This Gun For Hire - Part 1 - My 19th Nervous Breakdown

"The dark night of the soul is not restricted to holy people. It can happen to anyone. I believe that in some ways it happens to everyone." Thomas Moore, Dark Nights of the Soul

While Stan and I often joked about how we went into retirement after every film - another gold watch -  it was also sometimes true that a particular project would be so emotionally draining as to leave my faith in film in taters.

My overwhelming disappointment on how Town Diary turned out and the loss of my dear friend JR left me in such a place.

To call it disillusionment suggests almost a morose state of ennui. This was not the case. This was full on anxiety and burning doubt.

"This is not what I do.  This is who I am," I would sometimes share with women in my life who were important to me, including my (now ex and) future wife. 

If this were true; if harnessing the various creative forces was the core of my being,  what would it say if I now thought all of it for naught?

Moore again:

“During the dark night there is no choice but to surrender control, give in to unknowing, and stop and listen to whatever signals of wisdom might come along. It’s a time of enforced retreat and perhaps unwilling withdrawal. The dark night is more than a learning experience; it’s a profound initiation into a realm that nothing in the culture, so preoccupied with external concerns and material success, prepares you for.” 

What happens when life shatters the great "what if"? 'What if' I got to see my screenplay done, and not these inferior screenplays I have worked on? 'What if' the director was a friend and someone I respected, and someone who respected me? 'What if' I was able to surround myself with the crew people I most respected?

'What if' I did all that and it didn't work? 

As with a more recent experience, the darkest part of this place was that I found myself adrift in windless waters, motionless sails, the middle of the metaphysical ocean; mourning the safe shores of what was the heartbeat of my life for so long, unwilling to head towards the safer shores of a "normal" job.

So it was that I came upon a tiny but magical island, one whose flora and fauna were comfortably familiar, but whose landscape seemed so much more hopeful, more settled. Yes, I could use my knowledge of my fading land here, while maybe planting fresh and wonderful seeds that could grow with stability, without the insanity of long, pressure-filled days. Here, there would be the comforts of security and normal work hours and nothing but happy people who could help art be made but not be burdened by all the hang-ups I found on set.

Behold, this beautiful land, this blessed place - Shooting Gallery, or, more precisely, it's operation division, Gun for Hire.

The opening was for a Director of Operations for Gun For Hire, which helped managed two facilities in the Lower Manhattan at 110 Leroy Street and 609 Greenwich Street. In many ways, the position was less film production and more chief maintenance person, keeping track of day-to-day operations assisting VP and Head of Operations for Shooting Gallery and designer of Gun for Hire, Dave Tuttle, one of the smartest and most forward-thinking production people I have been honored to meet in my life.

As I mentioned in the linked article, meeting with Dave for this position was such a great experience. Dave had been a line producer himself, and understood that I was burned out. I was going to love it there, Dave told me, and, for the most part, he was right. There were many good things about my time there.

But I wasn't looking for good. If I were to let go of one dream, I wanted it replaced by another.

Xanadu. Shangri-La. Narnia. The Garden of Eden. No matter how old and jaded we get, deep somewhere in us is a happy child that wants to believe. As we get older, it becomes Camelot, where all that is good and true can exist.

Students of history and literature know that these shining places have a shelf-life. As it turned out, I landed after the apple had been eaten, the final battle of Salisbury Plain was already underway.

In the following posts, I will describe my brief but important time at Shooting Gallery and Gun For Hire, and my personal view of the Misfire.

At the beginning, though, I was sure I had arrived. After all, I was at the home of Slingblade and You Can Count On Me. For sure, I had come out the other end of Moore's Dark Night:

"It is precisely because we resist the darkness in ourselves that we miss the depths of the loveliness, beauty, brilliance, creativity, and joy that lie at our core.

The Color of Money Isn't Always Green

"When making a business decision, the only color that matters is green."
-Dom Pagnotti, He Got Game

(NOTE: I try to keep this blog to the world I know best - low budget indie filmmaking from a production perspective. Sometimes, however, my knowledge of that world can shed light on topics in the news. While I have no intention of having this blog become a "soapbox" from which to make broader assumptions, some things need to be said.)

Worrying about who does or does not get nominated, no less wins, awards in the movie business is pointless. Opinions are like that anatomical feature where the sun don't shine - everyone has one.  Or, as William Goldman once famously said, "In Hollywood nobody knows anything."

So, when Ava DuVernay was not nominated for her direction of Selma, I was neither angry nor surprised. Let's remember that Alfred Hitchcock never won an Academy Award for a motion picture he directed*, and many talented directors have been passed over. Odd as it may seem, directors of nominations for Best Picture are often passed over

All of this suggests that there was no grand conspiracy on the part of the voters to snub Ms. DuVernay, nor was there a conscious racial or gender bias. I cannot imagine many - if any - of those people saying "I'm not voting for this Black female director."

Still, I was forced to reply when I read a comment in reply to a Forbes article by Scott Mendelson (who was angry about the snub) that said 'I have worked in Hollywood, and the only gender that matters is talent, and the only color that matters is green.' This person was making an assumption that is logical, but untrue, either in Hollywood or even in the indie world with which I am more familiar (more on that later).

Yes, the folks in Hollywood WOULD hire talent blindly, IF they knew it when they see it. They do not. A look at the tremendous number of box office failures each year tells us that.

The way the money people in Hollywood keep their jobs is by making safe choices. If you make a blockbuster movie and hire George Clooney in the lead and it fails, it's unlikely you will lose your job. Monument Men, anyone? If you hire a heretofore unknown in that same lead and it fails, everyone looks for your head. "How could he be so stupid?" Especially on the studio level, keeping your job is more important than making money, and, as you are talking about a world of OPM - Other People's Money - the two do not always go hand-in-hand.

What that means is that track record matters, and, thus, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. You hire those you know because its safe, so they keep getting to make movies, and their track records get longer, and so it goes.

Even if Selma were to sweep the Oscars, the studios (which is where the big money is) would STILL say that Ms. DuVernay only succeeded with Selma because it was a "Black" movie, and argue that she could not direct some subject matter where race is not an issue. To paraphrase Robert Evans, in Hollywood, there are 100 reasons to say no and very few to say yes.

If Hollywood is so gender blind, why was an Oscar winning actress at the height of her talents and looks - Charlize Theron - being paid $10M less than her male co-star before the Sony hack?

In the days when I was still trying to raise money for indie projects, one "fact" I was told in terms of casting is that, regardless of the popularity of the lead actress, the financing depends on the male lead. I was once raising money for a project where I had another former Academy-Award winner attached (Best Supporting Actress) and investor after investor told me that it "didn't matter," and why didn't I get someone like Eric Estrada attached for the much smaller male lead (it was the 90s, and Estrada was one of the go-to names you always got as a 'sure-thing' when raising money).

Since posting this, David Carr wrote a very good article in the NY Times with much the same theme. He points out - as others have - that the Academy, in the last few years, is 93% White, 76% Male and an average of 63 years old.There were a number of articles that popped up today about how many movies about White men won nominations today, and how skewed the nominations seemed.  

It's worth noting that Director nominations come from the DGA - not the Academy, and that Best Actor Awards come from SAG, a group  that is much more diverse. He mentions what may be even a bigger problem - that  Paramount had planned its push for Interstellar much longer, and belatedly got behind Selma , doing so only after it received critical acclaim. This seems more important to me. Anyone who followed the difficulty a member of the "club" - George Lucas - had getting  Red Tails financed tells you that in the halls of power, where the money is, there is still a belief that movies that feature women or people of color are "niche" movies and don't have a wider audience. 

There was never any proof of this myth of money and gender, but it was a perpetuated over and over again for years. While I hear it less often now, it clearly has not gone away when it comes to money and gender equality.

If anyone thinks gender and race have nothing to do with who Hollywood entrusts it's money to, then they likely also think we live in a post-racial, society.  I suggest that they look a little closer.

Even in terms of my smaller world of indie film, gender matters. Race matters. In fact, everything matters.  I have been told - more than once - that a certain African-American would be a bad "fit" with a certain director (in one specific case, a famous TV actor who was directing his first short). I have been asked if a female First AD could "handle" a difficult director or situation.

There is no doubt that there are more opportunities for not only women and people of color today in the indie film world and Hollywood, but for folks from all walks of life and backgrounds. I can remember when producers would question my hiring of a female gaffer or female assistant camera, asking if the "cute little things" could carry that heavy equipment (in the film days, carrying heavy mag boxes was part of an AC's job).  That rarely comes up anymore.

It's also thankfully true that awards don't guarantee future funding or hires, and lack of them does not preclude those possibilities.

Sometimes, the bias can even be worked to a filmmaker's advantage. I worked as line producer on an obscure film by a first-time female feature director that raised a good deal of it's money from women who were attracted to precisely because of it's female perspective on love.

Maybe if we stopped making believe that we did not see differences in people, but rather acknowledged it and tried to deal with it, we would make progress toward that post-differences world a little quicker.  In the meantime, let's at least stop being so surprised when it happens.









*Hitchcock did, of course, win a Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance*, (or, There's Something About Actors)

"We Do Not Rent To Theatricals"**
- Old Rooming House Sign

(SPOILER ALERT - While discussing  the film Birdman, I will try not to give away too much of the plot, and definitely not the ending. That said, it's hard to write this post without discussing what happens in the movie, and that can certainly sometimes harm the experience. If you haven't seen the movie and would like to - you have been warned.)

Do not fear. I have no intention of deviating from the course of this blog, which is the insanity of a career on the production side of low-budget independent film, to indie film criticism. Many folks do it just fine right now, and, on the other end of the spectrum, many more people already do it badly, and I have no intention of competing with either crowd.

This is similar to my early forays in the world of the arts, which was as a writer and actor, a profession that had a similar spectrum. That side of my career when I came to a not-so-different decision that the world did not need one more mediocre actor, which I imagined was the extent of my talent.

My viewing of a matinee of Birdman  came on the heels of  finally finishing my series on Town Diary. Thank you, holiday time in New York, for providing an elder production person with ample free time to go to matinees.

It was only two short posts ago that I mentioned that my original plan for that script was not unlike this one, about the insanity of the backstage life in the theater. Of course, this is a path with deep tread marks in film, going back to the very early days, from the "I've got a barn. You've got the costumes. Let's put on a show" musicals to backstage back-stabbing in movies like All About Eve, to neurosis of the characters in Tootsie, which, while it covers soap operas, is filled with earnest, honest, true ac-tors from the theater world. Both Birdman and Tootsie are filled with characters determined to stay true to their pure art and eschew the crass and commercial (soap operas in the case of Tootsie, and the deluge of comic-book movies in Birdman.)

In fact, many of the characters in Birdman have sympatico companions in Tootsie. Ed Norton's insistence on the truth, and nothing but the truth, has echoes of Bill Murray's playwright ("I don't want my plays done at the Uris Theater. I only want my plays done in a little theater in the Village where the only people who see them are people who come in out of the rain")*** and of course, Hoffman's vain actor ("Nobody does vegetables like me!"). Teri Garr's neurotic actress would be right at home with this group. Where Garr's character famously tells Hoffman of the role he eventually takes, "I can't play her - she's, she's - she's a woman", one actress in Birdman comforts another in this scene.

Lesley: "I wish I had more self-respect?"
Laura: "You're an actress."

Indeed, Birdman is the movie that every film person who comes out of the theater world wants to write and/or direct. When done right - and this film is, for the most part - it offers a world where people are at the same time funny caricatures and real people who demand that you care about them. I got the same belly-laughs out of this that I got out of films like Tootsie and Noises Off and, on the film side, Tropic Thunder, The Player, and, of course, the inspiration of this blog's title, Living in Oblivion.

We are, after all, like family. We will defend our frailties, eccentricities and foibles to the death to the outside world, but among ourselves, we love nothing more than to pick at those same oddities. Undeniably, there is also the shadenfreude of watching others suffer as we have suffered.

Birdman does a very good job with the genre. Still, as I pondered it on the way home (yes, having all this free time leaves me time to not only see matinees, but ponder about them), the question that always troubles me about these films comes back. Sure, we love them but do "civilians" love them as much as we do?

To some degree, this can be said of any profession. If I search the internet, I'm sure there is a blog post of airplane pilots wondering this about Airplane. As with Tootsie, if they are broad enough, of course any audience will enjoy them just as much.

That is a problem with an "indie" film like Birdman. It spends so much time dismissing the crass commercialism of blockbusters that it would be an abject failure if it was broad enough for that audience, where as a film like Tropic Thunder can wear over-the-top blockbuster like a badge of honor.

Here, I started to think that Jack was right; that if we had done, this, it would have had limited appeal. We both loved Waiting for Guffman, but if we were going to be an even more obscure version of that film, there wasn't much chance of success. OK, so in the end we did not have any commercial success with Town Diary, and only limited critical success (Jack and I shared a screenwriting award from a very small L.A. festival).

I have a hunch that a lot of the critical acclaim and love for this film in the indie world comes exactly from this familiarity, and for many festival voters and indie film critics rooting exactly for this type of film and a character like Michael Keaton's Riggan Thomson. Keaton is an easy guy to root for and the parallels to his actual career (walking away from a third Batman the way his character, Thomson, walked away from "Birdman 4") make this a natural for him. The cinematography helps as well, accentuating every line and crease of his face, his receding hair line, the bags under his eyes, his sagging physique (though I would take it - he doesn't look that out of shape).We feel his pain.

Don't get me wrong. I really enjoyed this movie, and I'm fine if he and this movie gets awards. It entertained me. What more can I ask? If this was a review, it would get both of my thumbs pumped high in the air like celebratory fists***.

The more I thought about it, it was better than the outline I wrote for that comedy, so maybe, on this point, Jack was right. Maybe the world didn't need another one of these films either. In the end, though the fruit was sweet, it was of the low-hanging variety.

NB - Keaton won a Golden Globe, as did the screenplay






*This is the subtitle for the Birdman, in case you didn't know. Does a movie title really need a subtitle?

** I used to have one of these signs, and I remember them being popular in the homes of my theater buddies. I have never done the historical research necessary to say whether they were authentic or just another self-depricating reference. If anyone out there knows for sure, please leave a comment below.

***Some of the Tootsie quotes are from memory - I love those lines, but some were not on IMDB quotes and I don't have the script. If they are off by a word or two, don't shoot me.

****If you are too young to remember, this is a reference to the old Siskel and Ebert review show, which became a template for so many of those shows to follow. As you might imagine, this show, which began on PBS, had much more insightful criticism than most TV review shows today, yet it was incredibly entertaining. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were reviewers for competing Chicago newspapers, at a time when newspapers still mattered. Neither was very TV savvy in the beginning, and the resulting spontaneity was much more fun than the more scripted shows today. We lost both of them too soon.

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.

All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - ...The Ugly

"Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you."
-Dr. Ira Byock, From his Book "The Four Things That Matter Most" on what you need to say to loved ones before they die.

My mom used to visit her mother every day in the hospital. My grandmother was relatively healthy right up until her death in her late 80s. One day, as my mother was leaving to go home, my grandmother, sitting comfortably in a chair by the window, said "Goodbye, Margaret."

My mother was all the way to the bus stop before she got a chilling feeling. My grandmother would always say, "I'll see you tomorrow, Margaret" - never goodbye. My mother thought to go back, but, it was late and getting dark out. She still had to get home and make dinner. She was sure it was nothing.

Mom wasn't home more than a few minutes when she got a call from the hospital telling her my grandmother had passed.

A lot of books and articles have been written on preparing for death, both for the person dying and the the loved ones who are left behind. Many a novel - and likely more movies - have ended with two people reconciling in those final precious moments before the last breath. A popular tear-jerker of a novel from my youth was made into an even more tear-jerker of movie, Love Story, with the syrupy tag-line: "Love means never having to say you're sorry."*

Yeah, but it wouldn't hurt.

......................

Near the end of our shoot, two days stuck out in my mind.

One was the day of a scene where Brian goes to the home of his assistant and she makes dinner. It was a scene I wrote intended to show that there was at least some sexual tension between them. Brian was played by a man in his late 40s; his assistant, Veronica, was played by a lovely young actress and singer who is still stunning today.

I've previously pointed out that the actor Frank (Brian) had become rather boorish, and by this point, Brette (Veronica) was put off by him, as were some of the other actresses. There really was not much chemistry between them, but I still liked the idea that there would be some romantic interest, even though I never wrote a scene where anything more than the suggestion happens.

Jack (director) had made it clear he thought Brian would never become involved in a romance with his assistant. My point was not that he did, but that it had, at least, crossed his mind, even if he thought better of it later. It was hardly an unreasonable assumption, and it added some heart to the story.

Jack thought the steaminess would come from the major sub-plot - that a teenage girl had drowned under mysterious circumstances during an evening skinny-dipping with her boyfriend (who turns out to be a character close to Brian in his childhood).

This wasn't quite a noir, but it was meant to seem like a crime and cover-up might have occurred. Still, I thought a romantic interest for the leads would add an emotional warmth to a story that seemed, as we were shooting it, rather cold.

At Jack's request, I had rewritten the dinner scene from one where it is suggested that they wound up in bed (though not shown) to one where it was made clear that they did not - but that Brian and she think about it.

On the day of the shoot, after agreeing to my rewrite, Jack completely ignored me and shot the scene as if there was nothing between them - making a clear point to both actors that there was nothing there.

What was the point of the scene, then? I didn't need to see two characters eat! Yes, I would have fought him if had told me of his intention, but by avoiding a discussion we needed to have, he gave me no options.

I was incensed as producer and writer. Both of these things should have been discussed with me. Writers get their material changed all the time. Directors get final decision (in indie films, anyway) but producers should always be in on such a discussion that changes a feel of the film significantly. In the end, I would have made the case for shooting it with romantic overtones, and then seeing if it made sense in post. We were set to shoot it, we had the location rented, etc.

Instead, we wasted half a day on a scene that no longer made any sense. When I made my case to JR afterwards, he basically shrugged and said he didn't understand, either, but it was Jack's decision.

If I felt alienated before, I felt more alienated now.

JR was definitely weaker from the chemo. Thankfully, he trusted Charlie fully as operator and to make decisions about the photography. We all suggested that JR could go back to his room early whenever he wanted, but the professional in him would not allow it. Unfortunately, on some days, the chemo got the best of him, and he would rush through set-ups or suggest we could cut coverage.

All of this was sub-conscious on JR's part. I knew it was not intentional Still, on one day when I really thought we needed more, JR insisted it was fine. I don't remember my exact words, but they were something like this:

"Great. We're just going to compromise and accept average again. That's just great."

It was one of those things you say out of frustration. I know JR never stopped giving his all, and I could not imagine what it was like to be dealing with minutia while literally being sick to your stomach.

The three of us went through the rest of the shoot - this was the last or next to last day - saying little, and I didn't have any real discussions with JR after that, and Jack and I dealt only with what we had to discuss.

JR and Jack went back to Chicago, where JR, with his now-trusted assistant editor, would begin editing. As the days after wrap went by, it occurred to me that when we got to the point where we were close to final edit and I was scheduled to go out to Chicago to join Jack and JR, it would be good to get back to the three friends we were.

One morning - maybe a week or two after we had wrapped - Jack called me.

"Are you sitting down?" he asked.

What a silly question. Just tell me what you need to tell me. Anything about the movie that needed to be fixed....

"John's dead," he said.

JR was told he was in remission, and all was going well. That morning, JR was getting dressed after taking a shower, and Jack went to the ATM to get some cash. Jack would only be gone a few minutes. Jack said JR seemed fine and healthier than ever.

When Jack got back, just a few minutes later, JR was on the floor. The EMTs later told him that John was already dead by the time Jack got back, and we later learned that his body was filled with cancer.

From that moment until this one - more than 14 years - my last words to JR stay with me, the unintended meanness that I never got to undo.

Stacy, JR's girlfriend, flew out to Chicago to see him before he was cremated. She and Jack flew back to NYC where his friends gathered and each of us tossed a few of his ashes into the ocean near where he had grown up in New Jersey.

At some point, I took Stacy aside - it might have been that day, or later. You think you're going to be supportive for that person. but I could not hold it in. I started crying as I told her that I could not forgive myself for having the last thing that I said to a dear friend, to someone who was so instrumental in every step of my development as first an AD, and then, after introducing me to Stan, as line producer and UPM, not to mention the love and support we shared.

No thank you for all he had done for me and had meant to me.

No 'I love you', though I certainly did.

He had nothing for me to forgive him for, but I would have liked to have taken back faulting him for what were much bigger problems.

Certainly, no "Please forgive me."

Like JR, Stacy was reassuring, and said that JR had never even mentioned it to her, and, knowing him better than I did, that there was no way he took it to heart. I hope she was right.

I could not find an obit, and his IMDB does not begin to tell his story. John Rosnell never thought of himself as a mentor, but there are a gaffers and grips and make-up people and others that he helped get a leg up, valuing loyalty and hard work over resume or even previous experience. Oh, and one First AD and line producer. My post about when we met - aptly titled "When JB met JR - The Birth of JB" - tells it in a bit more detail.

There are a lot of us who remember him. He fought cancer not once, but twice, and the disease may have finally laid him down, but could never take away the tenacious, loving person he was, though I'm sure if he were here, he would scoff at the latter.

I like to imagine JR and I talking over a glass of wine (he still with his white zinfandel, God love him) at his favorite Italian restaurant, both laughing at what a sap I am to make such a big deal out of one bad day for both of us, among so many bad days on set, where things that are said out of weariness or frustration are allowed to dissolve and disappear like bad frames cut from a movie.

So, I won't burden his spirit out there with a pathetic request to forgive me - I hope he has better uses for his energy now. I will just leave it at - thank you, and I love you, man.






..................

Next post, the editing, a re-shoot a year later, and the final product (as you might have imagined, that might be more than one post)


* Tear-jerkers are a genre that go back to the silent era in film. As they play on emotions we all have, they tend to work. Beware, images on the screen are sometimes more shallow than they appear at first viewing, JR would get a real kick out me using this clip in a post about him (or, more likely, kicked me). Enjoy, JR!

All In the Family: The Making of Town Diary - The Bad....

"Is a dream a lie if it don't come true, or is it something worse"
Bruce Springsteen, "The River"

Karma can be a bitch.

The reality of making low budget films is that there will be concessions. You start with the script and make the film as close as you can to what is on the page, but you know there will be changes and things you just cannot do. This is advice I have handed out to first-time filmmaker after first-time filmmaker as I have guided them through the process.

The important thing, I keep telling them, is that at the end of the day, it has to essentially be the movie you wanted to make.

From the inception of this movie I would be making with my good friends Jack (as director) and JR (as DP and editor), we all made concessions. JR and I liked the idea of a comedy, and one of Jack's original premises was about a theater company trying to put on a play. It was familiar territory given my theater background, and it could make for a good movie. Among successful attempts at this genre were the film version of Noises Off, though it has a great history in film comedy, as many film actors and directors come from the stage.

Jack and I had started discussing those ideas, but Jack had dismissed them finally when he saw Waiting For Guffman, a comedy from Christopher Guest and his usual band of wonderful character actors. I didn't think our movie would be anything like that one, but Jack had made up his mind.

Among other things, Jack taught film history in Chicago. There was hardly a scene or a word in a classic film he didn't know, so when I started the film with the a train bringing the character of Brian from New York to his childhood town in Long Island, Jack immediately remembered the imagery from the beginning of Bad Day At Black Rock.*

Bad Day was a favorite of mine, and a favorite of Jack's. The opening sequence has this train carrying Spencer Tracy stopping in a town that is used to seeing the train just pass on by. The arrival of the stranger who upsets the secrets and lies of a small town is another film standard, and we both liked it.

On Page One of the script, I went into great detail to show how we might shoot this scene, with an emphasis not on the exterior of the train, but Brian's POV looking out the window, almost like watching frames of movie.

Admittedly, the mental image was easier to capture than a good screen image. Jack and I rode the train, and the images outside the window were less interesting than the ones I had in mind. Still, the two of us, and JR, spent some time working out what the opening could look like.

When we started shooting, we agreed to just pick up the scene at the train station where David looks for a taxi, and is met by Jimmy Ryan, the hopeless younger brother of his good friend, Frank Ryan. Jimmy drove a taxi, and he grills Brian about being a "Hollywood producer," something the documentary filmmaker Brian certainly is not.

The thought was that we would get the rest of the opening later, but once it was in the can, Jack pretty much decided that we didn't need the train opening at all, and went for something different. Admittedly, whether my opening or his would have been better is subjective, but it was the first in a series of incidents where I felt that we were making compromises before at least trying to do something more creative.

While we were all great friends, the fact that each of us saw filming a different way became apparent before long. While JR and I had worked together on features, Jack and I had only worked together on Dental PSAs, a medium where my concern for the content was minimal. This was different.

Film directors approach directing actors in many different ways. Jack's approach was mostly to trust the actor to bring something, but, when they didn't, he would offer line readings or offer "just do this." It goes back to why he wanted to hire actors who were already close to the part.

I often felt that this method was less than effective, or that he was accepting an okay performance where they might be a better one. I tried to take him aside privately and discuss these issues as often as possible, but when the producer and director are talking, all eyes are on them and little is private.

Eventually,  I let go of this, but not before Chris, my AD, rightfully took me aside and said if I was going to keep doing this, he would prefer I not be on set. Chris correctly felt that questioning Jack, even if I pulled him away to do so, was undermining his authority, and it made it harder for him to keep control on set.

It is not easy to admit that he was right, and I found myself spending less time on set during filming and more dealing with producing elements. This was made easier by the fact that most of the actors we hired were wonderful and brought strong performances without much coaching.

Then, there was our lead actor, David in the role of Brian. As I have said previously, David decided early on that he knew more about acting than Jack did (well, as Jack was not an actor, that was true) and he would ignore Jack when he could, and confront him if Jack pressed him. Now, Jack did not envision the Brian character as a version of himself, and while I had used some of Jack's manners to give Brian a fuller life, I didn't see it that way, either.

Brian was the lead character, however, and as such, Jack was more invested in his performance than any other. David, as I have mentioned, was an actor who had not often been the lead in a movie, and he was determined to make this part his. This conflict devolved to the point where David would pretty obviously challenge Jack on set. These were the worst days, and David made it worse by being passive-aggressive when I tried to talk to him privately about it.

There were the usual practical problems as well.

The bane of my existence on other shoots reared its ugly head again - location manager. We went through two ineffective ones before I brought on a third - a woman who had been great on another shoot. The difference now was that she was pregnant, and it meant more time for her on the phone and less time scouting, and worse, an irritable mood that no one appreciated. We had to let her go as well, leading to a total of four location managers in all.

My savior through the bad times was my assistant Christine, who became as much a confidante and voice of reason as an assistant. She was incredibly helpful as I spent more and more time off set, either dealing with production issues or trying to make up for the deficiencies of our location department.

Chris K, as AD, was in the middle of it all, and as time went on, I saw he felt the pressure of balancing seemingly different marching orders from friends. I have been there as a First AD, and it is no fun. That blew up on day in a sign of frustration that also wound up being unintended humor.

Shooting out in New Jersey, one of our weak location managers had printed poor-to flat-out wrong driving directions. As each vehicle was attempting to get there - Chris driving in his own car, we all were calling each other trying to figure out a) where each of us were, and, b) where the heck was the location. I was one with one such call when Chris K tried to call me and got my voicemail. His message would have made NY Jet's coach Rex Ryan** or Joe Pesci (see below) proud. I think you can work your way through my redaction:

Son of a f****ing bitch. This is so f***ed.  We're f**cked. You have f**cking f**cked me....."

It went on like that for about 45 seconds, with Chris K deftly finding uses for his new choice favorite word as verb, adverb, noun, adjective  and just about every other part of speech imaginable.

I put in on speaker, and as concerned as we were about the situation, Christine and I could not stop laughing - something we kid about to this day.

Understand that Chris would use the occasional profanity as any of us might, but was usually well-spoken and not someone of limited vocabulary. This was an exception.

Chris was involved in another unintentional funny moment  that went badly. There is a mock-TV reality cop show sequence that is playing for a few seconds before a scene between Brian and his father. The scene is MOS***, and brief. We needed two actors to be in the car, and we talked through an improved scenario where a boyfriend and girlfriend get into a physical argument in a car.

The girl was an acting student of mine who had bugged me to be in a scene, a stripper who was trying to become a serious actress. The bg car we wanted did not show up, and Chris reluctantly volunteered his car.

When Jack called "action" the improv - or I should say the actress - went insane. She started screaming and kicking and made the character who pulled her out of the car practically drag her. In doing so, she did some serious damage to the front of Chris' car.

When Chris came over and challenged her (I'm being polite) as to what was wrong with her, she looked at him, tears in her eyes, and screamed "Leave me alone - I've just been raped."

Now, there is nothing funny about rape, but never in our description of the improv did Jack, Chris or anyone else suggest that her character was raped. If that worked as "motivation" for her, okay, but there was no reason for the over-the-top performance.

Chris walked over to me and made a suggestion about getting that "psycho bitch friend of (yours)" out of his car. We all agreed we would go with the first take.

Even these funny moments did not reduce the strain, and more and more, at wrap, all of the "friends" went their separate ways without much said.

Good friends. Your script. It should have been a dream, but too often, it was more of a nightmare. When the expectations of what it can be are so high, the disappointment when it is something less is exponentially worse.

The worst moments, and biggest disappointments, were still to come. The last post was the "good." This one is the "bad." You know what the next one will be.











*Bad Day at Black Rock should be on your list of must-see movies if you are in the business, or just a fan of good movies. John Sturges at his best directing, and a cast of great character actors around Tracy, from Robert Ryan to Ernest Borgnine to Lee Marvin and more.

** Both Rex Ryan and Joe Pesci, in different movies, have become known for their colorful language.

*** Without sound, for those not in the business.

All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - The Good...

"Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness"
-Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn*

(This post picks up on the series of posts about a film I produced and co-wrote, called Town Diary. The last in that series is here (it started here), which ends with the end of pre-production. Here starts the story of production.)


Low budget indie films are about Plan B. They are about letting go, which is definitely the only path to happiness in making your movie.

Understand what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that you drop your basic vision for the movie - and you have to have one. Reality is that it will never be exactly what you envision. Ted Hope, a great producer and a source for sage advice in the indie world, in part described it this way recently:

I often say that there is the role of the producer and there is the role of the director that are remarkably similar. The producer comes in and has to extract the big vision, the dream of everything that you want to accomplish, and then cut the legs out from under it and say, “That’s where we’re going. But with these funds, with this story, with this cast, we’re only going to be able to capture forty percent.” And then through work and through structure, hopefully [you can] achieve a place where you get another twenty or twenty-five percent. And then through good engineering, having built a structure where serendipity can occur, where the miraculous might be achieved, you get something more. And then to be able to sit and help the director recognize that you still may not have hit that full vision that you had before you ever shot, but you have something very unique and distinct that you were able to capture.

I can't say if the world owes anyone anything, but I know that the world owes no one a movie. If you get to produce or direct a film, it is a privilege. In this case, while I didn't get to see my name on the slate, I did get to see a script that I wrote actually shot. To hear my words on set and on film spoken by really great actors like Terry Quinn and Angelica Page and Annie Grindlay and Bob Hogan and so many more that I have mentioned.

Making an indie movie is hard - but not as hard as getting one financed, and JR and Jack put down their money and let this come true, all while trusting my decisions as producer.

Some of the good days included seeing Annie do a scene with her "children" not being excited to see their dad, the lead character of Brian, her ex-husband. While my ex and I never had children, I could still feel the heartbreak in the room.

Terry Quinn was every bit as terrifying as we imagined, all while being a very real and human character.

Luke Reily, as Frank Ryan, sold a scene where he talks about the vagaries of 'doing what's right' when it harms other people.

My dear friend, Angelica Page gave me maybe my best day.

She came in off the red-eye from LA, a flight, for those who are not familiar, leaves a person having lost three hours and landing early in the AM NY time. It often takes a lot out of people.

She had one scene where she is interviewed by a reporter. The reporter has a few questions, but it is pretty much a four page monologue where she coldly describes viaticals, a practice of buying insurance policies for pennies on the dollar which became "popular" during the AIDS crisis of the 80s and early 90s. Angelica is an amazing actress, and it took that to pull this off and make it believable.

She got out of make-up, showed us the wig she chose (she gave Jack and I cursory right of approval - of course, it was perfect) and then sat down to rehearse the scene.

All through the rehearsal, when she would try something out, she would call for "line" from the script supervisor. Usually, this is a clue that the actor may not, in fact, know their lines.

Jack was concerned. Was she going to be alright? Was it maybe the flight?

As I've said, her mom was the great Geraldine Page, who was not only a great actress but a founding member of The Actors' Studio. Angelica is on the board. Professionalism runs deep with Angelica, so much so that she once related a story of chastising a rather famous actor in an airport scene for not knowing his lines.

It was this discussion and others about professionalism that made me confident, and I told Jack she would be fine. I never asked her if there was a problem.

The minute we rolled camera, the lights went on; not just those that provided an image for the camera but within Angelica. She nailed it the first time. We did a second master for safety. She nailed it again. We did her CU - she nailed it once more.

As we were relighting for the reverse on the "interviewer," I stopped by her holding room. She grabbed my arm and asked "JB, was that okay?" She really did care what I thought, and thanked me for giving her the opportunity to do the role.

"It was more than okay," I told her. "It was great."

He face changed from questioning to recognition. She grinned and said, "Mommy knows how to get home." As she had told me often before, she knew that if you show up and do your job, it can be a short day for everyone with none of the stress. Her reaction was classic, and almost as good as the scene for me.

There were many other great performances and days of satisfaction. But, of course, there were those days that were not. If this post is entitled "The Good..." you can imagine what the next two posts will be entitled.







N.B. Sorry for the delay between posts. Been dealing with some personal issues, and also basically outlining and roughing all three posts about the making of - this and the ones to come - to make them part of a whole and not miss anything. I'm certain as soon as I hit "publish" I will think of more good things - but it's time to put it up there.



*At this writing, the Venerable Thich Nhat Hahn, the great Vietnamese Buddhist leader, is battling a brain hemorrhage. It may be why he was in my thoughts as I searched for a quote this week. Please send out whatever good vibes you can.