Johnny Depp, Gateway to Pretentious Movie Fandom

Tracing the origins of my love of pretentious movies back to its roots, I inevitably have to reach the conclusion that the one cinema figure that had the greatest influence on my development was Johnny Depp. Not so long ago, he was prime crush material for my generation of teenage girls, the bad boy alternative to Tom Cruise and the London brothers. Naturally, once I'd been firmly hooked on "21 Jump Street" reruns and multiple viewings of "Benny and Joon," and "Edward Scissorhands," I set out to watch everything else in his filmography. I did not know what I was getting myself into.

Depp movies were my introduction to many cinema greats, including Roman Polanski ("The Ninth Gate"), Oliver Stone ("Platoon"), Jim Jarmusch ("Dead Man"), Terry Gilliam ("Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas"), John Waters ("Cry Baby"), and Lasse Hallstrom ("What's Eating Gilbert Grape?"), but it was a challenge. Initial encounters with unorthodox material often left me bewildered or completely out of my comfort zone. But every time I got frustrated with weirder titles like "Arizona Dreams" and "Fear and Loathing," Johnny Depp would go and make another movie with Tim Burton and I'd find the patience to sit through "Blow" or "The Man Who Cried." And I started to appreciate what he was doing.

Depp's wont for picking projects based on the people he wanted to work with was fairly unique at the time, which meant he wasn't focused on box office success like your typical movie star of the era. It was often an ordeal to find some of his smaller films a I remember a TIME magazine article expressing sympathies for his agent regarding the Depp's shrinking paychecks and diminishing visibility. Occasionally he would show up in a thriller like "Nick of Time" or "Donnie Brasco" so he could share the screen with Christopher Walken or Robert DeNiro, but for much of the mid-to-late 90s he was a decidedly non-mainstream commodity. It wasn't until 2003 and "Pirates of the Caribbean" that he started turning out massive, kid-friendly blockbuster films. Now he's one of the only A-listers we have left, and many young actors are following his model for success.

I've gone through a lot of other filmographies since Depp's, and found a lot of stars with amazing cinema legacies, like Jimmy Stewart, Catherine Deneuve, Cary Grant, Claudia Cardinale, Jeanne Moreau, and Toshiro Mifune. I wouldn't have gotten to know them if I hadn't learned to sit through more challenging Johnny Depp movies like "Dead Man" or figured out how to get my hands on a copy of "Platoon" for those few brief scenes where he plays an army translator. His choice in roles wound up influencing my taste in films, just for their variety and their departure from the usual leading man images that Hollywood offered up. He played kooks, junkies, outcasts, dreamers, and people who got very, very lost. And I slowly became a fan of the directors who made films about those characters. And a fan of the other actors who showed up in those films too. I still think of Marlon Brando as the psychiatrist from "Don Juan DeMarco" before I think of Don Corleone or Stanley Kowalski.

To date there are still several titles from Johnny Depp's filmography that I haven't seen. "The Brave," for instance, which was his directorial debut back in 1997, the sex comedy "Private Resort," "The Astronaut's Wife" with Charlize Theron, "Lost in La Mancha" about a film he and Terry Gilliam didn't make, and most of the cameos. I also really should get around to seeing Julian Schnabel's "Before Night Falls." Now looking ahead to Depp's upcoming films, it's amazing how my priorities have shifted. I still adore his work, but much of my excitement over "The Tourist," which is coming out in December, is due to the film being the English language debut of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck ("The Lives of Others"). And then there's "The Rum Diary," which will be the first picture Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I") has made in nearly twenty years. Sure, it'll be fun to see Depp back in Jack Sparrow mode for the next "Pirates of the Caribbean" installment, but I find myself preferring the weirder pictures now.

I shudder to think what would have happened to me if I'd been infatuated with Luke Perry. Well thinking it over, I know what would have happened. I'd have probably found my way to pretentious movie geekdom eventually, but it would have taken me longer and I probably wouldn't have sat through Polanski's "The Ninth Gate." Johnny Depp has been in a lot of great movies, and he made a lot of not-so-great movies seem great, but even he couldn't salvage that one.