Felix just laughs. “I’m not worried.”
Suzanne is amused. “No offense, but he’s huge. So . . . you know.”
This bothers Felix enough that he joins his own school’s rugby team to show Suzanne how tough he is. I actually did this in real life. I joined Colgate’s rugby team (for a week) to prove to Denise that I was as tough as her ex. When he realizes that his rugby team is scheduled to play a match against Tracy’s team, the showdown is set. Thematically, Puddle Cruiser is about modern-day machismo. One of my favorite jokes in the film is when the guys realize that Tracy Shannon not only has two first names, but two girls’ first names, which makes him a “firsty-firsty, girlie-girlie.”
The name of the script wasn’t great, but back then, we loved random names. We named one of our sketch shows “Jolly Joe Triphammer Hits It Big” and another “The Return of the Biscuit Champion.” We thought the words “Puddle Cruiser” would catch a film festival crowd’s attention. When people asked what it meant, we made up something about Felix being a big fish in a small pond (puddle). There was no obvious connection to the film, and most people called it Puddle Jumper. A well-known, flamboyantly gay film rep lit up when he misheard the name. “Tunnel Cruiser?” Ah well.
Having a script we liked was great, but how the hell were we going to make it? Since Kevin Cooper and Deanna, who had helped us make The Tinfoil Monkey Agenda, had left New York, we needed help. We needed a producer—someone to budget the film, hire crew, and possibly raise money. I met with a couple of indie producers and quickly realized that I was out of my depth. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about—unions, insurance, blah-blah-blah.
Erik Stolhanske was temping at an investment bank and told me that his boss, Rich Perello, had overheard him talking about movies. Rich had almost produced a movie once and wanted to meet about becoming our producer. I was skeptical. Were we really going to hire an investment banker who had only almost produced a movie?
When I met Rich, he told me his story about being in the Arizona desert with a cast, crew, equipment, and trucks full of food, all of which he had secured with his charm, his hustle, and his verbal promise of future pay. But the check from the investor, which was supposed to be in the bank weeks earlier, still hadn’t arrived. It never did. So when we sat down, Rich’s first question was, “Do you have the money?”
“Not yet,” I said, “but we’re hell-bent on getting it.” He smiled and rolled his eyes. Great.
Rich knew about unions, camera packages, insurance, and crew—all of the things I had no idea about. He was smart, passionate, and straightforward, and he wanted the job badly. In the end, it was obvious that he was our guy. Meeting Rich was critical to Broken Lizard’s success. Sometimes, a filmmaker will hook up with the wrong producer and the money will disappear, through either poor budgeting or graft. With Rich, the money always ends up on the screen, and the budget before we start is always the budget at the end. Rich doesn’t go over. Period.
Back at Film Video Arts, one of the editors, Sooz Hewitt, was leaving to go to her second job, where she worked as a paralegal. She mentioned that her firm was hiring and asked if I was interested. Interested in being a paralegal? I was trying to avoid law school. But then she told me that the firm was the Sloss Law Office and her boss, John Sloss, repped a list of filmmakers that included John Sayles, Steve James, Kevin Smith, Eddie Burns, and Richard Linklater. My ears perked up. “Linklater?”
My job at Sloss Law Office was answering phones, revising contracts, copying, and filing. Lots of copying and filing. I was part of a team of assistants who worked for John and his associate, Jodi Peikoff. The Sloss Law Office was the legal heart of the independent film business. John had posters from seemingly every major indie film from the past ten years, all of which had been touched by that office in some way. When I’d “roll calls” for John, I’d get to listen in as he spoke with financiers, directors, producers, actors, and studio heads like Harvey Weinstein. It was fun to hear the two spar, negotiate, manipulate, charm, and sometimes openly fight.
Filmmakers sent tapes of their finished and half-finished films to John, hoping he’d sign on as their sales rep. One such tape was of a ten-minute short called Bottle Rocket by an unknown filmmaker named Wes Anderson. When Sooz and I marched into John’s office telling him he needed to see this filmmaker, he shrugged.
“You’re too late. They already shot the feature at Columbia Pictures. It’s coming out this fall.”
I didn’t meet Linklater, but I did talk to Whit Stillman, Kevin Smith, and Eddie Burns about their films and what I needed to look out for when I made mine.
Rich did a budget and we began our raise. The investor pool was composed of my parents, their doctor friends, some uncles and aunts, my sister, Lemme’s parents, his aunt, and some of our friends. In total, we raised $125,000, which was a huge fucking sum. Look, film is an expensive art form, and investing in a first-time filmmaker requires having extra money. If you’re worrying about rent and food, you’re not investing five grand in your nephew’s film. That’s why there are so few films about the impoverished by the impoverished. The film business, like life, is unfair.
When we approached our alma mater, Colgate, to discuss our plan to shoot there, the dean was friendly but asked for a script, so we sent him one.
We put a casting notice in Backstage magazine and got stacks and stacks of headshots from aspiring New York actors. One day, while eating at a local dive, Milady’s, I chatted up our waitress, who turned out to be an actress. When I asked her to come to our apartment to audition, she was understandably skeptical. Eventually, she got over her kidnapping fears and showed up. Her name was Kayren Butler, and she was hilarious and smart and the best actress by far, so we cast her in the role of Suzanne.
Then Colgate called back. The dean had read our script and said that it “just wasn’t something they’d like to pursue.” Say what? Shooting at Colgate was emotionally important to us. What were we supposed to do? Just shoot it somewhere else?
We started scouting other schools while simultaneously trying to change the dean’s mind. We hit the phones, enlisting the hundreds of alums and current students we knew, to start a letter-writing, faxing, and phoning campaign. The gist of the message was, Colgate claims to be a liberal arts school, but when alumni are trying to make it as liberal artists, Colgate is standing in the way. What a damning contradiction!
Hundreds of letters later, the dean called.
“Call off your dogs. You can shoot here. And send me your list. We want to use it to raise money.” Before the dean hung up, though, he added one last thing.
“I’m agreeing to this on three conditions: The film can have no sex, no drugs, and no drunkenness.” Aw, come on, man, this is a college movie.
We went up to Colgate in the summer of ’95 to make Broken Lizard’s first feature film. Rich said we had enough money for only three out of four weeks of shooting, but I assured him that the rest would come. It was the classic wing and a prayer. We hired Tony Foresta, the same director of photography who shot The Tinfoil Monkey Agenda, and we rented two 35 mm Moviecam Compacts, lighting trucks, sound equipment—all of it. I was intimidated. What was I doing directing a feature film? I didn’t know shit. Or at least it felt like that. Terry Gilliam had directed six years of television before directing The Holy Grail. I’d tell Tony to put the camera in a certain place and then I’d look around, half expecting the crew to laugh about my choice. They didn’t because I was the director and they were there to execute my vision, whatever that was.
On the first day, I shot twelve takes of the master, which is the term used for the widest shot of the scene. In my mind, I needed to keep shooting until every line of the master was perfect. That took three hours. After the twelfth take, our Venezuelan sound guy, David (pronounced Dah-veed), mercifully came up to me and said, “Are you sure you need more takes of the master?” I nodded, unsure, but mo
ved on. When we got into the edit, Kevin and I used only three seconds of the master. Meaning we spent 180 minutes shooting to capture three seconds of on-screen footage. It was an important lesson because, beyond the creative, filmmaking is very much about time management. The smartest filmmakers spend the most time on the shots that they believe are going to appear on-screen the most. Now when I shoot a scene, I shoot two takes of the master, using about twenty minutes of production time, and I spend way more time on two-shots and singles, which tend to take up more screen time in the final film.
I was under immense psychological pressure, which was amplified by the crew’s watching me learn how to direct on the fly. The stress was so intense I lost fifteen pounds and developed back and knee pains so debilitating that I limped around for a week. The medicine my mom prescribed to combat the pain listed potential side effects like “vomiting a coffee ground–like substance.” All of the Lizards hoped to have a ringside seat if that happened.
Stressful as it was, shooting Puddle Cruiser was also a dream come true. We were back at our school, living in our old fraternity house, and starring in our own movie. At night, we drank and smoked like the old days and savored our “bonus month” of college. Seeing our faces on-screen, beautifully lit, on 35 mm film for the first time was intoxicating. This looked like a real movie.
As Rich had predicted, we ran out of money three weeks into the shoot and had to stop production to dial for dollars. When I came up short, I laid out my secret weapon: four credit cards with the name “Dr. Chandrasekhar” on them. To be clear, I didn’t set out to commit credit card fraud. In a bit of reverse racism (all Indians are doctors, right?), the credit card companies had accidentally sent me those cards, along with the corresponding doctor credit limits. I didn’t correct the error, and I used those cards to keep the film rolling and the crew fed.
When we got back to New York City, Heffernan and I rented a nonlinear editing system called D/Vision from our soundman, David. We worked our day jobs and then came in to edit at night. To our great surprise and relief, the film cut together really nicely. Maybe I knew more than I thought? The first cut was two and a half hours, and though we were excited about it, when we showed it to Broken Lizard, their response was underwhelming. It felt long. Where was the music? Why did it look so washed-out? We were bummed, but Heffernan and I knew we had a good movie in there somewhere.
I then decided it was time to show my boss, John Sloss, hoping he’d agree to represent the film for sale. When I walked into John’s office, he looked up from his papers.
“Are you sure you want me to see this now? You only get one chance to make a first impression.” I thought about Broken Lizard’s reaction to the cut and walked out. This piece of advice stuck with me, and it’s a line I often repeat. Whether it’s an early draft of a script or an early cut of a film, when you’re showing it to someone you need help from, make sure what you’re showing is great. Because if it’s not, they’re unlikely to watch draft two.
Kevin and I headed back to the edit room to find a tighter version of the film, when disaster struck. A computer bug had wiped out the entire edit—two months of work, just gone. We had to reconstruct the edit by eye, using a VHS tape we’d made as a guide. Having lost two term papers in my school career, you’d think I would have learned. Today they call me “the Backup Kid”—because I back up a lot. Well, they don’t, but they should.
The Sundance deadline was quickly approaching, and we were bogged down in the reconstruction, so I just sent them the two-and-a-half-hour cut.
Thanksgiving weekend is when Sundance calls filmmakers with the good news that they got in. We heard nothing, because they don’t call the rejects. So we continued to edit. Five months and $45,000 in credit card debt later, I got a call from Visa that said, “You’re not a doctor, are you?”
“Not at the moment, no,” I admitted. My credit was cut off, but it didn’t matter, because Puddle Cruiser was done.
—
We had our premiere at the Gramercy Theatre on East Twenty-Third Street. The Gramercy was a beautiful old New York theater that perpetually smelled of Indian food, because they only showed Bollywood films now.
The place was packed with four hundred of our closest pals, who all made jokes about the Indian food smell. This was going to be the first time John Sloss saw the film, which we had trimmed down to a svelte 104 minutes. If he liked it and thought he could sell it, he’d sign on as our representative. If not, I’d go back to making copies. As the film started, he leaned in, driving the obvious home.
“This better be good.”
The friends-and-family premiere screening was gangbusters, with big, constant laughs. I imagine some of the response was relief—Oh thank God it doesn’t suck. As the credits rolled and the audience clapped, John leaned in again.
“You’re fired.”
I smiled. “You’re hired.”
After the screening, Samantha Mazer, the director of the Hamptons International Film Festival, approached. “We want your movie!”
When I told John, he groused about our Sundance rejection and said, “Let’s find out what Toronto thinks first.” Selling a film requires a careful strategy, starting with where the film premieres. Sundance and Toronto were the only two North American festivals where films had actually sold, so Toronto had become critical to our sales prospects. Truthfully, there’s no better place to sell a comedy than at a film festival, where the crowds are smart and they get every joke. And since the majority of festival films are about heroin addicts, sex trafficking, incest, and genocide (kidding—well, I’m kinda kidding), watching a comedy can be a welcome respite. When selling a comedy, you’re relying on the enthusiasm, energy, and laughter of the crowd to overwhelm the opinion of the acquisition executive. You want them to think, Holy shit. People really like this film. We’ve got to buy it.
For festival programmers, premieres are the ultimate prize, because they want to say that their festival was the first place that Film X was exposed to the world. Sundance took it a step further with their unwritten policy of not programming films that had already premiered at other US festivals. The big dog eats first. Only after Sundance made its intentions clear did anyone dare commit their film to another US festival. The one exception was Toronto. If your film got into Toronto, you went, and Sundance had no problem with that.
Film distribution companies each have a team of acquisition executives whose job it is to watch every independent film made in a given year. If the executives find a film they love, they’ll tell their boss (the check writer), who will watch the film and make the final decision on whether to buy it.
When a film gets into a festival, acquisition execs immediately call up the filmmakers, hoping to sweet-talk them into showing their film early. For the filmmaker, it’s a huge mistake because of how their film will be watched, which is on a computer screen, in an office. There’ll be no hype, no word of mouth, and no laughing festival audience to influence the buyer. Saying no to the acquisition executive guarantees that they’ll be at your first festival screening, because if they’re not, and a competitor buys your film, they will miss out on a relationship that could be enormously lucrative to the company. The best example of this is when Miramax bought Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. It started a relationship that gave Miramax (and eventually, the Weinstein Company) Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, and everything else Quentin has done since. But when you’re a new filmmaker and have a film with unknown stars, you’ve got a problem. The execs who go to the first screenings are never the ones who can write the check. Why would the boss come to our screening when Gwyneth is in town and wants to have dinner? Shit, I’d choose that too.
But let’s say you had a good premiere screening, and the first wave of execs (at, say, Miramax) love your film. They’ll tell the film’s rep, John Sloss, that Miramax is interested, but they need their boss, Harvey Weinstein, to see it. The problem is that Ha
rvey isn’t in Utah yet, so a print needs to be sent to him. This must be avoided at all costs because Harvey will watch the film alone in a screening room, where he’ll be free to check email or roll calls (if he’s bored). He may recognize that the film is funny, but he won’t be swept away by the energy of the rowdy, sold-out Egyptian Theatre crowd, and the likely result will be that Miramax will pass on buying the film. So the key to selling a film at a festival is to get Harvey (or his equivalent) to watch the film in a theater, with a rowdy audience. That’s the only way he’ll buy it.
Because of this, John Sloss’s job is to tell the acquisition executives that if Miramax is serious about buying the film, they had better get Harvey to the screening tomorrow night, because check writers from the other distributors were there tonight and offers are starting to come in. That’s what you tell them even if it’s not strictly true. John’s goal is to get them worried. What if another company makes an offer tonight and the film is sold before Harvey can see it? And what if the film goes on to become a hit and make tens of millions of dollars like Napoleon Dynamite?
When Toronto let us know that they were not going to program Puddle Cruiser, it was off to the Hamptons Film Festival for us. Since the Hamptons was only three years old, it was considered an upstart and was unlikely to have check writers there. So our strategy was to build buzz and then follow up with distributor screenings in New York and Los Angeles, where we would pack the room with a crowd and invite check-writing acquisition executives to watch.
The Hamptons Film Festival couldn’t have gone better. The screenings were packed, and the crowds loved the film so much that they gave us the Golden Starfish Award, the audience award for most popular film. This was the first time we’d shown the film to strangers, so the laughs told us that maybe we had appeal outside our own friends. The late, great actor Roy Scheider (Jaws, All That Jazz) and David O. Russell, the director of Flirting with Disaster (one of the great comedy films of all time), gave us the award. Afterward, Ken Hardy, from the Creative Artists Agency, said he wanted to sign us. Wow. CAA. Surreal.
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