WRAL’s newest true crime podcast, “The Killing Month August 1978,” tells the true story of a string of murders in Chester County, Pennsylvania, committed by the Johnston Gang and its leader, Bruce Johnston Sr. Throughout the 1970s, the Johnston’s crime empire grew bigger and bolder. They stole anything they could make money on, and they got away with it, for years. They kept witnesses quiet with threats and intimidation. When threats weren’t enough, they turned to murder.
It made for thrilling story, and pretty soon Hollywood took notice. In 1986, Orion Pictures released the movie “At Close Range.” It starred Academy Award-winning actor Christopher Walken and rising stars Sean Penn and Mary Stuart Masterson. The story was loosely based on the saga of the Johnston Gang.
Hollywood has a tradition of taking creative license when it comes to ripping stories from news headlines and translating them for the big screen. Ask anyone about a work of fiction based on a real-life tragedy they witnessed; chances are they will find fault with it. “At Close Range” is no different.
Local district attorney, father of WRAL's Amanda Lamb asked to consult on the movie
My father, Bill Lamb, was the district attorney in Chester County, Pennsylvania, who prosecuted the Johnston brothers. When Orion Pictures was in development on “At Close Range,” the director, James Foley, asked to have lunch with my dad. The producers were hoping he would sign on as a consultant who could not only help them with the storyline but could also help them get permission to shoot in key locations in Chester County where the crimes took place. I was a college student at the time. We talked about this meeting recently when I interviewed him for “The Killing Month August 1978.” He’s how he remembered the lunch:
“It was the director of the movie, and Sean Penn who was going to play Bruce Johnston, Jr.,” my dad recalled.
“You went to lunch with him,” I said with more than just a little annoyance in my tone. Remember, for me, as a teenage girl this was less about Sean Penn than about his impending marriage to Madonna.
“Yeah, I know,” he replied.
“And you told me about it later. And I will say, I was not happy that I was not invited,” I responded with cheerful sarcasm.
I remember being a little miffed at the time that my dad didn’t include me in this meeting with a Hollywood superstar. And there would be no second chances for me to meet Sean Penn. My dad’s relationship with him and the director and producers of the movie was short-lived. After my dad and the investigators read the screenplay, there was no deal. They would not play ball. The screenplay diverged from the real story in too many ways.
“And we said, we want no parts of this. We're not going to help you. We're not going to provide details for you. We're just not going to do it because it's not what happened, and it's not the truth. And you're glorifying homicide,” my dad said to me.
'There’s nothing noble in this story'
Here’s what he said to the Los Angeles Times in August of 1985 when entertainment reporter Lewis Beale interviewed him about the initial screenplay producers had shared with him:
“We were singularly unimpressed. It was clear from the beginning that there was no interest in making anything that approached the truth. There’s nothing noble in this story.”
My dad went on to say: “The screenplay tends to make a folk hero out of Bruce Johnston Senior. It also tends to glorify criminality and make the police and prosecution look like the Keystone Cops. I think taking a Greek tragedy approach to the story is like taking a weed and putting it in the Smithsonian as a great part of American culture.”
Beale responded to my dad’s concerns saying in his article: “Well, hell, if you were responsible for putting behind bars three of the sleaziest mass murders in the history of southeastern Pennsylvania, you’d be upset when Hollywood comes in to make a personalize mythic story about it all.“
The movie went in a different direction
Because of the reluctance of Chester County officials to work with the movie’s production team, they decided to take their show elsewhere. They began filming in Franklin, Tenn., on May 29, 1985. The makers of the film told the Los Angeles Times that they moved the location because there was “bad karma” in filming a story about cold-blooded murders in the place where all the gruesome deeds happened.
The names of the characters were also changed to distance the film from the real story. Bruce Sr. (Christopher Walken) became “Brad Whitehead Sr.”, and Bruce Jr. (Sean Penn) became “Brad Whitewood Jr.” Jimmy Johnston (Chris Penn) was “Tommy Whitewood, and Robin Miller (Mary Stuart Masterson) became “Terry.” The Los Angeles Times reported that some of the cast and crew members didn’t even know the screenplay was based on a true story.
Of course, the actor, Sean Penn, did know because he was in on the project from the very beginning. The Los Angeles Times reported that he gained thirty pounds for the role and perfected a bleached blond biker’s haircut. It was a look that closely resembled Bruce Johnston Jr.’s look in 1980 when the trials took place.
Critical response to “At Close Range”
When the movie was released in 1986, critic Roger Ebert gave the film 3 ½ out of 4 stars, praising Penn’s performance as one of the best of a crop of young actors at the time. He also praised veteran actor Christopher Walken for his dark performance as Bruce Sr. The movie was not, however, a box office success. It grossed a little more than $2.3 million. But for those who lived the story, it’s not about reviews or box office returns, it's about the thin line between fiction and truth, and the liberties taken to create a palatable big screen story from a real life tragedy.
I have seen the movie multiple times. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty entertaining, and even more so when you think you know the story. But now that I do know the story, I can see how people who lived it feel like it significantly departs from what really happened.
Their main concern is that in the end of the film there is a scene between Bruce Jr., who is riddled with bullets from the ambush, and his father, Bruce Sr., where Bruce Jr. plays the hero, calling his father out for his transgressions while he stands bleeding to death in his kitchen. This moment never happened. It is pure fiction. And the critics of the film say it makes Bruce Jr. out to be a hero, a person who truly loved his father, but wanted to turn him in to the police for the greater good, when in reality, he just wanted revenge on his evil dad.
I asked almost everyone I interviewed for our podcast “The Killing Month August 1978” what they thought of the movie because I was genuinely interested in what they had to say.
Johnston Gang investigators respond to the movie
Former U.S. Attorney Doug Richardson said: “I thought it was simply, revoltingly bad. I simply couldn't believe it. We know what Hollywood does, but first of all, heaven only knows where Walken got that accent? I mean, I don't think that accent exists anywhere on the face of this earth. I thought the real story was so much better, and if they'd made it into how law enforcement collaborated across traditional rivalries in order to gather tons of information and just squeeze the life out of this gang, that would've made a good movie.”
Former Chief Chester County Detective Charlie Zagorskie and his wife, former Assistant District Attorney Dolores Troiani, refused to see it in the theater. They eventually watched it on television. Troiani recalls they turned it off part of the way through. Zagoriskie called it “very bad.” His biggest criticism was that the movie tried to portray Bruce Sr. and Bruce Jr. as having a credible loving relationship as father and son, a relationship which he says simply did not exist.
Former Pennsylvania Police Detective Tom Cloud admits that the actors did bear a pretty good likeness to their real-life counterparts, but he also believes the movie was stylized to make the story digestible to the general public. He points out that the movie includes a drowning which has little or nothing to do with the Johnstons. The incident relates to one of the snitches that investigators eventually used. It was obviously an intriguing scene for the producers whether it was anchored in the truth or not.
Lisa Harrington, a teenage motel clerk who saw one of the Johnston Gang members on the day of the ambush and testified in both trials, saw the movie and didn’t even realize it was about the case she spent years embroiled in.
“I have to say it's really nothing like when I remember anything to be about the, the event and somebody said to me: ‘Oh, that's about the Johnston trial.’ I'm like, What? Like really? I've seen the movie. I didn't even put the two together when I saw the movie,” Lisa told me in our interview.
Newspaper reporter consulted with screenwriters
Julia Cass, a former reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, was closer to the film than the other stakeholders in the story because she did consult with the producers. She was friends with one of the writers of the screenplay, Elliott Lewitt. He was working with another screenwriter, Nicholas Kazan. Kazan’s father was best known for his screenwriting and directing of films like “A Streetcar Named Desire,” “On the Waterfront,” and “East of Eden.” Cass felt like there was a writing pedigree there that gave the team some credibility.
Lewitt, a New York-based writer, told Lewis Beale for his Los Angeles Times article that he had read about Robin Miller’s murder and was interested in the fact that “someone was killing kids in Andrew Wyeth country.” The premise of the story was so dark that he and Kazan pitched it to multiple studios for several years before they got any traction. Finally, the Hemdale Film Corporation, Orion Pictures and Sean Penn agreed to sign on.
Kazan told the Los Angeles Times he knew he had a winner because this was “the movie that no one wants to finance, but every executive in Hollywood wants to see.”
Cass remembers the production team coming to Pennsylvania to do research for the screenplay. She took them to meet with one of the notorious fences for the gang, Kenny Howell, who would cut up stolen cars and re-sell the parts for the thieves. Howell told Cass that he also helped the gang launder money.
“They came out and I took them to visit Kenny Howell and they wanted to know different kinds of things that I, as a reporter, had asked. And one of the things that I remember that Kenny told them was how they laundered money. And so that scene was in the movie where the guys, what they would do is that they had some stolen money, so they'd go off and buy a car somewhere and then they'd sell the car somewhere else and that would be a legitimate sale.”
As a writer, Cass knew that the film would ultimately be a mix of fact and fiction. She believes the movie and the story do have significant parallels but acknowledges that the film is a work of fiction.
A mix of fact and fiction
Beale wrote, “’At Close Range’ was pretty closely based on this, but they fixed up the characters. I mean, they made Little Bruce more substantial, especially by having been played by Sean Penn, and then, you know, they had the father played by Christopher Walken be more torn and horrified, just having more emotions because otherwise who is there to care about the story except the sad mothers, grandmothers and great aunts?”
According to an article in The Philadelphia Inquirer on July 11, 1985, the film’s publicist Katherine Moore said the story was not intended to be a factual account of the Johnston Gang’s lives, but instead was a study of relationships “inspired by real events.” Ironically, in the same article, convicted murderer David Johnston was quoted as saying the movie might make it more difficult for him to get an impartial jury in his case if the court agreed to hear his appeal.
But in the end, we all know that movies are not about bringing real life to the big screen, they’re about suspending disbelief for two hours, about leaving reality behind and immersing ourselves in a fantasy.
I think Beale summarized it best when it comes to this film: “The film makers figure that with a hot young star, a strong romance, an atmospheric story and the extreme, father-tries-to-kill son hook, they have the makings of a hot movie.”
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