The Outsiders

The film began with a letter, not a studio decision. Jo Ellen Misakian, a librarian at Lone Star Elementary School in Fresno, wrote to Francis Ford Coppola for her seventh and eighth graders, with about 15 pages of children’s signatures. Casting was odd too: Coppola gathered the candidates in one room to watch each other, swapping which part they read. Ralph Macchio recalls feeling like an outsider there; Rob Lowe was making his feature debut. Coppola’s first assembly was 133 minutes long; Warner Bros. judged it too long and the release came down to 91. The 2005 Complete Novel edition did not only restore material; it dropped the lakeside hair talk, the rabbit and the poker game, and rebalanced his father Carmine’s romantic score with period songs, an objection he had not been prepared to raise while his father lived. The church fire got away from him: he pushed for more flame, it grew, and a downpour doused it. Novelist S. E. Hinton scouted locations and appears as a nurse in Dallas’s hospital room. A good fit if you take Tulsa here as a legend built from sunsets and narration rather than a realistic criminal world. Not for viewers expecting each character to carry the weight the novel gives them; the release cut drops nearly a third of that assembly.