The Bootleg Files: Sticks and Bones

BOOTLEG FILES 900: “Sticks and Bones” (1973 television film directed by Robert Downey Sr.).

LAST SEEN: On YouTube.

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO: None.

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS: It is a complicated story.

CHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE: Not likely.

This article represents the 900th entry in The Bootleg Files column celebrating films and television productions that can only be appreciated in either unauthorized presentations or in problematic public domain dupes. For those who are not familiar with this column’s history, it began on Film Threat in 2003 and appeared there on Fridays through 2015, when the site went offline. Although it was one of Film Threat’s most popular features, it was not invited back when Film Threat resumed publishing in 2017. Thankfully, Felix Vasquez Jr. – who was a colleague of mine on Film Threat – invited me to resume The Bootleg Files here on Cinema Crazed. And while the column has received some nasty comments – which is to be expected from any Internet publishing effort – it has received far more appreciative input from readers during these past 22 years. For those who turn up every Friday to read this column, I offer my deepest appreciation for your support and friendship.

So, what’s on tap for the 900th column? Well, I picked at a film that I probably should have reviewed a few hundred columns ago – Robert Downey Sr.’s production of the David Rabe play “Stick and Bones.” This film created a major controversy ahead of its premiere, but over the years it vanished – and if not for an unauthorized video posting to YouTube, it may have been lost to oblivion.

“Sticks and Bones” tells the story of a blinded, PTSD-afflicted Vietnam War veteran returning home to his suburban family, only to find his integration back into civilian life even more tumultuous to his time in combat. Rabe, himself a Vietnam veteran, wrote the play while he was a graduate student at Villanova University, where it was first staged in 1969. He envisioned the veteran’s family as being in the vein of the cheery, bland clan of the sitcom “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet,” even going so far as to name the parental characters Ozzie and Harriet and their sons David and Ricky.

Joseph Papp’s Off-Broadway Public Theater staged the work in November 1971 before moving the production to Broadway’s Golden Theatre in March 1972 – that production won a Tony Award for Best Play and for Elizabeth Wilson’s performance as the veteran’s mother. Papp had a contract with CBS to produce teleplays for the network, and he felt “Sticks and Bones” would be a provocative work that would confront the nation’s difficult relationship with the still-ongoing Vietnam War.

Papp recruited Robert Downey Sr. to adapt and direct the play. Downey was a hot commodity at the time, coming off the success of his films “Putney Swope” and “Greaser’s Palace.” Tom Aldredge repeated his Tony-nominated Broadway performance as the father and Cliff DeYoung, who played the younger brother on stage, was given the role of the impacted veteran. Anne Jackson was recruited to play the mother and Alan Cauldwell played the younger brother.

“Sticks and Bones” was scheduled to be broadcast on CBS on March 9, 1973, but a few days before its premiere the network pulled it from the schedule. Papp would later accuse the Nixon White House of coercing CBS into making the cancellation while the network insisted the decision was the result of pushback from affiliate stations, adding that the film might be considered “unnecessarily abrasive” at a time when American prisoners of war were being returned from North Vietnamese imprisonment. CBS rescheduled the film for August 17, 1973, but 94 stations refused to run it and some moved it from prime time into the midnight slot. NBC mischievously scheduled John Wayne’s “The Alamo” to run opposite “Sticks and Bones,” thus offering a big budget serving of patriotism against a small-scale work viewed as being critical of American values.

In “Sticks and Bones,” Rabe skewers middle-class American stereotypes – the pipe-smoking father watching football from his living room club-chair, the housewife-mother ready to use comfort food to soothe ruffled feelings, the younger brother who is really a decent kid despite his long hair and penchant for playing rock music on his guitar. The emergence of the blinded older son returning from Vietnam shatters this sitcom setting, with his family showing little empathy for his damaged physical and emotional state while spouting wildly racist comments about his sex life while in Vietnam. There is a silent Vietnamese woman who permeates the production – she is supposed to be the veteran’s lover, and her presence brings a strange fantasy element to the story.

I’ve never seen the theatrical version of “Stick and Bones,” so I cannot say what was dropped from the text in the transition from the stage to the screen. I can state the Ozzie and Harriet references were gone – the characters have different names, which jettisons Rabe’s satire of how the cruelty of Vietnam shatters a sitcom family setting. But what Downey brings to the work is incompetent direction – his actors seem to be playing to the last row of a theater’s balcony rather than to the camera, creating overcooked performances that steamroll Rabe’s concept. Sly and the Family Stone’s “Family Affair” and Randy Newman’s “Gone Dead Train” are briefly sampled, for no great effect.

It doesn’t help that the camera magnifies some of the more thudding aspects of the text – the family speaks in short, snappy lines and the dialogue often feels like a skein of non-sequiturs rather than genuine conversation while the veteran spouts dialogue in sophomoric poetic verbiage. When the parents complain of “yellow gook pigs” in Vietnam, the veteran declares, “They are the color of the earth…Only the winter is white.” Huh?

Downey also doesn’t seem to know where to place his camera or when to stop shooting, resulting in a film with too many tight close-ups and scenes that dribble on endlessly – most egregiously a sequence with the younger son playing the guitar in his bedroom and later with the father jogging through their suburban town. By the time the shock ending rolls around – no spoilers, sorry – the only genuine shock is realizing that so much time was wasted watching such a bad film.

“Sticks and Bones” was aired without commercials because no advertiser wanted to sponsor its broadcast. It turned up again in the 1980s on a barely publicized cable television broadcast before disappearing. There was a screening in 2012 at a gathering of film industry professionals with Downey present, but otherwise it has never been made available in any home entertainment format. A copy of the film with a time code at the bottom of the screen was allegedly pilfered from CBS and is on YouTube – how long it stays there is anyone’s guess. For those who are curious about “Sticks and Bones,” proceed with extreme caution.

IMPORTANT NOTICE: While this weekly column acknowledges the presence of rare film and television productions through the so-called collector-to-collector market, this should not be seen as encouraging or condoning the unauthorized duplication and distribution of copyright-protected material, either through DVDs or Blu-ray discs or through postings on Internet video sites.

Listen to Phil Hall’s award-winning podcast “The Online Movie Show with Phil Hall” on SoundCloud and his radio show “Nutmeg Chatter” on WAPJ-FM in Torrington, Connecticut, with a new episode every Sunday. His new book “100 Years of Wall Street Crooks” is now in release through Bicep Books.