Their doing a retrospective on the films of Ted Kotcheff in LA, and there was a great interview him about the making of First Blood.
two of my favorite bits:
Filmmaker: The book First Blood had been knocking around Hollywood for quite a while before you turned it into a movie. How did you first become aware of it?
Ted Kotcheff: The head of Warner Brothers, Bob Shapiro, was an ex-agent of mine he used to be the head of William Morris in England when I lived there. He sent me this book by a Canadian writer, David Morrell, and said I should read it. There had already been a couple of attempts at scripts, but I didnt read any of them; they had all been rejected by Warners anyway, so it would have been a waste of time. I read the book and loved it, so they hired me to do the script. I worked very intensely with a writer named Michael Kozoll for three months and we delivered what I thought was a pretty good script. I submitted it to Warner Brothers and one week went by, two weeks went by
three weeks went by. I thought, This cannot be good. Finally Bob Shapiro said, Come to my office. He told me the board at Warners had decided they didnt want to make the film, because Vietnam was one of the worst military disasters in centuries and everybody hated the war. He said, The right wing thinks the veterans are a bunch of losers and the left wing thinks theyre baby killers. Weve got Ronald Reagan as president now and old-fashioned patriotism is back in. This is not a patriotic film. I said, Jesus, Bob, couldnt you have thought about this three months ago before I busted my ass to deliver a script? He apologized, and I just thought it was another film that was going to go down the toilet.
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Kotcheff: I always conceived of Rambos story as a suicide mission. America doesnt want him, and he decides that he doesnt want them he knows when he comes to that bridge at the beginning of the film that things will probably turn out badly. In the original ending, Rambo says to his colonel You made me. Now you should kill me. The colonel has his gun out and thinks about putting Rambo out of his misery, but he cant do it. Rambo reaches up and blows himself away, commits hari-kari. Well, we shot the scene and Sylvester gave a spectacular performance. Everyone was thrilled with it except Sylvester. He took me aside and said, Ted, weve put Rambo through so much
the audience has suffered with him through all of this, and now were going to kill him? They are going to hate this, Im telling you. I thought about it for a minute and came up with an extended tracking shot we could do we would end the scene before the colonel takes the gun out, then follow Rambo and the colonel outside the police station as they walk down the steps in front of this town Rambo has almost destroyed.
I was getting it set up and the producers rushed over to me: Kotcheff, what the fuck are you doing? I said, Im shooting an alternate ending. An alternate ending? We agreed on the ending. Its a suicide mission. Youre over budget and over schedule, you dont have the money to do two endings. I said, I dont take shit from producers. Get off my set. Im going to get the shot. Its only going to take me two hours. I told them, Ive got a hunch when we find an American distributor, theyre going to want this ending. Theyre going to want Rambo to survive. Sure enough, we got the shot, finished the film, and took it with the original ending to Orion for distribution. And Mike Medavoy, who ran it, said, I love this film, but I hate the ending. Andy Vajna was so angry he leapt across the desk and tried to punch Mike Medavoy in the face.
We went to a suburban theatre in Las Vegas to test the film, and I knew it was going to be a success the audience was so involved. Then Rambo commits hari-kari. You could have heard a pin drop. A voice in the silence says If the director of this film is here, we should string him up from the nearest lamp post for doing this to Rambo. I turned to my wife and said, Lets get the hell out of here, and ran out of the theatre. The cards came back and all five hundred of them were practically identical everyone thought it was a great action movie with a horrible ending. You could see consternation growing on the faces of the producers as they read card after card.