Joel & Ethan Coen: The Brothers From Another Planet

Pacing and smoking, pacing and smoking, in their rented house, Joel and Ethan Coen are waiting for the phone to ring. Every time Ethan finishes a cigarette, he mutters, “Butt me, butt me.” Joel occasionally stops at the window to scream at Los Angeles, a visceral but controlled scream of rage. It is 1984; after writing the film-noir-like Blood Simple in 1980, raising funds for it in 1981, directing it in 1982 and editing it in 1983, the Coen brothers were broke. They flew from New York to Los Angeles with the reels of Blood Simple, fairly confident that the artful thriller would find a distributor.

“We brought the film around to all these different studios and had’ em bone us,” Joel says today. “Sat there and listened to their garbage.” During one meeting, a studio chief kept spitting sunflower-seed shells into a cuspidor behind his desk. He suddenly interrupted his barrage to ask, apropos of nothing, “Why is Revenge of the Nerds making so much money?” The brothers exchanged a quizzical look. On the way out, Ethan said, “If there’s anything else you want to know about the movie business, feel free to call me.” The executive stared at Ethan, then threw his head back and screamed with laughter, slapping Ethan on the back so hard that he knocked over a chair and slammed into the wall.

This sort of encounter was typical. Hollywood was hot for the Coens — maybe they’d like to direct Psycho III? — but nobody wanted to distribute Blood Simple. The word was it was too gory to be an art film, too arty to be an exploitation film, funny but not quite a comedy.

So the brothers just hung out. They killed time concocting “thought experiments” — high-concept movies they’d have liked to see but didn’t want to bother making. The most telling remnant from their stay in L.A. is a thought experiment they hatched there called Adolf “Teny” Hitler, which rewrites history thusly: Hitler’s parents emigrate to America at the turn of the century and head west. Young Adolf grows up and becomes a big Hollywood agent nicknamed Terry, running the Adolf Hitler Agency (AHA); he wears baggy suits and takes lunches at Mortons, waving to everyone and reading People magazine.

Unsurprisingly, when Blood Simple finally found a distributor, it was Circle Releasing, a small company based in Washington, D.C., not in the Coens’ beloved Los Angeles. The studios missed out on a prestigious project that had the critics gushing and won a Grand Jury Prize at the United States Film Festival, the independent filmmakers’ equivalent of the Oscars.

These days, the Coens and Hollywood seem to have figured each other out. As soon as the studios saw the script for the brothers’ second movie, Raising Arizona, they scrambled to buy distribution rights from Circle, and Twentieth Century Fox won out. Arizona reached the screen an ingeniously executed gonzo caper, starring Nicolas Cage as the petty thief H.I. McDonnough and Holly Hunter as his policewoman sweetheart, Ed. After they marry, Ed learns that she’s barren, and they kidnap a quintuplet named Nathan Arizona Jr., reasoning that his parents have “more than they can handle.” \

Full of the same showy camera work and slightly dim characters as Blood Simple, Raising Arizona also tosses in slam-bang mass-appeal elements like car chases, a biker from hell and cute babies. Most critics were bowled over, calling it a “deranged fable of the New West” (New York) and “exuberantly original” (Time). Vanity Fair said, “The brothers seem to be having a ball, and inviting crashers.”

The biggest fear shared by Fox, Circle and the Coens was that Arizona — stylized, difficult to classify and lacking big-name stars — would perform like Blood Simple, filling a few art houses and little more. But as Arizona opened gradually around the country (“platformed,” in movie-business lingo), the box-office returns quashed those fears. Joel, 32, and his little brother, Ethan, 29, didn’t go Hollywood: they made Hollywood come to them.