A Tribute To ‘Road House,’ The Greatest And Only Cultural Product This Writer’s Home Town Ever Produced

Despite being less than four hours drive from LA, the small town in California’s Central Valley where I went to high school has only ever hosted one film production. Even with an impressive variety of natural terrain — plains, rolling foothills, mountains, farmland, rivers and lakes — that would seem to make it a convenient stand-in for the Midwest, the South, or the old west, you’re far more likely to see Vancouver dressed up as New York City or a CG Bay Bridge being blown up than anything shot in the middle of California. Why spend all that money to fly over flyover country when drive-past country is right here

Being ignored by popular culture was sort of our lot in Fresno County. As definitive evidence of this, I point to Tupac’s “California Love,” in which Fresno is California’s largest city (at half a million) not to receive a shout out (technicalities: one could argue that San Jose is bigger and also not specifically mentioned, but it’s also clearly on the San Francisco Bay and thus covered under the “from Diego to the Bay” clause). Even Bakersfield, Fresno’s smaller San Joaquin Valley sibling to the south, has produced the occasional nationally known music act. Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Korn. What did Fresno have

Reedley though, at the southeastern end of Fresno County, at least we had Road House. (Whether anyone else knew it is immaterial, we knew it).

While it’d be nice if there were more, it’s hard to imagine a more perfect film to be our sole cultural product. Released in 1989 as super producer Joel Silver’s follow-up to his smash hit Die Hard, Silver — who has said proudly that he makes films for teenage boys — pitched Road House to prospective cast members in three words: “boobs and bombs.”

It’s a nice pitch, and accurate enough, but it makes Road House sound far less strange than it actually is. It starred Patrick Swayze, a burgeoning star after Youngblood and Dirty Dancing two years earlier. An early tagline: “The dancing is over. Now it gets dirty.”

Swayze played a “cooler” — which we’re left to infer from the film is like the head of security for a bar — named Dalton, who is so universally acknowledged as the best in his business that he’s one-name famous among service staff. “You see that guy over there That’s Dalton,” waitresses breathlessly tell bartenders when Dalton shows up at the Double Deuce. “I thought you’d be bigger,” sniff the bouncers.

That’s Road House in a nutshell, a mix of wildly inventive parallel universe world-building and tried-and-true tropes from westerns and martial arts films. The Double Deuce, by the way, is the rowdy honky-tonk Dalton has been hired to clean up. What ensues after Dalton rolls into town (in a grey Mercedes that he keeps hidden in a barn for the entire movie) is a hybrid Western/martial arts movie pitting white hat Dalton against black hat Brad Wesley, an ascotted big game hunter who has an entire town under his thumb.

“When I first read the script, I wasn’t very happy,” director Rowdy Herrington told us. “I thought it was too broad. Joel Silver called me because I was going to pass and said, ‘Would you come down and meet me Even if you don’t do this, I think you’re talented. I have other things going on.’ So I said, okay. He set up a meeting at midnight. They were shooting Die Hard on a lot at Fox. I met the whole bunch of guys, Bruce Willis and everybody and McTiernan. Anyway, Joel and I talked about it and he said he understood my concerns about the material and that’s why he wanted me to do it. I told him what I would do to it.”

One quality Road House has, common to a lot of cult and extremely rewatchable movies, is the sense that there’s this whole hidden world around us that we just never noticed before. Lucrative honky-tonks, the toughs who ruin them, the famous bouncers sent to clean them up. In Road House, that may be partly due to the fact that it was initially a much longer movie, carefully whittled down to its 1 hour and 54-minute running time. The original cut was three hours long.

“The script was long. It was like 140 pages or something,” Herrington says. “And my first meeting with United Artists, I went in with Joel and [then-chairman of United Artists] Tony Thomopoulos is sitting at one end of this long conference table. We’re at the other, and he’s got his people on each side of him. I was totally unprepared for this because Joel didn’t give me a clue what was going to happen in this meeting. We go in and sit down and Joel says, ‘Tell him what you’re going to do.’ I did a couple of minutes on what I was going to do with the script and the stuff that I thought was really going to be hit scenes, why this picture should get made, and all that. And Tony Thomopoulos just said ‘The script’s too long.’ And of course I agree. Joel slid the script all the way across this long table that Tony had, and he said ‘Take anything out you want, but when it’s a bomb, it’s your fault.’ ‘What do you want, a hit or a bomb Choose now.'”

Kelly Lynch was already signed to United Artist for a Sam Kinison movie that never happened, and instead got cast as Dalton’s love interest, the sexy doctor. They also lucked out getting Jimmy Iovine (future Dr. Dre collaborator) as their music supervisor.

“Jimmy read the script and said, ‘Oh my God, I know who this blind guitar player is,'” Herrington says. “It turns out the original writer of the script [R. Lance Hill] had seen Jeff Healey in a bar and wrote him into the script.”

Iovine had apparently seen a similar show. So Road House got Jeff Healey, a blind Canadian with a unique way of playing slide guitar with the guitar flat across his lap, to play Cody, leader of the bar band at the Double Deuce. Healey was just 23 when Road House came out, and 41 when he died of lung cancer in 2008.