Back at Penn State, a creative-writing professor, Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), had introduced me to Henry Morrison, a literary agent who accepted me as a client. Until that time, few novels had the amount of action that First Blood had. Henry wondered if a hardback publisher would be comfortable with it, but six weeks after the novel was submitted, a hardback house, M. Evans and Co., accepted it. Evans was known for its bestselling nonfiction books Body Language and Open Marriage, and promoted First Blood with the enthusiasm it had brought to those other titles.
Columbia Pictures purchased the movie rights for Richard Brooks to write and direct. High schools and colleges taught the book. Before he was a bestselling author, Stephen King used it as one of his two texts when he taught creative writing at the University of Maine (the other was James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity).
Columbia, evidently not liking the script that Brooks prepared, sold the film rights to Warner Bros., which hired Sydney Pollack to direct Steve McQueen, only to realize after six months of script development that McQueen, in his mid-forties, was far too old to be a returning Vietnam veteran. In another possible production, Paul Newman was considered. It’s interesting that the two protagonists are so balanced in the novel that Newman’s role would have been the police chief, whom some book reviewers considered to be the main character.
The project was sold to another studio, and another. Twenty-six scripts were prepared. Finally, ten years after the book’s publication, a new company, Carolco, hired Ted Kotcheff to direct Sylvester Stallone, and the resulting 1982 movie was the most successful autumn release in memory.
Some changes were made. The setting was moved to the Pacific Northwest (to get Canadian financial incentives). The character of the police chief was simplified. The degree of action was reduced. Rambo was allowed to live (although in an early version of the film, he did die). Perhaps most important, the character was softened. My Rambo is furious about his war experience. He hates what he was forced to do, and he especially hates that he discovered he had a skill for killing. It’s the only thing he knows how to do, but he’s a genius at it, and in the novel, when the police chief keeps pushing and pushing, Rambo finally explodes, almost with pride in the destruction he can accomplish.
Not in the movie. Concerned that the character might not be sympathetic, the producers made him a victim. At the start of the film, Rambo walks soulfully to a home near a lake where a black woman hangs washed clothes on a line. Rambo, we discover, is looking for a friend who was in his Special Forces unit, but as the black woman explains, Rambo’s friend died from cancer. Agent Orange, a defoliant used by the military in the Vietnam War, killed him.
After pressing these sympathetic emotional buttons, the script arranges for Rambo to walk into town, where the police chief gives him trouble because he doesn’t like the look of him. In the novel, this motivation works because Rambo has the long hair and beard of a hippie, an automatic target for police officers when I wrote the book. But by 1982, ten years after the novel’s publication, just about all American men had a long-haired hippie appearance. People in the audience murmured to one another, “What’s wrong with the way he looks?” But then the plot got down to business, showing Rambo being harassed by the police, and when the razor came toward him, the book and the movie coincided.
I was fascinated to see how the same story could be interpreted in different ways, but I became even more fascinated when, three years later, I saw how the 1985 sequel film, Rambo (First Blood Part II), interpreted the character in yet another way, as a jingoistic superhero who rescued American POWs, long rumored to still be in Vietnam, and single-handedly won a second version of the Vietnam War, which had ended with the North Vietnamese invasion of Saigon in 1975. One often-quoted line from the film was “Sir, do we get to win this time?” The obvious implication was that American politicians, influenced by the antiwar protests, had hampered the military’s ability to show its full strength.
President Ronald Reagan made frequent references to Rambo in his press conferences. “I saw a Rambo movie last night. Now I know what to do the next time there’s a terrorist hostage crisis.” Not surprisingly, the novel was no longer taught in high schools and colleges. The jingoistic Rambo also appeared in 1988’s Rambo III, in which he fought Soviet forces in Afghanistan, but this time audience emotions weren’t as engaged because the day the movie premiered in American theaters, the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. Perhaps they’d heard that Rambo was coming. The political controversies struck me as being ironic inasmuch as I’d made so strong an effort to conceal the politics that had prompted me to write the book.
The ironies became stronger. In 2001, now an American citizen, I was on a publicity tour in Poland. So many journalists asked for interviews that I met with them for twelve hours in a row. They all spoke excellent English. A woman in her mid-thirties noted that I seemed surprised by all the journalistic attention I was receiving. She told me that I needed to understand the way Rambo was viewed in her country. During the Solidarity years of the late 1980s, when Polish youth protested against the Soviets, the Rambo movies were not allowed to be shown, but illegal videotapes were smuggled in. She said that protesters would watch the movies to fire up their emotions. They would then put on forehead sweatbands resembling the one Rambo wore and go out to demonstrate. In an indirect way, she said, Rambo was an element in the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Her explanation reminded me that in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, demonstrators were filmed painting “Rambo” on the wall before they tore parts of it down.
Rambo’s name is in the Oxford English Dictionary. In positive and negative ways, it continues to be part of daily vocabulary around the world. The novel has been translated into twenty-six languages. It has never been out of print. But I didn’t expect to see a fourth movie about Rambo. Released twenty years after the previous one, the new film, simply titled Rambo, took the character into one of the most politically repressive and violent regions in the world, Burma, the official name for which is Myanmar. Yet again, my character was reinterpreted, but now, to my surprise, for the first time he was presented in the way that he had appeared in my novel so many years ago: angry and disillusioned. Sickened by violence but knowing that killing is what he does best, Rambo has fallen into despair. He hunts cobras for a snake farm and is so at home with death that he handles them with indifference, just as they seem to recognize a kindred soul and submit to being handled. He spends a lot of time in the rain, trying to cleanse himself of what he has done. People call him “the Boatman,” with all the Greek-myth implications of death and the River Styx. During an anguished scene in which he forges a knife to go into yet another battle, he tells himself: “Admit it. You didn’t kill for your country. You killed for yourself. And for that, God won’t forgive you.”
In a Rambo movie. Absolutely astonishing. After four films and thirty-six years, the character returned to the tone of his origins in my novel. It felt like old times to see him again.
CAROL O’CONNELL
Born in New York in 1947, bred in New England and New Jersey, Carol O’Connell attended the California Institute of the Arts. This was back in the days when it was located not far from LA’s MacArthur Park (anarchy heaven of the 1960s). She was a hippie without portfolio (wrong wardrobe, no love beads, no albums of Indian sitar music, and she never bothered to lay out the cash for her own bong). Edging eastward, she completed her studies at Arizona State University, where she earned a bachelor of fine arts degree (the major she had the most credits in when it came time to leave school). O’Connell then moved to Denver, Colorado, regarding it as a largish halfway house between coasts east and west. After a few years as a papergirl for the Denver Post, on to Manhattan. During the early New York years, she earned her living as a freelance proofreader, working at mind-sucking graveyard-shift jobs while doing the starving-artist thing. Upon publication of Mallory’s Oracle, the first of ten novels, she was (in her own words) incredibly overpaid, and this enabled her to quit the rent-money gigs. The author also trashed her alarm clock. Now O’Connell goes to bed when she gets tired and wakes up when she’s completely finished sleeping.