On the Front Lines

“I realized that I would probably live past 26, and I’d never considered that.” – John Milius, 2003

Portrait of a young man who knows exactly where his life is going.

It is the 1970s, and the young man lives and works in a manner that is at once deliberate and determined; devouring life both as dedicated surfer, outdoorsman and firearm-enthusiast and a voracious student of film, literature and history – one of that lost breed of warrior-philosophers who would ride a wave with the same dedication with which they’d shoot down a target… or recite from memory grand tales of history and myth.

He lives this way, in part, because he believes he has already charted the course and endgame of his life. He will live youth fully and completely, so that he may be ready and prepared for his greater dream – to enlist in the United States Marines, and have a proud warrior’s career (or a proud warrior’s death) in the jungles of Vietnam.

But then, the young man finds that the path he had charted is unexpectedly blocked. He has asthma, and will not be permitted to enlist in the armed services. No proud career of combat or glorious pass to Valhalla awaits him, and instead of beginning the climax of his story he now faces – perhaps for the first time – the prospect of a long life stretching out in front of him. A long life he neither sought nor planned. If this were you, what would you do? How would you react? Where would you go?
John Milius went to Hollywood.

To movie fans, especially those reared on the major American productions of the 70s and 80s, the now 66 year-old Milius is a figure of legend and infamy. Some gamers, however, may only recently have become aware of him as one of the most prominent Hollywood professionals to get newly involved in the games industry. He’s contributed to the Medal of Honor series in the recent past, but 2011 will see his biggest gaming project to date: Kaos Studios’ Homefront, a shooter set amid a theoretical near-future occupation of the United States by a nuclear-armed North Korea, boasts Milius as a credited writer, story consultant, and author of the game’s official novelization. It’s hard to imagine an established figure as perfectly suited to inhabit both the movie and gaming world at the same time.

Naturally, the first and quickest rationale for Milius’ involvement in Homefront is the game’s obvious similarity to one of his most famous films, 1984’s Red Dawn, in which American high schoolers form a guerilla militia to wage insurgent war against an occupying Soviet army. At the time best known for being the first film released with the new PG-13 rating (it held a Guinness World Record for acts of violence: 2.23 per minute!) it’s become a cult classic and a particular favorite of many military personnel: When the U.S. 4th Infantry Division in Iraq rooted-out and captured Saddam Hussein, they did so under the name Operation Red Dawn.

For much of his career, Milius has been a polarizing figure in his own industry, though not always for the reasons many have tried to assign. Popular culture has often imagined him in simplistic terms – the lone “conservative” in supposedly “liberal” Hollywood. You’ll seldom hear him call himself “conservative,” though; he tends to prefer cryptic descriptions like “Zen Fascist.” And while he’s happy to play up his anachronistic modern-cowboy image – frequently photographed chomping a cigar, a rifle resting on his shoulder – he stands as a reminder that one can be a public figure and a proud member of the NRA without also becoming a grumbling talking head on cable news. If nothing else, he maintains a sense of humor about his persona: He’s friends with the Coen Brothers, who used him as the inspiration for the character Walter Sobchak in The Big Lebowski.

When he learned that his health would bar him from his dream of warrior glory, Milius was already a film student, an active member of the USC Film School crowd that would produce the so-called “movie brat” generation of filmmakers. His list of friends and associates in those halcyon days reads like a who’s who of present-day Hollywood royalty: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and of course Milius’ close friend and mentor, Francis Ford Coppola.

Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind’s essential book chronicling the rise of the movie brats, depicts him as a standout personality even among these larger-than-life figures, the gun-slinging “muscle” of the outfit, the Wolverine among film-student X-Men not only in friendship but also in professional collaboration. You’ve heard his signature grandiose, bombastic dialogue leap – often uncredited – from the mouths of everyone from Dirty Harry to Jeremiah Johnson to Jack Ryan. And while other filmmakers of their generation dismissed or even excoriated Spielberg and Lucas for wasting their early promise on “silly” killer shark and space war movies, Milius was among their proponents. He’s also responsible for Quint’s “Indianapolis speech” in Jaws, and has been referenced as helping turn Lucas on to the Samurai ethos that plays such a big part in Star Wars.

His greatest triumph in that early period was also a moment of professional frustration. He wrote the original screenplay for Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but was angered to learn that the finished film changed his ending and, in doing so, espoused a much different point than he had intended. In Milius’ version, the characters’ realization that the only way to victory in Vietnam would be to embrace a primal, inhuman warrior ethos was akin to a moment of clarity – in Coppola’s finished film, that same realization becomes a descent into madness. Either way, the film is an all-time classic, and many have pointed to the warring personalities of Milius vs. Coppola being the special ingredient that energizes the proceedings.

In any case, while the legendarily-troubled production of Apocalypse Now has been said to have drained (if not all-but extinguished) the life from director Coppola, it gave Milius some of the clout he needed to emerge as a visionary in his own right in the decade that followed. Along with Red Dawn, he wrote and directed cult classics like Conan the Barbarian and Flight of the Intruder, the latter of which has been called a response to Apocalypse’s version of Vietnam.

In the 90s and early 2000s, Milius turned his attentions more toward television and other projects. While making the Teddy Roosevelt actioner Rough Riders for TNT, he got involved with a campaign to award Roosevelt – unsurprisingly a personal hero of his – a posthumous Medal of Honor for events depicted in the film (the movement succeeded). Later, he’d co-create the hit HBO series Rome. More unexpectedly, he was involved in the creative planning for the early days of the Ultimate Fight Championship. The UFC’s now-famous Octagon fighting space? He came up with that.

It’s likely that the same unique mix of qualities that made him at once invaluable yet occasionally out-of-place in Hollywood – military history expertise, love of epic mythmaking, and genuine screenwriting talent – are what have made Milius suddenly seem so appropriate for the videogame world. Movies, with their emphasis on broad third-person narratives, have had great difficulty rediscovering the concept, whether mythic or real, of glory or even simple heroism in a wartime setting in the lingering shadows of Vietnam and the similar, growing shadow of Iraq. But videogames set in the theater of war, particularly first person shooters like Homefront, are a different story. With perspective often narrowed to the experience of only a single character, war games have become the New Millennium’s home for tales of soldiering as a character-building experience.

For good or ill, the Call of Duty-era of shooters sells not just gameplay, but the opportunity to experience an often starkly-real(ish) simulation of the Great Warrior Myth: the lone soldier, pitted against hundreds on a bloodied battlefield a thousand miles from home with only his skill and determination to see him through. It’s a story Milius has been telling his whole career. We’ll know soon enough if this marriage of man and medium yields worthy results in Homefront, but I for one hope it’s not the last the gaming world sees of this particular Hollywood visitor.

Bob Chipman is a film critic and independent filmmaker. If you’ve heard of him before, you have officially been spending way too much time on the internet.