The Man Who Created Rambo

One Year Ago, I was on a publicity tour for one of my novels. On impulse, after a TV interview in Dallas, I stopped at a bookstore.

"I'm a writer," I said. "I'm just checking on how my books are doing."

"Writer?" the manager asked. "What did you----"

"I created Rambo."

The manager stepped back as if I might be dangerous. He looked me over, all five feet, nine inches and 155 pounds of me. "Sure you did." He gestured soothingly. "Of course."

"But I did. I really did."

"Oh, I'm sure." He nodded, with that just-another-nut look in his eye. "I really believe you. I do. But, just for the record, didn't Sylvester Stallone...?"

"No, he created Rocky."

"But what about Rambo?"

That's a long story.

•

In the summer of 1969, I was 26, a graduate student at Penn State University. Specializing in American literature, I'd finished my master's thesis on Ernest Hemingway and was starting my doctoral dissertation on John Barth. But, in my heart, I wanted to be a novelist.

I knew that few novelists made a living at it, so I'd decided to become a literature professor, an occupation in which I'd be surrounded by books and allowed time to write. A Penn State faculty member, Philip Klass, whose science-fiction pseudonym is William Tenn, had given me generous instruction in the techniques of fiction writing. Still, as Klass had pointed out, "I can teach you how to write but not what to write about."

What would I write about?

By chance, I watched a television program that changed my life. It was the CBS Evening News, and on that sultry August evening, Walter Cronkite juxtaposed two stories whose friction flashed like lightning through my mind.

The first story showed a fire fight in Vietnam. Sweaty American soldiers crouched in the jungle, shooting bursts from M- 16s to repel an enemy attack. Incoming bullets kicked up dirt and shredded leaves. Medics(continued on page 134) Rambo (continued from page 89)scrambled to assist the wounded. An officer barked coordinates into a two-way radio, demanding air support. The fatigue, determination and fear on the faces of the soldiers were dismayingly vivid.

The second story showed a different sort of battle. That steamy summer, the inner cities of America had erupted into violence. In nightmarish images, National Guardsmen snapped bayonets onto M-16s and stalked the rubble of burning streets, dodging rocks, wary of snipers among devastated vehicles and gutted buildings.

Each news story, distressing enough on its own, became doubly so when paired with the other. It occurred to me that if I'd turned down the sound, if I hadn't heard each story's reporter explain what I was watching, I might have thought that both film clips were two aspects of a single horror. A fire fight outside Saigon, a riot within it. A riot within an American city, a fire fight outside it. Vietnam and America.

What if I wrote a book in which the Vietnam war literally came home to America? There hadn't been a war on American soil since 1865. With America splitting apart because of Vietnam, maybe it was time to write a novel that dramatized the philosophical division in our society, that shoved the brutality of war right under our nose.

I decided my catalytic character would be a Vietnam veteran, a Green Beret who, after many harrowing missions, had been captured by the enemy, had escaped and returned home to be given America's highest distinction, the Congressional Medal of Honor. But he would bring something back with him from Southeast Asia, what we now call posttrauma stress syndrome. (It's an overused term these days, but it wasn't in 1969.) Haunted by nightmares about what he had done in the war, embittered by civilian indifference and hostility toward the sacrifice he had made for his country, he would drop out of society to wander the back roads of the nation he loved. He would sleep in the woods and live off the land. He would let his hair grow long, not bother to shave, carry all his possessions in a rolled-up sleeping bag slung over his shoulder and look like what we then called a hippie. In what I loosely thought of as an allegory (don't forget, I was a professor in training), he would represent the disaffected.

His name would be.... I am asked about his name more than anything else. One of my graduate school languages was French, and on an autumn afternoon, as I read a course assignment, I was struck by the difference between the look and the pronunciation of the name of the author I was reading, Rimbaud. An hour later, my wife came home from buying groceries. She mentioned she'd bought some apples of a type she'd never heard about before, Ram-bo. A French author's name and the name of an apple collided, and I recognized the sound of force.

"His name was Rambo, and he was just some nothing kid, for all anybody knew, standing by the pump of a gas station on the outskirts of Madison, Kentucky."

While Rambo would represent the disaffected, I needed someone to embody the establishment. Another news report, this time in print, aroused my indignation. In a Southwestern American town, a group of hitchhiking hippies had been picked up by the local police, stripped, hosed and shaved--not just their beards but their hair. They had then been given back their clothes and driven to a desert road, where they were abandoned to walk to the next town, 30 miles away. I remembered the harassment that my own recently grown mustache and long hair had caused me. "Why don't you gel a haircut? What the hell are you, a man or a woman?" I wondered what Rambo's reaction would be if he were subjected to the insults those hippies had received.

In my novel, the establishment's representative became a police chief, Wilfred Teasle. Wary of stereotypes, I wanted him as complex as the action would allow. I made Teasle old enough to be Rambo's father. That created a generation gap--with the added dimension that Teasle wishes he had a son. Next, I decided that he would be a Korean War hero, his Distinguished Service Cross second only to Rambo's Congressional Medal of Honor.

What happens when Rambo encounters Teasle is familiar now. It is enough to say that Teasle, for his reasons, hassles Rambo, and Rambo, for his reasons, won't take it. A jail escape leads to a man hunt. Teasle thinks he is in Korea. Rambo thinks he is in Vietnam. In that conflict, the conventional tactics used in Korea don't have a chance against the guerrilla methods of Vietnam. Almost killed, Teasle struggles down from the mountains, accepts the help of Rambo's Special Forces instructor and hunts Rambo yet again, with the result that Teasle's town is virtually destroyed, Teasle is killed and Rambo is executed by his former instructor, who takes the top of his head off with a shotgun.

Yes, Rambo is killed. And the cop isn't the broadly sketched antagonist of the film but a character who many readers (depending on their political viewpoint) believed was the hero of the novel. And Rambo's instructor isn't the sympathetic Richard Crenna but a cold professional. And the novel tries to show that escalating force results in disaster, that nobody wins.

•

Because of the rigors of graduate school, I didn't finish my novel till after I'd graduated in 1970 and taught at the University of Iowa for a year. In the summer of 1971,1 submitted it to a literary agent, but I had misgivings. How could an assistant professor expect to gain tenure when he'd dramatized such unremitting violence? To hedge my bets, I sent along my dissertation on John Barth.

Three weeks later, the agent called. "I sold it."

"My dissertation?"

"First Blood."

"Oh, Christ."

Time not only gave the book its lead review but claimed that it represented a new kind of fiction, "cartography," violence's equivalent of pornography. I didn't mind. For a terrified first novelist, any kind of attention feels great. Most other reviews were glowing, and the paperback advance didn't hurt--my family could stop eating frozen potpies. When the Literary Guild accepted the book, I felt legitimate. The round-the-world translations made me raise my head in wonder. And then came the movie deal.

Ah, yes, the movie deal.

•

For ten years after its publication, the story passed through three movie companies, 18 screenplays and such directors as Stanley Kramer, Richard Brooks, Martin Ritt, Sydney Pollack and John Frankenheimer. Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Steve McQueen, Clint East-wood, Robert De Niro, Nick Nolte, Brad Davis, Powers Boothe and Michael Douglas were all considered to play Rambo. The novel became a Hollywood legend. How could so much money and so much talent be spent on an enterprise that somehow couldn't get off the page?

Part of the reason was the mood of the Seventies. America's involvement in Vietnam had ended badly, and feelings about the war were bitter. The few films that referred to Vietnam reflected that attitude. Coming Home is a good example.

But another reason First Blood wasn't filmed for so long had to do with actors and scripts. In the middle Seventies, I met Sydney Pollack, a brilliant director, who mentioned his involvement with Steve McQueen on the project.

"McQueen? He's one of my favorite actors," I said. "He'd be great as the cop."

"Well, that's the problem," Pollack said. "Steve liked the motorcycle chase. He wants to play the kid."

"Rambo? But McQueen--"

"Looks too old for the part. We had to adjust the story. It didn't work."

That typified the problem--how to match actor and role.

Years passed. I wrote other novels, banked my movie-sale money (not an option but an outright purchase) and despaired that First Blood would ever be filmed. A new decade arrived. Now Reagan was in the White House. America was feeling optimistic again. The defeat in Vietnam seemed long behind us.

At that point, two film distributors successful in the Orient, Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar, decided to become producers. Seeking a project, they happened upon the legendary First Blood. The script they read was by William Sackheim and Michael Kozoll (the latter a cocreator of Hill Street Blues). With modification, the story would play well in America, Vajna and Kassar thought, but more important, their experience in foreign film markets told them that the movie, if it emphasized action, would attract large audiences around the world.

Provided they found the right actor. These days, audiences forget that in 1981, Sylvester Stallone's only film success--at least financially--had been as Rocky. So when Vajna and Kassar offered Stallone the role, industry observers were skeptical. For that matter, so was Stallone. At the time, he was quoted as saying that he feared First Blood would be the most expensive home movie ever made.

On the contrary, it grossed $120,000,000 and became a cult classic.

•

I know it's fashionable for authors to complain that their work has been bastardized by Hollywood. The fact is, I like the movie, even though changes were made from my novel. The locale was shifted from Kentucky to the Pacific Northwest (to avoid harsh winter weather; ironically, the production was shut down by a blizzard). Rambo's Green Beret instructor, Samuel Trautman, was upgraded from major to colonel. Rambo acquired the first name John ("When Johnny comes marching home"). Also, he was made less angry, less violent (he's far more savage in my novel). On the screen, he kills one man by accident (a rock thrown at a pursuing helicopter causes a vicious deputy to lose his balance and fall to his death in a gorge). Later, Rambo bumps a stolen truck against a pursuing car filled with gun-blazing deputies. They veer off the road and fail to avoid a car parked along the road. That's the total body count in the film (the police chief--now, I'm afraid, a stereotypical redneck--though badly wounded, lives). But in my novel, the casualties are virtually uncountable. My intent was to transpose the Vietnam war to America, whereas the film's intent was to make the audience cheer for the underdog.

The most important change between my novel and the film almost didn't occur. In a vault in L.A., there's a film clip in which Rambo shoots himself. But second thoughts prevailed. Another ending was filmed, and Rambo lived.

I don't object, though I would never change the ending of my novel, in which Trautman is Rambo's executioner. The reason I don't object is that Rambo in the novel causes so much destruction that the authorities would hunt him down, even if they had to use a Nike missile. But Stallone's revision of the script makes Rambo so reluctant to use force, so sympathetic a victim, that his survival seems justified.

I blessed the attorney who, in 1972, had charged me $500 (at that time, a fortune for me) to revise the fine print in the movie contract.

"David, you now have profit participation not only in the First Blood movie but in any sequels."

"Sequels?" I cringed, convinced I'd wasted my hard-to-come-by $500. "But almost every major character's dead at the end of the novel. How the hell can there be sequels?"

"David, you don't know what Hollywood can do with a novel. It may end up as a musical. By the way, I've also asked for profit participation on any merchandise associated with the film."

"Merchandise?"

"Dolls. Lunch boxes. Television cartoons. Who knows? Anything's possible. That's why you hired me. To predict the future."

"Dolls? Impossible!"

How wrong I was.

•

While Rambo: First Blood Part II was being filmed, Andrew Vajna asked if I'd be interested in writing a novel based on the script by Stallone and James Cameron. My impulse was to tell him no. Novelizations are derivative, an inferior literary form, and I'm serious about my fiction, even if I aim toward the broadest audience possible.

"You don't understand," Vajna replied. "This is a $27,000,000 picture. It'll be an enormous hit. You want to be associated with it."

"No. I won't be an automatic typist and simply add description to someone else's screenplay."

"You're not listening, David. This is a $27,000,000 picture."

More phone calls, morning and afternoon, for a week. Each time, I said no. Finally, my doorbell rang at eight A.M. and a messenger handed me a package. I peered inside to discover a video tape. Groggy, still in my pajamas, clutching a cup of coffee, I stumbled toward my VCR, inserted the tape and slumped on my sofa. Suddenly, music blared as Rambo piloted a helicopter, attacking an enemy compound. I spilled my coffee. "Donna, get over here!" I yelled to my wife. "You have to see this! It's a $27,000,000 movie!"

So I agreed to write a novel for Rambo: First Blood Part II. In the first place, no one else could do it. I hold the literary copyright. That's something else my wonderful $500 attorney put into the movie contract. The producers can do anything they want with Rambo on film, but I'm the only writer allowed to publish fiction about him.

In the second place, I began to see the chance to accomplish something distinctive. Novels based on films are usually transcribed screenplays. But the bargain I had made with Vajna was to follow the bones of the movie's story but to invent, color and interpret as I wished, to write a novel based on a plot that happened to be supplied to me. I also saw the way to counteract the backlash I sensed some critics were ready to slam toward Rambo.

The truth is, Rambo hates war. He loathes what he is and what he has been trained to do. He reacts with justified rage only when pushed to the wall. On the set of Rambo III, Stallone and I talked at length about that issue. Anger's a last-resort emotion, we agreed. People shove you around, and most of the time, you acquiesce. Why retaliate unless it's a critical issue? If your family's threatened, you have to respond. Or your life. Or your country. But it has to be a genuine threat. Otherwise, it's better to back away. Because if it's necessary to retaliate, you have to go all the way, and you have to accept the consequences.

That's the secret to Rambo. Fate pits him against relentless bullies and, like the gunslinger determined to retire, he reluctantly straps his guns back onto his waist.

•

When Vajna and Kassar hired me to write the initial script for Rambo III, I thought that Rambo's fundamental anti-war stance could be sidetracked only if Trautman, Rambo's surrogate father, were in serious trouble. My version had Trautman as a military advisor in Central America, where his wife and daughter paid him a visit, only to be abducted by marauders from a neighboring enemy country. Rambo's love for Trautman and his family compelled him to become a warrior again.

Eventually, the story's setting was changed from Central America to Afghanistan (to get away from the confining forest and jungle of the first two pictures, to give Rambo III a different look, the stunning scope of a desert).

Stallone and Sheldon Lettich prepared a brand-new script, necessarily changing the story to fit the war in Afghanistan. But Sly agreed with my interpretation of the character, with Rambo's desire for peace. Eliminating Trautman's wife and daughter, Stallone decided to put Trautman himself in jeopardy, captured by the Soviets on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

I wrote an amplified novel based on the script and in it emphasized Rambo's complex emotions. At the same time, I added new elements to his character. Now we learn that in his youth, he was battered by his father. To escape his troubled home, he joined the military (another paradox: Seeking peace, he entered a violent profession). He feels affection for Trautman, because Trautman's the only authority figure who ever showed him respect.

In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Stallone had a character describe Rambo as "part German, part Indian, a hell of a combination." I liked the idea of Rambo's mixed background but modified it. In my sequel novels, Rambo's father becomes Italian, his mother Navaho.

Why the change? To deepen the character. In my books, Rambo is raised in both the Roman Catholic and the Navaho religions, learning guilt from the first and mysticism from the second. While in Vietnam, he becomes attracted to Zen Buddhism. In Rambo III, he enters Afghanistan, a Moslem country. There, he finds elements of the Islamic faith that help him come to terms with his troubled soul. A character with four religions. Hardly the simple macho man some critics berate.

If you match my books with the films, you get the full story. Sometimes, to make my points, I add and subtract scenes from the films. Indeed, in Rambo III, the process was reversed. Stallone liked some elements I added to my novel of his screenplay and put them into the film.

•

Let's talk about Stallone. Several months ago, I went to a cocktail party in L.A. Most of the guests were from the movie industry. An assistant director discovered I'd created Rambo, approached me and inexplicably began insulting Sly.

"Stop. Have you ever met the man?" I asked.

"No, but from what I've read...."

"Listen," I said, "my 15-year-old son just died of cancer. I tried to do everything to give Matt hope, to provide his final days with quality. Toward the end, wanting something unique for my son, I asked Sly to call him. He didn't have to do it, but he responded and talked with Matt for almost 40 minutes. Before my son died, his conversation with Sly was one of his fondest memories. As far as I'm concerned, Stallone's a compassionate, decent man, and I won't let you dump on him."

So you know my bias. I'm tired of critics' giving Stallone bad press. His income has been widely publicized, mostly with negative connotations. Hey, would you turn down a ton of cash if someone offered it? Sine as hell, I wouldn't. And then there's Sly's personal life. It's none of anyone's business. How's your life doing these days? Would you like your privacy violated? Of course not. Gossip columnists have pried and twisted and distorted beyond the point of tastelessness. In my experience, he has been modest, generous, humorous, intelligent and extremely verbal, a great guy to talk with. Rambo doesn't speak much, but that's a character. As Sly says, "What people don't understand is, I have to communicate Rambo's silent intensity, everything he's thinking, the anguish he's feeling, just with my eyes. Critics should try it. To communicate without words is challenging, frustrating, terribly difficult."

Then there's the Rambo backlash. Politics. In October 1987, Nicaragua's president Daniel Ortega made a speech at the UN. "Let President Reagan recall," Ortega said, "that Rambo exists only in the movies. The people of the world do not want Rambos. The people want men of peace." The U.S. delegation walked out in protest, and they were right, as far as I'm concerned, because Ortega was wrong on several counts. Rambo exists in print as well as in the movies. And Rambo, like the people of the world, wants peace.

Rambo, as a generic word, has become, unfortunately, a simplistic reduction of complex issues, "U.S. Rambo Jets Bomb Libya," the London Times announced when I was on a book tour in Great Britain in 1986. The word is in everyday use in several languages, it's a favorite of political columnists and sports announcers, and it's always misinterpreted either in militaristic or in macho terms. On my tombstone, I've requested the following: Here Lies David Morrell, who Invented a word that few understood. The Rambo character is violent, yes, no question. Bui only as a last resort.

Let's talk about violence. If your idea of entertainment is The Sound of Music, the Rambo movies aren't for you. They're action pictures. You could say that you think their action's excessive. But the Star Wars movies have far more violence. Of course, Star Wars happens a long time ago in a galaxy far away, whereas Rambo addresses controversial contemporary issues. It's true that most Vietnam vets didn't suffer posttrauma stress syndrome. But then, most of them didn't belong to the Special Forces, Rangers, Recon or Seals. The soldiers in those cadres learned skills no one should ever have to learn, let alone put into practice. Their missions were nightmares with long-lasting psychological consequences. I've never yet spoken to a Vietnam veteran who didn't identify with Rambo's turmoil.

The new movie will, no doubt, cause more controversy. Rambo against the Soviets in Afghanistan. I can imagine the further accusations of Red bashing. But the Soviets have forced 6,000,000 Afghans from their homes. A million others have been exterminated. The new spirit of cooperation between the Soviets and the West sounds good, and I certainly hope that the recent Afghan peace agreement is honored, but the Soviets have been practicing genocide. Rambo III reminds us of that fad. It's action-adventure, but it's also passionate about its message. Popular yet serious. A paradox. Like Rambo--a man of peace yet war.

During one of our conversations on the Rambo III set in the Negev desert in Israel, Stallone was called to return to the camera. As he rose from his chair, Israeli children surrounded him. Dozens of extras from the village scene. Crowding, hugging, kissing. Sly stooped and kissed them in return. He ruffled their hair. He used both arms to embrace them. Thinking of my dead son, I wished I had a photograph of this display of affection.

"Rambo!" they shouted. "Rambo!"

Stallone and I later discussed it.

"See, it isn't me they're hugging," he said. "It's Rambo. The children don't know about the politics and the controversies. They see him as a hero. A protector. He's violent, sure, but reluctantly, and they know he's on their side. Against the bullies. In defense of the helpless."

"Rambo! Rambo!" the children shouted. Their voices echoed through the desert canyon, so simple, so complicated. "Rambo! Rambo!"