Free Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind by Gavin Edwards

didn’t have a lot of material knowledge of the world because of the way he had been brought up. The meaning of things often had to be explained to him and it put him in a difficult position,” Dante said. “Considering River had been somewhat deprived of an education, he was a very bright kid and very smart and knowledgeable about things. He just didn’t have a lot of facts at his command because he’d never been walked through history and literature.”
    Television was also a largely unknown landscape to River. He had spent more time in his life making TV than watching it. “Television wasn’t really one of the things that was in our house,” Arlyn said, in an understated description of the family’s itinerant lifestyle. When River, on a break from shooting Explorers, stumbled across a TV set playing MTV, he was immediately hypnotized and spent the next several hours inhaling clips by the likes of Van Halen, Prince, and Night Ranger. When he was introduced to the Three Stooges, he couldn’t understand why anybody thought they were funny; he started asking random people if they liked the Three Stooges.
    Dante encouraged his young actors to improvise, and was pleased by the spontaneous rapport they developed. “We got along exceptionally,” River said. “It’s like having foster brothers and sisters that you just move in with for a while and get to know. Ethan, Jason, and Amanda are good personalities, very easy to work with. There are some Hollywood kids who are really brats, and it’s just hard to deal with them. I’ve been lucky that I haven’t been such a brat; I’m trying my best not to be . . . When we get hyper, we can get on adults’ nerves, and we get tired of just hanging around the set. And maybe we, like, light people on fire and stuff.”
    One night, River asked Hawke a direct question that most actors, of any age, would dance around: “Are you going to be famous?”
    Hawke tried to play it cool, and act more humble than he actually was. “I don’t know—I don’t care much,” he lied.
    River was straightforward: “I’m going to be famous. Definitely. Rich and famous.”
    “Why? What’s so cool about fame?”
    Hawke didn’t expect River’s answer: “I’m doing it for my family.”
    “After that night, I really saw the heavy trip his family had laid on him. To them, he was the Second Coming, the man of the house at age fourteen. Maybe that’s why River always took himself so seriously,” Hawke said. “I also think he made a myth out of his parents. Incessantly bragging about his father, he’d say, ‘My father is the coolest guy with the deepest philosophy.’ ”
    John’s behavior could fall short of his son’s claims. “One day, John showed up at a looping session obviously drunk,” an eyewitness reported. “River tried to laugh it off, saying, ‘My dad, well, he gets funny sometimes.’ But you could see the kid was hurt and embarrassed.”
    Explorers flopped at the box office. It was hindered by being released on the heels of another kids’ adventure, The Goonies, and further hurt by not being a good movie. “It’s charmingly odd at some moments, just plain goofy at others,” opined Janet Maslin in the New York Times. The first two-thirds of Explorers, when the kids build and test-drive a spaceship, mouths agape with a sense of wonder, played like warmed-over Spielberg. But the final third went off the rails: the kids reach an alien spaceship, only to find that the extra-terrestrials are the movie’s comic relief, quoting incessantly from American television broadcasts. The mix of action and pop-culture insanity that worked so well in Gremlins fizzled here.
    All three leads turned in good performances, though—and periodically, on the faces of both Hawke and River, you could see flashes of the adult actors they would become.
    When Hawke left for home, River wept.
     
    AS AN ADULT, HAWKE HAD nothing good to say about child acting: “I believe it is profoundly