Johnny Cigarini

by John Cigarini

  Having felt that I missed out on investing in the Hard Rock Café, I was keen to invest in the House of Blues. Initially, before the clubs had opened in New Orleans and LA, I had put in $20,000 and I hadn’t even been in the clubs – but after I saw them, I was impressed. Planet Hollywood had gone public and made a fortune for Robert Earl and the shareholders. Robert Earl had been running Grand Met when they bought up Isaac’s half of the Hard Rock Café. He had found that Isaac had built up a big collection of Hollywood memorabilia… and that was the beginning of Planet Hollywood. Isaac was talking about the House of Blues going public and I wanted in. I begged him to let me invest more, but he kept saying things like, “Those shares are reserved for John Goodman.” In the end, he let me raise my shareholding to $300,000, but I lost it all. I thought you might all like to know – after all this bragging about cars and whatnot. If I’d invested that kind of money in 1995 in any tech stock, like Microsoft or Apple, I would be a very wealthy man, but I’ve stayed positive about it. I reckon I had my money’s worth in fun.

  Things started to go wrong for Isaac at the 1996 Atlanta Georgia Olympic Games. He always paid frequent visits to his guru, Sai Baba, in India and he was undecided whether to open a House of Blues at the Olympic Games. He asked Sai Baba, about a month before the Games, and the baba told him he should open a club, so Isaac had crews working double time through the night to get the club finished in time. It supposedly cost $9 million to build, for a club that was only going to stand for a month. Unfortunately, the thing that really did it for Isaac was the bomb that went off at the Atlanta games, killing one person. Whole areas where the House of Blues was planning to sell merchandise were closed off and the whole thing was a disaster. By then, the House of Blues had a number of large investors who had put in $10-15 million each. In addition to Harvard University, there was Disney and someone who had made a fortune selling Mexican salsa. After the Atlanta debacle, the public listing was cancelled and the figures no longer stacked up. Isaac fell out with the financial partners and left the company.

  The whole House of Blues fun was over and eventually the clubs were sold to Live Nation concert promoters.

  “Man learns through experience, and the spiritual path is full of different kinds of experiences. He will encounter many difficulties and obstacles, and they are the very experiences he needs to encourage and complete the cleansing process.” – Sai Baba.

  Chapter 33

  Closing BFCS Inc.

  “A man is born alone and dies alone; and he experiences the good and bad

  consequences of his karma alone and he goes alone to hell or the

  supreme abode.”

  – Chanakya

  I had been in LA for one year but the US company wasn’t showing a profit, so the other UK partners sold it to me. I was fine with that. I knew it would boom someday but they didn’t believe in it. In fact, it was a job away from going bankrupt, but I knew a job would come. I don’t know how or why I knew, I just did, and then it did – a $1.4 million production for the launch of the Lexus GS300. I worked hard, and within a couple of years, the US company was billing three times the UK company. I was the sole owner and by 1995 BFCS Inc. billed $25 million – its last full trading year. I paid myself a bonus of one million US dollars and I carried the cheque around for a week, showing it off to friends. Nothing cool about me!

  In the US, BFCS made commercials for Ford, Toyota, Cadillac, BMW, Mazda and Chrysler. We also shot for Coca-Cola, Reebok, Nike, Cover Girl, Schweppes, Cadbury, Maybelline, Bank of America, the US Army, Texaco and many more, but our best-known hit that everyone remembers was the original ad for Grey Poupon, directed by Michael Seresin. In it, two English toffs (aristocrats!) draw alongside each other in their Rolls Royces, eating their lunches on the picnic tables of the cars. One says to the other, “Pardon me, would you have any Grey Poupon?” The other one says, “But, of course,” and speeds off. Everybody loves that one.

  My main director in the US was Dutchman Allan van Rijn, who I had brought over from the London office. He would do huge car shoots, sometimes costing between three and four mil each. To begin with, he always went over budget, eating into the profit. It didn’t bother him because he still got a big fat director’s fee, and the more money he spent on the production, the better his film would be. It bothered me, because I needed the mark-up to cover my overheads. I gave him an offer he couldn’t refuse: he could keep most of the underage, if he came in under budget. At least I would make my budgeted profit. Funny how he suddenly started to be profitable. He could make a fortune on big jobs. One car shoot, he made $500,000 in director’s fees and share of the profit – for one month’s work. Unfortunately, Allan was becoming really difficult to deal with. Rumour had it that he was mixing Prozac and Valium, something no doctor would ever prescribe together – the combination is just too dangerous. He was becoming erratic and, to this day, I’m sure he nearly caused me a nervous breakdown. He would also flirt with other production companies, give them false hopes, let the rumours fly around in circles and then never join them. On one occasion, he moved a snow shoot a hundred miles because he didn’t like the snow in the first location. Eventually, he told me he didn’t want to do any more car commercials, which was where the big money was. After I closed the company, Allan moved to RSA, Ridley Scott’s company. I knew Bruce Martin, their executive producer, and he would call me at home: “Allan refuses to come out of the trailer” and “He won’t talk to the agency.”

  “Was he always like this?” he’d ask.

  “Yes, Bruce,” I replied. “It’s why I’m sitting on a beach in Malibu.”

  Running a production company in America was much more stressful than in London, especially with the added fear of the brewing ‘Big One’. In the UK, agencies would pick who they wanted to do their commercial and wait for them to become available, even if it was two or three months. In my day, very rarely would we have to bid against another director. In the US, it was exactly the opposite. Agencies would always leave things until the last minute and they would bid a job between six or eight directors to shoot the following week. So, we could be bidding one small job for $50,000 and another one for $1 million, both for the same week. You wouldn’t want to book the small job in case you got the big one. Then, when you got awarded the job, it was kick, bollock and scramble to get it produced in time.

  I had overheads between the New York and LA offices of $175,000 a month, but that wasn’t the end of the story. The directors and the sales reps between them took about fifty percent of the profit, so actually the company had to make $350,000 profit a month to break even – all with a black hole of no work two or three weeks ahead. It was incredibly stressful! Then, two of my principal directors went to do movies. I was used to Barry Sonnenfeld doing feature films. He was primarily a film director and he only did commercials to pay for the building of his Long Island Hamptons house, which he called the BFCS Palace. He would only ever do ten-day shoots and his daily rate was $25,000. He would get the art department to print up a giant cheque for $250,000, like a lottery winner, and it would be presented to him in front of the agency at the end of the shoot. To be honest, it was embarrassing, flaunting it like that in front of the clients and the crew, but they all found it amusing. In reality, they were just brown-nosing and I guessed he liked that a heap. On top of that director’s fee, he got forty percent of the profit and went off to shoot Get Shorty. I went to see him on set and met Travolta and Gene Hackman, which was pretty cool. I always loved Saturday Night Fever from the seventies and I grew up watching Hackman on screen, plus we had some mutual friends: ex-Formula 1 racing driver Rupert Keegan and his brothers. Unfortunately, as soon as Sonnenfeld finished Get Shorty, he was persuaded to do another film. You have heard of the film – it was Men in Black. In addition the busy husband-and-wife team of Libman and Williams went off to do their first TV feature film, which left a big hole in the company.

  I went back to Ridge Farmhouse in Wiltshire for Christmas 1995.
I was incredibly stressed out. Sid Roberson, who had owned his own production company, came to visit. I told him I was thinking of getting out of the rat race but he advised me not to walk away from it just yet.

  After the Christmas holiday, I went back to LA. I was doing a lot of Kundalini yoga with a wonderful Sikh woman and Madonna’s former teacher, Gurmukh Kaur Khalsa. The best I have ever felt in my life was on the day after a whole day of White Tantric Yoga. I mentioned it to my GP, the brilliant Dr Soram Khalsa, who is also a Sikh man. He told me that’s why all the hippies started with Kundalini in the late sixties… to get high without taking drugs! Today, most of the Kundalini Sikhs are white Americans and you see them all over America. Their Master Guru, Yogi Bhajan, was an Indian, but very few of the practitioners are these days. It’s an American thing, I guess. They wear white outfits with white turbans. During the White Tantric, which lasts a day, about 100 people are to sit cross-legged in yoga posture in lines, facing one another. The energy comes from the lines of meditation. People are alternated boy-girl and I was paired with a pretty French girl, with the day’s activity consisting of doing yoga meditations for sixty-two and thirty-one minutes. One meditation I will never forget involved staring into the other person’s eyes for the sixty-two minutes. I think during that time I fell in love with the French girl, or infatuation took over. It’s partially why I felt so good the next day. We saw each other a few times, but my love wasn’t reciprocated… she had a girlfriend.

  A band had come over from India and after a whole day of White Tantric Yoga, I’d lay on the floor exhausted, but feeling terrific, listening to that ancient and meditative Indian music. I think I felt that bliss that everyone was blabbering on about: enlightenment or something. By the end of the music, I can say I did feel blissful and I didn’t want to leave it. I wanted it to be like it forever, so I made the decision to leave the Western world, to live a life apart and on the edge of all society, perpetual pilgrimage and the abandonment of all material and sexual attachments – to become like the sadhu and go live in a cave. Another thought popped into my head: a full English brekky and a pint of Guinness. The White Tantric was okay, but walking around outside, cold in a loincloth was a no-no. My mind was spinning and it was all to do with work.

  I did White Tantric a second time a few months later. The experience was not so good, I think, as I didn’t have the French girl. We were made to do one meditation that involved holding our arms in the air for sixty-two minutes. This is impossible to do without occasionally bringing them down, or so I thought. I’ve since seen a documentary on YouTube about the naga sadhus of India. Sadhus are mystics, monks who practise yoga with one life ambition: achieving moksha… liberation through meditation, contemplating Brahman and all teachings. They live in caves and temples, in cemeteries and with ghosts. Some are naked, some carry swords and some eat only fruit. Some stand up forever, but I had the most respect for the one on this documentary: he had kept one arm in the air for over twenty years. I couldn’t do it for an hour and even got severe damage to my shoulder, which I exacerbated by playing tennis a few weeks later. I eventually had to have keyhole surgery on it back in England.

  I got back to LA in the New Year of ’96. Gurmukh knew that I was stressed out and thinking of giving up work, and she recommended I talk to a Kundalini psychiatric counsellor, Sat-Kaur Khalsa. I saw her every week for a few weeks, and after it I made the decision to finish my career and change my life. It had to be done. Six friends had died in ’95 and I was living the same type of lifestyle. Peter Cook was the only one older than me. Johnny Chapulis, the friend of all the supermodels, had died of a brain tumour at the young age of thirty-three. Lesley Sunderland, who had done all the fabrics at Ridge Farmhouse, Gerlinde Kostiff of Kinky Gerlinky and an artist friend, Luciana Martinez, had all died of aneurisms in their forties. I was constantly being reminded to enjoy every day, but at the same time… not too much. I had had open-heart surgery twice, my arteries were blocked, I was overweight and I was highly stressed. The truth was, I could have been next and I knew it.

  I hired a personal trainer and saw him in the gym three times a week. In between, I was doing yoga and living on a fat-free vegetarian diet prepared for me by a different Kundalini Sikh. In the first six months of 1996, I lost 60lbs – going from 230lbs down to 170lbs. To put that in perspective, a twenty kilo suitcase that you take on holiday and heave up onto the belt for the check-in girl to weigh is 44lbs, so I lost almost one and a half suitcases of body fat in just six months, and I owe a lot of that to yoga. It works if you do it and I know there are a lot of sceptics out there, so think of it this way: in the words of John Lily, “Yoga is the science of the east while science is the yoga of the west.”

  *

  I could not sell BFCS Inc. There is nothing to sell with a commercials production company. I was the glue holding it together. The only assets were the directors and they could walk away to another company at any time. I decided to close the company down and change my life. I paid all the bills, totalling nearly a million dollars. This was unheard of in the production business in America. Usually when companies close, they walk away from all their debts, but I had learnt about karma. I recalled two English production companies going belly up and owing millions of dollars. The difference was, I hadn’t gone bust, and after thirty years in the business, I wanted to go out with good karma. So, I paid all my bills. Some of the larger creditors, like the equipment houses and film suppliers, gave me a discount for old times’ sake, but if people insisted on full payment, they got it.

  The news of my retirement and closure of BFCS Inc. was announced as the front-page headline in Shoot magazine. The reaction was extraordinary. Jon Kamen, owner of bi-coastal @Radical Media, called his LA partner, Frank Scherma: “Frank, how old are you?”

  “I’m forty-two,” Frank said.

  “So am I. Cigarini’s fifty-two. We’ve got to work like FUCK for ten years so we can get out, like he has.” I knew Jon personally, as he was the brother of my neighbour in Notting Hill, the brilliant film score composer Michael Kamen. I saw Jon in a restaurant a couple of years later, and he said a very sweet thing to me, “I’ve still got your photograph on my desk”.

  After the retirement announcement, I went to the Hollywood Center Studios, where the BFCS office had been. I ran into a casting director I knew. “You are everyone’s hero,” she told me. I think everyone wanted to get out secretly, but couldn’t afford to. I’d had enough, but the difference was, I didn’t give in to the fear of not working, which is often the thing that keeps people in the black hole. It is a black hole because then they die, forgetting to have lived. That’s the key: to not give in to fear. It was just as Jim Morrison said it: “Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power… you are free.”

  I retired at fifty-two.

  *

  I had some great staff working at BFCS Inc. I think it’s true to say everybody loved working there and, looking back, that’s something I can be proud of. It had a family ambience. The grovelling staff would often tell me it was the best company, or that I was the best boss they ever had. I still keep in touch with some of them. Patricia Judice and Cathy Dunn were outstanding in the production department. Tim Sullivan now has a cult following as a director of horror films. Katy Tipton was my absolute fave. She was a production coordinator who had come over to the LA office from London. Goodness me, I remember when she first came in for her interview as a receptionist. She was, and still is thirty years later, very pretty, but also very shy. My heart went out to her. “How many interviews have you been to?” I remember asking her.

  “This is my first,” she told me. I couldn’t resist, and I immediately jumped in. “You’ve got the job,” I told her, and I never regretted my impulsiveness.

  After my initial years in LA, I wondered why everybody in England didn’t move to California, but the grass was always greener and the New World soon wore thin. I yearned for the Old World. Steve, Siobhan Barron’s brother
, wed in Italy, in Bellagio on Lake Como, to a beautiful girl called Andrea Brenninkmeijer, from the Anglo-Dutch family who own C&A. Como epitomised everything I missed in LA. The lake is beautiful and the old villas on the lake are a dream. I remember, oh so clearly, being on a boat on that lake and taking it all in: the history, the sounds. It was everything that America was missing… age. People came from all over the world to be at the wedding. I had just shed 60lbs and was able to buy smart new suits for the occasion. The main base was the wonderful Grand Hotel Villa Serbelloni, dating from 1872. It was on the peninsula where the two branches of the lake meet. Most of the wedding party stayed there, including me. One outstanding day was when Andrea’s parents hosted a lunch in a restaurant called Locanda dell’Isola Comacina, which stands on its own little island of Comacina. There was a fleet of launches to ferry the guests down the lake to the island. It was an unforgettable day. During the festivities, I was hanging out with Siobhan and Jamie Morgan. A friend of Andrea, Stella, made the dresses for the two teenage bridesmaids. She was an up-and-coming dress designer from Notting Hill. It was only months later that I found out her surname was McCartney. The Bransons were there, too, and we reminisced about Thailand. Most of all, I was back with my closest friends and I was back in my Europe. I was back, but I’m sure you’re getting the vibe now, I get itchy feet. It doesn’t take me long to pack a bag and hit the road because, like Kerouac said, the road is life.

  Chapter 34

  Travelling