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Miracle Mile — Special Edition

by Glenn Erickson Jan 18, 2025

Los Angeles bursts into flames, total disaster, no mercy …. but it’s not a firefighting problem. Steve De Jarnatt’s classic apocalyptic thriller comes back in a remastered edition, with an entire disc devoted to the writer-director’s career story. Anthony Edwards’ and Mare Winningham’s ill-fated 24-hour romance in the City of the Angels is more poignant than ever. Even the cast seems miracle-chosen: John Agar, Mykelti Williamson, Kelly Minter, Kurt Fuller, Denise Crosby, Robert DoQui, O-Lan Jones, Danny De La Paz, Jenette Goldstein. And for locals that know the Miracle Mile neighborhood, it all feels very personal.


Miracle Mile
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1989 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 87 min. / Street Date December 31, 2024 / Special Edition / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Anthony Edwards, Mare Winningham, John Agar, Lou Hancock, Mykelti Williamson, Kelly Minter, Kurt Fuller, Denise Crosby, Robert DoQui, O-Lan Jones, Danny De La Paz, Claude Earl Jones, Alan Rosenberg, Earl Boen, Diane Delano, Jenette Goldstein, Peter Berg.
Cinematography: Theo Van de Sande
Production Designer: Christopher Horner
Art Director: Richard Hoover
Costumes: Shay Cunliffe
Film Editor: Stephen Semel, Kathie Weaver
Original Music: Tangerine Dream, Paul Haslinger
Produced by John Daly, Derek Gibson
Written and Directed by
Steve De Jarnatt

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.

 


 

KL Studio Classics gives their Special Edition Blu-ray of Miracle Mile everything that disc fence-sitters want to hear. It’s a new HD remaster “from a 16-bit 4K scan of the 35mm original camera negative,” with the blessing of director Jarnatt & cinematographer Theo van de Sande. The show has a great look throughout.

The special visual effects also hold up very well. They don’t feel compromised — those views from the in-distress helicopter are really impressive. Burning palm trees have a real emotional impact. All these years later we fully appreciate the Tangerine Dream soundtrack even more — we love the group’s tracks for  Shy People.

The 2015 disc could boast some very good extra menu items. The original audio commentaries, cast reunion piece, and outtakes tell us that everybody who worked on Miracle Mile holds it aloft as a very special experience. Some of the new items are good angles on new subjects, like Paul Haslinger on the Tangerine Dream score. A couple of extras display long sections of truly excellent storyboards, allowing readers to compare De Jarnatt’s ‘vision’ with the great coverage he got on the set.

 

The disc gives us a welcome illustrated career story on the talented writer-director. A comprehensive piece called The Extra Extras is like a video scrapbook that includes De Jarnett’s college film work back in Iowa, his attention-getting AFI short film, and his years-long struggle to get Miracle Mile made on his own terms. We learn that it was a 1983 American Film magazine article with the poll of worthy but un-produced screenplays that boosted the project. We see some flaky video extras and even some rough & ready advertising spots De Jarnatt did for the picture, but were never used. We see parts of other student film, and lots of screen grabs from a TV movie he directed.

The best news is the inclusion of two elaborate student films. De Jarnatt co-wrote and co-directed Eat the Sun back in Iowa, a 16mm sci-fi tale about a technology-driven cult that expects to achieve a spiritual breakthrough via bio-feedback. A lot of photographed color video is used; it’s in the vein of David Cronenberg’s early feature experiments. De Jarnatt’s 1978 AFI show Tarzana is a half-hour hardboiled detective drama in film noir mode, Michael C. Gwynne’s detective solves a case for a mystery girl (Thelma) detained in San Pedro, after sneaking in on a boat. The supporting cast is impressive: Edie Adams, Eddie Constantine, Kate Murtagh, Reni Santoni and Carel Struycken — with none other than Timothy Agoglia Carey as the detective’s best buddy. The show’s Chandleresque vibe isn’t bad, and it’s obvious that the writing and direction is what’s making the difference. De Jarnatt’s name is misspelled up front, but that’s okay — Tarzana’s FILMEX premiere got him multiple directing offers.

We learn that De Jarnatt ‘survived’ the maniac actor Timothy Carey, who sabotaged an entire night’s filming by jumping into seven minutes improvised insanity. That footage is included on the ‘Extra Extras’ piece.

This may be something of a premiere for Tarzana. A text cards thanks the entertainment attorney who cleared up some music rights, allowing it to be seen in this venue. The piece ends with a long series of BTS photos from the shoot, with affectionate notes from a grateful director. By the time we finish all these goodies, we’re convinced that Steve De Jarnatt is the George Bailey of L.A. independent filmmaking … eighty people go on camera to express his brilliance and friendship.

De Jarnatt’s story is a student filmmakers’ dream come true — even though his feature directing career stopped after this show and Cherry 2000. Trailers for both are included. We’re surprised to hear that the Cherry 2000 trailer has snatches of music from Bernard Herrmann’s  Taxi Driver.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Miracle Mile
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent 5.1 Surround and Lossless 2.0 Audio
Supplements (which are so detailed, I’m keeping Kino’s wordage):
DISC 1:
NEW Audio ommentary by Los Angeles Literary Mavens Janet Fitch and Matthew Spector (L.A. as a Character in Miracle Mile)  *
Audio Commentary with Writer/Director Steve De Jarnatt and Film Critic Walter Chaw
Audio Commentary with Steve De Jarnatt, Cinematographer Theo van de Sande and Production Designer Chris Horner
Theatrical Trailers (Miracle Mile/Cherry 2000)
DISC 2:
Tarzana (1978 35mm Short Film Noir by Steve De Jarnatt) – Starring Michael C. Gwynne, Eddie Constantine, Timothy Carey, Edie Adams, Pete Candoli, Reni Santoni, Charles Knapp, Kate Murtagh, Ann Dusenberry & Carel Struycken  *
Eat the Sun (16mm Award-Winning Short by Jim Cox) – Co-Written and Co-Directed by Steve De Jarnatt  *
Grace for Grace: Audio Readings of Two Award-Winning Stories by Steve De Jarnatt (83 Min.)  *
Johnie’s Supporting Cast Reunion: 2015 Featurette (14:24)
Johnie’s Supporting Cast Reunion – Part 2: More Great Stuff (24:59)  *
Harry and Julie: 2015 Interview with Stars Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham (12:23)
Scoring Miracle Mile: New Interview with Paul Haslinger (16 Min.)  *
Excavations From the Editing Room Tar Pits: Deleted Scenes, Outtakes and Bloopers (11:20)
Diamond in the Rough – Refining the Diner Scene: Script Text/Storyboards/Stills/Clips/VHS Rehearsal Footage  *
Paul Chadwick Storyboards: Storyboards in Sequence (40 Min.)  *
The Extra Extras: Several Small Pieces and Short Films – Getting the Film Made and the Early Career of Steve De Jarnatt  *
A Tribute to the Crew, Cast and Staff – Photo Montage (16 Min.)  *
Alternate Diamond Ending (4:30)
PACKAGING art by Thomas Walker.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two Blu-rays in Keep case
Reviewed:
January 15, 2024
(7201mira)

*  Gardner Park was built via a massive excavation in the 1980s. Up the ‘hill’ out of the pit we can see the original Pan-Pacific Auditorium, not long before it was torn down. All the art deco masts are still up. The place had been a wreck for years, boarded up and ready to crumble.

In the 1940s the all-purpose Pan-Pacific had been a ballroom and an ice skating arena, which is how it is presented in Frank Tuttle’s solid film noir Suspense. In his autobiography, Walter Mirisch said that Elvis Presley performed there as well. A much smaller building with one feeble mast is there now, visible from Beverly Boulevard.


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Text © Copyright 2025 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

Screen Shot 2015-08-24 at 6.51.08 PM

Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Chas Speed

I bought the German Blu-ray years ago because they hadn’t released “Tarzana” in the U.S. at the time. This is an amazing cast for a student film. I could never get into “Miracle Mile” that much, but I loved the scene at the diner and it kind of reminds me of the diner scene in “The Birds”.

Todd Boughn

One of my favorite 80s films (the less said about Cherry 2000, the better). I dig the cover art. Will definitely pick this up.

BRENT G SPALDING

This is one of my favorite films, and it shines in showing how a great film with an epic feel (those riot scenes are still frightening to watch) can be made with a relatively low budget. I also love the nightmare structure and little unsettling details De Jarnatt adds to the film to keep viewers on edge. A clever detail I noticed on a later viewing was that it is Harry’s own carelessness that sets in motion his night’s mishaps: the bird picks up Harry’s discarded cigarette for nesting and starts the fire that shuts off power to his building.

Last edited 18 days ago by BRENT G SPALDING
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