Three for the Road
| Three for the Road | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Bill L. Norton |
| Produced by |
Mort Engelberg Herb Jaffe |
| Written by |
Richard Martini (screenplay/story) Tim Metcalfe Miguel Tejada-Flores |
| Starring |
Charlie Sheen Alan Ruck Kerri Green Sally Kellerman Blair Tefkin |
| Music by | Barry Goldberg |
| Cinematography | Stephen L. Posey |
| Edited by | Christopher Greenbury |
| Distributed by | New Century-Vista |
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Release date
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Running time
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88 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $1,539,000 |
Three for the Road is a 1987 road trip-themed comedy starring Charlie Sheen, Alan Ruck, Kerri Green, Sally Kellerman and Blair Tefkin.
The movie centers around Paul Tracy (Sheen), aide to a United States Senator (Raymond J. Barry), and who has political aspirations of his own. He is asked to transport Robin (Green), the Senator's delinquent daughter, to an institution for girls. He asks his aspiring writer roommate T.S. (Ruck) to come along for the trip. Robin is initially drugged by her father and put unconscious into the back of their car, but as soon as she wakes up she tries everything and anything to escape.
Eventually a romance develops between Robin and Paul, and he begins to take her claims of her father's abuse more seriously. Along the way they pick up Missy (Tefkin), a southern belle who has her eye on T.S. They make a detour to locate Robin's estranged mother Blanche (Kellerman), hoping that Robin can live with her. Blanche refuses, clearly out of fear of the repercussions of her powerful ex-husband.
Robin eventually ends up in the institution, but her friends devise a ruse to break her free. This is quelched by the unexpected arrival of the senator, but at the last minute Blanche arrives and threatens to expose his dastardly deeds, including the rape of a babysitter. Thus Robin goes to live with her mother, free to explore the romantic possibilities with Paul.
The movie was a critical and commercial dud, grossing approximately $1,500,000 in the U.S. The film effectively ended the mainstream acting careers of Green and Ruck, who had been rising Hollywood stars whose past projects were huge successes (Ruck in Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Green in Lucas and The Goonies.) Ruck would continue acting in smaller roles until cast in the TV show Spin City (opposite Sheen in later seasons); Green, who had played the romantic lead to Sheen in Lucas, did not appear in a mainstream movie again.
Writer Richard Martini has asserted that the screenplay was dramatically altered from his original. Instead of being a rebellious troublemaker, the character of Robin was shunned by her conservative Republican Senator father because she was an outspoken liberal activist who stages protests. When she finally finds her birth mother she discovers that she was a drug addict who never wanted a child. Martini paid a visit to the set and met Sheen who said "Forget it – the reason I did this movie was I loved your script, but they've re-written it and it sucks now." Martini was then not invited to a screening and instead saw the film in a 3,000 seat theater with only 8 people in attendance. Martini discusses these experiences on both his own website and in an entry at IMDb.com.
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