"The reality was a gunshot."
On April 10, 1994, Leaving Las Vegas author John O'Brien died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. He was 33 years old. He was not the character in his book. He was not livingNicolas Cage's life fromthe movie. There was no prostitute who looked like Elisabeth Shue by his side.John O'Brien died alone, in a Beverly Hills apartment, next to apistol with one missing bullet.
"He couldn't drink himself to death," O'Brien's only sibling, sisterErin O'Brien, tells Esquire. "The reality was delirium tremens and sickness and an addiction that rightly or wrongly, that he couldn't escape on his own. I think that was his only escape. A violent suicide was the reality at the end of John's life. Leaving Las Vegas was the highly-stylized romantic fantasy, to me."
In Hollywood, addiction is onepath to aprize. Drama isbusiness. Tragedywins awards. But true stories haunt final products. Reality reverberatesbeyond the closingcredits, oftensensed only by victims and families.In the case of Leaving Las Vegas, thefour-time Oscar nominated drama that turns 25 this month, the gulf between fact and fictioncrackswider with each passing year. Most of us look back at director Mike Figgis' neon-lit descent into hell and see a great movie. But to understand the film in 2015 is to understand John O'Brien, who never saw it on screen.
O'Brien published Leaving Las Vegas in 1990, four years before his suicide. In the book and movie, Los Angeles writer, Ben Sanderson, decides to sell off his possessions (burning the ones he can't flip) and moves to Vegas. He spends the next four weeks drinking himself to death. While in a city of vices, he falls in love with a heart-of-gold hooker named Sera, a sometimes cherubic hallucination who grants him mercy as he fizzles out.When Leaving Las Vegas hit bookshelves, O'Brien was an uncontrollable alcoholic. Though his life would divert from fiction, many critics would posit the novel was John's suicide note. Erin doesn't think so. "After studying his body of work so painstakingly, [the book] was the beautiful poetic way to check out: Taking that long slug of liquor and gurgling into your death with this beautiful woman," she says.
Hollywood's spotlight mytologized O'Brien's demise. A few weeks after signing away the film rights for Leaving Las Vegas, set to be adapted by Figgis, the author killed himself. This came a year after the release ofSheryl Crowe's "autobiographical" hit song "Leaving Las Vegas." The singer's March 1994 apperance on David Letterman's Late Show reportedly angered John. It all bubbled to the surface after his death. Erin doesn't believe any of it provoked her brother to pull the trigger. "I think that he just felt his alcoholism was so profound and so all-consuming and so horrible, that there weren't any options," Erin says. "My guess is in the last few hours of his life the contract for that movie was not even secondary or third in line or fourth in line—just completely inconsequential. I don't think it had any bearing whatsoever."
Less than a month before O'Brien committed suicide, John's father visited his "shakily sober" son in an L.A. hospital. He tried to help him as much as he could. John had been in and out of rehab for years. Nothing seemed to work. Sixteen days after his father returned to his home outside of Cleveland, Ohio, John took his life. Erin doesn't know what happened during John's final days in that Beverly Hills apartment. "My guess is things dissolved very, very quickly," she says. Erin can't speak specifically on what his life looked like during his final days, but imagines it. "How could anything be more black than the period right before the suicide?"
When Erin got wordCage had been cast as Ben, she penned a letter to the actor, saying how she thought John would be pleased with "an actor of your caliber" playing the role. Back then, Cage wasknown forquirky roles in Raising Arizona, Moonstruck, andVampire's Kiss(with its meme-friendly cockroach eating scene). He wasn't aseriousthespian.Vegascatapulted him into a new realm of actor-dom, leading him into action roles like his 1996follow-up, The Rock. But during filming of Leaving Las Vegas, Cage handled the sensitive material with aplomb. "He said to [my] Mom and Dad how moved he was by John's writing," Erin says. "There were just a few poignant and personal connections with him." Erin doesn't see Cage's performance as a pillar of an American tragedy, mainly because she's too close to the story. "There's something sweet and sad and romantic about Ben— and not too realistic," she says. "My reality is John, and the author, and the gun. Cage's performance: I see it and there it is. I'm not a movie critic; I'm John's sister."
On March 25, 1996, almost two years after John's death,Cage accepted the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of alcoholic Ben Sanderson, who drinks himself to death in the final act of Leaving Las Vegas. The movie was released in theaters on October 27, 1995, and for an independent feature, earned a hardy $32 million at the box office. During his terse speech, Cage thanked the producers and his then-wife Patricia Arquette. Then he gave thanks to "the late John O'Brien, whose spirit moved me so much."
Leaving Last Vegas moved Erin and her parents. At the time of its release, they praised Figgis' "stunning job" and how Shue and Cage "dazzle on the screen." The family had a new reason to be proud of their late son's achievements. Still, Erin has one major complaint. Within the first few pages of the book, a group of college guys gang rape Sera. In the movie, the abominable scene happens before the third act. "Sera is a really hard hooker in the book and when Figgis moved that scene to the end of the movie, he softened her," Erin says. "I think if John were alive, that would be his biggest criticism. That totally changed her character." She speculates that could be one of the film's rare concessions to Hollywood. "I think they moved that rape scene because it was such a dark movie, they never would've gotten it made if they left in the beginning."
After the immediate success of the film, John got what he always wanted: literary recognition. The family helped publish his posthumous novels The Assault on Tony's (1996), Stripper Lessons (1997 — Erin's favorite book of John's), a short story called The Tik published in the 2007 Vegas anthology Las Vegas Noir, and Better (2009). In John's wake, his immense writing talent propelled Erin to quit her corporate job in the Cleveland area and become a successful writer, just like her brother (she's published one novel and a memoir). She also became ensnared in taking over her brother's affairs, a torchbearer for his work. She's the self-appointed person to field questions about her brother, and even though sometimes she thinks "John should be doing this," she has no choice. "I kind of shepherd his work," she says. "It's how you gotta treat your dead kin— somebody's gotta do this. It fell on me, so be it." Erin says so many years later, John's writings continue to impact people, especially young people finding his works.
It's been a few years since Erin's watched the film. Every time she views it, she remembers something different. Erin, her parents, John's ex-wife Lisa, and Erin's husband visited the Burbank, Calif. set during filming of the movie. She says everybody involved in the production was respectful to the family, and she specifically remembers being on set for the scene in Sera's (Shue) apartment where Ben spouts the line "I'm not here to force my twisted soul into your life." Erin recalls standing off camera, taking in the smell of Asiatic lilies as Cage delivered with force. She isn't sure what John "will whisper from his papery grave" the next time she takes in the film. Just that he will.
Erin spent twenty-one years parsing John's works for clues. Today, she has reconciled with John's passing and what the movie represents. "At the end of day, Leaving Las Vegas was a novel and a movie, and they both exist in two dimensions." The problem, she says, is distilling the three-dimensional John down to his writing. He was a troubled writer who felt compelled to take his own life by grisly means. But he was also a Stevie Nicks fan. He loved the Star Trek episode "The Tholian Web." He had a taste for airplane food. As Erin observes, the populist refraction of her brother's lifecould only say so much.
John O'Brien's life ended with a gunshot. Leaving Las Vegas, for its intensity, its bravado, and its legacy—an American tragedy that would pave the way for many more—only begins to understand why. "Ben wasn't the real tragedy," Erin reminds us. "John was."
