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Alpha Dog
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 Alpha Dog Production NotesFrankie is a Los Angeles drug dealer. He comes from a good family, owns his home, several cars and enjoys partying with his friends. Frankie is 19. When his friend Jake welches on a debt, Frankie and his boys kidnap Jake's 15-year-old brother Butch and hold him as a marker. Even though Butch has numerous chances to escape, he doesn't. He's enjoying partying with them, losing his virginity and having a good time - until something goes horribly wrong.
A drama based on the life of Jesse James Hollywood, a drug dealer who became one of the youngest men ever to be on the FBI's most wanted list. The film the story of Johnny Truelove (Hirsch), a young man from southern California's San Gabriel Valley whose ambition is to follow in his father's footsteps. When one of Johnny's plans goes awry, his father is forced to step in and save his son from a life behind bars.
"Alpha Dog" is inspired by the true story of Jesse James Hollywood, a mid-level drug dealer from the San Gabriel Valley whose thirst for power led him to become the youngest man ever to appear on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Young, flush with money and at the center of their self-created universe—life for Johnny and his friends doesn’t come with any consequences. Anything can happen. And over the course of three days under the hot California sun, something does.
Now, Cassavetes provides a startling and all-too-real look at contemporary youth culture with Alpha Dog, which tracks 72 hours in the lives of a group of Southern California teens—three days when everything suddenly spins out of control.
When raging hothead Jake (Foster) fails to come up with deal money he owes Truelove, the situation escalates into a battle for dominance that culminates with Johnny and his gang impulsively kidnapping Jake’s little brother, Zack (Yelchin). En route to Palm Springs, the group decides to keep the kid as a marker and slowly begins including him in their schedule, alternating between parties and slack time. With no parents in sight, they grow used to having him around. Under the temporary care of Johnny’s charismatic friend Frankie (Timberlake), Zack now enjoys an illicit summer fantasy of drinking, girls and new experiences.
Out in the desert, everyone soon begins to lose sight that Zack is a hostage, a “stolen boy,” and he can’t just be simply returned. As the hours turn into days, solutions to the Zack problem begin to dwindle. Bad decisions are followed by worse ones. Johnny’s dad (Willis) attempts to track down his son and convince him to return the hostage. With police called in by the boy’s distraught mother (Stone), the situation grows even more complex, and Johnny finds himself out of his league with no idea how to fix it. For Johnny, the line between playing a thug and becoming one soon blurs, and very real, very adult and very dire consequences result for everyone involved.
About the Production
In summer 2000—before the release of his films The Notebook and John Q—filmmaker Nick Cassavetes found himself putting pen to paper to outline a story about some of the types of teens who populated his daughter Gina’s high school. He pondered what would happen if a group of kids took a prank way too far, and made a series of decisions and missteps that would ensnare them in a situation from which they could not be extricated.
While researching the family life of some of these San Fernando, California, Valley kids, Cassavetes found their home dynamics to be surprising and particularly compelling. These stories would quickly find their way into a screenplay. “I expected to find a bunch of spoiled, disaffected rich kids raised by parents with a great sense of ennui, and that’s not what I found at all,” he explains. “What I ended up finding, which frankly I’m guilty of in my own life, was that it’s a complicated world now where both parents have jobs and get caught up in their own lives. The by-product of that is you find yourself ‘checking in’ with your children to find out if they’re okay, where they are going to be and if they need any money…instead of putting in the time and hanging out with them.”
Cassavetes continues, “That was the thing that impressed me the most and was the common thread among almost all of these people. Most of them were people I wouldn’t find great fault with. The problems were born out of letting all these children get together and make decisions without any kind of parental guidance or interference, and they could create the ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances and coincidences that would allow something to happen that never should have.”
After many discussions with colleagues and extensive research about the types who inhabit this world, Cassavetes would create the screenplay for Alpha Dog. He found one of the keys to unlocking the script lay in the way these alpha-teens spoke. “These are not really good kids that just lose their way for one weekend. I wanted to use language that I think the kids use, which is very offensive and almost an assault. But for me, that would give the film a type of genuineness. I didn’t want to back away from them being unsympathetic. Children can be ugly. They haven’t had their time to get their routines and their personalities in order. They have many rough edges, and I didn’t want to lose that.”
Veteran producer Sidney Kimmel, head of Sidney Kimmel Entertainment, found the project to be a great package for his company, which was built on a diverse offering of intriguing, offbeat stories helmed by talented filmmakers. He offers, “Nick comes from the best of Hollywood talent, and has made his own name with his actor-driven films and his acting work. He’s able to easily shift gears—moving from the romance of The Notebook to the gritty realism of Alpha Dog. I was extremely enthusiastic to get behind this picture. It’s an unflinching look at what can happen when a series of bad turns leads to even worse consequences. It’s a kind of cautionary tale about contemporary culture, but it doesn’t preach.”
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Susan Hartunian (Dominique Swain), Frankie Ballenbacher (Justin Timberlake), Sabrina Pope (Charity Shea) and Keith Stratten (Christopher Marquette) party in Alpha Dog.
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