10 Things to Know About The Wild Life (1984)

10 Things to Know About The Wild Life

10 Written by Cameron Crowe

Read any 10 reviews of The Wild Life and you’re likely to find a comparison to Fast Times at Ridgmont High. This is not terribly surprising as both films were written by Cameron Crowe. The reason you’ve only heard of one of them is because Fast Times is a far better film. Yeah, it’s really that simple.

9 The Wild Life Began Filming in February 1984

Principal photography on The Wild Life began on February 6th, 1984. This was just 11 days before star Chris Penn had the debut of his biggest role to date, Footloose, which opened in theaters on February 17th, 1984.

8 Weird Parallel with Full Metal Jacket

The Wild Life was announced as beginning principal photography on the same day as Stanley Kubrick’s Full Meta Jacket. But while The Wild Life would be completed and released in theaters by September 28th, 1984, Full Metal Jacket was more than 3 years away from being released.

7 Diner Meets Fast Times

Cameron Crowe shared an anecdote about the making of The Wild Life that sheds some light on the idea behind the movie. According to Crowe, movie theater owners were desperate for a sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High but that was the last thing Crowe wanted to do. He wanted to grow up a little more and show his own maturity as a writer.

The compromise was The Wild Life, a movie that Crowe himself said could be considered Fast Times meets Diner, an evolution of the Fast Times style young characters into the adult world, tentatively and without growing up too much.

6 Art Linson Wasn’t the Original Director

Art Linson was an experienced director, he’d made Where The Buffalo Roam a few years earlier. However, he wasn’t initially the choice to direct The Wild Life. It’s not known who was originally tapped to direct, only that they stepped out not long before the film was going into production.

According to Cameron Crowe, the last minute director switch caused a bit of chaos and definitely contributed to the film not quite becoming what was intended. That’s not a knock on Linson as a director, who had a successful producing partnership with Crowe, he simply struggled stepping in at the last minute.

5 Sybil Danning

Sexy superstar Sybil Danning was cast in The Wild Life and even filmed a scene for the film. But Sybil Danning is not in The Wild Life. Despite hiring Danning to appear in a sexy dream sequence and filming that scene, Danning’s part was cut from the final cut of The Wild Life.

The scene, which is believed to have been filmed, has never been released It doesn’t appear as an extra on any release of The Wild Life and has never been leaked online. It’s not exactly a lost media case, we can’t confirm that the scene was actually filmed, but it may exist somewhere.

4 Eddie Van Halen’s First and Only fFilm Score

Eddie Van Halen’s work appeared on numerous film soundtracks over the years but only one film can claim to have Eddie Van Halen as the composer of its film score. That’s The Wild Life, which was scored beginning to end by Eddie Van Halen’s killer guitar riffs.

3 Doomed Ad Copy

The newspaper ad copy appears to have doomed The Wild Life.

“From the creators of Fast Times at Ridgmont High something even faster.”

It makes sense to evoke Fast Times at Ridgmont High in theory. In practice, the comparison invited expectations that The Wild Life was not capable of matching.

2 Music Licensing Made Home Video a Headache

The Wild Life has a great soundtrack but it turned out to be a double edged sword. The music of Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, Little Richard and Prince all appear in The Wild Life while Bananarama provides the killer title track which gets released as a single. It all works to create a great musical atmosphere for the movie

Unfortunately, these musicians fell under different record companies, requiring differing contracts and costs if the songs are to remain in the film. The music made the release of the original film nearly impossible for a time, though eventually, the movie as it was intended, music and all reaches DVD and Blu-Ray.

1 James L. Brooks Was a Fan of The Wild Life

While The Wild Life is not well remembered, it was well liked by someone who mattered. Academy Award winning director James L. Brooks saw The Wild Life and sought out writer Cameron Crowe. What happened next was Brooks acting as producer for Cameron Crowe’s directorial debut, Say Anything.