.980
He was so poor that he had to sell his own dog.
00:12:28.620
And Buttkiss, he stars in the movie and he gets a credit, at least in the Amazon Prime
00:12:38.440
So yeah, no one thought there was going to be success, but then it just landed.
00:12:40.880
Like, why was this movie, why did it become such a, not only a critical success, because
00:12:46.260
it won an Oscar, but also just a popular success?
00:12:50.660
Well, I asked the producer, Owen Winkler, that and he said that his theory is that people
00:12:55.980
It was that it just came along at the right time and everything had been so gloomy and
00:13:01.420
And then it came along and it's just the story of a guy.
00:13:06.680
You look at him and listen to him and he's not massively impressive.
00:13:09.500
And he just prevails by just keeping going and having a dream.
00:13:18.900
It wasn't just the number one movie at the box office, but it was at the Oscars.
00:13:23.640
And Stallone was on stage, shadowboxing with Muhammad Ali.
00:13:26.740
Stallone didn't get the Oscar himself, which apparently bummed him out, but it was, it
00:13:35.540
I mean, it just became a pop culture zeitgeist smash.
00:13:39.940
So as you say, this launched Stallone's career.
00:13:42.560
And at first he loved the success because it allowed him to experiment when he did some
00:13:50.840
No one liked it, but then, you know, people wanted more Rocky and did Stallone at some
00:13:56.380
point start feeling like he was a prisoner of this Rocky character.
00:14:01.240
He started feeling that straight after the first one came out.
00:14:04.500
He was kind of strangely, I mean, maybe not strangely, but he was, he was, he was resentful
00:14:10.280
because it became the one thing that everyone associated him with.
00:14:13.380
And everyone would come up to him on the street and go, yo, Rocky.
00:14:19.260
He wanted to do all kinds of things, but yeah, he kept being asked to make more Rocky sequels
00:14:27.120
And he did come to a point where he, he, he accepted the character and kind of fell back
00:14:32.800
But yeah, there was a long time where he was very unhappy.
00:14:35.000
And you imagine after Rocky kind of changes him from being, you know, a poor unknown guy
00:14:40.980
to being one of the biggest stars in the world that that would transform your life in a good
00:14:45.020
But he, you know, the more I read up on it, the more you realize that he, he had a really
00:14:50.180
hard time adjusting to fame and he really resented Rocky.
00:14:53.700
And there were quite a few years where he was just feeling bruised and misunderstood and
00:15:02.720
So it was quite a difficult time for him adjusting to fame, although he did manage it.
00:15:07.720
And you talk about in the Rocky movies, you can kind of see Sylvester Stallone playing out
00:15:12.460
this ambivalence he has towards the character and towards his own career with the movies
00:15:17.140
So in the first one, Rocky's the underdog, just like Stallone was the underdog.
00:15:21.480
And by movie four, Rocky's this big star making tons of money, lives in this giant house.
00:15:26.980
They got a weird robot that talks and somehow has artificial intelligence in 1985.
00:15:32.720
And then, you know, you see Rocky, he feels like I'm getting soft and I'm, I just don't
00:15:38.940
You see whatever his preoccupations are at the time, kind of bleeding into the films.
00:15:42.140
And that's really interesting because it's not many of these action icons who were creatively
00:15:47.900
And I think definitely with Stallone more than any of them, he was quite hyper controlling.
00:15:53.080
And, you know, I spoke to lots of directors and writers and he would tend to come in and
00:15:57.480
he would kind of insert himself right in the middle of the process, right the way into
00:16:02.740
And so, yeah, I think he took these films deadly seriously and he put a lot of his personality
00:16:06.620
in and whatever he was struggling with at the time would make it into the film.
00:16:10.400
And speaking of, we mentioned earlier how these movies, they started getting bigger and
00:16:13.620
bigger and more, more bombastic as they progressed.
00:16:16.220
One thing I noticed with Rocky, if you watch Rocky one, you look at Stallone's physique and
00:16:20.080
he's a good physique, but it's not huge and bulking, but by Rocky three, the guy looks
00:16:28.660
People wanted the really jacked brawny action hero guy.
00:16:33.600
And like I was saying, it was kind of like this arms race against Schwarzenegger.
00:16:36.680
The two of them were competing in every single aspect.
00:16:38.720
And part of that was how big their muscles were.
00:16:40.880
I think they were like keeping an eye on each other's specific muscles and then heading
00:16:44.940
But I think the biggest change between one film and another is probably first blood,
00:16:50.080
to Rambo first blood part two, where, you know, he's placed John Rambo and he's this
00:16:56.680
He's quite an impressive guy, but he's not super jacked.
00:16:59.460
And, you know, people that they were considering for the role were people like Paul Newman and
00:17:05.000
These are not big guys, but, you know, it's hard to imagine Paul Newman in Rambo first blood
00:17:09.280
part two, because by that point he's a monster.
00:17:12.920
His body in that is just like, you know, super, super ripped.
00:17:17.820
So I'm curious, do you have a favorite Rocky movie?
00:17:23.440
Well, I have a, I have a soft spot, obviously more than a soft spot for the first one, which
00:17:27.140
is a classic and the original, and it kind of made so many things happen.
00:17:33.480
I think that's just for pure entertainment value.
00:17:35.960
I love that about it's, I think approximately 80% montage.
00:17:42.540
Stallone famously recut it a couple of years ago and got rid of the robot.
00:17:49.380
This past summer or this past spring, our family, we watched all the Rocky movies from
00:17:54.220
And then we went all the way through the Creed films as well.
00:18:05.820
So you mentioned Rambo as this other character that basically became Stallone, like Stallone
00:18:12.540
And as you said, he wasn't the first pick for this.
00:18:14.980
He had other just like, you know, Paul Newman, Robert Redford.
00:18:25.080
He signed up and then he tried to back out a bunch of times, even after the film was
00:18:29.260
He was offering to buy the negative and burn it.
00:18:32.420
It was the director, Ted Kocheff, who was a fan of Stallone, who kind of came up with the
00:18:36.860
idea of casting him and went to him and got a quick yes.
00:18:42.100
It's sort of got one foot in the seventies and one foot in the eighties.
00:18:44.980
It's this kind of character study of this Vietnam vet who kills himself at the end.
00:18:51.880
And, but it's also like a kind of a rip roaring action film.
00:18:59.380
And I think everyone was a bit uncertain how it was going to do much like Rocky.
00:19:03.660
But yeah, the film itself changed during the shoot and Rambo doesn't kill himself at the
00:19:09.320
That was Stallone's thing that he decided he wanted to keep playing the character potentially.
00:19:17.880
Kirk Douglas, who was originally cast as Colonel Troutman, quit the film in protest because
00:19:24.000
But yeah, it was not a film that Stallone really was proud of when it came out.
00:19:28.160
And again, it took him a while before he kind of fell in love with the character.
00:19:32.180
And what do you think was behind Rambo's success?
00:19:33.800
Well, it's just this really, really great underdog story.
00:19:39.260
I think even more than Rocky, because, you know, you look at Rocky and he's got Mickey,
00:19:43.880
he's got Adrian, he's, he's in some films, he's got the robot.
00:19:46.800
But if you look at First Blood, it's literally just this guy in the woods and he's got absolutely
00:19:58.480
And it's just this very well put together kind of underdog story of this guy managing
00:20:06.060
And I think had he killed himself, probably wouldn't have connected in that way.
00:20:09.600
But as it is, it just came out and people really, really loved it.
00:20:12.820
And it's hard to say why one film connects and another one doesn't.
00:20:18.700
And then, yeah, it became a pop cultural phenomenon with the sequels.
00:20:21.680
And I remember as a kid, I watched the Rambo cartoon.
00:20:26.480
And you're looking back and it was pretty interesting that, you know, my parents would
00:20:29.500
be like, hey, we're going to get you some toys for this rated R movie you could never
00:20:35.880
But yeah, there was a Chuck Norris cartoon as well around the same time.
00:20:38.460
And it's like, which kids are watching Chuck Norris?
00:20:40.680
Like he's watching like Force of Vengeance or Silent Rage.
00:20:46.640
They did that with the Police Academy movies, too.
00:20:54.840
And if you watch Police Academy movies today, you're like, this is not like a kid would
00:20:58.900
never should never be what should not be watching this movie.
00:21:06.760
And so does Rambo, I think one of the Rambo movies, doesn't it still hold the record for
00:21:16.320
Obviously spoofed by Hot Shots Part Deh, which is basically a bit of a Rambo spoof where
00:21:21.200
you see Charlie Sheen in like kind of Rambo gear just firing this giant gun and you see
00:21:25.800
the actual numbers on the screen going up and it's like more than Total Recall, more than
00:21:30.540
But yeah, like I said, Stallone and Schwarzenegger got into this pissing contest over like who
00:21:37.460
And I think it was Commando where one of the producers or something went to watch Rambo
00:21:43.080
two and counted how many people got killed and then went back and they did a reshoot to
00:21:49.720
So it became like this weird thing, kind of a symbol of quality.
00:21:54.220
If you could kill more people than the other films, we're going to take a quick break for
00:22:08.280
So Stallone's career rival was Arnold Schwarzenegger.
00:22:11.840
And so how did this Austrian bodybuilder with a funny accent become one of the biggest movie
00:22:21.120
Kind of like the same way as Stallone in that he, um, he was just relentless.
00:22:25.200
Like he was not going to take no for an answer.
00:22:27.360
Like, you know, one of them was suffering a lot more than the other one because Schwarzenegger
00:22:33.460
He had massive success in the bodybuilding world and then he came and he got into real
00:22:37.720
So he was already super rich even before he was a movie star.
00:22:40.380
So he was having like one success after another.
00:22:44.000
But they both were like so ambitious and so, you know, relentlessly fixated on that they
00:22:50.080
were going to be, they were going to be successes.
00:22:51.940
And Schwarzenegger even wrote himself a list when he was still in Austria.
00:22:54.880
He was like, right, I'm going to go to America and I'm making a list and I'm going to do this
00:23:03.540
Like it was just one on the list, but he made everything happen.
00:23:06.060
And he was incredibly charming and straightforward.
00:23:11.200
And I don't know, he just came along and nobody had ever seen anything like him in
00:23:15.880
It did take a while for him to take off because his first bunch of films were not good.
00:23:23.280
Well, he made something called Hercules in New York.
00:23:25.580
It's kind of a bit of a rite of passage for the whole, there's a whole kind of history of
00:23:29.660
Hercules movies with Hercules being played by bodybuilders and wrestlers.
00:23:34.520
But one of them was starring a guy called Steve Reeve, which was a big defining moment
00:23:38.060
for Schwarzenegger when he went to the cinema and saw it.
00:23:40.820
But yes, Schwarzenegger played Hercules, a super low budget film.
00:23:45.680
He wrestles a guy in a bear costume in Central Park.
00:23:49.760
But it took him another decade after that to get a bigger break.
00:24:00.500
Yeah, didn't like his first movies, maybe this was with Hercules in New York.
00:24:04.300
Didn't they dub his voice because they couldn't understand him?
00:24:08.140
They not only dubbed his voice with another actor, but they changed his name to Arnold Strong.
00:24:19.640
I spoke to the director for the book and he was very graceful, Schwarzenegger about it
00:24:30.080
He was like, I'm going to be famous at some point, so I'm not going to stress about it.
00:24:33.680
So he was more easygoing probably than Stallone.
00:24:36.960
So his first big break was Conan the Barbarian.
00:24:43.400
Yeah, Conan Terminator took him over the top in a different way, kind of put him on the A-list.
00:24:47.960
You know, that was where you see his one-liners starting to come into effect.
00:24:53.040
And, you know, he only says 84 words or something like that in it.
00:24:56.120
So it's a very, it's obviously an iconic performance, but it was something so different from anything
00:25:02.200
he had done because, you know, Conan the Barbarian is quite chatty and quite smiley.
00:25:07.480
And so were all the previous movies he made, but it was a new thing for him playing a villain.
00:25:11.300
He was quite unsure about doing it, but he decided to do it.
00:25:14.880
And not every actor would have at that point in their career.
00:25:18.020
So as you mentioned, Schwarzenegger had a different personality than Stallone.
00:25:24.620
Schwarzenegger, life of the party, charismatic, just wanted success.
00:25:31.420
Yeah, Stallone is kind of the tortured artist who is always on kind of the brink of a big
00:25:37.000
disaster or something going really right or really wrong.
00:25:42.300
Whereas Schwarzenegger kind of just rolls through and seems to just have one big success after
00:25:48.580
Like he doesn't really have those giant failures that Stallone endured.
00:25:51.560
Like you mentioned, Rhinestone, you know, staying alive.
00:25:54.060
There were a whole bunch of like real calamities, possible career enders.
00:25:58.260
But yeah, Schwarzenegger just seemed to make everything look easy and was just kind of rolling
00:26:03.320
And even when he tried his hand at comedy, it worked for him straight away with Twins.
00:26:11.840
Stallone wanted to do comedy, but every time he tried, it was like a complete fiasco.
00:26:16.440
And why do you think, I mean, for most of their career, Stallone and Schwarzenegger, they
00:26:20.940
They'd actually almost come to like fist blows when they saw each other and when they did
00:26:27.640
I think, you know, the same thing you see, the same kind of feud going on with Steven
00:26:35.880
I think these guys are just all type A, super competitive, you know, going back to Arnold
00:26:40.920
and the bodybuilding world where you just want to take down everyone and they're all your
00:26:49.900
And that was the attitude that they had against each other.
00:26:53.520
It all kind of started with Stallone throwing a vase of flowers at the Golden Globes in
00:26:57.500
Arnold Schwarzenegger's direction when he won an award and Stallone didn't in the 70s.
00:27:05.000
And it's fascinating reading interviews from the time where you get Schwarzenegger kind
00:27:08.180
of talking Stallone's fur coats that he used to wear at the time and, you know, saying
00:27:15.380
And they had all these little things and they were, they didn't have a lot of interactions.
00:27:20.160
Like they didn't encounter each other a whole lot.
00:27:22.300
They were kind of moved in slightly different circles.
00:27:24.060
But yeah, there's a famous story about Stallone and his entourage going into a bar in
00:27:27.400
New York and there's a picture of Schwarzenegger on the wall and Stallone makes the bartender
00:27:32.940
So, I mean, this was like real pumped up rivalry and people kept trying to get them
00:27:36.700
together in a movie and not succeeding because there was just too much bad blood.
00:27:40.920
Yeah, the thing about Schwarzenegger, he loves psychological warfare and that goes back to
00:27:45.340
He would kind of corner competitors and tell them, man, you're looking really small.
00:27:51.120
Or he would tell them to do things that he knew would not be good for the competition.
00:27:55.340
And he carried that over into his film career too.
00:27:58.120
Just kind of just messing with people's minds to knock them off their game.
00:28:02.420
So that's probably what he was doing with Stallone when he was talking about him to the
00:28:07.200
But yeah, they definitely kept a very close eye on each other's like box office, everything
00:28:11.520
from the muscles to the size of the knives that they had to the box office figures.
00:28:16.340
Like they were definitely trying to outdo each other in every respect.
00:28:19.280
So Stallone and Schwarzenegger were sort of the big guys in this golden age of the action hero movie.
00:28:24.620
And you also talked about some of these other characters that also played a role in this
00:28:36.440
How did this country boy from a small town in Oklahoma end up one of the greatest martial
00:28:44.000
Well, he was a soldier in being stationed out in Asia and he came across a karate class just
00:28:54.820
He became this karate expert, kind of like Schwarzenegger with the bodybuilding.
00:28:58.420
He was in that world and of competitive combat and he was getting belts and working his way
00:29:06.940
He came into acting quite late in life, but he had the real skills.
00:29:09.880
He went up against Bruce Lee in Way of the Dragon and held his own and in the big kind
00:29:17.440
And he was like a kind of taken really seriously in that world.
00:29:24.760
So he's kind of become a bit of a, you know, to a point, a figure of fun.
00:29:27.940
Obviously, the Chuck Norris facts that people love quoting about how invincible he is.
00:29:32.720
But yeah, no, he can really, you know, kick your ass.
00:29:35.380
But he has like a really interesting kind of persona of this kind of cartoonish cowboy
00:29:40.300
guy who, you know, it's kind of hard to take a lot of his films seriously because he's
00:29:47.540
And, you know, there's one where he's up against the kind of reanimated serial killer,
00:29:53.460
And yeah, it's quite something to work your way through the Chuck Norris oeuvre.
00:29:58.140
What were the movies that made him a big star in the 80s like that he's known for?
00:30:02.180
He never made it as big as Stallone or Schwarzenegger.
00:30:06.500
He was kind of doing the B-movie versions of what they were doing.
00:30:09.040
His breakthrough was probably this movie called Good Guys Wear Black, where he dropkicks a
00:30:13.960
And it didn't make like a massive amount of money.
00:30:16.060
I think it made like 18 million or something like that.
00:30:17.820
So it wasn't like giant numbers, but it cost nothing to make.
00:30:20.760
So, you know, it was so profitable, they let him keep going.
00:30:24.000
And then he did things like Silent Rage and Forced Vengeance and all these movies with
00:30:29.020
these like kind of slightly generic Steven Seagali titles.
00:30:32.080
It probably is the one that kind of broke him out the most is Lone Wolf McQuaid with
00:30:42.400
And then he did a movie called Code of Silence with Andrew Davis directing, who did The Fugitive
00:30:50.180
Like that's the, if anyone asks me, what's the Chuck Norris film you recommend, go see
00:30:56.160
He's a Chicago cop and he's kind of partners with Dennis Farina.
00:31:00.000
And what was his personality like and how was it different from some of these other big
00:31:06.980
You know, Stallone was playing these intense, intense characters and Schwarzenegger was these
00:31:10.980
like walking sheds, you know, these giant behemoth, colossal guys.
00:31:15.940
Like Chuck Norris, he was, he was deadly, but he was not outlandishly huge.
00:31:22.320
It was like this kind of this blonde guy from the Midwest just going around karate kicking
00:31:26.160
And so I don't know, I think there was a level of kind of wish fulfillment from people
00:31:29.840
maybe because, you know, Schwarzenegger was, you were never going to be Schwarzenegger,
00:31:35.480
So, you know, you could buy a pair of his action jeans and then try and karate kick people.
00:31:39.660
But he was, yeah, I think genial is probably the word.
00:31:42.340
Like he's just kind of like quite a kind of calm sort of easygoing persona, which is quite
00:31:58.200
And it's funny, I still use, there's this, you know, it's Sidekicks who haven't seen it.
00:32:02.080
For those who haven't seen it, it's about this asthmatic kid who fantasizes or dreams
00:32:06.160
that he's friends with Chuck Norris and Chuck Norris helps him out, you know, defeating bullies
00:32:12.980
But there's like this tip, this running tip the asthmatic kid got, like supposed to breathe
00:32:19.500
I remember watching that when I was, I don't know, 10, 11.
00:32:25.460
So thank you, Chuck Norris, for teaching me how to breathe.
00:32:38.520
He was getting on a bit in age and just deciding he wanted to mellow out his screen persona.
00:32:43.360
He was kind of done with, you know, laying waste to drug dealers and serial killers.
00:32:54.100
But Top Dog is maybe the Nadir in the Chuck Norris filmography.
00:33:02.920
Maybe don't watch the film, but just look at the poster because it's incredible.
00:33:10.260
And then I think this opportunity to do a TV show came along and he took it.
00:33:16.500
And so he kind of just stayed doing that and gave up the films.
00:33:19.820
Because another, one of the weirder action heroes to come out of this era was Steven Seagal.
00:33:27.560
So where did this guy come from and what was his backstory?
00:33:31.140
Well, no one really knows, I think, to this day.
00:33:33.320
Because he gave different stories about where he came from.
00:33:36.160
And I think what you're saying is actually his appeal.
00:33:38.900
Like the fact that this mysterious guy, no one really knew.
00:33:43.120
He talks about, I've spoken to him and he told me a story about being in Japan and having his life saved by a mysterious white dog that then vanished when his dojo was burning.
00:33:52.240
So he has all these kind of quite wild stories about what he got up to in Japan and taking on gangs of bad guys in real life.
00:34:00.220
So I think that was part of his appeal was that he seemed like the real deal.
00:34:04.620
You know, he came along in Hollywood and there were all these action stars who were clearly just actors playing roles.
00:34:09.700
But then he would talk in interviews about having done operations for the CIA and been a bodyguard and what he was up to in his dojo in Japan.
00:34:21.160
And then I think even within Hollywood, people took him very seriously.
00:34:28.680
So, you know, who is this kind of mythical kind of mystic guy who might have been a real assassin?
00:34:37.340
And there was a bit of a throwback, I think, to like John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, those kind of strong silent types.
00:34:42.840
And he came in and, yeah, had a lot of charisma at the start and became increasingly weird.
00:34:51.260
Was he actually a CIA operative that actually happened?
00:34:53.800
He kind of, he kind of, his line is, because I tried to raise this with him when I spoke to him and his line is kind of like, oh, I can't get into that.
00:35:01.580
So his whole thing is that it would be breaking some kind of covert ops code if he were to talk about it.
00:35:10.900
But I spoke to a screenwriter for the book who worked with him and he said Seagal would come in with like a loaded gun.
00:35:16.960
And the writers would ask him, what were you up to on the weekend?
00:35:19.520
And he would say, oh, I was, I can't talk about it.
00:35:22.780
So like even way into his career as a movie star, he was still kind of pretending whatever that he was.
00:35:28.960
He was out doing like real movie star stuff on the weekend.
00:35:36.920
I think a lot of these guys, almost all of them really struggled, you know, from Van Damme to Schwarzenegger to Stallone.
00:35:42.700
It took them all a long time and a lot of starts.
00:35:47.180
Warner Brothers signed him up for Above the Law, his first film, which was based on his apparent real life.
00:35:58.340
And then he did Under Siege, which was a giant hit and one of Warner Brothers' biggest summer movies.
00:36:04.260
So he had this really meteoric rise and then quite quick fall as well.
00:36:11.780
When did these guys like Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Chuck Norris, when did they start to realize that their days were numbered?
00:36:20.680
Like things were shifting in the United States where their type of movie wouldn't have a receptive audience?
00:36:26.660
I mean, you could maybe go all the way back to Die Hard, which kind of changed the game in the action genre in terms of who the hero was and who the hero looked like.
00:36:38.340
Because up to then it was the Rambos, the Commandos.
00:36:41.440
It was these giant, you know, monster jacked up guys.
00:36:45.240
And then you had Bruce Willis come along, who's this quite slight, relatively cop, who's quite vulnerable.
00:36:54.480
And I think Stallone and Schwarzenegger paid attention to that.
00:36:57.160
Stallone has mentioned the Tim Burton Batman in 89 as something that he looked at that.
00:37:02.500
And I think he said something like, you know, now they can Velcro on muscles and we're in trouble.
00:37:06.500
And then I think just as you got into the 90s, as these guys started to get older, and then just the arrival of visual effects.
00:37:13.800
And, you know, I kind of pinpoint in the book, Last Action Hero coming along as Jurassic Park is about to come out.
00:37:22.200
And Jurassic Park was giant and Last Action Hero wasn't giant.
00:37:27.360
And people were paying to see the visual effects.
00:37:30.780
And these guys were the visual effects in the 80s.
00:37:32.700
It's like their bodies, they transformed their bodies.
00:37:34.420
And now you could do anything with the visual effects.
00:37:38.280
It kind of made what they were doing a bit less special.
00:37:40.800
And, you know, nowadays with the Marvel films and everything, literally any actor can be an action star.
00:37:50.240
So I think it's, yeah, the early to mid 90s is when you see them really going to fade away.
00:37:59.660
You know, Chuck Norris kind of stopped making movies.
00:38:05.320
Bruce Willis got more into drama, you know, pop fiction and stuff like that.
00:38:12.860
You know, Stallone kept going and is still doing, I think, Expendables 4 is out in a couple of months.
00:38:18.440
And Dolph Lundgren and a bunch of these other guys still doing that, doing their 80s action thing.
00:38:23.960
Segal and Van Damme kept making their movies, but were going direct to DVD instead.
00:38:33.180
I think Schwarzenegger and Stallone, who you could argue are kind of the smartest out of the bunch,
00:38:39.660
They both realized they needed to stop doing pure action and they needed to expand what they were doing.
00:38:44.100
So you see both of them trying to kind of evolve what they're doing.
00:38:50.100
We mentioned that he's very involved in his films.
00:38:52.600
And oftentimes the films he does reflect what's going on in his life.
00:38:56.300
And I think you make the case, Demolition Man, that came out in 1993,
00:39:00.100
was sort of a response to this decline of the action hero.
00:39:03.360
Demolition Man is all about this tough guy cop that gets cryogenically frozen.
00:39:07.040
He's from the 90s and reawakens in the 2020s in America,
00:39:11.140
where everything's sort of bland and wussy, saying like,
00:39:14.760
oh, here, you know, we're no longer needed, but actually we're needed if you really need us.
00:39:20.340
Yeah, I mean, it's set in the future, but it might as well just be set in the 90s,
00:39:23.100
because I think that's, it's definitely a reflection of what was going on,
00:39:26.240
that these big, brutal, tough guys were suddenly out of time and out of their time.
00:39:32.300
And they get a lot of comedy out of that in the film.
00:39:35.240
And Stallone is for a game for kind of going along with it.
00:39:42.200
And it's basically making the point that these kind of big action movies are done.
00:39:48.280
But yeah, it's quite a smart commentary on what was going on with the drama, definitely.
00:39:52.520
Three shells. Do you ever figure out how to use the three shells?
00:39:56.140
I've never figured it out. I've never figured it out.
00:39:58.080
I've spent quite a lot of time attempting to figure out.
00:39:59.940
There's some diagrams out there that are interesting hypotheses that are kind of disturbing.
00:40:05.160
So I think one thing I noticed, so you mentioned, you know, we have these Marvel action stars.
00:40:10.100
And there's some other kind of action hero, like Chris Pratt, maybe you'd call him an action hero type.
00:40:14.760
But I feel like a lot of today's action stars, they don't have the same type of appeal or star power
00:40:21.100
or, you know, tough guy cachet compared to these stars of the golden age of action heroes.
00:40:26.540
You know, someone like, you know, yeah, Jeremy Renner or all the different types of Chris's that are out there.
00:40:31.660
They're just not on the same plane as a Schwarzenegger or Stallone.
00:40:35.960
I just think there was something about these 80s and 90s action stars.
00:40:43.100
And you very rarely saw them doing something that wasn't an action movie.
00:40:46.020
I think nowadays you have actors who dabble in doing a big, you know, VFX Marvel thing.
00:40:50.940
And then they'll go off and do a drama or they'll do a musical or whatever.
00:40:54.960
But you look at these guys and they literally dedicated their lives to it.
00:40:58.400
They were in the gym all the time, chugging protein shakes.
00:41:02.860
And there was just something really unique about them.
00:41:05.360
I mean, it was almost impossible to imagine Arnold Schwarzenegger just doing something normal.
00:41:16.820
I mean, you get Dwayne Johnson, who's probably the closest thing these days.
00:41:25.920
And I think also they just worked with great action filmmakers.
00:41:30.620
They were working with James Cameron and Paul Verhoeven.
00:41:33.520
And you got really, really interesting action films out of it.
00:41:36.840
And I think that they weren't working in that kind of factory like you get with Marvel,
00:41:42.400
It doesn't really matter who's in it because you know what you're going to get.
00:41:45.360
Like, these big, crazy movies were being crafted around these guys' screen image.
00:41:56.340
Another thing I noticed with all these action heroes you highlight in the book is all of
00:42:06.480
Same with Schwarzenegger's dad was abusive and he had alcohol problems.
00:42:10.140
And they all had to work incredibly hard to get to where they were.
00:42:13.520
I think that might have given them a bit of grit.
00:42:16.680
You know, today a lot of actors come from middle class backgrounds and they went to
00:42:22.520
And something about that doesn't give you the same sort of cachet.
00:42:27.400
I think there was something about almost all of these guys.
00:42:33.200
They had something to prove and they were going to prove it.
00:42:35.940
I don't think Stallone or Van Damme who came to America and he was sleeping in a car.
00:42:40.280
And I mean, these guys were just, they were not going to give up.
00:42:44.560
A lot of them had really tough upbringings and difficult relationships with their fathers,
00:42:51.420
And I think there was definitely something to prove with a lot of them.
00:42:54.520
And there was this kind of relentlessness and drive that they had for real that I think
00:43:01.780
And you can see in any of these movies that these guys really, you know, they're going
00:43:06.140
to, they're going to, they're not going to give up.
00:43:08.260
So these movies that these guys starred in, they're 30, 40 years old now, but they're still
00:43:15.660
What's the appeal of these movies, even in 2023?
00:43:17.680
I think part of it is the simplicity of these movies.
00:43:22.520
They're not generally part of a big, complicated mythology.
00:43:26.460
You can just pick up a Predator or a Terminator and you just kind of get it straight away.
00:43:31.060
They have a kind of like a primal, a kind of, I don't know, they just appeal to like that
00:43:36.180
part of your brain that just wants to watch one person go up against an army and prevail.
00:43:41.020
And I don't think any movies have done it better or more entertainingly.
00:43:44.300
If you watch Commando, it's so much fun still today just to watch Arnold going up against
00:43:52.740
And there's just a sense of fun to them and imagination and kind of an anything goes craziness
00:44:02.220
We haven't talked about Jackie Chan, but Jackie Chan was also making great action movies at
00:44:07.320
And the amount of inventiveness in his films that he probably wouldn't be able to get
00:44:12.160
He certainly couldn't get away with it when he came to America.
00:44:14.820
And I think another thing too, I appreciate about those action movies, I get kind of annoyed
00:44:18.700
with a lot of movies do this today, but particularly action movies, modern ones, they're too self
00:44:26.120
And so you'll watch a movie made today and you'll see some sort of action thing.
00:44:30.660
And then the stars will make some sort of ironic knowing quip about, hey, we know this
00:44:36.320
And so we're going to make like a sort of a subtle commentary on it.
00:44:41.480
And those movies in the 80s and 90s, they didn't do that.
00:44:43.740
They just, we're going to kill this guy in a weird, ridiculous way.
00:44:54.140
I think the Expendables movies is kind of where they go wrong is they wheel on people and
00:44:59.080
then they're trying to do, you know, hey, it's Chuck Norris.
00:45:01.380
And then they'll have five minutes of jokes about Chuck Norris and they kind of forget
00:45:05.320
that it's just got to be a throwaway thing, but you've got to actually have great action
00:45:11.740
So if there were, I'd say, three movies from this period that you think every man should
00:45:20.580
It would be hard to pin down even three per person, but I'm going to have a go.
00:45:24.820
I'm going to, I just mentioned Commando not long ago.
00:45:26.800
I think Commando still holds up as, I mean, it is, it is not a masterpiece.
00:45:31.780
It's definitely not as good as Terminator 2, but I'm going to pick it for an Arnie film
00:45:34.660
just because it's so fun and entertaining and Arnold hoists the log with one hand and
00:45:41.840
And it's so like ridiculous and outlandish all the way through that if anyone hasn't
00:45:54.480
I think probably the greatest action movie of all time, the greatest action movie villain.
00:46:03.220
It's a rare action movie where you can probably quote 30 different characters in that.
00:46:07.520
It's got such a deep bench of great characters, which is very rare in action.
00:46:11.240
And then for the third one, I'm going to throw in a Jackie Chan because we haven't really
00:46:14.720
talked about him, but police story I got to see on the big screen in the Prince Charles
00:46:21.400
It's got a shopping mall fight at the end that is so crazy and involves so much broken
00:46:31.400
Well, Nick, this has been a great conversation.
00:46:32.680
Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?
00:46:38.580
And I'm editor of Empire Magazine, which is the world's biggest film magazine.
00:46:44.100
So you can head to wherever you can find magazines and hopefully find a copy of that.
00:46:54.460
He's the author of the book, The Last Action Heroes.
00:46:56.520
It's available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere.
00:46:58.800
Make sure to check out our show notes at awim.is slash thelastactionheroes.
00:47:04.060
Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast.
00:47:14.080
Make sure to check out our website at artofmanless.com where you find our podcast archives, as well
00:47:17.860
as thousands of articles that we've written over the years about pretty much anything you'd
00:47:21.560
And if you'd like to enjoy ad-free episodes of the AOM podcast, you can do so on Stitcher
00:47:27.460
Use code MANLESS at checkout for a free month trial.
00:47:30.060
Once you're signed up, download the Stitcher app on Android iOS, and you can start enjoying
00:47:35.760
And if you haven't done so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to give us a review
00:47:43.360
Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who would think you'd get
00:47:47.560
As always, thank you for the continued support.
00:47:49.740
Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what
00:47:59.520
AOM podcast is a production of the AOM podcast, which is a production of the AOM podcast.