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Phoenix

River Phoenix fascination continues 20 years after death

Donna Freydkin
USA TODAY
River Phoenix while filming his final project, 'Dark Blood,' which was released after his death in 1993.
  • %22People connected with him really deeply%2C%22 says author Gavin Edwards
  • His career and death both happened in a time before social media and relentless paparazzi
  • Even with only 24 movies to his name%2C he inspired stars such as Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio

His acting credits add up to a measly 24.

But River Phoenix, who died 20 years ago Thursday of a drug overdose at age 23, has a legacy more meaningful than the sum of its relatively few parts.

He arrived on the heels of the wayward Brat Pack, a glossy group of actors with shiny teeth and pretty faces, and blazed a trail for today's cause-oriented stars by publicly embracing veganism and environmentalism.

"People connected with him really deeply," says Gavin Edwards, author of the just-published Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind. "In this world of teen idols — where everyone feels polished — he was a beautiful boy and wonderful actor, but there was a degree of eccentricity and sense of being an outsider. People bonded with him. They thought he was trying to make the world a better place and not trying to book his next job."

Suzanne Leonard, who heads up the cinema and media studies program at Simmons College in Boston, calls his death a "zeitgeist moment."

"He embodied natural living, and being cut down by drugs disrupts the narrative. It reminds me of Heath Ledger and Kurt Cobain," she says. "He had so much potential. You see these attractive, talented young men, and they died these untimely deaths."

Ira Deutchman's film company at the time, Fine Line, financed Phoenix's final movie, Dark Blood, which was finished after his death. He says Phoenix was poised for a distinguished career. .

"He was a vegan and came from a family that was very into spiritual things. I didn't think he was going to be somebody susceptible to drugs in that way," says Deutchman, who is now a managing partner of Emerging Pictures and the chair of the film program at Columbia University. "Had he lived, he would have had an enormous career ahead of him. It's the shock of the young person with his whole career ahead of him being cut down by tragedy."

Phoenix grew up in Venezuela and Florida, busking to support his family and never attending a regular school. His most lasting films weren't gauzy or glitzy vanity projects, but 1991's My Own Private Idaho, with Phoenix playing a gay hustler, and the 1988 thriller Running on Empty, which earned Phoenix an Oscar nomination for embodying the conflicted son of American fugitives. His meteoric rise ended on Hollywood Boulevard, outside Johnny Depp's club the Viper Room, with Phoenix collapsing after ingesting a deadly mixture of heroin and cocaine and his frantic brother, Joaquin, calling 911.

"After River's death, I felt like I was in an altered state. It took me over a year to get my life back," Joaquin, now a three-time Oscar nominee, told the Calgary Sun in 1997. "Dealing with death is always difficult, but suffering in public adds a whole new dimension."

And because we never saw River fighting wrinkles or fat rolls, he remains immortalized as a young hunk, Edwards says..

"He's always going to be 23, and you can fill in the gap any way you like and imagine the kind of life he would have had."

The jobs Phoenix did finish have influenced generations of actors, including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jared Leto and Brad Pitt, who have worked overtime to be known as more than just pretty faces, experts say. They embraced Phoenix's penchant for grittier and controversial roles, and near-total immersion in the characters they play.

"He had this quality, this luminescent beauty. You look at a generation of actors like Jared Leto and Brad Pitt, and River was something of a signpost, of how you can do this with integrity," Edwards says. "My Own Private Idaho was a touchstone of him going all the way. It was so intense. His legacy is an inspiration to a lot of actors."

And his marquee looks didn't hurt.

"With him and his career, that combination of looking like a leading man and being a brave, good actor, there was a sensitivity there people responded to," says longtime film writer Benjamin Svetkey, author of the novel Leading Man. "DiCaprio mirrored his career to it in a way. That's probably where Phoenix would have ended up as an actor."

Behind closed doors, in a more private time before the advent of social media and the Internet and relentless paparazzi, a disheveled and often ashen Phoenix used drugs quietly. His relationships, with Martha Plimpton and Samantha Mathis, were private. And when he wanted to escape, he headed to his family's compound in Florida.

And consider this: A photographer was nearby when Phoenix was convulsing outside, on the night of his death, and didn't snap photos out of respect, Edwards reports — something unfathomable now.

"Today, it feels like no one in Hollywood has secrets, but we're fooling ourselves. They have drug problems that we don't know about," he says. "River was good about escaping the nexus of fame. He would not be able to go incognito like he did in Gainesville with his family. There would be people taking pictures of him."

And his death would have made global headlines almost instantly, as Ledger's similarly shocking demise did in 2008. But back in 1993, there was no Twitter. No Facebook. No TMZ.com. So the news spread slowly, on nightly TV programs and mostly through word of mouth, shocking in its incongruity with Phoenix's wholesome, granola image.

The double life was surprising, even by Hollywood's permissive standards. Just consider this infamous quote of his, which ran in a 1990 profile in Vogue: "I just stay away from it," he told the magazine about drugs. "I don't even like talking about it. It depresses me."

So when he died three years later, few saw it coming.

"I was at Entertainment Weekly at the time," Svetkey recalls. "We had one of those old-fashioned news machines in the back computer room. It was not imperative to get something online. Now it would be the cover. We weren't chasing these stories like people are chasing them now.

"At the time, it had been a while since anything like this had happened. It seemed like Phoenix was keeping (his drug problems) really well hidden, the way it couldn't be done today. Someone would blog about it."

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