My Own Private Idaho (1991) on Netflix
Mike Waters, a Portland hustler with narcolepsy, is set on finding his long-lost mother. His friend Scott Favor, the son of Portland's mayor, joins the search.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.9/1068,014 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
Surreal character study focusing on the friendship between two male hustlers, Mike and Scott, in Portland, Oregon. They live on the streets, do drugs, and sell themselves to men and women. Mike is quiet, gay and suffers from narcolepsy. Abandoned as a child, he is obsessed with finding his long-lost mother. Scott is the rebellious son of a high-ranking family, who lives this life mostly to embarrass his father. Mike is in love with Scott, who still maintains he is straight and insists that his wild lifestyle on the streets is only temporary. Together, they embark on a quest to find Mike's mother, traveling from Portland to Idaho to Italy, with Scott picking up a beautiful girl along the way.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about My Own Private Idaho (1991)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- When River Phoenix's agent would not even show him the script, director Gus Van Sant had Keanu Reeves personally deliver it, riding his own 1974 Norton Commando motorcycle from his family home in Canada all the way to the Phoenix family ranch in Micanopy, Florida, over the winter holidays.
- The campfire scene, in which Mike professes his love for Scott, was originally just three pages, but River Phoenix expanded it into an eight-page scene, making the character's homosexuality obvious as opposed to Van Sant's more ambiguous original version.
- Kiefer Sutherland later revealed he had turned down Van Sant's offer to play the lead role of Mike because he wanted to go skiing instead, a decision he said in a 2012 interview that he still regrets.
- The idea to combine the two scenarios came to Van Sant after seeing Orson Welles's Chimes at Midnight. He said he thought the Henry IV plays "were really a street story", and realized that Prince Hal in the plays resembled Scott while the sidekick was Mike.
- The film's title comes directly from the song "Private Idaho" by the B-52's, which Van Sant heard while visiting the state in the early 1980s.
- Mike's narcolepsy in the film was inspired by a real person, a guide Van Sant met while gathering research material who always looked as though he was about to fall asleep.
- The film's Shakespearean dialogue was contentious even within its own production: some New Line executives wanted Van Sant to cut the Henry IV-derived scenes entirely, while foreign distributors pushed to keep as much of the Shakespeare in the film as possible.
