Touchstone Plus-Or-Minus: Stakeout

When Richard Dreyfuss’ comeback movie, Down And Out In Beverly Hills, was released in 1986, it had been two years since his last picture, The Buddy System. Since then, he appeared to be making up for lost time. Later in 1986, he made a cameo as the narrator in Rob Reiner’s Stand By Me. In March of 1987, his second Touchstone picture, Barry Levinson’s Tin Men, hit screens. Now, just five months later, he was back alongside Emilio Estevez (making his first return to Disney since Tex) in the action buddy comedy Stakeout. The Dreyfussaince of the 1980s was officially in full swing.

Stakeout was written by Jim Kouf, a prolific writer who already had about a dozen produced screenplays under his belt, mostly comedies like Class, Up The Creek and Secret Admirer. A little later that year, another Kouf-written project, the sci-fi thriller The Hidden, made it to theatres. He’d employed the pseudonym “Bob Hunt” on that one, after budget limitations caused him to worry that the end result would be an embarrassment. But once critics and audiences appeared to like it despite its low budget, he’d admit that it turned out better than he’d expected. Kouf would continue to be a presence at Disney and Touchstone well into the 2000s, although he wasn’t always credited for his work, such as serving as an executive producer on Disney’s 1991 adaptation of White Fang. Still, we’ll see his name in this column plenty in the future.