The film follows Dar (Adrian Pasdar) and Tuck (Chris Penn) as they escape from Centralia, stealing cars, semi-trucks and anything not pinned down on their way to Los Angeles to meet a dream girl that Dar saw in a surfing magazine. Centralia, then a dying coal-mining town with a raging fire coursing through the mines underground, has since been abandoned, with, at last check, five official residents. Dar and Tuck style themselves after Marlon Brando in The Wild One (1953) and act out Brando's quip in response to what he is rebelling against: "Whaddya got?"
The cinematography by Curtis Clark opts for a distanced documentary realism, with montages of shuttered storefronts and the hollowed-out rust belt. The screenplay by Zbigniew Kempinski is shambolically episodic, as the duo scam their way from town to town with Dar picking up women (most significantly Lori Singer as blonde bombshell Annie) and Tuck waiting for the women to leave. They are not characters as much as symptoms of a disease, like they are something belched out by the Centralia fire that keeps running until extinguished.
It goes without saying that Pasdar doesn't have the dynamism of Marlon Brando, but he does possess a brooding beauty appropriate for the part. The released version leans heavier on the comedy according to a contemporary Los Angeles Times report from Jack Mathews, one of the few people to have seen both cuts. And there are some funny bits, like when Dar and Tuck go into a laundromat, completely disrobe then walk back to the seats completely nude, waiting for their outfits to clean. It's an indication of their level of poverty, as well as their lack of caring about said poverty. All they have left is each other, which they cling to with increasing dependency.
Both Friedman and Hemdale producer John Daly agreed that the film needed some adjustments after an initial poor preview in Hollywood. Friedman then, according to the Los Angeles Times, "whittled away...offending scenes and tried to reorder the film to hold the audience's sympathy." Hemdale was never satisfied and took the editing process away from Friedman. Daly's cut was going to be shown at the 1987 Cannes Film Festival for potential distributors. But the Director's Fortnight section heard about Friedman's plight and invited him to screen his cut of the feature, for one night only. Perhaps due to the drama behind the scenes, his director's cut received a five minute ovation. "No matter what happens now," said Friedman, "I have that."
There was an attempt by New Line Cinema to purchase the rights to Made in U.S.A. in November of 1987, but nothing ever came of it. Adrian Pasdar told Tribune Media Services that he and Friedman "will try to have their names removed from the credits" if New Line was unable to acquire the film. Pasdar went on to say that "Daly threatened to have him [Friedman] arrested if Ken showed his cut publicly again." He described the movie as "a real art-house film, with an environmental message; Daly has tried to make it sort of a teen exploit film - but it doesn't work. I saw his cut, and it was terrible."
Jack Mathews claims that the differences were not so huge between the versions: "For anyone seeing the two versions back-to-back, and without an emotional stake in the outcome of the battle, the Hemdale and Friedman cuts are not dramatically different. Friedman's version puts more emphasis on the environmental disease and overall has a greater social urgency. Hemdale's version emphasizes the film's comedic elements. Neither cut rates a standing ovation from this viewer, but pressed to make a choice (and with the benefit of having been told what the movie's aims are), Friedman's is the more effective film." But Hemdale had the final say, and it is their cut that limped into the VHS marketplace in 1989, dooming it to an obscurity it is only now beginning to emerge from.
By R. Emmet Sweeney
