My Own Private Idaho

Synopsis: Feature film. A story about street hustlers that incorporates a reworking of the Hal/King Henry/Falstaff triangle. Some of the dialogue is taken from Henry IV Part 1.
Language: English
Country: United States
Medium: Film
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 1991
Duration: 104 mins; 9,356 feet

Director

Gus Van Sant

Producer

Allan Mindel

Cinematographer

Eric Alan Edwards; John Campbell

Screenplay

Gus Van Sant

Music

Bill Stafford

Art Direction

Ken Hardy

Cast

General: Van Sant has stated that it was seeing Welles’ CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT which inspired him to make the film. The Henry IV segments were shortened in the editing process because Sant said they ‘were becoming like a movie within a movie’.
Reviews: Reviewed in Sight and Sound (April 1992), p 55. ‘Imitation as Originality in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho’ Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing his Works for Cinema and Television edited James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2004). Tony Howard in his essay ‘Shakespeare’s Cinematic Offshoots’ in Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Film edited by Russell Jackson (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) comments ‘Unfortunately Van Sant experimented by making his embarrassed cast paraphrase their Henry IV-based scenes in pseudo-Elizabethan dialogue; this is the worst of both worlds’.

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