A Pound of Flesh

"Tarrya little, there is something else.
This bond doth give thee no jot of blood.
The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh'"
-Portia, Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare=

The quote from The Merchant of Venice above may be among the most sanguine on the nature of justice.

At first glance, Portia is using a technicality, but, in fact, it is far more. It hopes to define the line between justice and vengeance, between addressing a wrong and trying to deal with the frustration that senseless death brings.

I have written before on Sarah, and on the safety responsibilities of the First Assistant Director. As I read the recent deal offered to First Assistant Director Hillary Swartz on Midnight Rider, I found myself tripping over that fine line between responsibility and compassion like a DUI suspect attempting to walk a straight line.

I've written often on the First AD's responsibility for safety on set, and my anger at what happened to Sarah.

When I first read the report of  Sarah's death, my first reaction was "where the hell was the First AD."

Yet, as I read the verdict against the First AD, Hillary Schwartz, I could not help but feel like a ping-pong ball bouncing around with different feelings. A more detailed recap here.

The sentence was a 10 year probation, and a lifetime ban of working as director or assistant director or any capacity where she is involved in the safety of others, as well as a $5000 fine.

My first reaction to the latter was - who would hire her?

Sadly, I know the answer. Without naming names, I worked with a guy who was directly responsible for the death of an NYU student on a film shoot. In fact, this guy now has his own company that does pretty well. In my experience with him - after he had gotten a student killed - he was still willing to risk lives to get the shot.

I am sure there is a director somewhere who would hire Hillary exactly because she would bend the rules. That is why this verdict is so important. I've talked about ADs who have been willing to sacrifice jobs in the interest of safety, as well as my own experience there.

Further down in the article, it did mention two years of prison time for low-life director  Randall Miller. Let's be clear - this is a guy who, in the making-of doc on a previous film CBGB, made light of risking the life of an infant.

"I'd like to take a moment just to emphasize in the film industry the importance of the A.D. They are in charge of safety. That emphasizes that Hillary Schwartz apparently failed in her duty," Jones' father Richard told judge Anthony Harrison before the sentencing. "That being said, this is a very difficult decision for [Sarah's mother] Elizabeth and myself, but considering the situation we are in agreement with the D.A. for this resolution."

There are some who would have preferred the AD received jail time, that it would have sent a stronger message. I can't say they are wrong. However, outside of Sarah, no parties were more aggrieved than her parents, in this case the word aggrieved being painfully fitting. They likely know horrible details that we do not.

If they are good with this resolution, then so am I. Assistant Directors are under enormous pressures from all sides, and Hillary failed the test. Sarah's parents deserve credit for not asking for the pound of flesh to which they were entitled.

As far as I'm concerned, director Miller can't do enough time. However, when I think of him, and of Hillary, the First AD, I can't help but remember this scene from the great writer, Aaron Sorkin.

In A Few Good Men, Sorkin borrows from the classic film Mutiny on the Bounty. In that film, as with A Few Good Men, the failures of the commanding officer are brought to light by bright lawyers.

After they embarrass the commanding officer, though, there are still consequences for those on trial.

At the end of Mutiny on the Bounty, lawyer Barney Greenwald  offers the fact that just because  something Queeg was off, it doesn't mean that Lt. Maryk (played by Van Johnson) was free of blame. Ultimately, though, he felt others were more to blame, which is why he took the case. As Maryk let fellow officers down Hillary let down the entire crew, especially Sarah.



In A Few Good Men, after attorney Kaffee shows the illegal actions of Colonel Jessop, one defendant does not understand why he is still being punished. This scene should ring true to Hillary.



Hillary, it was your job to protect Sarah Jones. Regardless of the recklessness of director Miller , who sadly only got two years in prison, it does not change your responsibility. You were supposed to fight for people who couldn't fight for themselves - like Sarah.






* A very harrowing description from a Deadline article on the details of what happened, as recited by the DA during the sentencing portion of Randall Miller's agreement. Deadline has, IMO, done the best reporting on this story and followed it closely from the beginning.

All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - The Final Cut

"I don't try to guess what a million people will like.  It's hard enough to know what I like."
-John Huston

After JR's death, there was a definite mourning period. He was cremated, and we got together on a beach in New Jersey and spread his ashes, joking as we could amid the tears.

Of course, Jack and I were as determined as ever to finish the project, and we collaborated as much as we could with Jack in Chicago, where JR's editing suite was located, and me in New York. Jack did the editing with JR's assistant editor, which added another dynamic to the process. In theory, it was good to have a fresh set of eyes. In reality, since he had only been an assistant editor, it meant Jack did the first cut pretty much the way he wanted to do it.

My first reaction to the first cut was that it was slow, but that's not unusual. I assumed that we could pick up the pace. I knew the problem started at home.

From the first reading of the script, through listening to sides at auditions, it occurred to me that, despite my best efforts, the script was too "talky." I have a great love for dialogue, and ever since Town Diary, I have pushed myself and the filmmakers I produced to pare down the words. Talking is great on stage, but it is hard to sustain it in film.

There are exceptional writers who can get in a great deal of dialogue and keep a story moving; Aaron Sorkin is my hero in this area. The difference is that the dialogue is always active, always moving the plot forward, and he does a great job of having his characters on the move as well.

Our story was about a filmmaker with regrets, battling his own past and that of a town's. Too often, I felt the scenes were telling and not showing. Worse yet, they often were reflective, which works better in novels than it does on screen.

Part of that was Jack's rather straight-forward style of shooting, which made the dialogue too precious, but I have to take responsibility for laying that foundation for him.

One scene in particular bothered me. The main character, Brian, has a strained relationship with his father. At one point, he discusses it with his mother. This is an adult man in his 40s trying to come to terms with his relationship with his parents.

It worked on paper, but when I watched it, I realized that it was not only reiterating something we had already established (his issues with his father), but it was at a point in the film where we were following a mystery, and it stopped it dead in it's tracks.

I asked Charlie, our cameraman and now de facto DP, to take a look, and he agreed, not only with the scene, but with the pacing as a whole.

Jack and I were past the arguments - JR's death made all that seem trite - and we tried to work out the problems. Jack agreed with some changes, but he felt that the mother-son scene was too good to lose. It was odd - a writer protesting to a director that a scene should be cut, and the director responding that the dialogue and performance made it indispensable.

In the end, the biggest change for Jack was that certain scenes just didn't work, and we needed to do a reshoot. I wasn't sure, but Jack  raised the money on his own to do it. 

We did the reshoot the following June, with Charlie as DP. The scenes we reshot certainly were better than what we originally had, including one in a newspaper office which I completely rewrote. We never found a good location for the original newspaper office, and built it in a studio. It looked awful (not the fault of our designer - there were budget and time limitations).* This time, we found a little underground newspaper office that was perfect. We also cast a long-time character actor named John who I knew from, you  guessed it, West Bank Cafe.

An aside on John.

John had one of the more revealing off-screen lines during the shoot. Word spread on set that Jack Lemmon had just died. When John, an older character actor, heard, his droll response was, "It's just as well. His work was going downhill." John wasn't kidding. He really felt that, if an actor didn't have his work, there was not much reason to stick around. Tells you a lot.

Back to the movie.

Shortly afterward, we had a screening at Tribeca (we rented the space). A table was set up with photos to honor JR, and certainly, much of the party afterward was a celebration of stories about working with JR, as it should be.

The screening itself? I sat with my assistant on the film, who knew me and my feelings better than anyone. She was the one who had to listen to all my complaints about how Jack was missing the main points of the film, how our lead was wrong, etc. Bless her, she helped me get through the entire thing.

The final product, in my opinion, is slow. I sat there, proud to see my name in a writing credit for the first time, but disappointed.

The film you screen is never the film you shot, or the script you wrote. It's rare that it is everything you wanted under the best of circumstances (see "Director's Cuts" and the Coppola's endless retelling of Apocalypse Now); and low budget films are never the best of circumstances. There is a line - and each individual has to find it - where the film that you screen is a true expression of the story you were trying to tell, or it is not. For me, it didn't make it across that line.

That experience has propelled me as a producer. I work with a lot of first-time directors, and, on low-budget, there are always compromises. A point I always stress is that you really need to know what things you would like and what are essential, and fight for the latter.As a line producer, it's a hard balance, but I really have fought on every film since not to have another filmmaker have that sinking feeling watching your baby and realizing that she is not as pretty as you thought.

* Here is a lesson I have learned more than once on low budget: when in doubt, go with a real location. It always sounds enticing to build to your needs, but if you don't have the budget, manpower, and time, too often, the result looks cheap.

N.B. This could have easily been three posts - one on the aftermath JR's death, one on the reshoot, and one on the screening. This series has run the better part of this year, with interruptions and I thought it was time to move on, both for myself, and those who are good enough to follow this blog.