‘We did that fight 72 times’: the throat-ripping secrets of Patrick Swayze’s Road House

The Road House crew can’t quite agree on just how many nights Patrick Swayze and Marshall R Teague – Swayze’s on-screen nemesis (turned real-life best pal) – spent fighting to the death. Director Rowdy Herrington thinks they fought for two nights. Stunt and fight choreographer Charlie Picerni recalls just one. Teague himself – a former US Navy man and NATO kickboxing champion – says that he and Swayze were going at it for a total of five nights. “Five nights, five-and-a-half hours a night,” Teague explains. “We set up the cameras and all we did was fight. We did that fight 72 times.”

In Road House, Swayze plays the absurdly-named Dalton, a hard-as-they-come, philosophising bouncer (“Pain don’t hurt”) who’s hired to clean up the Double Deuce – the roughest, toughest honkytonk in Jasper, Missouri. It’s a small town with a big troublemaker problem, and Dalton soon butts heads with the local baddies. And what a magnificently maned head it is. “That hair has turned into the bane of existence,” Swayze later said. “Once people started saying Swayze invented the mullet.”

The big fight comes when Dalton faces the town’s most sadistic henchman, Jimmy (played by Teague) in a moonlit, riverside showdown. Crackling with homoerotic tension – “I used to f--- guys like you in prison!” boasts Jimmy – it’s one of the all-time great movie fights, and ends with an all-time ludicrous kill shot as Dalton rips Jimmy’s throat out with his bare hands – one of the many, many improbable moments that make Road House such a slice of joyous, ridiculous, hyper-violent man-cinema.

It feels absolutely right that no one agrees on how the fight played out. It’s earned a cult-like status in its own right, based on a number of apparently-true-but-apocryphal-sounding stories: that Swayze and Teague battered each other for real, forcing the crew to jump in; that the throat-ripping was inspired by a real incident; and – best of all – that a gaggle of Dirty Dancing-crazed women rafted up the river for a glimpse of Swayze.

Just as Dalton wanders the land, sorting out trouble and making a double-hard myth of himself, Road House – trashed by critics back in 1989 – exists in an ever-present, near-legendary state. Not just on television (it’s said to always be showing somewhere, on some channel, at all times) but in the male psyche, where it’s become shorthand for the basest masculine pleasures: fights, boobs, swearing, beer, explosions. And starring Swayze, one of the great specimens of cinematic masculinity: dancer, athlete, martial artist, dreamboat, and real-life Texas cowboy.

Now a Jake Gyllenhaal-starring remake hits Prime Video, following a troubled road to the small screen. Director Doug Liman boycotted the SXSW screening to protest the film going straight to streaming, while fiery super producer Joel Silver, who also produced the original, departed. Some reports said he was fired, though Silver’s representatives denied it. Meanwhile, the writer of the original screenplay, R Lance Hill, has filed a lawsuit that alleges AI was used to complete the film during the SAG-AFTRA strike, which Amazon MGM has denied.

The new film reimagines Dalton as a former MMA fighter and pits him against real-life UFC bad boy, Conor McGregor. But is Road House 2024 tough enough to be so ridiculous that it will go the distance of the original? “I wish it well, I really do,” says Teague about the remake. “If they can hang on for 36 years, good for them…”

Looking back, Rowdy Herrington admits that he didn’t want to make the original Road House. “It was so broad,” he says about the script, written by R Lance Hill (writing as David Lee Henry) and Hilary Henkin. Everything was right there on the page: nudity, violence, ridiculousness. Joel Silver boasted that he made movies for 13-year-old boys and pitched Road House to incoming cast members as, quite simply, “boobs and bombs”.

Certainly, Road House is ludicrous from the off. Within minutes of us meeting Dalton, he’s sewing up a knife wound on his own shoulder. He has a far-and-wide reputation as “the best damn cooler in the business” (cooler apparently means bouncer-in-chief). Dalton is so notorious for his chucking-people-out-of-clubs skills that he only needs a singular name – like Prince, Bono, or Madonna. As the story goes, he once tore a man’s throat out, the guilt of which he still carries around.

The ridiculousness continues: when Dalton is hired to clean up the Double Deuce he demands $5,000 up front and $500 per night (that’s around $1,250 in 2024) – probably more than half of the Double Deuce’s takings. Not to mention the thousands of dollars the bar must lose in smashed-up furniture and glasses every night, once the like-clockwork brawls kick-off. As the bar’s resident bluesman (played by blind guitarist Jeff Healey) describes it, the Double Deuce is “the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing”. It’s also the sort of place where women happily strip for the drunken hound dogs – a frequent cause of the barroom brawling – and the fighting talk is colourful. “What’s the matter you chicken d---?” asks one knife-wielding troublemaker.

Herrington may have been reluctant, but Road House was a foot in the studio door. And Joel Silver was on a hot-streak of producing money-spinning action thrillers, packed with grit, testosterone, and quotable zingers: 48 Hrs, Commando, Predator, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard. Looking back now, the cranked-up machismo of Road House plays into Silver’s reputation – an outsized personality known for rambunctious spending and industry-shaking outbursts. Sylvester Stallone claimed to have seen Silver “recede someone’s hairline” with his screaming.

“Joel was a maniac on every film,” laughs Charlie Picerni, who worked on a number of Silver productions, including Die Hard. “But I loved him because he made things interesting.” Picerni adds: “Joel was a character, no doubt about it. If things went right, he loved everybody. If things went badly, you’re done.”

Silver persuaded Herrington to make Road House and told him not to worry about any critical backlash. “They’ll blame me,” Silver reassured him.

“I told Joel there had to be work done on the script,” says Herrington. “There was some really crazy s--- in there. Really nuts.” (One of the oft-spun legends about Road House concerns a castration scene that Herrington refused to shoot.)

Silver also charmed Kelly Lynch into co-starring in Road House. As Lynch recalled in a 2012 interview, Silver told her “I don’t make art, I buy it” and promised that Road House would be “the best drive-in movie ever made”. He then reminded Lynch that she was under studio contract so ultimately didn’t have a choice.

On the flipside, first-time actress (and now stuntwoman) Julie Michaels landed the role of Denise, a Double Deuce siren and gangster’s moll, by pandering to Silver’s ego. Michaels was just 19 years and – at her agent’s suggestion – wrote “property of Joel Silver” on her thigh and revealed it during a dance audition.

Swayze, meanwhile, had gyrated his way to superstardom with 1987’s Dirty Dancing. “I thought I had prepared myself for this success,” he said in the wake of Dirty Dancing’s $214 million box office. “I’ve dealt with a certain amount of notoriety for six years now, so I felt I knew the ropes. But I knew nothing.”

Looking to hot-step away from the heartthrob persona, Swayze declined what he described as “crotch first” roles. He wanted to make something macho – an action film to show off his rough-and-tumble skills. “I’d better get my jollies off doing whatever physical movies I want to do before the knees go,” he said. (Swayze suffered from knee problems for years and needed to have a knee drained twice while filming Road House’s river fight.) “Plus, I kind of like it,” Swayze said about the action, “being from Texas and all.”

Swayze trained for Road House with Charlie Picerni and Benny “The Jet” Urquidez, a legendary kickboxing champion (Urquidez can be seen trading blows with John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank – another all-time great movie fight). Urquidez was impressed with Swayze’s martial arts skills. “Benny actually wanted me to start competing,” Swayze later said. “Wanted me to go on the kickboxing circuit.”

Picerni was one of several heavy-hitters behind the camera. “A top-of-the-line stuntman,” says Herrington. Indeed, Road House was punching above its weight in terms of its crew, including editor Frank J. Urioste (RoboCop, Die Hard) – “One of the greatest editors of all time,” says Herrington – and cinematographer Dean Cundey (The Thing, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park). The cast and crew knew full well what Road House was. “They call this movie a guilty pleasure,” says Herrington. “We all know better but giggle about it. We knew we were doing that. We weren’t naive about it.”

“None of us thought we were going in there and making Gone with the Wind,” says Teague. “We’re not looking at an award-winning picture here.”

Road House is amusingly low-stakes. Dalton has to just stop a few bar fights (which he does by, well, having a lot of bar fights). Meanwhile, the local kingpin, Brad Wesley (a riotous Ben Gazzara), exerts his influence over the town by demanding menaces money from the poor mechanic and swerving all over the road whenever he feels like having a laugh. Ultimately, Dalton gets on the villains’ bad side because he won’t let them get drunk, have sex in the storeroom, or enjoy a good old-fashioned punch-up whenever they want.

The fun of Road House is how it escalates to monster truck carnage, actual murder, and explosions so big that Herrington thinks the film’s SFX coordinator “would be in prison for arson if he wasn’t in the film business”. Collateral damage includes Dalton’s best friend – the also-brilliantly-named Wade Garrett (Sam Elliot), a gangly, hard-fighting mentor – who gets a knife in the chest for his troubles. Sam Elliot was also reluctant to sign up, so Herrington had to do some Joel Silver-like persuading of his own. He met with Elliot and pleaded, “Sam, if you don’t do this movie, I’m f-----!”

For Herrington, Road House was both a cartoon and modern western. Dalton is the new gunslinger, riding into town to sort out the crooked sheriff. In Dalton’s case, he drives into town in his flash Mercedes. In fact, he refuses to take a plane to Missouri. “I don’t fly, too dangerous” says Dalton, a man who has so many fights that he carries his medical records around with him. Dalton’s “I don’t fly” mantra is just one of his many worldly lessons or life-rules-to-die-by – macho one-liners dressed up as philosophical teachings. Other corkers include “nobody ever wins a fight,” and – the absolute classic – “pain don’t hurt”.

Dalton is a spiritual type of chap, which he proves by practicing tai chi with his top off, and one of the few ‘80s action heroes with a degree in philosophy. Swayze’s own worldview was reflected in the character. “I really do believe in the peaceful warrior concept,” said Swayze about Dalton. “Yet I’m very clear we have to be trained to protect our world.” Dalton is so double-hard that it causes him anguish – a pacifist heart tortured by his penchant for plucking out tracheas. He has to get over the horror of killing a man by kicking the stuffing out of a load more. The character stands alongside Swayze’s other alpha types: wrong-side-of-the-tracks loverboy Johnny Castle in Dirty Dancing and bromantic adrenaline junkie Bodhi in Point Break.

The ladies in Road House are certainly impressed with Dalton’s wounded warrior shtick. Julie Michaels’ Denise, panting for Dalton from the second she claps eyes on him, performs an impromptu striptease for his benefit. It’s the kind of casual nudity that doesn’t happen in mainstream films now – from a time before intimacy coordinators were standard practice. “I think I was probably more uncomfortable than the girls,” says Herrington about filming the nudity. “Is it exploitative? On some level it definitely is,” he admits. “It was part of what the whole movie was about.” 

Tragically, Julie Michaels’ boyfriend took his own life the day before they filmed her striptease – and she still got up and performed it.

Road House’s iconic sex scene is between Kelly Lynch and Swayze – standing, jeans still on, thrusting against a stone-cladded wall. Swayze worked out the scene with his wife, Lisa Niemi, and described it as “probably the hottest I’ve ever done, and the clothes don’t even come off”. The scene is also the source of an amusing Road House coda. Whenever Bill Murray or one of his brothers catch Road House on TV, they call Lynch’s husband, Mitch Glazer, to taunt him down the phone about it. “Kelly’s having sex with Patrick Swayze right now,” Murray would say. “They’re doing it. He’s throwing her against the rocks.” Murray once called from Russia, as if to prove that Road House is always on somewhere.

When Herrington first read the script, he worried that the script’s many vulgarities would actually turn off women – sexist doozies such as, “What do you say you and me get nipple-to-nipple?” Which must be the world’s least successful chat-up line. (Herrington tried to cut out some of the coarser lines during the edit, but found they’d be reinserted when the film arrived in cinemas.) But Swayze’s sex appeal was unshakeable. Trucks filled with women, all thirsting for Swayze after Dirty Dancing, turned up at filming locations. “Women throw themselves at my feet all the time, some of them the most beautiful women you could ever wish to meet,” said Swayze in a 1988 interview. “Older ladies are the worst. They put their hands right on my butt. Then I hear them say, ‘I did it, Myrtle, I did it!’”

Herrington experienced it first-hand when they were filming in Fresno. “Patrick had his motorhome on the street,” he recalls. “He came out and there was this mob of girls. It was like Elvis! They tried to rip his clothes off. Tim Moore [the executive producer] and I had to get in there and push them away. Patrick was freaked out. He got almost instantly famous. Girls were mad about him… the mixture of a really masculine man who can dance is a powerful draw for women. They see his sensitivity and strength.”

In the Double Deuce, Dalton’s rampant sexiness seems to catch the eye of the baddies, too. It’s easy to see the campier elements 35 years later, though Marshall Teague’s Jimmy – with his crucifix earring and impeccably coiffed hair – has a sadistic-but-sexually-charged hankering for Dalton. “You’re a-- is mine,” Jimmy sneers. 

As the Road House legend goes, there was a sort-of beef between Swayze and Teague – a method-like tension that spilled over from their characters. Herrington remembers seeing Swayze and Teague “snarling at each other” over lunch. Teague says that crewmembers got in his ear about Swayze and told Teague to “tick him off” – to give their upcoming fight an extra edge. “I said, ‘I can do that, I can make him mad,’” says Teague. “Did we snarl at each other? Yeah. Was it for real? Yeah, it was.”

Teague insists that the actual fight was as real as it could be, too. When they first squared up, Swayze hit him with a kick to the stomach, which Teague brushed off.  “I said, ‘If that’s the best kick you’ve got, this movie is going to suck,’” recalls Teague. “With his next kick I went back a little bit and grabbed his foot, pushed it down, and said, ‘Dang boy, bring it!’ This is where we stopped the snarling. He got up and didn’t say a word except ‘roll camera’. We went back into it and he kicked me so hard that I went off the ground and skipped on my butt, going backwards about 10 feet. I said, ‘That’s a kick man.’ He looked at me and said, ‘You like this s---, don’t you?’ I said, ‘No, I love this s---!’”

Swayze put his hand on Teague’s shoulder and said, “What do you say we don’t cheat the audience?” As Swayze explained about the big fight: “When we kick each other, we’re literally lifting each other off the ground, but have enough control to not break bones.”

It was certainly real enough to convince the crew, says Teague. “We started this fight and it got so vicious that the next thing I know the entire crew – Joel Silver, everybody – was piling on us and holding us to the ground. They were going, ‘Cut it out guys! You’re killing each other!’ We’re trying to spit out the sand and we’re saying, ‘Get off us, we’re trying to do this fight for you!’”

The fight was choreographed by Charlie Picerni, who was also second unit director. For Picerni, the key to staging a great movie fight is giving the characters motivation – to have them execute moves that would make sense if the fight was happening for real – which he did by drawing on real-life experience. “I don’t just choreograph a fight to make it look good for Hollywood,” he says. “I choreograph a fight for the situations that the character is in. I’ve been in a lot of situations in my life and I got out of them luckily – I incorporate that in movies.” He adds: “You’ve got to have motivation and to put yourself in that situation. ‘What would I do?’ Just like an actor does in a dramatic part.”

It is a rollicking fight. No flounce, no bullet time. Just a pair of alphas going at it. “The reason the fight worked so well, is that I had two guys who were very coordinated,” says Picerni. “They came up with some moves that I incorporated into the fight and it all blended together. Normally I’d have to get doubles. But Patrick knew what he was doing and Marshall did martial arts. It came together much easier because of what they knew.”

At one point Teague grabbed a log and cracked it into Swayze’s ribs. Swayze later admitted that he’d made a mistake going topless for the fight – because he couldn’t wear any padding – and the most time-consuming aspect was having to cover up the bruises on his body. “Our rib cages were black,” says Teague. “Our legs were black.” 

There’s some debate about who came up with Jimmy’s “I used to f--- guys like you in prison!” line. Teague once claimed credit for coming up with it though others said Joel Silver. Teague is happy to yield. He can believe that it might have been Silver. “Joel would sit there on his phone and shout, ‘Say this!’” laughs Teague.

It’s appropriate that in one of the manliest films of all time, the mano-a-mano punch-up was a bonding moment for Swayze and Teague. “We were so utterly exhausted on the last night that we were leaning on each other,” says Teague. “He whispered, ‘Are you OK for one more?’ I said, ‘Yeah, you?’ It was a lovely moment.” They remained close friends until Swayze died in 2009.

The actual throat ripping – a move Dalton has to pull out because it’s kill or be killed – came from Herrington. “My college roommate had a friend who was a martial artist,” he says. “My roommate told me that he’d been attacked and he did this move where he plucked the guy’s trachea out. I suggested it and it ended up in the script.”

Both Teague and Picerni agree that as over the top as it seems, it’s possible. “It’s a little much,” says Picerni, “but a guy that’s really into martial arts can do that. They can pull your throat out.”

Teague recalls they needed to get the shot fast because the sun was coming up. It took just twelve minutes to apply the make-up effects to his throat and they filmed it in one take. “It all came down to the choreography,” says Teague. “Boom, boom, boom – grab, slap, rip it out, and kick me into the water.” To this day, Road House fans always check Teague’s throat to make sure it’s still intact.

Test screenings of Road House were so positive that the film’s release was brought forward a few months. It hit cinemas on May 19 1989. Reviews were brutal – “noisy, grimy, implausible” wrote one US critic – and the box office was modest, with a haul of $30 million in the US. When producers of Ghost were considering Swayze for Ghost, they watched Road House. Once the credits rolled, director Jerry Zucker announced: “No way on God’s green earth will Patrick Swayze ever do this movie!” “They were lucky to have him,” says Herrington, quite rightly.

Road House gained its cult following on VHS and through never-ending TV repeats. “Someone told me there was an article in Playboy saying that we’d broken the record for the most television showings,” says Herrington. 

Thirty-five years on, Road House is categorised as so bad it’s good. Even Kelly Lynch called it “like the best worst film ever made.” That underplays its cultural wallop. Road House is a film about masculinity in overdrive – one of the last stops on the road out of 1980s action and all of its excesses. The 2024 version will do well to be talked about as a macho classic in 35 years’ time.

“It’s like making a sequel to Die Hard,” says Charlie Picerni. “Or look at all the Rockys they made. It was never as good as the first one.”