Role: Samantha Delongpre
Genre: Drama
Director: Zalman King
Written by: MacGregor Douglas
Running time: 104 min
Release Date: April 22, 1988
Additional Cast: Sherilyn Fenn , Richard Tyson
Synopsis
April Delongpre (Sherilyn Fenn) is the well-born daughter of a powerful Alabama senator and heiress to an old and respectable Southern family. One summer, while her fianc? Chad Douglas Fairchild (Martin Hewitt) is away on business, April commences an affair with Perry (Richard Tyson), a carnival roustabout she had met a few days previously.
April’s grandmother Belle Delongpre (Louise Fletcher) has assigned the local sheriff Earl Hawkins (Burl Ives) to keep an eye on her. Belle and the sheriff conspire to get rid of Perry on the day of April and Chad’s wedding. Perry escapes, and the film ends with April, wearing Chad’s wedding band, finds Perry and they kiss.
The film was shot throughout Los Angeles County, with the major sequences filmed at The Shambala Animal Preserve, which is owned and operated by actress Tippi Hedren.
Production
Donald Borchers had just left New World Pictures, where he had made a number of successful productions. He set up his own production unit and tried to make Moving Target (later made with Jason Bateman). This project fell over and Borchers was looking for another film. He knew Zalman King from when King tried to get Nine and a Half Weeks made at New World; King showed him his script for Two Moon Junction. Borchers liked the script calling it “a page turner” and he bought the rights and raised the finance. In the original draft of the script Richard Tyson’s character died at the end but Borchers pressed for this to be changed.
It was Richard Tyson’s second film following Three O’Clock High. “It was magic to get cast in that role,” he later said. “I was nice to a girl for the last time ever in a movie. I thought I did a good job. I get stopped for that too – all the time.”
Zalman King said he cast Tyson because “I was looking for someone who was a teen idol. And he did have it in that movie, I thought. It was one of the few times that I could see his beauty, because I love the way his face looked. When I met him he was a football player and he was very beefy and drank a lot of beer. And I asked him to please lose weight and he did, and for that amount of time I thought he was very, very attractive… [His character] is out of a romance novel… It was romance, although not much of a plot, and that’s what I needed: someone who was bold and strong, and was cut and ripped, and he had charm—I don’t think he was everybody’s cup of tea, 100%, but I thought he fit quite well.”
Sherilyn Fenn later said she thought the movie “felt really exploitative.”
The film was shot throughout Los Angeles County, California, with the major sequences filmed at the Shambala Animal Preserve, which is owned and operated by actress Tippi Hedren.