Hardcore (1979) on Netflix
Jake Van Dorn, a Calvinist businessman from Michigan, learns his teenage daughter Kristen vanished on a church trip to California. A private investigator returns with an 8 mm film of her.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb7.1/1017,226 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes76%
Trailer
Plot summary
In Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Calvinist businessman Jake Van Dorn is raising his teenage daughter Kristen himself. She goes missing on a church trip to Bellflower, California, and months pass before the Los Angeles investigator Andy Mast brings him an 8 mm stag film bought in a sex shop, showing Kristen with two men. Convinced she was kidnapped and forced into pornography, Van Dorn flies to Los Angeles, fires Mast and begins his own search through sex shops, brothels and peep shows. Passing himself off as a producer of adult movies, he places an ad to draw informants, one of whom points him to Niki, a streetwise prostitute who says she knows where Kristen is. He pays her to take him through the pornography trade in California.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Hardcore (1979)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warren Beatty was attached to star in Hardcore but clashed with Paul Schrader in pre-production and left the project in August 1976. Beatty wanted the character to search for a missing girlfriend instead of a daughter, feeling he was too young to play a teenager's father.
- Schrader first cast Diana Scarwid as the prostitute Niki, but the studio rejected her as not attractive enough and Season Hubley got the part. Adult film actress Marilyn Chambers also auditioned and was turned down by a casting director who thought she did not fit the image of a porn star.
- George C. Scott's contract on Hardcore required five break days during the shoot because of his drinking problem at the time. Scott and Schrader clashed on set, Scott once calling Schrader a terrible director and the film a piece of shit.
- First-time actress Ilah Davis was cast as the missing daughter Kristen because Schrader thought she was not conventionally beautiful and could be lured by flattery. She was then working as an exotic dancer in New York City and was a member of the Yippies, and Hardcore was her first film role.
- Paul Schrader partly based the screenplay for Hardcore on his own upbringing in the Calvinist church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he studied theology at Calvin College.
- In the original version of Hardcore's screenplay the story ended with Jake never finding his daughter, and later learning of her death in a car accident.
- Schrader shot Hardcore in his hometown of Grand Rapids, using his own childhood church and a factory where he had been employed as filming locations, and cast his parents in uncredited bit parts.
