Rambo, page 1
RAMBO (FIRST BLOOD PART II)
A novel by David Morrell
From a screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and James Cameron
RAMBO (FIRST BLOOD PART II)
Originally published as a Jove Book by arrangement with the author and Anabasis Investments, N. V., 1985.
Copyright © 1985 by David Morrell, all rights reserved;
Screenplay Copyright © 1984 Anabasis Investments, N. V., all rights reserved.
RAMBO
FIRST BLOOD PART II
MARIO KASSAR AND ANDREW VAJNA PRESENT
SYLVESTER STALLONE
RAMBO/FIRST BLOOD PART II
RICHARD CRENNA
Music by JERRY GOLDSMITH
Produced by BUZZ FEITSHANS
Directed by GEORGE P. COSMATOS
Screenplay by SYLVESTER STALLONE and JAMES CAMERON
Story by KEVIN JARRE
Based on characters created by DAVID MORRELL
Filmed in PANAVISION®
© 1985. AnaBasis Investments, N.V. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Distributed in the United States and Canada by Tri-Star Pictures
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Author’s Note
1: The Quarry
2: The Wolf Den
3: The Wat
4: The Compound
5: The Slime Pit
6: The Grave
7: The Blood Zone
About David Morrell
INTRODUCTION
It’s important for you to understand the unusual nature of what you’re about to read.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a hybrid type of fiction, known as a novelization, became popular. Basically, it’s a screenplay that’s expanded into what looks like a novel. In an age before films were widely available on videotape, fans of movies like Star Wars and E.T—the Extraterrestrial could experience them only in a theater or else, if they waited a long time, on network television. Neither DVDs nor cable movie channels existed.
Producers decided that fans might be devoted enough to want to re-experience the stories in the form of a book. But if the film was based solely on a screenplay, a book needed to be created. A writer was hired to novelize the screenplay, describing the characters and the settings while letting readers know what the characters were thinking.
Some producers demanded that the writer make no changes to the plot and the dialogue. That could be difficult for a novelizer. How much description and how many thoughts could the writer add until the story lost its momentum?
Other producers understood that the writer needed a margin of freedom, and some interesting novelizations resulted, particularly William Kotzwinkle’s 1982 adaptation of E.T., which book critics reviewed favorably and which sold an astonishing million copies. Eric Segal’s bestselling 1970 Love Story was promoted as an original novel, but actually Segal wrote the screenplay first and then novelized the screenplay to promote what became an immensely popular film. John Wayne’s 1953 film, Hondo, was based on a Louis L’Amour short story, “The Gift of Cochise.” L’Amour then combined his short story and James Edward Grant’s screenplay into a novelization for the film. With a publicity quote from John Wayne on the cover, it boosted L’Amour’s career.
So there are interesting examples of novelizations, but I don’t think any of them had a history quite like Rambo (First Blood Part II). In 1972, I sold the film rights of my debut novel, First Blood, to Columbia Pictures for Richard Brooks to write and direct. A year later, Columbia sold the rights to Warner Bros., where Martin Ritt was considered as the director, with Paul Newman perhaps as the police chief. When that production possibility fell apart, Sydney Pollack was hired to direct Steve McQueen as Rambo, but that production fell apart, also. More studios and scriptwriters became involved until finally, in 1982, Carolco Pictures filmed my novel, with Sylvester Stallone as Rambo.
The movie was so successful that, two years later, a sequel Rambo (First Blood Part II) went into production, with the countryside outside Acapulco doubling for Vietnam. Halfway into filming, the producers decided that a novelization would be useful for promoting the film. But when they studied the contract that I’d signed with Columbia Pictures years earlier, they discovered that a clause stipulated I was the only person who could write books about Rambo.
This was in late October of 1984. A lawyer from the film company phoned to ask if I’d be interested in writing the novelization. I said, “No.” I was working on a new novel, The Fraternity of the Stone, and despite the interesting examples I mentioned a few paragraphs ago, many of my author friends who’d written novelizations usually compared the experience to something like the literary equivalent of being a photocopy machine. So I decided to save myself a lot of grief.
“No.”
The next day, I received another phone call. And the day after that. It turned out that the production company really, really wanted a novelization to help promote the film. In those days, there were usually two chain bookstores (Waldenbooks and B. Dalton) in almost every mall in America. Every shopper would see the attention-getting book cover—lots and lots of copies—with Stallone as shirtless, scar-chested Rambo, holding a rocket launcher.
Again, I said, “No.”
The calls kept coming. By now, it was early November. I asked how soon the producers would need the novelization.
“The end of December.”
“Less two months from now? No way.”
The next day, one of the producers called.
“You really should do this novelization. This is going to be a huge movie.You’ll be glad you’re associated with it.”
Let me pause to note that I had nothing to do with the screenplay for Rambo (First Blood Part II). Until the production started and I read about it in the newspapers, I had no idea that a sequel was planned. In Hollywood, the author is usually the last person to be told anything. There’s an old joke about a starlet who’s so simple-minded that she seduces a writer in the mistaken notion that it will advance her career. Ha.
“I’m working on a novel,” I said. “There’s almost no time to write the novelization, and it’s basically repetitive motion, retyping someone else’s dialogue.”
“I’m telling you this movie’s going to be huge.”
In those days, I lived in Iowa City, Iowa. At 8 the next morning, as I got ready to go to the University of Iowa where I was a professor of American literature, the doorbell rang.
I opened the door.
A man in uniform faced me.
The uniform said FEDEX. In those days, FedEx was just getting started. I truly didn’t know who this guy was or what was going on.
“Sign here please.” He handed me a package.
The label on the package said, CAROLCO PICTURES, LOS ANGELES.
“They sent it priority, yesterday afternoon,” the man explained.
“From Los Angeles? Yesterday afternoon? That’s impossible.”
When I closed the door and opened the package, I found a videotape. Most movies weren’t released on videotape in those days, except for rental in video stores. Tape machines were used primarily to record TV shows. But here was an honest-to-goodness videotape with pre-recorded material. Needing to get to the university, I looked at my watch, put the tape in the machine, and remained standing while numbers counted down on the screen. 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . .
A helicopter seemed to fly from the core of the sun. A very pissed-off looking Sylvester Stallone, dressed as Rambo, piloted the chopper to a Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp, where he used machine guns and rocket launchers to blow the shit out of everything. Halfway through the attack, Jerry Goldsmith’s powerful music began pulsing.
Blam.
The music got stronger.
Blam!
The music got even stronger.
Rambo landed the helicopter, jumped out, grabbed an M-60 machine gun, and blew the shit out of more stuff.
The music swelled.
The tape ended.
My mouth hung open.
I went to my wife in the kitchen, where she was getting our son and daughter ready for school.
Echoing what the producer had told me, I said, “This movie’s going to be huge.”
The package also contained a film script. I read it between teaching classes throughout the day.
It was 90 pages long. It was so streamlined that most of it was limited to stage directions such as Rambo jumps up and shoots this guy and Rambo jumps up and shoots that guy. How on Earth could anyone get a book out of that, especially when I’d been told that I wouldn’t be able to see the finished movie until a couple of months after the manuscript was scheduled to be delivered to the publisher?
That night, the film executive phoned again.
“This movie’s going to be huge,” he repeated. “You should write the novelization.”
“But there’s nothing to turn into a book. The tape you sent has plenty of excitement, but a book needs more than that. Do you have anything else?”
“If it matters, there was a script we didn’t use.”
“A script you didn’t use?”
“By James Cameron.”
Let me pause again. These days, James Cameron is famous for having directed two of the most successful films of all time: Titanic and Avatar. In fact, the former got him a best-directing Oscar; not to mention, it received a best-picture Oscar. Aliens, Terminator 2, The Abyss, True Lies. This guy made a ton of big pictures, or as the Rambo film executive liked to say, huge.
But the James Cameron the executive mentioned hadn’t yet become th
I knew who Cameron was, though, and when the executive mentioned his name, I very much wanted to see that script.
At 8 the next morning, the doorbell rang, and by now I was getting used to this FedEx thing. I didn’t pause when I signed for the package. I eagerly opened it to learn what hadn’t been used.
Quite a lot—and it was wonderful. For the first time, I became interested in the project.
This is how Cameron’s script began. A government-type vehicle arrives at a drab, imposing building. Colonel Trautman gets out. He enters the building and walks along a corridor. In the rooms that he passes, stunned-looking men stare blankly at nothing. This is a hospital for the emotionally disturbed. The men in the rooms look increasingly worse. Trautman descends to a corridor that has metal doors and resembles a prison. At the far end, a sentry holds a .45 pistol outside the final door. Through the small barred window, we see that the cell is totally dark.
“Smashed the light bulb again,” the guard says. “He thinks he’s the fucking prince of darkness.”
And that’s where we meet Rambo, crouching in a corner, ready to attack anyone who enters the cell.
Wow.
If you’re familiar with the film, you know that it begins with Rambo—his shirt off—splitting rocks in a quarry. I asked a production executive why they hadn’t used the more interesting first scene that Cameron imagined.
“Audiences would have thought Rambo was crazy,” he answered.
Well, yeah. But damn, what an opening. There were many other riveting scenes of a similar sort, none of which were in the shooting script I’d been sent.
I could easily understand why another element hadn’t been used, however. In the Cameron script, Rambo had a sidekick, a young, gung-ho, comical soldier who goes with him on the mission to find POWs. Stallone had recently directed John Travolta in Stayin’ Alive, the sequel to Saturday Night Fever, and an executive told me that for a time Travolta was considered as the sidekick, hence that element in the first script. Wisely, that idea was dropped.
Time had moved on. It was now the middle of November. The novelization, if I was going to write it, would need to be delivered in six weeks. A lot of things troubled me, even about the Cameron script, the biggest of which was that Rambo was being asked to go back to the very same prisoner-of-war camp from which he escaped during the war, and yet both scripts made only a passing reference to the parallel and never suggested that Rambo would have an emotional reaction to going back to Vietnam and especially to that POW camp.
The production executive phoned again.
“How much freedom would I have?” I asked.
“Freedom?”
“There isn’t enough material in the shooting script for me to turn it into a book. Can I use Cameron ‘s script also?”
“How much of it?”
“A lot. And I’d be adding a lot of my own ideas also. The book’s going to look as if the film was taken from it, rather than the other way around.”
“As long as we recognize the story.”
“Absolutely.”
I had just been given the freedom to write the most unusual novelization in the history of the form. With the knowledge that I was now a pioneer, I eagerly embraced the project, realizing that I had a lot more things to say about Rambo.
Thus began the most intense six weeks of my writing career.
First, I needed to do my usual research. I contacted legendary Arkansas blade smith Jimmy Lile and learned everything I could about the Rambo knives he’d designed. I spoke with Hoyt-Easton Archery in Van Nuys, California, which had designed Rambo’s compound bow, and with Pony Express Sport Shop in Sepulveda, California, which developed the unusual arrows.
Because so much of the film involved archery, I went to a local Iowa City sporting goods store for instruction. A history of archery is one of my favorite parts of the book. The Zen archer is an archetypal figure, so I decided to incorporate Zen into the book and eagerly read Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. Years earlier, Alan Watt’s The Way of Zen had been a major influence on my novel, First Blood. I liked the idea of continuing the theme of the Zen warrior.
That made me think about the background the shooting script gave Rambo: part Native America, part German. I confess I paused. None of this was in my novel. I liked the Native American concept and knew that I could blend the idea of a Native American archer with a Zen one. But German? Since when did Sylvester Stallone look German? Obviously I needed to make him part Italian, which gave me the idea that Rambo would be Roman Catholic on his father’s side and would follow the Navajo faith on his mother’s side. Add an element of Zen Buddhism that I decided Rambo would have learned from a Montagnard tribesman who worked with Rambo’s unit in Vietnam, and the character was starting to look as if he had a lot more dimensions than the shooting script gave him.
The script also said that Rambo’s hometown was Bowie, Arizona. In my novel, it’s somewhere in Colorado. But okay, Rambo might have moved when he was a kid, so I could handle the Arizona connection. As in the film adaptation of First Blood, the script for Rambo (First Blood Part II) gave Rambo the first name of John (as in the Civil War song “When Johnnie Comes Marching Home”) whereas he doesn’t have a first name in my book—I liked the idea of a single name that had the sound of force. But okay, I could deal with that, also. (I have no idea about the meaning of the middle initial J that the First Blood screenwriters invented for him.)
I wrote like a dervish: twenty-five pages a day. Any writer will tell you that’s an enormous number of pages. Day after day after I finished teaching my classes, I hurried home to my writing desk. I barely slept.
Not that I was performing as a human photocopy machine. To blend the Cameron script with the quite different shooting script, I needed to rewrite both of them. At the same time, I needed to invent all sorts of new plot points, such as the implications of Rambo’s return to the POW camp from which he escaped. I added the controversial history of Special Forces in the Vietnam War, especially the 1968 near-mutiny that I refer to early in the book. I created numerous set pieces, such as Rambo’s journey through the ravine of skeletons and his immersion in the slime pit.
The slime pit made me realize that the book could be divided into parts that would be titled according to their locales: The Quarry, The Wolf Den, The Compound, The Grave, The Slime Pit, and so on. The relationship with Rambo’s female guide, Co, was underwritten in the scripts, so I elaborated on it. I removed troublesome plot points, such as the scene in which Rambo fires a hand-held rocket launcher through the canopy of a supposedly downed helicopter. The back blast would have killed the rescued prisoners behind him. I replaced the rocket launcher with the Gatling gun known as “the dragon,” which was in a few scenes in the Cameron script. I turned “the dragon” into a major prop in the book, with primal implications in its name that related to Rambo’s primal-yet-modern bow and arrow.
“I’m getting reports that he killed eight of the enemy with the bow and arrow,” a radio operator tells his superiors (using dialogue that isn’t in the scripts). “After that, he stabbed a Russian. He strangled a Vietnamese with a vine. He strangled another Vietnamese with the string on his bow. He impaled a Russian with a spear. He even rigged some kind of catapult and brained a Russian with a rock.”
“Spears and slingshots,” Trautman tells the man running the operation. “Isn’t that what you said he was good at?”
I also added a topical reference to Nicaragua. These days, it might be confusing. Nicaragua? What’s that about? Back in 1985, when the book was released, the reference wasn’t at all confusing. Rebels were fighting a civil war against a Communist regime in Nicaragua. The U.S. was secretly funneling aid to the rebels, known as the Contras. Eventually a major scandal about how that aid was delivered (through Iran) threatened to topple Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Some people feared that the U.S. was about to become mired in a new version of the Vietnam War. That’s the background. Since no one in 1985 would have needed an explanation, I retained the 1985 feeling of the novelization and let the Nicaragua reference stand as it did back then.
