![]() ![]() RIVER PHOENIX FULLA new day had already dawned for me full of change and new rules and, like most of us who experience such a thing, it had sprung upon me suddenly and had already slipped away before I could grasp the enormity of the New World I suddenly found myself in. In a way, much like Stand By Me, it was my own coming of age. I grieved for my grandfather whom I had spent so much of my formative years with growing up I grieved for River Phoenix and his untimely departure and most of all I cried for all of the years that could and should have been but now no longer were. Now with his own death, River had given me one final and bittersweet gift that meant more to me than any superlative piece of film work he had left behind: River Phoenix shocked me out of my inability to properly grieve for my lost grandfather and for the first time I sat down and cried my twenty year old heart out. States and thousands of miles away from my grandfather at the time he died, I had felt emotionally cut off from the death of our family patriarch. His sudden passing shook me to my core just months before River’s death I had lost my grandfather to cancer and, as hard of a blow as that was and as much as I loved him, I had difficulty processing the emotion of that loss until I learned through a discarded newspaper about River’s own end. ![]() There in the early morning hours on a cold sidewalk outside the club where he had come to listen to and play music, River Phoenix passed away from a still-mysterious drug overdose. What felt like a real and fresh change in this creative medium brought about by a true Hollywood outsider – Phoenix and his family were true Hippies and one of the better examples to emerge from the hazy and smoke filled days of 1960s “flower power” – came to an all-too abrupt end on Octooutside West Hollywood nightclub The Viper Room. River was one of us, the so-called Generation X who had infiltrated the closed ranks of moviedom and who was now gleefully and mirthfully turning the industry on its proverbial ear through extremely subversive and atypical career choices and layered performances. RIVER PHOENIX MOVIERiver PhoenixĪ movie from River in the late 1980s and early 1990s was, to me, like a newly discovered letter from an old friend who would periodically catch me up with what was going on in his life: The Mosquito Coast, Running On Empty (for which he received his one and only Oscar nomination), Dogfight and My Own Private Idaho were all like Reports From the Front to this burgeoning film fan who was only beginning to discover the joys of the long and rich history of the medium. The kid left a wide swath through the Hollywood industry and disappeared as abruptly as it seemed he showed up, leaving behind a generation of his peers and contemporaries who, twenty five years after his untimely passing, are still attempting to catch up with that indefinable something that encompassed his understated acting. All that aside, River’s deeply nuanced performance (at just fifteen!) of a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who sets out on a trek to find a body with his three best friends was a career making performance that set him off on a Hollywood odyssey that spanned thirteen completed films over the course of just seven years. I was thirteen in 1986 when the movie came out and even at that young of an age I knew that there was a difference between the character of Chris Chambers and River himself. No, wait chalk that: I looked up to his portrayal of a troubled youth in Rob Reiner’s classic Stand By Me. When I was coming of age in a small one-horse town in the Deep South I idolized the actor of my generation, River Phoenix. ![]()
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