Written by former PBS producer Naomi Foner (who turned to writing after the birth of her children, Maggie and Jake Gyllenhaal), Running on Empty is the story of campus radicals (Judd Hirsch and Christina Lahti) whose participation in a botched protest bombing during the Vietnam War has kept them on the run for two decades, a clandestine lifestyle of false names and fudged documents that begins to have an adverse effect on their oldest child (River Phoenix). The particulars of Foner's script are based in fact. The fugitives played by Hirsh and Lahti are based on Bill Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn, leaders of the Weather Underground protest group, who carried out bombings of the United States Capitol, the Pentagon, and several New York City police precincts as part of a "Declaration of a State of War" against the United States government; Ayers and Dohrn went into hiding for ten years before surrendering to authorities in 1980. The film's inciting event, the bombing of a napalm laboratory that crippled a maintenance worker, echoes the infamous Sterling Hall bombing of 1970, in which radicals attempting to shut down an army research center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison succeeded only in killing an innocent student.
A small, personal production for Lumet - shot with a small cast and a crew of only sixty (the director employed a crew of twice that on Prince of the City) across the Hudson River New Jersey, Running on Empty is a quiet film about volcanic revelations. Relationships on location were amiable, apart from the clean-living Phoenix admonishing costar Lahti for drinking a Diet Coke and for one set-to between Lumet and screenwriter Foner. As Lumet explained in his 1996 memoirs, Making Movies:
Somehow she fell in love with a scene that, to me, was her only bad idea in the whole movie. The young boy, played by River Phoenix, comes into a strange house, sits at the piano, and begins to play a Beethoven sonata. Eventually, he notices that he is being watched by a young girl, about his age. In the script, he segues into boogie-woogie piano music. I explained to Naomi why I thought it was a bad idea. There was a feeling of pandering to an audience: See, he's not really an egghead--he likes jazz... When I began to stage the scene, River asked if we could cut that bit. He felt false playing it. I saw Naomi pale (and) River told Naomi with great simplicity and earnestness how it compromised his character... At the end of rehearsal, Naomi came over to me. She said she didn't mind if I had to stretch to accommodate the scene, but she couldn't bear to see River turning himself inside out to make it work. She loved the scene, but she said "Let's cut it."
Running on Empty opened in the fall of 1988 to considerable acclaim, with Chicago Sun Times critic Roger Ebert praising "one of the best films of the year." (Due to the presence of a single F-bomb in the script, the film was branded by the Motion Picture Association of America with an R-rating. Lumet appealed, successfully, winning a more appropriate PG-13.) River Phoenix and Naomi Foner both received Academy Award nominations for Running on Empty though neither won. (Foner contented herself with a Golden Globe for Best Screenplay.) Phoenix would next play the young Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) and completed seven more films before his tragic, untimely death at age 23 in 1993. (A celebrity demise on par with James Dean's, Phoenix's death inspired a number of indie rock ballads, among them Natalie Merchant's "River" and Rufus Wainwright's "Matinee Idol.") Sadly, the last few years have seen the passing as well of a number of Running on Empty participants, among them actors Ed Crowley (in 2013) and L.M. Kit Carson (in 2014), as well as Sidney Lumet himself (in 2011).
By Richard Harland Smith
Sources:
Making Movies by Sidney Lumet (Bloomsbury, 1996)
Sidney Lumet: Film and Literary Vision by Frank R. Cunningham (University Press of Kentucky, 2015)
Profile of Naomi Foner Women Screenwriters Today: Their Lives and Words by Marcia McCreadie (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2006)
Sidney Lumet interview by Gavin Smith, Film Comment, August 1988
