All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - It's Going to Be a Bumpy Night

"We all have abnormalities in common. We're a breed apart from the rest of humanity, we theater folk. We are the original displaced personalities."
-Addison DeWitt, All About Eve

There is something that happens to some actors, actors who have struggled as supporting actors, once they finally get to be a lead. I call it the Eve Harrington syndrome. More about that in a moment.

For all the success we had with supporting roles, casting the leads was tough going on a number of levels.

We would have liked a name for the lead role of Brian, but if not, we wanted a very solid actor. Once again dipping into my past, I thought of an actor named Dan*

Dan was a member of the first theater company where I was the production stage manager. He was short, with red hair. The company was an ensemble, and Dan was the lead in a play called Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone by Terence McNally. I remembered being enthralled with Dan's performance as the provocative Tommy - great energy, and a real ease on stage. Like everyone else in the company, Dan was acting on a popular soap opera, and the theater company was a way for them to get back to their legit theater roots.

Over the years, I had become amazed that Dan had never really succeeded as an actor; in fact, years later, I remember running into him waiting tables at the same place he waited tables when I first met him. Ironically, one junior member of that cast did go on to success. The role of "the women" (playing multiple parts, as the name suggests) was played by an actress who was less experienced, but always real and engaging on stage. Her name was Mercedes Ruehl, and she would go on to win an Oscar in The Fisher King.

I was not having much luck finding Dan, so, on a whim, thought I would make the trip to that same Greenwich Village restaurant. Sure enough, he was there. This should have told me something.

I gave him the script.

I did the first series of auditions while Jack was in Chicago. Dan auditioned for me, my assistant, and the casting director.

Nothing. His take on the character was wrong, the delivery was dry. He was a completely different actor than I remembered.

I had told Jack about Dan, and Jack, being generous, said maybe he had a bad day, and he was willing to see him when he got in. I met with Dan and gave him some insight into the role. He came and auditioned for Jack as well.

Again, nothing. 

The only saving grace was that he knew how bad his audition was, so it was no surprise that he didn't get it. To this day, I don't know if I remembered him better than he was (the reviews of him in Tommy Flowers were very good, so I wasn't all wrong) or if years of toiling as a part-time actor had finally taken its toll on him.

After seeing many people, we saw one great audition. It was by an actor named David, who had played a major supporting role in Apollo 13, as well as recurring roles on a number of television series. Since, he as continued to have success as recurring, supporting characters on shows like Covert Affairs, Justified, and Necessary Roughness. 

David gave a great audition for me. I liked him a lot. My casting director and my assistant were not so sure. Specifically, they felt it was more calculated; I saw it as genuine.

In retrospect, he gave the same audition when Jack was there. Jack loved it as much as I did.

My casting director and assistant were still unswayed. However, already Jack and I had gotten into a bit of a rhythm where one of us would like one performer, and the other would like someone else. Here, we agreed! That had to mean something!

Eve Harrington.

For those not familiar with the play and more famous movie, All About Eve, the title character is a conniving ingenue who flatters and woos until she gets to the place of Margo, an established but aging star.

There are many talented supporting actors who spend years watching lead actors get all the attention: superficially, the nice trailer, the better car service, and other prima donna perks; on a more professional level, getting input on dialogue, wardrobe, hair, "motivation," and even how they are shot (a word that comes to mind for different reasons with David).

They understand that as supporting characters, it is not their show. While they might offer an opinion, in the end, they will do as they are told and serve the greater good.

When and if they finally do get to be lead, then, they think, all good things will come to them. I think of Shakespeare characters who think they have been wronged and feel a need to put things right, specifically, Richard III, and how unfair that he, the better choice, has to stand by and watch his more handsome brother be king.

Ok, David didn't kill anyone. However, the two ladies with us, casting director Susan and assistant Christine, were right. David would never be better than that day at the audition hall, and, to boot, he would be difficult. Specifically, he did not respect Jack, as a first-time feature director, and as their takes on the character grew farther and farther apart, David would descend into subtly mocking Jack on set. But, that was later.

In fairness to David, I had seen this before, and I've seen it since. I produced a short for a first-time director who cast his dear friend of many years, a supporting actress in soap operas, to a lead. All through rehearsals, they were wonderful together. Once we got on set, the demands started, and, again, the clear suggestion that she knew more about how the role should be played than the writer/director. Also, she would not be rushed out of hair and make-up, and she balked at wardrobe that we had all approved at the last minute. The same with a female lead in another short who had experienced some TV success - the female writer/director on that film would have to step outside with me and scream in order to not blow up at her on set (or worse).

Much like Richard III above, All About Eve references Macbeth, where what my Shakespeare teacher in high school referred to as "vaulting ambition" becomes the otherwise valiant Macbeth's fatal flaw. After all, it was Macbeth and Duncan who had won the battle, but, through nothing but birthright, it would be Malcolm, King Duncan's son, who would be the next king.

"Stars, hide your fires

Let not light see my black and deep desires."

*Not his real name - you know what that means.

N.B. Sorry about the delay in getting this post up and the long time between posts. I've been busy with work and other personal responsibilities, and taking the time to get this right took some time.

All in the Family - The Making of Town Diary - Corner of First and Exes

"Whenever you want to marry someone, go have lunch with his ex-wife" 
-Shelly Winters, who had three ex-husbands and a lot of ex-lovers**

Around the time I met my ex-wife, Maureen, I also met a young actress named Annie. She had auditioned for the first play I directed,  a silly whodunit called  Kidnap Kaper.  It was written by a bitter older British actress, whose name I have thankfully forgotten. We'll call her Brit.

Brit was one of those actresses who clearly had been known for her looks at one time, but that, her only real asset,  had faded. Now, she ran this hole-in-the-wall theater in Hell's Kitchen,  and tried to relive glory days that weren't all that glorious.

I had already cast a girl as the young ingenue when Annie walked in. Annie's headshot was so bad I thought she was more like forty than the 24 year old beauty she was, all red hair and energy. The other girl was good; Annie was perfect.

Unfortunately,  Brit was also a redhead,  and Annie clearly reminded her too much of the young starlet she no longer was. She hated my choice, and proceeded to make Annie's life miserable during rehearsal. It got so bad that I insisted she put a stop to it, which led to a blowup about a week into the show. When she tried to fire Annie,  myself and the entire cast quit.

Annie, like Maureen, was Canadian by birth, and they  grew up pretty close to each other (albeit years apart) in  Southern Ontario.  We all became great friends, the three of us going out together whenever Maureen (who still lived in Ontario at this point) was in town.

Annie went on to study with famed acting guru Sandy Meisner in Bequia, and later LA.  It was near the end of his life, but the training clearly made Annie not only a better actress,  but eventually, a very good acting teacher herself.

Annie had moved to LA, and we would hang whenever I was out there. This was before Facebook,  but we kept in touch the old-fashioned way,  by phone or, later, email.

I wrote the character of the lead character's ex-wife from personal experience.  Maureen and I are great friends to fhis day, but in the script,  I wrote her from the tempestuous days leading up to our divorce.  I also added kids who were not big fans of their mostly absent dad, something Maureen and I did not have.

I sent the script to Annie without telling her anything.  The phone rang a few days later.

"She's Maureen, " Annie said, referring to the  characters. I explained that it was based on Maureen,  but that I had tried to hide it. Annie laughed.

"You did a bad job of hiding it," she said. "Don't worry. I can definitely play Maureen."

Indeed,  she went on to do a great job. We flew her in from LA,, and it was worth it the days we shot her scenes. It didn't hurt that she (like some others) did not particularly like our lead (much more on that later), and the Method actress in Annie made her avoid any 'friendly' contact with the actor beforehand.

The scenes were tough for me. I had to push Jack to shoot them more sympathetic to her than he would have, as his experiences with exes were not the same as mine. They are among the best scenes in the film.

-----------

Another 'first' was John S, who would play the reckless younger brother of the lead character's best friend, Frank Ryan. Jimmy Ryan was the younger brother dependable Frank always got out of trouble.

My first theater company as Artistic Director was in Allenton,  PA., where I did three one-acts around Sam Shepard and Patti Smith. The main part of the evening was Cowboy Mouth,  which Shepard and Smith co-wrote and performed together at times around their crazy days living together at New York's Chelsea Hotel.*

The Chelsea Hotel came up a few times in my life.  My good friend Kevin O'Conner lived there, and I dated an actress who lived there who had an "imaginary friend.'  What can I say? She was cute, funny, and though we had to set  place for him when we had dinner - in or out - at least I didn't have to feed him. Besides,  a life spent with actors and film people makes you a lot less judgemental.

There were "favorites" at the local theater company,  but I passed them all over to cast John S. as Slim, the Shepard character described as a "rock and roll hero with a cowboy mouth."

John S. was then a student at Muhlenberg College under a truly under-rated theater teacher and director,  Charlie Richter.

I had seen John S. in a student production and been impressed with his charisma and energy.  His background was as an athlete,  but his instincts were great.  Although he was a raw talent at the time, I knew he would be worth a little extra coaching. He was.  Every performance was fresh and real.

John S went on to work in other film and TV, and eventually,  Broadway. My only regret in casting John S. is that, in retrospect,  I gave his character some of the cheesiest dialogue.  He overcame it, for the most part, but his talent would have come through more if I'd done a better job.

---------------

It was great working again with John S. and Annie, but I went to the well once too often when I reached back into my past to try and cast the lead with an excellent stage actor I had met years earlier. In fact, casting the leads proved difficult on a number of levels.  While I had planned to address that casting here,  explaining the background on John S. and Annie took up more space and time than I thought, so it will need to wait for the next post.

Brevity,  you are no friend of mine.

* Ok, I did cover much of this story of working with John S back in a 2009 post. However, I find that readers don't like flipping back and forth, and I won't assume that every reader was around when I posted the original over five years ago. A little about my time with Actors' Collective, which will be covered in next post with actor Don, is also covered in that post. Besides, here, it is about both of these folks working with me on Town Diary.

**Shelly Winters had an interesting relationship with my mentor, Stan.

This Character Actor Got The Girl - Eli Wallach

"...the quintessential chameleon, effortlessly inhabiting a wide range of characters, while putting his inimitable stamp on every role."
-From The Academy of Motion Picture Arts when he won the Governors' Award in 2010

The first two times I spoke to Eli Wallach were on the phone.

In the 1980s, I had written a screenplay and wanted to attach him for one of the parts. Actors' Equity had a membership department that had contact numbers for its members. Usually, it was a manager or agent. I assumed that would be the case with film legend Eli Wallach.

"Hello?"

Hmm, I know that voice.

"Yes, I'm calling about Eli Wallach."

"That's me. What can I do for you?"

I hadn't prepared for this. After stumbling a little, I said. "I'm sorry. I got this number from Actors' Equity. I didn't mean to bother you at home. I thought....."

"Good. They got the right number. What did you want to know?"

"Well, actually, I was calling about a part in a movie."

"That's great. Tell me a little about it."

I proceeded, in bumbling fashion, to pitch the role to Eli Wallach over the phone. It had never occurred to me that I would actually be talking with him on this call, so I'm not sure how impressive the pitch was. At the end, he said it sounded interesting, and to call his agent about the details.

"Oh," I said. "Yes. Sure. I meant to call your agent to begin with."

That's all right," he said. "I like to always talk to people about the role first, see what it's about. You tell him I said it was okay."

We never did get the funding for that film, so the negotiations didn't get too far. However, years later, when I was line producer on Man of The Century, there was another call. Sorry, but this time re-telling a story I told before>

Anne Jackson, Eli's long-time wife and partner, was in our film, She was getting on in years, and we wanted her to be as comfortable as possible. Most (if not all) of her scenes were at a mansion out on Long Island, with a large spiral staircase. Anne had recently been ill, and, unfortunately, every time we had to do another take, it meant Anne going up and down that staircase in a long period dress from the Turn of the 20th (not 21st) Century.

Worse still was our luck in getting her there. Our regular cast vans had no problem getting there, but we wanted private transport for Anne. This was before everyone had a cell phone and there was no GPS in cars. Still, we carefully mapped out the route, faxed it to a private car service that came highly recommended, and arranged for them to pick her up.

The first day, they got lost with her. Got her to set very late and a little shaken.

After a similar bit of bad experience with another car service - they were late picking her up - we sent our 2nd AD - a very reliable guy - to pick her up personally in one of the 7-pass vans.

He got there on time. Knew the route. Got a flat.

It was somewhere around that time that my production coordinator got a call. She looked a little concerned as she handed me the phone without telling me who it was.

"Are you JB?"

"Yes."

"You're the guy who is in charge?"

That's always a debatable point, but since I had been handed the phone, assumed it was true in this case.

"Yes. Can I help you?"

"What are you trying to do? Kill my wife?"

In what was, admittedly, an odd reaction, I was at first impressed with talking to this acting legend (I wasn't thinking about the first call more than ten years earlier), and only a little later into the conversation did I delve into assuring him that we were doing everything we could to insure his wife's safety and that things would, definitely, get better."

Eli Wallach died yesterday at the age of 98.

I had not planned on a mid-week post, but I wanted to add personal notes here. I will refer you to the NY Times for a full and wonderful obituary that details this versatile actor's expansive career. 

It is a little ironic that only days ago I put up a post about Walter Brennan, another character actor, though I don't think of both of them the same way. Brennan was one of those wonderfully quirky character actors from the Studio days, who mostly developed their trade on their own or learning from fellow bit players.

Wallach, on the other hand, was from that generation of actors who came out of the Neighborhood Playhouse and later, Actors' Studio, where he was a founding member along with Lee Stasberg. Like Brando, they were that early generation of Method actors that Hollywood quickly realized could bring a level of risk and realism to the screen that it had not seen before.

In many studio films, they were used as to play different - see "ethnic" - characters, and in many cases, that meant a mustache. It may seem silly now, but they were still dealing with Hollywood conventions. 

The one that most people know, of course, is the Mexican bandit Calvera in The Magnificent Seven, and later Tuco in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, mustached both. 

Then, there were the Italians, Guido in The Misfits and Silva in Baby Doll. Although he did not get the girl in either of those, he got to take his shot at bombshells Carroll Baker and Marilyn Monroe. Watch the subtle way he goes from sympathetic to cold as ice in one scene, and holds his own in a scene with one of the hottest actresses of her time.

Later, there would, of course, be other Italians and Mafioso, as well as Jewish characters. Given his age, many of the latter were Holocoust survivors, or later, little Jewish New Yorkers, which he was.

In between, there was, well, every imaginable role in between. Like many actors, he did movies and television to pay the bills, and theater because he loved it, often with his lovely wife Anne. In 2000, friend and comedienne Anne Meara wrote a play they did together about two retired comedians, "Down the Garden Path."

He did many episodes of a personal favorite of mine, the anthology series on early television like Playhouse 90. He plays an aide to Russian dictator Stalin here.

There is one similarity to Brennan. Because he lived up until 98, to many, especially younger viewers, he was always old. That's why I chose a picture at the top of the post that showed him when he was young.

The quote from Brennan, oft referred to by other character actors as well, was that they never get the girl. While that might have often been true on screen, he did get the girl he really wanted, his adoring wife Anne. Here, again, I offer this cool  and funny tribute she offered to him in 2010. (Yes, I have used before as well - but then to show Anne - good enough to share again)

My heart goes out to Anne now. I used to see them often at West Bank Cafe on Theater Row, and when Anne once called me over to their table, Eli had fun sharing with his dinner guests the adventures Anne went through on our film. I wanted to  dig a hole and hide, but that impish smile said that it was all in jest - maybe.

All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - A Cast of Walter Brennans

"I'm not a glamour boy and I never get the girl. I like to play old people because there's something to them.  Did you ever see anyone under 30 who had any character or expression in their face." - Walter Brennan, Oscar Best Supporting Actor Winner in 1936, 1938 and 1940

In preparing this post on casting Town Diary, I realized that a previous post on Casting in general - Priorities - Casting - had discussed a lot of what happened during the casting process for the film. Rather than repeating most of a rather long post here, let me elaborate a little more on what our process was, and what it wasn't. I highly recommend checking out that post if you are newer to the blog or have forgotten it.

If Town Diary was going to succeed,  it needed a great ensemble of character actors.  That meant finding a Casting Director who understood that and was not just interested in casting names.

Low budget indies tend to thrive when they find people, especially staff and crew,  who are happy to be there. With our budget, we would not be able to afford an established Casting Director, but we did better. We got an enthusiastic, experienced casting assistant who worked for some time in Georgianne Walken's office. The wife of actor Christopher Walken was not only established,  but known for understanding how to cast indies.

With Susan, our Casting Director,  we had someone excited about the job with access to the type of actors we were seeking.  One meeting with her and we knew she got it. At the time, we still did things like solicit headshots on Backstage and put notices up in the Hollywood Reporter. Now, both of those are unnecessary - at least for a SAG feature - but we were at the cusp of the old ways of doing things meeting the newer, online Breakdown Services.

Our offices would be half of a full-floor loft space in Greenwich Village, with me living in the other half. A past partner of mine sublet the space to me while he was out of the country, and it was working out of the office here with him that I remembered the disaster that was our previous casting experience on another film.

It was standard to request headshots and resumes, and to have them sent to your office address. Regardless of the disclaimer you would always add about "No Dropoffs," inevitably, headshots would appear under your door the Thursday the ad hit Backstage. A day or two later, the bags of headshots would come - and I do mean bags. The mailman would show up and an entire mail bag - sometimes more.

While you ran only one ad, the headshots would come long after you had gone into production, in fact, they would still trickle in six months and more later. When this was also your home, it could be overwhelming.

Susan and my assistant, Christine, who was involved with the casting, went through these mountains of pictures, and from a few of them, and more from her files from Georgeanne Walken's office  and agent submissions, we set up appointments at a casting facility where we rented a room for a few days.

What I was not going to do was have an open call. To this day, there are folks that still feel it is a good idea. For those who have never experienced it, by the time you show up - usually a half hour BEFORE the announced start time - there is already a sign-up sheet started by the actors who are have been waiting on line, some for hours.

It's sad and inspiring, and reminds you that for every actor who goes on to be rich and famous, they, like most others, have to go through the grueling and often humiliating experience of appropriately-named "cattle calls." Actors wait for hours to be seen for a few minutes. In the case of Broadway shows, for example, where Actors' Equity would insist that productions see any union member, actors were "auditioning" for roles that were already cast.

We were determined not to do this. Even going through the mind-numbing amount of headshots we received was difficult enough, and then there were the actual auditions.

Jack was still in Chicago at first, so I did the first stage, and some of those roles we filled without Jack having to see the folks.  As I said in the "Castings" post linked earlier, we got really lucky with some great character actors, like Bob Hogan as the town gossip, and the actor who would eventually play the main supporting role of Frank Ryan, the lead's childhood friend, an actor named Luke Reilly. He is one of those guys who was on a number of Law and Orders, had a recurring character on soaps, and was just wonderful. He was never a star, before or since, but he was great in every scene.

I mentioned that Terry O'Quinn (I believe he was billed as Terrance Quinn in our film), who was already a well-known actor from shows like X-Files and Millenium, and who would reach star status after Lost, was one of our better finds.  

Television has a way of making stars out of character actors like Terry, James Gandolfini, William Peterson, Steve Buschemi et al. Their experience filling in the background on smaller roles that were not as fully written as the leads meant that when they were a lead, they created characters that came across the home screen and stuck.

Terry was amazing. He had a military background, which made him a natural for roles as high-ranking military in television and film. The role we wanted him for was the ex-sheriff who was somewhat crooked, and we wanted the character to be menacing.

Terry was well-known enough to us that we would have been happy with offer-only (meaning he would not have to audition and would only take the role if we offered it to him) or, at the most, having him send us a tape through his agent. Terry lived in Pittsburgh, and he insisted on coming in to audition, driving all the way for his short audition and driving right back.

Usually, people stand or sit in a chair. I usually frown on actors stepping up and playing right to us in front of the table, but that is exactly what Terry did. The sides (part of scene chosen for audition) for his scene were where he threatens the lead and warns him to drop his investigation. When Terry looked into our eyes with the threat, there was no actor there, just the character. It was chilling. He would finish, flash that wonderful warm, smile, and Terry, the very nice actor, would come back.

He auditioned for me, then came back to read for Jack and I. We never saw a second person for the role.

One thing no one tells you about auditions is that they are a great way to see where your script needs work. We had done readings, and I thought I had trimmed the dialogue sufficiently. I had not. One character had almost a full-page monologue (it was part of dialogue with another character - but it was mostly him). It was the stage-writer in me that had not gone away.

By the time the third actor came in and went  through this agonizingly long speech, I knew it had to be cut. I was bored hearing it about halfway through - and I had written it. No viewer would be able to bear it. Of course, we had distributed this long speech as sides for the character, and, as my Casting Director Susan kept reminding me, it would be unfair to ask actors to only do a short part of it, or to cut them short, even if it was no fault of their own.

It was instant karma. I had over-written the scene, and now I was to pay the price by having to listen to ALL of it over and over and over again, actor after actor. Mea Culpa.

It was Susan who also first got on me about not being as good as I could be about making believe I was still interested when I knew an actor was wrong. I took her scolding to heart, and from then up until today, I have tricks to keep it seeming like I am glued to even the worst performance. It's only fair to the actor.

 I remember other small moments, like when the actor who originated the role of Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd, Edwin Lyndeck, came in to audition. He was there for a role that was not quite perfect for him, but when his headshot came in from agent submissions, I could not resist bringing him in.

I remember seeing him on stage with the original cast of Sweeney on Broadway. A good friend of mine, Mary Pat Green , herself a now popular character actress ( a lovely woman, her broad shoulders and ability to create a hard look have often found her in "bulldog" roles- she is much prettier than you have ever seen her on screen) was in the show and got me great tickets. Over twenty years after seeing it, Lyndeck's performance of "Pretty Women" with Sweeney (Len Cariou in that production ) stuck with me. An old man singing lustfully about his attraction to a nubile teen, as written by Steven Sondheim, was at once lecherous and melodic. It was a mean trick to get both across, and Lyndeck had done that.

Unfortunately, he was still wrong for the role. Over the years, there are times I've brought in people who had previously impressed me, even if they they were not exactly what the role required. It's frankly something I need to stop doing, because too many times, the audition confirms what I knew in my gut, but my desire to work with that talent made me hope it could work. When Edwin finished, I took a moment to tell him how much he had thrilled me all those years earlier. He deserved to hear that.

Jack and I were both in our forties, and so it was not surprising that many of the roles were men and women who were forty and up. It worked for the type of character actors I liked, actors like Walter Brennan.

When you look up character actor in the dictionary (or, more likely now, Wiki) there should be a picture of Walter Brennan. While that is not the case, Brennan's Wiki immediately points out that only three men have won three Oscars, and only Brennan won all three for Best Supporting Actor. He easily could have won more.

The picture at the top of this post is how most people think of Brennan, both for his numerous cowboy sidekick roles with John Wayne (most notably for me, the iconic Stumpy in Rio Bravo) not to mention his roles on television later as Grandpa on The Real McCoys, and, to a lesser extent, a show I watched as a kid, The Guns of Will Sonnet.

It seemed Brennan was born old, and that is not a coincidence. As someone who trained horses on film sets early in his career, he got his teeth knocked out, so he was able to play older roles even when he was younger just by removing his dentures. However, old and/or drunken characters (his Eddie in To Have and Have Not opposite Bogart is pretty much an updated of Stumpy to John Wayne in Rio Bravo) is not all he could play. He also could look like the characters below.

We did a great job with the supporting roles. What was left was the lead role of Brian McCauley and his assistant, Veronica, as well as the role of Brian's friend's younger brother, Jimmy. Here, we would have differences of opinion, as well as mixed results with dipping into the pool of actors I had worked with in the past.

Until then, some fun with Walter Brennan. Below, Brennan as Eddie in To Have And Have Not. Eddie, much like Stumpy in Rio Bravo, is the sidekick who never stops talking, usually nonsense. Here, the fun is a very young Lauren Bacall repeating back to Eddie a story he told earlier in the film. (Unfortunately, none of Stumpy's better scenes are available on Youtube).

All in the Family: The Making of Town Diary - Cast What You Know*

"The first thing you should do with an actor is not sign a contract with him. Take him to dinner. And take him for a walk afterwards." Elia Kazan 

Jack, our director,  was very much of the Kazan school; that you should cast people who are close to the type of character they are to play. I have always thought that a good actor can find the character in themselves regardless of how they lived their everyday life. In some of the roles, we had both.

The script I wrote was meant as an ensemble piece, with the two leads, David and Veronica,  being the two roles we thought might attract name actors at some level.

I've talked about putting together cast on the Modified Low,  and how you can sometimes attract quality actors you might not have thought you could on the reduced salary, which then was in the neighborhood of $248 a day or $800 plus per week.

Even before we started casting, I enlisted the some of the talented folks I knew from my local food and watering hole, West Bank Cafe. Located right on NY's Theater Row, it was a regular hangout for talented actors as well as behind-the-scenes folk.  The Stillers (Ben, Jerry, Anne et al), Eli Wallach and wife Anne Jackson,  the late John Spencer (West Wing), many of The Sopranos cast (who bartender Kaleda had dubbed "The Perfume Mafia")  as well as many other talented stage and film actors made it their home, a nice atmosphere that had a greater energy without ever being loud.

Joe W, one of the bartenders,  was an actor looking to get into the production side. I brought him on as Director's Assistant (not to be confused with Assistant Director).

For myself assistant,  I brought on a regular named Christine. Like Joe W, she was young, bright, enthusiastic and charming,  the latter a trait in men or women that sometimes can help secure needed items. With Jack, JR, and I all over 40, it also insured feedback from another generation,  something I also think is important.

Experience is important,  but, as I've said here before, it's easy for experienced people to fall into patterns that sometimes need change, or at least challenging.  Joe W and Christine would provide that often. Both also had small roles in the film.

I had never gone on a walk with talented  actress Angelica Page, but we knew each other from both drinks and dinners as regulars at West Bank Cafe. Angelica is probably best known for her role as the mother who poisons her daughter in The Sixth Sense.

The daughter of late Oscar-winner (A Trip to Bountiful)  Geraldine Page (who presenter F. Murray Abraham called "the greatest actress in the English Language) and Rip Torn (Men in Black) Angelica is a versatile stage and film actress from a family that imbued her with a strong personality and, in a mother who was not only a fine actress but legendary acting teacher, a strong sense of responsibility to the work.

One of the characters in the script explains how she, and the sheriff at the time of the young girl's drowning,  had gotten rich on viaticals.  Jack was the one who made me aware of this rather morbid practice where, at the height of the AIDS crisis, people would buy out the insurance policies of AIDS patients at a fraction of the dividend. Those patients, who basically had a death sentence at that time,  needed the money now. As the rather cold character tells the documentary filmmakers,  "They needed the money, and we made a nice profit. Worked well for everyone. "

Angelica would not need it explained to her that while she had to come off as chilling to an audience,  she needed to also genuinely be convinced of her own "noble" actions.

Jack took my word that she could do it, but both she and Jack wanted to discuss the role over the phone.  Jack called her while she was in LA and we were in Chicago. The call lasted almost an hour, with Jack's end of the conversation being mostly one word responses to her ideas for the role. When he got off the phone,  I asked him how it went.

"Good," he said.  Then, he smiled. "I think she is still letting me direct."

We both laughed. Angelica knows her craft, and prepares meticulously for every role. She can also be intimidating, which made her even more perfect for the role. She would be having her person doing a wig for her, something she offered to do at her own cost because she knew we were on a tight budget.  That is her level of professionalism.

While we had ideas for the other roles, we knew we would need a Casting Director.  More on that and the casting process in the next post.

* A reference to the old writing advice, "Write what you know."

N.B. Some of the names here, and moving forward, are changed not because they did anything wrong, but rather to protect the privacy of folks who I did not seek permission from to use their stories.

All in the Family:The Making of Town Diary - Pt 3 - In Your Hometown

 

"Brenda and Eddie were popular steadies
And the king and queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
No one looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner."
-Billy Joel, Scenes from an Italian Restaurant

"Going Home" and "You Can't Go Home Again" have been the theme of many a movie, not to mention two specific expressions that inspired one movie and one novel, respectively. Not to mention well, a lot, of Springsteen songs (hence the subtitle above). Sorry, Bruce, thought I'd give Billy a shout out here.

Early on, Jack wanted to write the story of a man in career midlife crisis who goes home, thinks he has found the "big story", and then has to make the moral choice of whether to tell it or not.

Brian McCauley was the lead character, and the hometown he goes back to is a fictional one (East Islip) by the Bay on New York's Long Island, similar to the one where Jack had grown up.

As we all know, our memories of our hometown can sometimes be more quaint than the messy truth, and it was at this junction that we hoped to find our drama.

I came up with the name, Brian McCauley. Growing up in the Bronx, I was always aware that one of the things that defined a person was their ethnic heritage. At the worst end of that are stereotypes that provoke fear, but for me, it was just the little touches that filled in the way we approached life. You either embraced your heritage or rejected it, or did a little bit of both, but it definitely had some influence on you. To me, Brian came from Irish-American stock.

Brian was a TV producer whose career had seen better days. He had some meaningless awards, and now, in his early 40s, he went home to do a "town diary" of his hometown. hoping it revived his career.

As both Jack and I worked regularly but were hardly household names - and in our early to mid-forties (Jack was a tad older than me) - it was a theme that we very much appreciated.

For the most part, Jack was very generous in giving me leeway to create the characters, while there were certain story points that he definitely wanted to hit.

When I looked at the actual shooting of the film, it would be easy to say the writing process was contentious, but, as I recall it now, it was not.

Once he gets home, he decides to stay with his parents, something you know as a film watcher is a bad idea. In his world, the mother was more supportive and understanding; he and his father would butt heads about the fact that he never got a "real job." It was something I very much related to, if, in my life, the parents were switched.

The characters were a lot of "townies," as Jack would refer to them; folks who had grown up here, never left, and who knew everyone's business. One of those older ones, Hartley, is talking at a bar one day about a cheerleader who drowned years earlier named Dottie Vaughn:

HARTLEY
Oh, she drowned all right. What else?

BRIAN
I don't have a clue.

HARTLEY
But I have all the clues!

And so begins our mystery, as Hartley is anxious for someone to finally listen to him, that the drowning was not an accident at all. Brian originally thinks he is just a crazy old man looking for attention, but soon begins to think that there is something to his story. Soon, he starts to wonder if a documentary that unearths an old, possibly sordid murder and even cover-up would not lead him back to success. He does, indeed, follow the clues, which wind up involving some old friends, including possibly Frank Ryan, his best friend as kids, and Frank's ne'er to well brother, Jimmy.

Brian goes over all of this with an assistant he hires, Veronica. It is here that Jack and I had a difference of opinion which, in fact, never got successfully resolved.

Veronica was young, pretty and smart. I thought it was a given that this would be our love story, and that a love story was needed. Jack vehemently disagreed. He said that work relationships never work, and that Brian would be smart enough to avoid it. I suggested that thought had little to do with it, and it would only be natural that this long-divorced man would be attracted to this woman who was not only physically attractive but had a fire and spirit that reminded Brian of himself before he became jaded. I thought a growing love story would heighten both the tension and the difficulties in making the right decision later in the script.

Jack insisted a relationship would not happen, but I did convince him to add a scene where Veronica, slightly attracted to Brian, invites him over for dinner. To satisfy Jack, I suggest that there is an attraction, but that Brian chooses not to follow up on it, for career reasons. What would actually happen with the scene would be something else.

The script was dotted with characters both of us were familiar with, including an ex-wife who wanted little to do with Jack. Both of us had one of those, so there was definite inspiration there. * There was also a shady sheriff (isn't there always), a fisherman (whose ethnic identity changed once we cast) and Brian having to deal with his old TV boss, Don.

Coming from a theater background, I was aware that some of my earlier writing was too dialogue-driven. This was something JR would often remind me, one of the few areas where he made suggestions on the script. JR would shoot and edit the film, and felt that he would make more of his contribution to story in those areas.

I seriously thought I had cut down on dialogue and did a good job of "showing" and not "telling", though it actually took rewrites after we started prep and even production to get to that point.

When we finally had the script to where we wanted it, we went about casting and putting the crew together. Those choices, for better and worse, in the next posts.






*Regular readers of this blog will know that my ex and I are great friends now. In the script, I accentuated the points that drove us apart, which are not part of our relationship now.




NB: In looking for the original Billy Joel music video of the song, I found this video that was done for no budget (according to the notes) by some students in a Mexico City filmmaking programming back in 1990. I tend to think that this was not exactly how Billy Joel saw Brenda and Eddie or Hicksville, but I love the spirit and enthusiasm the students brought to it - besides, it's not like Billy needs another hit. Congrats to director Robert Moutal - I wish EVERY music video had this much spunk!

All in the Family:The Making of "Town Diary" - Pt. 2 - The Girl Naked on Page 57

"When I was writing on commission I would never get writer's block. I would just write a shitty scene and make a note to write a good scene later."
-John Sayles at a writers conference I once attended

John Sayles doesn't know how he inspired me with that quote.

I went to Catholic grammar and high schools, and I loved English. IThe way I remember learning writing was very structured., with outlines and Letters and Numbers, not unlike this:

While having a strong feel for structure certainly helped me as a writer, it also held me back. To say I was overly-critical would be kind. The minute I strayed from a tight, structured format, or, Heaven forbid, had a dangling participle at the end of a sentence, it would stop me dead in my tracks, sort of.*

This made for some well-structured by dull scripts.

The Irish novelists were a great inspiration for me, and highest among them, James Joyce. His command of the language was masterful, as much like a composer of music as any author I've ever read. Still, I remember a teacher referring to his stream of consciousness style as "run-on sentences."

Really? Are you joking? Here was some person who had never written anything outside of an essay in their life reducing masterpieces to some formal sentence structure, a structure he certainly understood better than she did or he couldn't have turned it on it's ear.

I had a similar problem my first year at NYU when I had a teacher (grad teaching assistant, actually) take points off for similar flourishes on my part.

Make no mistake. I am no Joyce. Do not judge by the blog, either. I have chosen a more conversational  (yes, sometimes rambling) tone that I fully understand tweaks some rules of grammar.

By the time I started writing the script for Town Diary with Jack, my writing style was a little more free-flowing, based on getting the story down on the page. I approached writing like work, making sure I got to a certain point in the script every day. I took Sayles' advice to heart - just keep writing.

Jack and I first spent a lot of time talking, expounding, tossing ideas around and letting them grow. Jack could have written the entire script like that; I needed my space to hear the words in my head. I have now co-written a number of times, and I have never been able to have the two of us at a computer together. I know it works for some people - not for me.

JR stayed at Jack's apartment in Chicago, and I would fly out there as often as cost and Jack or JR's frequent flyer miles would allow.

Once we had all of our notes, I started going to "the office" every day, working from 10AM until 6PM with an hour break. "The office" was JR's editing suite. For me, if I was going to get the work done, I was going to have to treat it like a job, and I would set how far I had to get and push myself to get there. Then, I would get home, share it with Jack, and we would go over it.

As expected, Jack always had notes. Now, Jack had become a big fan of Robert McKee's Story, whose idea for structure is pictured in the first image at the top of this page. It worked for Jack. If I were to work like that, it would be a maze that I would never get out of, any creativity pummeled as I worried whether the molecular structure was about to go nuclear.

Jack and I were an odd couple in many ways - more on that as this blog goes on - but we both not only respected each other, but needed each other in the process. Jack needed me to actually take the ideas and get them on the page; Jack's attention to structure often reigned me in when I was straying off-course.

Often, I thought of something Sayles also said at that writers' conference, and maybe somewhere else as well. I'm paraphrasing very slightly, as he talked about the difference between working on the studio film Eight Men Out , about the Black Sox scandal, and working for Corman. I believe the reference is to Sybil Danning in Battle Beyond the Stars, but it could have been one of their other collaborations.

"When I was working on Eight Men Out, I would get these notes in meetings like 'we wish the plot point at the end of Act 1 were actually earlier in Act 2' . I'd walk out with no idea of what they actually wanted me to do. With Corman, he would say, 'You have the monster attack on page 55 and then again on page 57. Why don't you have the girl naked on page 57 and have the monster attack again on page 59!' That I understood!"

However, after some less-than-fruitful experiences in Hollywood, there was another Sayles' quote that rang true about this project:

"If you write a movie for Roger Corman, it's gonna get made. You saw it almost the next day."

Town Diary was gonna get made.




* Dangling participles still drive me crazy in written form, especially because they are so common in our conversational mode.