#Swing shift 1984 movie
Nancy Dowd came up with the original script, and since the story is so similar to Coming Home, which she also worked on, it’s easy to make the assumption – as I did when I reviewed the movie for Film Quarterly in 1984 – that she’s mainly responsible for both. The film carries a screenwriting credit to Rob Morton, who doesn’t exist at least four writers contributed at one time or another. It takes a little digging to determine exactly how the Swing Shift that appeared in May 1984 (and can be widely seen, of course, on video) evolved Demme, who pronounced it the worst experience of his career in interviews at the time, has long since stopped talking about it publicly. Demme renounced it, the press generally panned it and audiences failed to come out for it. It finally opened in May, after a half-hearted, glossy publicity campaign that smacked of desperation. And Warners, viewing the film as a prestige picture and a potential blockbuster, planned to put it out at Christmas. If you’d seen Demme’s previous work, and you saw how graceful a touch he had with actors, the thought of what he could do with a sensational cast like this one was enough to make you salivate. The large, promising cast Demme assembled included Christine Lahti, Fred Ward, Holly Hunter, Sudie Bond, Patty Maloney, Lisa Pelikan, and a few of his friends: Charles Napier (the bigamous trucker in Citizens Band), Susan Peretz (of Melvin and Howard), Stephen Tobolowsky (in two small roles), playwright Beth Henley (in a walk-on) and – as MacBride, who isn’t glimpsed until late in the picture – Demme’s mentor, Roger Corman. A big-budget period piece, Swing Shift would begin the day before Pearl Harbor, end just after V-J Day, and focus on the introduction of a women’s work force during the war the action would take place in and around the MacBride airplane plant in Los Angeles. It starred one of Hollywood’s most bankable performers, Goldie Hawn – who also takes a strong hand in the production of her own movies – and featured Kurt Russell and Ed Harris.
Citizens Band (also known as Handle with Care) and Melvin and Howard had established his distinctly flaky, loose-limbed style, but this new project was the biggest of his young career. This particular story, sad and revealing, is about Jonathan Demme, Goldie Hawn and Swing Shift.ĭemme began shooting Swing Shift in the first half of 1983. There are plenty of tales of Hollywood injustices – of the good work of screenwriters destroyed by directors, of great scripts dumped at the whim of powerful stars, of movies nipped and carved by producers and studio heads after directors had given them their final shape.
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