A new indie film seeks to capture the mythologized man behind Phoenix’s most storied eatery. Does anybody in town really know Jack?
A specter of the past greets you at the restaurant’s unofficial entrance – which, in Goodfellas style, is the back door, through the kitchen – and leads the way as you navigate a maze of tuxedoed waiters into the dining room, pass the iconic L-shaped bar, and finally settle into one of the plush red tuck-and-roll leatherette booths that once seated such bygone legends as Marilyn Monroe and mobster Bugsy Siegel.
Everyone who dines at Durant’s, the 65-year-old Downtown Phoenix landmark steeped in Old Hollywood style and Vegas gangster lore, steps back in time, escorted by what feels like a swaggering ghost. Suddenly, no matter how progressive your views, you’re a Rat Packer. Go ahead, the spirit says: Flirt lecherously with the waitress. Down dirty martinis with that business lunch. There’s always a few folks at the bar who look like they’re stuck in a red velvet-flocked episode of the Twilight Zone.
Actor Tom Sizemore got swept up in Durant’s throwback vibe last year, during a meeting at the restaurant with Phoenix filmmaker Travis Mills, whose indie movie about the storied chophouse, Durant’s Never Closes, is scheduled to begin filming in March (a distributor and release date have yet to be established).
“He’s stuck in the past, but he is so self-righteous about it, he doesn’t know he’s doing it,” Sizemore says of the character at the center of Mills’ script. “He thinks people are lying to him about the world outside.”
Sizemore is talking about his starring role as the restaurant’s late owner, Jack Durant, a part for which the mercurial actor, known as much for his roles in Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down as for his outbursts on reality TV, seems well-suited.
The hot-tempered, lascivious restaurateur died in 1987 – alone, without heirs, leaving his home to none of his five ex-wives but instead to his English bulldog. The restaurant, meanwhile, defaulted to Durant’s silent backer, Jack McElroy, who died in 1993. Today Durant’s is run by McElroy’s daughter-in-law, Carol McElroy, who admits its namesake’s checkered past – which includes alleged mob ties and mistreatment of female staff and customers that would have mired him in sexual harassment suits today – hasn’t exactly been bad for business.
“People see the restaurant and the man through different lenses,” allows McElroy, who says Durant’s is keeping a hands-off approach to Mills’ movie, which will largely be filmed in a replica of the iconic restaurant erected inside producer Wayne Rainey’s MonOrchid art gallery on Roosevelt Row – largely because the place itself remains busy. “But our lens is the day-to-day operation of this incredible establishment.”
Durant’s Never Closes is also slated to star Pam Grier, Seinfeld alum Michael Richards, Joe Don Baker, Peter Bogdanovich and Dina Meyer. It’s the latest incarnation of a mythology that began with Arizona author Mabel Leo’s 1996 biography, The Saga of Jack Durant, and expanded with Terry Earp’s long-running play, In My Humble Opinion (both receive writing credits on the film). But whereas Leo’s book comprised an oral history of the man, told by the many who claimed to know him, and Earp’s play cast Durant as a foul-mouthed ghost retelling his exploits to a passed-out drunk at the bar, Mills’ movie places the real man at odds with his own outsized image. Did Durant really live the outrageous life his customers remain so enthralled with? Or did he unwittingly invent a fictionalized persona that’s now forever trapped inside its dark walls? “The restaurant becomes his heaven, hell and limbo,” Mills says, declining to give away too much of the story.
“He doesn’t want to be a guy who just gets old and ends up waiting to die,” says Sizemore, 52. “He wants to have had a life that, at the very minimum, was interesting. And he wants to feel the people that he got close to were, on some level, fascinating people. Particularly the women.
“And they’re not,” Sizemore continues. “They’re not. They’re ordinary. Like most people, he’s had an ordinary life. The most extraordinary thing he’s done is maintain this beautiful eatery. And he takes it for granted.”
Leo concurs Durant, born James Earl Allen in Tellico Plains, Tennessee, invented much of his backstory, taking the name of a then-popular burlesque comedian and dressing in tailored Italian suits.
“He made himself into who he wanted to be,” says the 77-year-old author, who has penned two sequels to her Durant bio. But sometimes, she observes, the humble Southern boy showed through all the bluster. “He’d say these horribly sexist things to one of his waitresses,” she says. “But then at the end of the day she’d find an extra $500 in her purse. He knew when he was wrong, but he didn’t want anyone to know he had a big heart. Because then he lost some of his power.”
“He’s a great subject to bring to the screen,” says Mills, who hopes to follow up the biopic with a film about the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles (plotted in the Durant’s lounge, as legend has it). “Like a Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull, or even a Citizen Kane. There’s just so much in that character – sadness, tragedy, humor, fear, mystery.”
