Miracle Mile

Steve De Jarnatt’s 1989 nuclear thriller  Miracle Mile  has maintained its status as a hot cult film. It had been planned several years earlier, when international tensions prompted the making of scary films like  The Day After and  Threads. It finally arrived just as Bush The First was taking over from Reagan The Last.

Repertory theaters helped sustain the movie but most of us first saw it on fuzzy VHS copies. Late college kids that couldn’t relate to the classic  On The Beach were more apt to identify with a horror tale set in contemporary reality. De Jarnatt’s L.A. story plays out at Wilshire and Fairfax, less than a mile from CineSavant central. We knew that intersection well. Two department stores were across from each other, the venerable May Company and a competitor that had been around for ages, Orbach’s.  The “Oh Oh” signs in the photo of the wrecked store above  ↑  were part of the store’s advertising: “Oh Oh Orbach’s!”

We never ate at Johnie’s — I only remember it after it closed and became a movie set for rent, not a working diner.

Miracle Mile began as a ‘famous’ un-filmed movie script, like John Sayles’ baseball story  Eight Men Out. At UCLA we had been impressed by the most famous un-filmed script of them all, Walter Newman’s  Harrow Alley. That amazing script may never be filmed, but both De Jarnatt and Sayles were eventually able to ‘fully realize their vision.’ In this case, there was a worthwhile vision to be realized.

Miracle Mile was almost canceled out by history. The Berlin Wall came down later in 1989, raising hopes that the Cold War nuclear standoff would finally be over. I told my kids, who ranged from four to ten, that a curse that had hung over the world for nearly fifty years was lifting. Other curses would soon rush in to fill the gap, but it was an optimistic time. Had De Jarnatt’s show been held up for one more year, it may have been dismissed as obsolete. But in the ’80s we were still living under the axe, imagining scenarios from Peter Watkins’  The War Game.

The movie Miracle Mile turned out to be a last beer call for that particular gnawing fear. Past nuclear attack movies had been outright  exploitation hysteria,  sci-fi fantasies,  bleeding heart allegories,  bleak intimate classics,  vigilante survivalist tales, and eventually  post-apocalyptic thrillers. De Jarnatt’s script is an apocalypse in a teacup. The Kafka-like nightmare lasts approximately 75 minutes, in real time — from the middle of the night until dawn.

Jazz trombonist Harry Washello (Anthony Edwards, with hair) meets Julie Peters (Mare Winningham, cute as a button) in Park La Brea. She lives there with her mother Lucy (Lou Hancock) and sees her father Ivan (John Agar, old but chipper), who lives separately but in the same complex. Ivan and Julie attend Harry’s concert in nearby Gardner Park, near the famed Pan-Pacific Auditorium.  ^*

Julie is a waitress at Johnie’s Coffee Shop. Falling in love in just the one afternoon, she goes to work while Harry gets his sleep; they plan to meet when her work shift ends after midnight. But a power outage stops Harry’s alarm clock. He rushes to Johnies to discover that Julie has gone home in tears. He’s figuring out his next move when the pay phone outside the café rings. Harry hears a call meant for Orange County — from a guy in a missile silo in the Midwest, phoning home to tell his father that a nuclear war has begun. The Russian retaliation will arrive in just seventy minutes or so.

Harry relates this info to the night crawlers inside the café. Stockbroker Landa (Denise Crosby) believes him, and arranges for an instant escape that will begin with a chartered helicopter. They’ll be leaving from the helipad atop a skyscraper one block to the East. Now all Harry need do is round up Julie — a mission slowed by a crazy series of events. Julie took a heavy sleeping pill and can’t be roused. By the time they can start for the helipad, the word has spread and Wilshire Blvd. has erupted into total chaos.

Mos of us have thought about what we’d do if we learned that the missiles were due in an hour, Miracle Mile brings the fantasy to full fruition. Harry’s rational escape plan will be tripped up by the same urban nightmare that dogged Griffin Dunne in  After Hours and Bill Murray & Geena Davis in  Quick Change: when the crunch is on, just crossing the street can be too much to ask.

We were location-specific above because Miracle Mile makes a lot of its exact setting in Los Angeles, just down the street from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The May Company building has been absorbed into the new Academy Museum and Orbach’s long ago became the Petersen Automotive Museum. But Johnie’s is still there, idle yet miraculously still evading the wrecking ball. That skyscraper is no longer a lone tower on palm tree-lined Wilshire.

De Jarnatt’s script is centered on a one-act situation in Johnie’s, with a cross section of patrons: a drunk, a pair of garbage collectors, Denise Crosby’s calculating executive, and a sarcastic transvestite (Danny De La Paz). The great Robert DoQui  (RoboCop) is the impatient cook, and clueless O-Lan Jones  (Mars Attacks!) is the waitress. Even when the dialogue gets goofy, it all works — the agitation grows in pitch with each passing minute. When poor Harry finally gets moving, he rushes about in a panic, detoured by crazy crimes and a police pursuit that stalls on a freeway overpass.

Sunrise finds Harry in Orbach’s with a S.W.A.T. Team aiming at him and an accidental comrade (Mikelti Williamson). When S.W.A.T. suddenly packs up and leaves the image is ironic — three years later in the L.A. Riots, the L.A.P.D. all but abandoned the city to roving thieves and looters. The film’s riot scene builds to a crazy pitch. The show blocked off all of Wilshire Blvd, jammed it with cars and panicked citizens, all to stage four or five minutes of the most convincing panic-chaos seen in End of the World movies.

Years before, director John Sturges had wanted to film a similar scene of panic-spectacle on Wilshire Blvd. for his thriller  The Satan Bug, but United Artists balked at the expense. Miracle Mile can’t have had a big budget yet this spectacular scene is wholly convincing, an amazing production accomplishment.

People crawl under cars amid a shooting spree. Fires break out. On TV monitors in a store window, Harry sees an early morning news crew abandon its set. A remote reporter is shot while trying to cover the panic elsewhere. Armed with a gun, Harry must go on a last-minute search. He finds his helicopter pilot in a gym, a guy who insists on first rounding up his boyfriend. What will happen when there’s not enough room in the helicopter for these plus-ones?  And that’s assuming that the helicopter even comes.

We realize that Miracle Mile is not exactly a cheapie, but we weren’t expecting a finale nearly as elaborate as what we get. De Jarnatt keeps our mind on Harry’s crazy effort to get up to that heliport in time. He at first must haul the semi-conscious Julie around in a shopping cart. Angles on the skyscraper keep reminding us of the possibility of escape. But what real chance have they got, with so many H-Bombs targeted for Los Angeles?

It’s like, poetic, dude.

De Jarnatt presents his visual themes with such finesse that we don’t reach for the anti-pretension alarm. The La Brea Tar Pits, just down the street, is a site for Harry and Julie to meet cute. That part of the park is surrounded by giant palm trees, which become a major symbol. Harry’s alarm clock malfunctions because of a little ‘apocalypse in miniature’: a bird carries a lit cigarette to its nest, starting a fire that knocks out the power to his building. At the finale, the burning nest is echoed by an image of a palm tree on fire, viewed past a giant mastodon statue in the middle of a pool of oily ooze. It’s quite an emblematic composition, like Mike Hammer driving his Corvette under Angels Flight in  Kiss Me Deadly.

The Tar Pits preserved victims of an earlier extinction, and will perform the same function now. All of Los Angeles has gazed at the oil burbling up in the pit, but missed the lesson that we’re just as vulnerable as those prehistoric Heffalumps and sabertoofed Tiggers. Harry’s last speech, delivered in near-blackness, offers a vision of he and Julie transformed into diamonds.

Liking Miracle Mile is of course dependent on buying into De Jarnatt’s fantasy. The show is too smart to preach and feels too personal to ignore. We know perfectly sane folk who insist that our nuclear standoff, post- Cuban missile crisis, was never the hair-trigger situation presented by the media. Well, maybe. For this maybe-paranoid fantasy, Steve De Jarnatt gets the pot boiling faster and hotter than anybody. The feeling of incipient chaos is frightening. And we all know that the chaos of Miracle Mile wouldn’t require a nuclear attack. If Los Angeles lost its power and its cell phone network, lawlessness and riots might hit the city like spontaneous combustion.