Midnight Movie

SPOTLIGHT

I dreamed I showed up in Physics 101 naked. I dreamed I got onstage and hadn't even studied my lines.. .These are the classic nightmares that every red-blooded American has squirmed through. But there are heebiejeebies that only New Yorkers have: I dreamed I had a terrific date lined up but all my money flew out the taxi window and vigilantes were after me and I tried to take the subway but they had raised the fare and no matter what I did I couldn't get out of SoHo.. .Which is what Martin Scorsese's new movie, After Hours, is all about. It's the lighter side of his Gotham gothic, Taxi Driver, and like its predecessor it features a voracious, enveloping New York—New York as a hydra, an implacable fiend, a movie monster. But funny. "A lot of Scorsese's friends are surprised by it," says Amy Robinson, who co-produced with Griffin Dunne and Robert F. Colesberry. 'They say, 'Gee, Marty. I didn't know you had a sense of humor.'"

Much of the fun flows from the picture's cornucopia of casting coups—Dunne as our hero, a straight-arrow word processor; Rosanna Arquette as the enigmatic siren, Marcy; Ten Garr as a lostin-the-sixties cocktail waitress; and Cheech & Chong as a pair of van-driving street weirdos. But the coup de grace is the gaggle of punks, lunatics, and space cadets who crowd the brief—though pungent—scene at the Club Berlin. "We had people whose job it was to go to the Lower East Side and round up the punks," says Griffin Dunne. "And since we shot the whole movie at night, the hours were perfect for them. They danced and drank beer and got crazy, and they were slam dancing by the time I did my big scene, which is about how they try to give me a Mohawk." Dunne was a little shaken by the experience—"I was pretty sore the next day," he says. But otherwise the punks were a producer's dream. After all, says Robinson, "they brought their own clothes and hair."