At the time, his company, Zoetrope, was facing possible bankruptcy.
Cast of the outsiders how to#
“What appealed to me was that it says something that I’ve always known, which is that children are capable of deep, deep, deep feelings of love,” he says.Ĭoppola was sold - now he just had to figure out how to make the movie. The director was touched by the book and S.E.
Cast of the outsiders movie#
“I said, ‘Well, I have a bunch of kids who have voted for me to do a movie from a book they love, so I’m going to at least read it and see if I’m able to.’ ” … So when I saw those little signatures - you could tell every one was real - I was very moved and touched,” Coppola recalls. And, you know, I was a camp counselor when I was 17. When I opened it up, I saw the letter from the librarian, and then realized the fatness was from the many, many, many, many sheets of children’s signatures. But he did, and almost 40 years later, the director - whose 2005 extended version of the film, The Outsiders: The Complete Novel, will see a 4K rerelease in November - still remembers that letter well. Had it gone to his usual fan-mail address, Coppola likely wouldn’t have read the letter or, eventually, the book. In 1980, Jo Ellen Misakian sent a copy of the book and a petition signed by her students in the farming community of Fresno, California, to director Francis Ford Coppola, imploring him to take The Outsiders to the big screen. And were it not for one very determined librarian, the movie version might never have been made. It’s still taught in schools around the country. By its 50th anniversary, the book had sold more than 15 million copies, been translated into 30 languages, and was ranked among the most influential young-adult novels of all time. The Outsiders has captured a wide audience since it was first published in 1967. Woven throughout are themes of love and loss, scenes of fist fights and friendship, and - notable for the era - lots of tears from macho boys trying their best to be men. The story centers around the three Curtis brothers. In a classic tale of the haves versus the have-nots, the Socs, letter-jacket-wearing “West-side rich kids,” face off against the Greasers, switchblade-toting rebels with slicked-back hair. The rest was based on Hinton’s high school experience and her observations of two real-life rivals: the Socs and the Greasers. That class led her to the Robert Frost poem, “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” that inspired the novel’s most iconic and oft-repeated line, “Stay gold.” “ Probably because I was paying more attention to writing my book than to what I was supposed to be doing in class,” Hinton, now 73, says over the phone. When 16-year-old Tulsa native Susan Eloise Hinton wrote The Outsiders in 1966, she was averaging a D in creative writing. The vision came easy, but creating the Outsiders House Museum - a 1,400-square-foot shrine that’s part time capsule, part pop-culture history lesson - would require a three-year gut renovation, tens of thousands of dollars, and a cross-country move from Beverly Hills. I can’t lift the house, move it somewhere else and still have the same effect.” “They want to go where stood in the front yard and Patrick Swayze did a handstand on the fence. “People come to the Outsiders house because they want to touch terra firma,” he says. O’Connor bet his life savings that fellow fans like him would want to take a peek inside. The house served as the onscreen home of orphaned brothers Darry, Soda Pop, and Ponyboy Curtis. But the biggest transformation came in 2016, when O’Connor purchased this rundown Tulsa relic with dreams of restoring it to look as it did in The Outsiders - Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 film adaptation of S.E. The goatee he sported in the music video for the party anthem “Jump Around” is now a salt-and-pepper beard. He’s filled out more of his six-foot-six–inch frame and replaced gold chains and ombre shades with flannel button-ups and a North Face fleece vest. And yet the owner, Daniel O’Connor, refers to it as a “national treasure.”ĭanny Boy, as he was known in the hip-hop trio House of Pain, looks different than he did in the Nineties. A craftsman bungalow in the Crutchfield neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the home contrasts starkly with the mansions and manicured lawns across town that once belonged to oil tycoons. A rusted chain-link fence matches the patio furniture on the front porch. Its once-quaint exterior is caught somewhere between off-white, yellow, and brown, depending on the thickness of the layers of dirt. From the street, the house doesn’t look like much.