8 Million Ways to Die
All actors and roles (10)
All team (93)
Short description
Matt Scudder is a Los Angeles narcotics detective who shoots a suspect during a raid and is unable to put the incident behind him. His drinking spirals, costing him both his job and his marriage. He turns to Alcoholics Anonymous for help, and it is through that recovery that he meets a woman who asks for his protection. When she is killed, he starts drinking again, then pulls himself together and sets out to find whoever is responsible, an investigation that draws him back into the worlds of prostitution and drug trafficking and puts his sobriety under constant pressure.
Hal Ashby directed the film, the sixth in the run of features listed for him, following Being There. Jeff Bridges plays Scudder, with Rosanna Arquette as Sarah, Alexandra Paul as Sunny, Randy Brooks as Chance Walker and Andy García as Angel Moldonado. The screenplay is credited to Oliver Stone, Robert Towne and R. Lance Hill, and Stephen J. Roth produced.
Released in April 1986, the film runs 115 minutes and mixes crime, action, drama, mystery and thriller elements. Made for a budget of 18 million dollars, it took in about 1 million dollars worldwide, a wide gap between cost and return. On IMDb it holds 5.8/10 from roughly 6,800 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 5.5/10 from 151 votes; a critics' rating of 3.5/10 from eight reviews places it below both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Director and screenwriter Hal Ashby was fired immediately after the filming period ended, and creative control passed to PSO Entertainment, for whom this was their first large-scale project.
- According to Lawrence Block, author of the 1982 book that served as the literary source for the screenplay, the set was a "joyless" place. Director and screenwriter Hal Ashby was withdrawn and gloomy, and his directorial style consisted of forcing the actors to overact. Ashby was not allowed to work on the final version of the film; some scenes in which the actors were blatantly overacting made it into the theatrical release.
- Oliver Stone was filming the war drama 'Salvador' (1986) in Mexico and could not refine the script before the start of production, so Hal Ashby took it upon himself to make the changes. While working on the screenplay, Ashby relied on Stone's writing, Lawrence Block's original novel, and his own thoughts. In total, Ashby wrote 50 pages of text. He gave the text to producer Steven J. Roth, who said he liked it. Soon, however, Ashby stopped working on the script when he learned that PSO Entertainment had hired David Lee Henry to rewrite Stone's screenplay without consulting him. Predictably, Ashby was offended and stated that he had never been treated this way before. He felt even more slighted upon learning that Roth was reporting all script changes directly to executive producer Mark Damon, bypassing him entirely.
- Oliver Stone strongly disliked the final version of the script, which had little in common with what he had written and what David Lee Henry had subsequently refined. Henry's version was disliked by both the producers and the actors involved in the project. The finale envisioned a large-scale shootout at the airport, the filming of which would have inflated the movie's budget to at least $16 million. Screenwriter Robert Towne was hired for $250,000 (a quarter of his usual fee), and he set about the final destruction of the version written by David Lee Henry. After this, Oliver Stone visited the set only once. He did not want his name to appear in the credits, but it was already too late, as the credits had already been completed.
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