Renegade Suburban Kids Making Super-8 Movies on the American River
The Neighborhood Origins of a Hollywood Filmmaker
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Justin Panson
My wife Megan grew up in Rancho Cordova, a suburb east of Sacramento along the American River. The river at Rancho is a flow of snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada, by way of Folsom Lake. It is a protected wildlife area that is one of the really great parts of Sacramento—a pristine stretch of brush and trails where the river isn’t too wide across. Rancho was developed in the 1950s, providing homes for employees from the nearby Aerojet campus who were building rockets for NASA, the Pentagon and aviation companies. Meg’s dad worked there when the family moved to Rancho in 1965. It really was this all-American life. Asa and Sue Whetstone had five kids and were quite active in the local Catholic parish, Saint John Vianney, where the kids went to grade school. Chris is the oldest kid, followed by four sisters, Greta, Sheila, Amy and Megan. Chris was this tall, handsome, athletic kid with a kind, artistic soul. He met his best friend Neal Jimenez in the 9th grade. They were on the basketball team and Neal spent a lot of time over at the Whetstone home, which was always a hub of activity. That Chris had four sisters probably factored into Neal’s presence. 
Chris top row second from left; Neal second from top row left side.
In the mid-1970s, Neal’s family bought a Kodak Super-8 camera. Introduced in 1965 during the midcentury boom in consumer electronics, this was one the first consumer-grade devices that made it easy to take home movies. It simplified the process by placing the film inside easy-to-load plastic cartridges. For middle-class families, this movie camera became both a status object and a way to capture memories. Neal became fascinated with the camera, and would do these little stop-motion animations. Then he began to rally the neighborhood kids to be his cast and crew for DIY films out along the sprawling riverscape right behind Chris’ home. Neal would come to the shoots with the scenes and concepts already worked out in his mind. He was very much in charge, and Chris was his leading man. A few years ago our brother-in-law Rick digitized some of the old footage, which at this point is pretty rough and grainy. The stories were along the lines of simple chase sequences, good guy vs. bad guy plots, and goofy dress-up scenes, some involving puppets and hand-drawn title cards. There was one scene where the motley crew of kid actors hit the local supermarket and got a checkout clerk to do a cameo. When you watch these old clips there is such a sense of innocence and sweetness, and you can feel the creative energy and esprit de corps of the kids. This footage is just a beautiful time capsule of life in mid-1970s suburban California. Chris did the music tracks for the movies, laboriously matching rock songs transferred onto cassette tapes with the action, having to constantly stop and start to get the sound and pictures to sync up. The gang of kids would gather to watch preview shows of the movies in the backyard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZqSMa_PDoo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LLhiRHuh8U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIzPoKKKMc0 
Neal’s amateur filmmaking was similar to the story of Steven Spielberg making Super-8 movies with his neighborhood pals, as retold in the 2022 biographical movie The Fablemans. During this time, lots of directors actually got started doing neighborhood home movies, including the greats: Lucas, Scorsese and Tarantino. In that sense, the modest Super-8 camera holds an important place in the history of film—its portability and affordability democratized filmmaking in a way previously impossible outside professional studios. In 1979, Chris went off to college at Santa Clara University, just south of San Francisco and Neal went to Sacramento State. After visiting Chris, he transferred to Santa Clara, where he wrote a play that was produced and performed on campus. Chris’ sister Amy said it involved two parents yelling at each other a lot, she said based on Neal’s sort of messed up childhood. Chris recalled that Neal’s dad owned a service station and coached little league, and they were a somewhat successful family. When Highway 50 was built through Rancho it bypassed the service station and that put the family on a downward path economically. Neal’s mom was an alcoholic and condescending to his dad. The college play was based on that dysfunction. Amy also shared that Neal was often kind of an asshole—he struck a lot of people that way. Sister Sheila shared that “Neal was an awkward but confident, energetic, creative guy. He was not handsome—skinny with crazy hair and beard, serious acne and a voice that was scratchy and squeaky. Chris was the beauty. Neal was the opposite.” She shared that he would always be poking people with little jabs thinly veiled as jokes. But there were also positive memories, like when he took the whole gang of kids all dressed up to the Rocky Horror Picture Show—the midnight cult movie of that era that involved audience costumes and participation. 
Neal followed his passion and enrolled in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, which allowed him to hone his talent for screenwriting and put him in proximity to the film industry. Neal’s UCLA classmates later talked about how his films during college were so different from everyone else’s, creative, crazy, impactful. He won an award at a UCLA competition during film school. Classmates said he was so much better than them. During this time he met Mike Steinberg, a later collaborator, who upon hearing that Neal already wrote a screenplay about a murder that was in the news said of the long-haired bearded dormmate, “who is this Jesus guy down the hall?”
That screenplay was called River’s Edge, a bleak crime drama inspired by a real murder case in Milpitas, California. It’s the story of a troubled teenager who murders his girlfriend and leaves her body near a riverbank. Instead of reacting with shock or grief, many of his friends respond with disturbing emotional detachment. Some casually visit the body, while others focus more on protecting the murderer than confronting the crime. The film follows a growing tension within the group as one teen becomes increasingly horrified by everyone’s indifference and struggles with whether to go to the police. The script got passed through a few intermediaries and landed with the producers of the recent indie hit film Desperately Seeking Susan starring Madonna. They were intrigued by the "dangerous ideas" in Neal’s screenplay, as well as the coarse, cruel dialogue written for the disaffected teens. They bought it, hired director Tim Hunter, and made the movie River’s Edge. 
A major presence in the film is Feck, an older paranoid former biker and drug dealer played by Dennis Hopper, while Keanu Reeves appears in an early role as the character Matt. Crispen Glover, coming off his breakout role in Back to the Future, plays the manic character of Layne, who responds to the crime by initiating a one-man coverup, popping pills and repeatedly passing out in his car.
Amy said “be sure and ask Chris about Mr. Fox. He was a character who was at our house a lot. A coach and a crazy beekeeper. My dad went with him to the casinos because he had supposedly figured out the system! The Dennis Hopper character is based on Mr Fox.” Meg added that Mr. Fox’s “system” didn’t work and the dude was weird. Chris confirmed that Mr. Fox was the track coach who, under the pretext of being a “coach”, had cruised around with the students and partied with them. Chris said that although River’s Edge was about a murder in Milpitas, he recognized a lot of their Rancho Cordova experiences in the movie. Rather than functioning as a conventional thriller, the film explores numbness, moral drift, and the emotional emptiness of suburban American life. The soundtrack features songs from various punk and metal bands, including Slayer, Fates Warning, Agent Orange, and the Wipers. River's Edge became a controversial sensation because of its unusually natural dialogue and its unsentimental depiction of suburban youth culture. Neal wrote the characters as confused, teenagers trapped in emotional paralysis. The screenplay has been praised for how accurately it captured the rhythms and alienation of 1980s teenage life. Reviews cast it as a portrait of a wider moral and emotional collapse in America, thus making the film a point in a larger cultural conversation. Critic Roger Ebert wrote of “a wider moral breakdown in our society.” A TCM feature on the film makes the point that the movie’s power came from locating this nihilism within an ordinary middle-class suburb, suggesting that alienation and desensitization had become deeply embedded in everyday American life. 
In the 1980s the independent film movement was generating a lot of buzz, powered by small features initiated outside the Hollywood system that often performed better than studio products. River's Edge tapped the sort of edgy subject matter that the studios would never touch. The movie won the 1987 Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature, having been nominated in four categories.
It’s interesting to note that the mid-80s were dominated by the so-called Brat Pack movies by the late auteur John Hughes, particularly his iconic high school trilogy Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, and Pretty in Pink. Daniel Waters, screenwriter of the dark teen comedy Heathers, compared the Hughes films with Neal’s film, calling River’s Edge “The darkest teen movie of all time.” He explained: “I felt like Hughes was trying to coddle teenagers and almost suck up to them, idealize them…No other film captures more accurately what it’s like to be dead inside during the end of the Cold War, the height of MTV and the invasion of concerned but impotent parents than River’s Edge. It was the one film that seemed to understand that it wasn’t the rap music, heavy metal music or even drugs that made ’80s kids, it was … nothing. As in the feeling of searching your soul for what you should feel and finding it empty, and slowly, horrifyingly getting used to it to the point that at least one, maybe more of us, will do anything, even commit murder, in order to combat that horrible void.” 
Somewhere along the way the story took a tragic turn. Neal had come up from L.A. to go on a camping trip with Chris out at Hellhole Reservoir, a remote man-made lake in the Sierra Nevada mountains just west of Lake Tahoe. The trip was organized by one of their friends who invited a bunch of guys who were in the Army. They stopped at a house in Rancho on the way out and bought some blotter acid. They rode 4-wheel-drive trucks on very rough roads way out to the far end of the lake and set up camp, the gung-ho army guys embracing the outback experience.
Some of the guys took the acid squares. Neal ended up taking a second tab, after which he became paranoid, thinking he was trapped in a Deliverance kind of thing (the 1972 river survival movie). The military guys were firing their guns at trees, which did not help the situation. In a confused state Neal fled into the woods. To this day Chris regrets not following his friend. At some point they heard a loud splash not far from their camp. The military guys raced to it and ended up pulling Neal out of a shallow pool of water. He had jumped or fallen from the rocks above. Chris believes they likely saved his life as he was unconscious and under water with a broken neck. In the chaotic state that ensued, Chris remembers somebody went to get help as they didn’t want to transport Neal on the very rocky dirt road. Chris said it was the last time he prayed—he went behind a rock and prayed for Neal. It took a long time for a boat to arrive from the other side of the reservoir. Chris remembers seeing the light approaching slowly in the distance. They loaded Neal on and Chris went with him. He said during the boat rescue Neal was still tripping and that at a certain point he came to and said “Chris, I can’t feel my legs.” They got him back to a town and onto a life flight to UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. Chris remembers Neal’s dad coming into the hospital room. In the face of the false hopes of a recovery he was weeping, muttering that his son would never walk again. Surgeries and therapy restored function to his upper body but his legs remained paralyzed. So thereafter, Neal was the guy in the wheelchair, acerbic, complex and with a sort of bitter sweetness about him. 
After a six month stint at a recovery facility Neal threw himself back into writing. He wrote The Waterdance, about his accident and recovery. With his newly earned reputation in the film industry he got a movie deal and co-directed the movie, which starred Eric Stoltz, Helen Hunt and Wesley Snipes. It was widely acclaimed for its honest and unsparing depiction of disability, rehabilitation, anger, humor, and survival.
In the following years he worked with Bette Midler on the movie For the Boys, for which Midler won a Golden Globe and was nominated for an Oscar. He worked with Dustin Hoffman and there was a story of the actress Diane Keaton calling him repeatedly asking if he had written a script for her yet. Neal attended the Cannes film festival and other industry events. He was hot, and everybody wanted his script writing magic. He developed a reputation in Hollywood as a kind of “script whisperer,” with an exceptional ear for natural dialogue, damaged characters, and emotional realism. During this time, major filmmakers and studios frequently brought him in to quietly reshape troubled screenplays. Directors admired his ability to strip away artificial movie dialogue and make scenes feel lived-in and authentic. Much of his work in this period went uncredited, but within the industry he became known as one of those rare behind-the-scenes writers trusted to rescue material. 
I only met Neal once, at Chris and Sandy’s wedding where he was Chris’ best man. At some point, maybe partly due to being in a wheelchair and unable to live a full life, Neal just gave up writing altogether, after which he fell into a sort of broken life of booze and drugs. Through all of this, Chris stayed in touch and continued to enjoy visits with his old friend in L.A. It’s odd to think how their trajectories were diverging at this point, as Chris was married, raising two sons and teaching at a Waldorf elementary school in Sacramento.
In his later years, Neal lived an isolated life with his sister near Santa Maria on the central coast of California, in deteriorating health and having spent through the money he had made in Hollywood. Sheila said “When Chris and I went to see him before his death, I hadn’t seen him in probably 30+ years. He was in a hospital bed, teeth were worn down, he looked so old compared to Chris. He had a rough life after the accident. He was the same Neal though.” She shared that at one point when Chris had stepped out of the room, Neal hit her with a hurtful jab about why her kids lived so far away from her. Despite this sort of thing, I got a sense that people had a real affection for Neal throughout his life. When he died in 2022 there were tributes in Variety, Entertainment Weekly and Indiewire. He was listed in the In Memoriam segment of the Oscars telecast in 2023. Chris and two of his sisters went to the memorial. He said that a number of the River’s Edge actors and crew showed up and that they expressed that working on that movie had been very special, there was something about it and about that moment in time in the mid-1980s. 
The story of Neal and Chris is one of the great tales in the Whetstone family, although after 40 years it seems pretty remote and Neal’s movies have faded into obscurity. When I asked for Chris’ blessing to write the story, he said “it’s weird to be thinking about Neal again.” At 66 years old, Chris remains haunted in ways that I cannot begin to understand. As an outsider captivated by the story, I’d say it’s pretty damn amazing to think about the path Neal Jimenez took from those renegade Super-8 movies with the neighborhood kids to becoming an admired American filmmaker.
It would be easy to focus on Neal’s lost potential and his decline. But the other side of it is that his creative success was an incredibly rare accomplishment—he threaded a needle that thousands and thousands of talented people will never get close to. His bitterness and complexity was likely somehow integral and necessary for the honesty and uniqueness of his writing. As is often the case, the good and bad are intertwined—Neal’s is a complicated story. 
I asked Chris how it could be that the two of them could be such good friends, Neal being dark and edgy and Chris being a kind, mild mannered guy. He said they just related as writers and always shared that. I would add that maybe there’s just a special bond you have with the friends you grew up with that are the deepest and most meaningful in life. Chris showed me some of the dense and voluminous correspondence between the two of them over the years, from when Chris was in the Peace Corps in Africa and through all phases of their lives. It was pretty powerful to see those old letters, from a time just a few decades ago when people still wrote letters. Chris’ sisters mentioned that Neil Young was a really important musician for them growing up.
At first I thought this was a story about kids making movies out at the river and then I thought it was about a guy who became successful in Hollywood, but after talking with Chris I realized this is a story about a couple guys who were great friends and who remained friends throughout their lives through all kinds of stuff. That is the very best kind of story. Down by the River, Neil Young 
FURTHER READING: https://www.vice.com/en/article/an-oral-history-of-rivers-edge-1987s-most-polarizing-teen-film/ https://www.salon.com/2015/01/23/rivers_edge_the_darkest_teen_film_of_all_time/ https://bombmagazine.org/articles/1992/07/01/neal-jimenez/ https://medium.com/@riverdaleonfilm/the-rivers-edge-1986-film-analysis-3b7bb4606c10 |
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