It wasn’t a good movie, but at the same time, many agreed that it ended up being a fascinating experience.
After suffering a violent attack in which her fiancé is murdered, Mina becomes an avenger of the night with a single objective in mind: ending the lives of all dangerous men who can harm women. Meanwhile, her boyfriend’s police brother also seeks to take down the biker gang associated with the murder.
It is the description of the Dangerous Men, an action ‘thriller’ that you probably don’t know, since it passed unnoticed for just a week in movie theaters and was also the subject of some pretty terrible reviews. However, The story behind the film is funny.
Although it was not released until 2005 – we will also get to that topic now -, Jahangir Salehian Iranian architect who had produced a couple of film projects in his country, began working on a new film Dangerous Men in 1984, wanting it to be his first production in the United States. Salehi had fled the Islamic Revolution in 1979 with his family to settle in the United States and assumed all tasks on the film, which he wrote, directed and produced under the pseudonym John S. Rad – the only name that appears, and six times , in the credits-. He also paid the distribution out of his own pocket.
The first version of the film was ready very soon, already in 1985, but it took 20 more years for it to be completely ready. However, far from approaching examples like the 13 years that James Cameron spent working on Avatar 2 or others of the type, the wait of two decades had nothing to do with perfectionism. In fact, given the unprofessional result of the film, we could rather say the opposite.
Unfortunately, Rad died shortly after, in 2007, so everything that happened in those 20 years in which he was mulling over his film is really a mystery. However, his daughter, Samira Wenzel, would give some clues in an interview with Vanity Fair on the occasion of a re-release of the film in 2015, already with a distributor, which would have filled the Iranian with pride. Wenzel, who spoke of his past as a childhood with all the comforts in which he lacked nothing but also the terrors of the beginning of the revolution, remembered some of the films that his father made in Iran and for which he even won awards , but which were never heard from again.
A lover of cinema, Rad continued to earn a living as an architect in the United States, but always pursuing his dream of being able to produce. Thus, he began working on Dangeorus Men in the 80s, but he was clear that he wanted to do it alone: ”He didn’t want debt. He wanted to have cash. He didn’t want to leave his life’s work in the hands of anyone. He always wanted perfection, but The perfection in his eyes was different than the perfection in ours.”
“And you can see that in the movie,” said Wenzel.
The story of a proud director who became a Juan Palomo
Thus, to make the feature film, the architect-director squeezed his few resources to the maximum: on the one hand he took care of everything, but he also opted to hire non-professional actors to star in the film and to use unusual editing techniques that They ended up causing the film, already edited, to have incoherent cuts.
“I paid them 10 dollars a day and a McDonald’s,” would say Zack Carlson, programmer of the Fantastic Fest where the film was also screened in 2015, according to what one of the cast members had told him. Another of the “actresses”, Donna Ohana, does not even remember being paid, but she does remember that the director had in mind that her film would be an event:
He told me this would be the greatest movie ever. The exact words she used were: ‘This is going to be bigger than ET.’
An ambition that did not have any type of resources at its service and that was marked by absolute precariousness.
According to Ohana, Rad wanted to show them a first cut even then, in 1985, and even rented a theater to do it: “He rented the Avco Theater on Wilshire Boulevard. We were excited. We thought, ‘Wow, this is going to be incredible.'” However, after seeing it, they were all horrified: “We looked at each other and said, ‘Shit.’ We knew it was terrible right there. We walked out. “I felt ashamed!”
The director, however, was determined to move forward. However, at some point, he decided that the film was not finished and he spent a few years making changes that, it seems, included taking cuts from another film. In the end, Dangerous Man was ready in 2005, but, to no one’s surprise, He had to distribute it himself, paying five cinemas out of his pocket to show it.. It barely lasted a week on the billboard. “He kept saying, ‘This movie can make a lot of money.’ I need help to get it into theaters,” said his daughter. “He never gave up. He said, ‘Until he dies, I’m not giving up on this film.’ “This movie can be successful, I’m just not reaching the right people or the right place.”
Although Rad died in 2007 and did not live to see it, the film lived a second life in 2015, when Drafthouse Films acquired the rights for distribution. Fortunately, according to his daughter, since he was so sure that his film was a marvel, he would not have taken the bad reviews very well. And he had them, because It was not a good film, but at the same time, many agreed that watching it ended up being a fascinating experience.
