This all started innocently enough, one Sunday during my senior year in college at UC Santa Cruz. Tim Hunter, UCSC lecturer in film history, came to call with a copy of that day’s San Francisco Examiner, whose top headline was MOUSEPACKS - KIDS ON A CRIME SPREE. 

 

The article was about vandalism and rowdiness among the adolescent kids in Foster City, a new town built on bay fill near the San Francisco airport. “This could be an exploitation picture,” Tim said, “and we could write it.” 

 

We started driving up to Foster City on weekend nights to interview the kids in the tiny park where they hung out: a few benches and a crumbling plaster whale at the end of a cul-de-sac. The kids were as advertised by the newspaper story -- snarky fourteen-year-olds blasting Cheap Trick and Joe Walsh on ghetto blasters in a disposable environment of theme-park-ish condo developments. (Whaler’s Cove, with fake pilings and fishing nets outside the instantly fading units, is one of the hardest to forget.) 

 

The kids were often high, and alienated at all times, but they weren’t dumb. Their take on the town and their lives were the heart of the movie we wound up making.

 

A few years later, when Tim and I had migrated to day jobs in LA and sold the script, we had hopes of shooting in Foster City and using the kids there in the movie. That didn’t happen, because of California child labor laws, but when we went to scout locations in Colorado we found strikingly similar suburbs and people. The ensemble cast consists of real kids that age, and even some of the principal players -- notably including Matt Dillon -- hadn’t acted before. 

 

The shoot was short and cheap, but Jonathan Kaplan, fresh from directing White Line Fever and with The Accused and Unlawful Entry in his future, did a wonderful job of weaving the kids’ slang, attitude, and unschooled charisma into the picture. 

 

Not everyone agreed. The initial trade reviews were awful, and the studio, spooked by reports of violence at theaters showing other bad-kid movies, dumped Over the Edge into remote drive-ins. That was that, until the movie played at Joseph Papp’s Public Theater in New York. Suddenly we had rave reviews in The New York Times, The Village Voice, and the Chicago papers, praising the picture’s naturalism. After a packed screening at a rep house in LA, Warners finally gave it a semi-decent release. 

 

The picture's real life, though, has been on cable and streaming, where it’s picked up a following of people who saw it when they were the characters’ age and found their own lives reflected in it. It’s generated a lot of musical references. Kurt Cobain wrote about it in his journals and styled the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video after it.  There have been bands called Kids on a Crime Spree and The Richie Whites (for Matt’s character), a punk operetta by Drats!!!, and lots of espontaneo art and merch. 

 

The Arrow Films Blu-Ray (from the U.K., all-regions) is deluxe, with learned essays, celebrity commentary, and the Drats!!! opera included. The U.S. Blu-Ray, from Shout! Factory, has extras of its own.

 

Mike Sacks compiled a fine oral history of the picture for Vice. The Little White Lies website has a good article. 

 

Harry Northup, the great character actor who plays Officer Doberman, has published some excellent books of poetry with Cahuenga Press.