1999 was a big year for movies. It was the year that The Matrix‘s slow-motion bullet influenced action movies for years to come. It was the year American Beauty won Best Picture at the Academy Awards and Oscar fans have been arguing about it ever since. It was the year Pokémon jumped from Gameboys and TV to the big screen. And worst of all, it was the year that disappointed a generation of Star Wars fans with the release of The Phantom Menace.
To celebrate that landmark year in film’s 20th Anniversary, The Pop Break is launching a new, year-long retrospective of 1999’s most influential (at least to us) films. The series kicks off with staff writer Matthew Widdis reflecting on everything Varsity Blues means—both then and now.
20 Years of Varsity Blues
Release Date: January 15, 1999
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Starring: James Van Der Beek, Jon Voight, Paul Walker, Amy Smart, Ali Larter, Scott Caan, Ron Lester, Jesse Plemmons.
Director: Brian Robbins (Good Burger, Ready to Rumble)
I never experienced the reality of high-pressure sports. Throughout high school, I played football in coastal New Jersey, but I spent as much time pulling bench splinters out of my keister as I did icing sore muscles. By the time Varsity Blues hit theaters, a pickup game on the college quad was a rare occurrence for me. Had I grown up somewhere else, someplace like western Pennsylvania or near the Georgia-Florida line, it might have been different. In places like Texas, as the opening monologue tells us, high school football can become a way of life, a culture or a religion with all of the grandeur and pitfalls.
After H.G. Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream hit bookstores but before it was made into a movie and TV series of the same name, the newly-formed MTV Films picked up that ball and ran with it. Varsity Blues could have been written off as a teen exploitation film. It was most likely conceived as such. A movie about a bunch of good-looking high school jocks partying on Saturday nights doesn’t produce a lot of empathy or intrigue, but a promising young cast that became stars in the 2000s helped turn it into a bildungsroman, complete with coming-of-age rebellion, reflections on small town life and great expectations.
Always remembered as Dawson Leery (and now known as Vampirina’s dad,) James Van Der Beek was nominated for a few minor awards for portraying Jon Moxon. A bookish backup quarterback for the perennial title-winning West Canaan Coyotes, “Mox” is awaiting word on an Ivy League academic scholarship and enjoying the bond of playing football with his lifelong friends. He’s happy being a high school second fiddle, dating his best friend’s sister and tagging along for the ride as his teammates blow off steam at parties.
He’s smart enough to avoid the stresses that the culture (if not outright cult) of football puts on the boys of West Canaan. When the star quarterback, Lance Harbor (Paul Walker), goes down, Lance’s future and Mox’s own comfort level are imperiled. The football-crazy town, his dysfunctional family, and the friends who make his life bearable no longer depend on him being “Mox.” They depend on him buying into the system and leading it.
Jon Voight, still early into his career resurgence, is perfect as the draconian head coach, Bud Kilmer, and is able to elicit both Tom Berenger’s Sergeant Barnes from Platoon and Judge Claude Frollo from Hunchback of Notre Dame as a ruthless and self-absorbed authority figure. Aware that Mox has been “sandbagging” (that he has athletic gifts that could be used to serve Kilmer’s team if he would fall in line), Kilmer is not above using vicious psychology to threaten not only Mox and his teammates but also previous generations of the men of West Canaan.
The school staff, his players’ fathers, and even the police aren’t willing to disappoint him or get in his way. He holds Mox’s future hostage and he uses his players as machines until they inevitably break; then turning a blind eye to their misuse of drugs and alcohol as physical and emotional painkillers. Kilmer, held in regard as saint by the town, programs them all to find fault in themselves and each other and everywhere but his authority. I was lucky to have coaches growing up who were fantastic role models and good men. But even some of those good men had Coach Kilmers in their past and they carried that into adulthood, determined not to pass that programming along to us.
As Mox’s spot on the Coyotes depth chart changes, so does his social dynamic. His father (Thomas F. Duffy) becomes laser-focused on the Coyotes season, dismissing every other aspect of Mox’s life. His girlfriend, Jules (Amy Smart,) begins to shut him out because of changes to his personality that she attributes to football. Ali Larter’s infamous “whipped cream bikini” scene (later lampooned by a pre-Captain America Chris Evans in Not Another Teen Movie) probably introduced more young boys to puberty than middle school health class, but what often gets glossed over was the tragedy in it: that a sweet and pretty “straight A” student felt that she had to use her body to piggyback onto one football player or another to escape her perceived future in small town America.
Mox’s teammates are the anchor of his story. They don’t change, although his perception of them slowly does. Up until now, Mox has been blind to the fact that running back, Wendell (played by former Stanford U and Kansas City Chiefs running back, Eliel Swinton, in his sole acting credit), has been getting short-changed by Kilmer to benefit white players’ stats. Scott Caan’s fun-loving Charlie Tweeder is seen less and less as a party animal and more and more as a walking id without impulse control or a future.
In the movie’s second-most-famous scene (sorry, but a whipped cream bikini is a whipped cream bikini) massive and jovial dim-wit, Billy Bob (Ron Lester), contemplates a boubon-soaked suicide in the middle of the football field after a disappointing loss and the guilt of the boys’ part in it. When Mox tells him that football isn’t important, Billy Bob’s insistence that it is to him makes Mox and the audience take notice that values sets are personal and that, for someone like faithful ol’ Billy Bob, a high school championship at seventeen-years-old may be the crux of his lifetime and that even Billy Bob is painfully aware of that.
The actual story of Varsity Blues is pretty unremarkable except that the antics of teenage boys deemed questionable in the 1990s are seen through a very different lens today. The characters’ situations change. Mistakes are made. Games become montages until the big finale. It’s the charm of these young actors that makes classic scenes memorable to us twenty years later. Even if you’ve never picked up a football or a basketball, tied on a pair of wrestling shoes, or even hung out at an after-game party, life is made up of moments.
You likely knew a Charlie Tweeder at some point and chuckle internally at Facebook pictures of him leading his kids’ scout troop while remembering his pool party naked roof dive. Or a Billy Bob who gave his all for school and country with little to show for it but is always there with a smile when you check out at the grocery store or bring the car in for a tune up because the memory of that time is satisfaction enough. At some point, one of your friends, classmates, co-workers, etc., has said something that you’ve repeatedly mimicked to each other as much as, “Ah don’t want your lahfe!”
Twenty years later, the class reunion would be bittersweet. Joe Pichler, the child actor best-known as Mox’s experimentally religious little brother, went missing in 2006 at the age of thirty-one. Director Brian Robbins, previously known for acting in ‘80s TV show, Head of the Class and as director/producer of Nickelodeon shows has gone on to bring us teen and jock-centered shows like Smallville, One Tree Hill, and Blue Mountain State. James Van Der Beek, reminiscent of Ricky Schroeder, has somewhat muddled below his talent level despite great performances in The Rules of Attraction and short-lived series like Mercy and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23.
Amy Smart and Ali Larter had runs as aught “It Girls” before becoming consistent performers in movies and TV. Scott Caan landed memorable parts in Gone in 60 Seconds and the Ocean’s Eleven franchise before taking on the role of Danny “Danno” Williams in TV’s Hawaii Five-O. Paul Walker went on to be the star of the wildly successful “Fast and Furious” franchise before dying in an ironically tragic car wreck in 2013. Eliel Swinton, never an actor to begin with, has stayed on his original path of film production assistant. Ron Lester famously lost over three hundred pounds after several roles similar to his breakthrough and iconic performance as Billy Bob. Unfortunately, years of morbid obesity had taken a steep toll and he died in 2016 of liver and kidney failure.
In recent years, CMT network bought the rights to revive the movie as television series (once again) and, eight years after the Friday Night Lights series ended, maybe it’s time to pull the trigger…or maybe it’s best to let memories remain memories and leave Varsity Blues to hang up its cleats. We all remember those days the way we need to.
