Go at 25: The making of the coolest ecstasy-fuelled Christmas movie of all time
Twenty-five years ago, Sarah Polley, Katie Holmes and Timothy Olyphant were among the cast of a twisty, randy crime caper set within rave culture and boasting Len’s ‘Steal My Sunshine’ on the soundtrack. Has anything, asks Tom Fordy, ever been quite so deliciously Nineties?
Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter for all the latest entertainment news and reviews
Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter
Sign up to our free IndyArts newsletter
Shortly after filming had finished on his star-studded drugs caper Go in 1998, the screenwriter John August had a meeting with an executive at Warner Bros. “He said, ‘Oh, you did that movie Go? Our movie’s going to crush you’,” recalls August today. “Then he played the trailer for The Matrix!”
As part of a class of on-the-pulse films released in 1999, Go might sit at the other end of the spectrum to The Matrix, but – 25 years on – it’s arguably the most zeitgeisty late-Nineties film of them all: a randy, twisty, non-linear, hyper-cool, ecstasy-powered film for the Scream generation. With a soundtrack dominated by seminal one hit wonder Len’s “Steal My Sunshine” and starring Dawson’s Creek’s Katie Holmes, no less, it’s a movie that throws you right back to a very different moment in popular culture: the days of No Doubt on the radio, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater on the PlayStation and Celebrity Deathmatch on MTV.
To no one’s surprise – least of all August’s – Go did end up getting beaten by The Matrix at the box office. The film – directed by Doug Liman, then hot off the low-budget smash Swingers with Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau – did modest business. On a budget of about $5m (£3.9m), it grossed $28m worldwide. But it connected with an audience of young people thanks to its on-the-money combination of sex, drugs and Fat Boy Slim bangers, as well as its innate cool.
The film follows three sets of characters in Los Angeles, whose stories all begin at the same point and intertwine around a Santa-themed rave and a drug deal gone wrong. In the first story, broke supermarket checkout girl Ronna (future filmmaker Sarah Polley) plays middle-man in an ecstasy deal, but has to think fast when she realises she’s been lured into a drug bust. In the second story, fellow supermarket worker Simon (Desmond Askew) goes on a Las Vegas misadventure of sex, strippers, and gun-toting grand theft auto. And in the third story, soap opera actors – and secret couple – Adam and Zack (Scott Wolf and Jay Mohr) act as bait in the drug bust and receive unexpected advances from an oddball cop.
Today, Go belongs to a lineage of alternative festive films set at Christmas but not strictly about Christmas. But, as August tells it, the season did set the tone. “Los Angeles Christmas is a very specific vibe,” he tells me. “Like the rest of the world, it gets dark early. So most of the day happens after it gets dark. It doesn’t really get cold. It’s just a weird time.”
When he wrote the script, August was living in Hollywood and would visit a branch of the supermarket chain Ralphs on Sunset Boulevard, which he called “Rock ’n’ Roll Ralphs” because of all the music students that worked there. “I remember being there at Christmastime and wondering what life was like for these folks who work at this store,” he says. “I got curious about what that would feel like.”
Some of our cast had heat, some of them were newcomers. But they were not useful for foreign financiers. They were like, ‘Nope, we need a white male star between 40 and 55 years old’
Initially, August wrote Go as a short film called “X” – an Americanism for what us Brits would call “E” – which just followed Ronna’s drug deal. “It just sat there,” he remembers. “People would read it and like it, but then ask what the full movie version was like. The problem was, I knew what happened with all the other characters – Adam and Zack were there, Simon had gone off to Vegas – but there was no way of adding their stories without the tension falling apart. When I went back to do it, I had to restart the clock on each of the stories and tell them separately. That became the three-part structure.”
Though it wasn’t a direct lift from Pulp Fiction – the granddaddy of too-cool-for-school, non-linear capers, and the obvious inspiration for so many crime flicks of the Nineties – August admits that Quentin Tarantino’s film emboldened him to take a risk. “I don’t think I would have had the guts to do that if Pulp Fiction hadn’t come out and been incredibly successful with non-linear storytelling,” says August. “Suddenly it wasn’t impossible.”
Between the Tarantino influence and Liman, whose Swingers had been such an influential, catchphrase-spawning hit (“so money!”) just three years earlier, Go sits at the centre of a Venn diagram of all that was trendy in the late Nineties. It’s a feeling bolstered by its cast, many of whom were stars of blockbuster TV hits. Scott Wolf was one of the leads of the teen drama Party of Five, future 30 Rock star Jane Krakowski was a regular on Ally McBeal, and Katie Holmes was about to be shot into the cultural stratosphere courtesy of Dawson’s Creek.
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
Watch Apple TV+ free for 7 days
New subscribers only. £8.99/mo. after free trial. Plan auto-renews until cancelled
“Katie had been cast in Dawson’s Creek but it hadn’t come out by the time we were shooting,” says August. “When we went back to do two days of reshoots, suddenly she was a star! We had people waiting outside her trailer. It was fascinating to watch the cast take off.”
Holmes plays Claire, Ronna’s square work buddy who gets reluctantly roped into the drug deal. Checkout boy Manny (Nathan Bexton), meanwhile, double-drops ecstasy and spends the rest of the film having a Fear and Loathing-style mad one. A scene of Manny dancing around the supermarket to a “Macarena” remix is a high point (though the comedown isn’t much fun). August says he only knew the rave scene from a distance, but the film brilliantly captures the excitement and nervousness of party drugs: kids anxious about buying, not quite knowing how they’re supposed to act.
Also among the cast was William Fichtner, who plays Adam and Zack’s over-friendly cop. It’s still hard to see Fichtner in any film without thinking of him in Go – totally nude and trying to sell a furniture-based pyramid scheme. Then there’s the presence of a pre-Deadwood Timothy Olyphant as drug dealer Gaines, a sort-of-antagonist who wanders in and out of each story and embodies a streak of barbed cool. Olyphant was just off playing (spoiler incoming) one of the killers in the also-of-the-moment Scream 2. August recalls that Olyphant came in to read for Adam or Zack – both much gentler souls. “But then he read for Gaines and killed it.”
Despite the abundance of future stars here (look out for a pre-fame Melissa McCarthy at one point, too), the cast initially made Go hard to, well, get going in 1998. Production company Banner Entertainment intended to raise money for the film’s budget from foreign investors, but they wanted a star with the heft of someone like Mel Gibson or Kevin Costner. “The challenge we ran into was we were selling this incredible cast,” says August. “Some of them had heat, some of them were newcomers. But they were not useful for foreign financiers. The foreign financiers were like, ‘Nope, we need a white male star between 40 and 55 years old.’ And there wasn’t a role in the movie for the kind of person they wanted.” Columbia Pictures stepped in. “We were basically still a scrappy independent movie,” August says. “It’s just the bank behind it was Columbia Pictures. They kept a distance at all times.”
The 31-day shoot itself had its problems, such as losing all the sound from the first day of shooting. “By the second day we were three days behind,” says August. He led a second unit team and quickly rued all the nighttime scenes he’d written. “We were out shooting in the cold a lot. It just got to be a drag!” Liman, meanwhile, cut corners with the budget so they could afford a Las Vegas car chase. The chase comes after Simon has had quite the night in Sin City. He has a threesome, starts a hotel fire, steals a Ferrari, gets a lap dance he can’t afford, and shoots a strip club bouncer. August names Simon’s story as his favourite in the film. “He’s a character purely driven by what he wants in the moment,” he says. “It was so much fun to write.”
He was horrified, though, by an early cut of the film. “I really wanted to die. It was so awful. I was nauseous,” he says. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe we could just never release the movie.’ That’s not an uncommon experience with other first cuts, but across all the movies I’ve been a part of, it was the furthest from what I thought it needed to be.”
Liman refined the film with reshoots, adding scenes to fill narrative gaps. Go then screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1999. “It was a big hit there so we knew it would play well to audiences,” August remembers. “But we also knew it was hard to market. It’s hard to even describe what it’s about. And we never found a trailer that did a great job selling the movie.”
Go was released in the US on 9 April, 1999 to mixed-to-strong reviews. Roger Ebert praised its “energy and wit”, though The Independent’s Antonia Quirke disliked it, writing in 1999: “Go feels endless. I was restless for lunch from the start.” Still, it made decent money, and rapidly developed a cult following. “I would meet strangers who’d say, ‘I saw your movie 10 times at the theatre’,” August says. “It was like, ‘oh Jesus – that doesn’t happen!’ It was really connecting with a certain audience.”
Twenty-five years on, Go might be of its cultural moment, but that’s a very different thing to being dated. A film that channelled the essence and rush of 1999, it’s now a buzzing dose of glowstick-coloured nostalgia.
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments