What Just Happened?

by Art Linson

  ‘I can’t make this movie without a star,’ Rothman said. Little white flecks of foam were forming on the corners of his mouth.

  Another odd tic that occurs when an executive is given the sweatshirt of authority is the use of the word I instead of you or even we when referring to the making of movies. To be fair, this astonishing exhibition of self-confusion was not limited to Rothman. In fact, it’s rare to find an executive these days who will not say things like ‘Two years ago when I made [fill in the famous title of your choice] blah blah blah.’ Directors and writers, who actually do the prodigious work for these guys, have to patiently listen to this drivel with their eyes glazed over waiting to pick up the money. Executives simply confuse making a committee business decision with making a movie. I think it makes them feel artsy.

  ‘Maybe we can find a star to play a cameo?’ I asked.

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘What about Robert De Niro to play the convict.’

  Alfonso grinned. I thought he was about to jump up and say, ‘Olé.’

  ‘I like Bobby,’ Rothman declared.

  Bobby. Bobby! A minute before getting this job, Rothman would have been saying, ‘Mr. De Niro, can I please freshen your drink?’ Now, even though they had never met, he was already calling him ‘Bobby.’

  He couldn’t help himself. This kind of congenital weirdness gets distributed with the parking space on the Fox lot. As time went on for Rothman, and the attendant pressures of the job expanded, things would start to even out. Insecurities and disappointments would erode the confidence of the most successful of these executives. After some of my movies came out, particularly the ones that were not successful, Rothman’s behavior took a strange bent. He began to remind me of a guy standing uncomfortably at his desk with the barrel of a .357 Magnum pressed tightly to his temple, threatening everyone in the room, ‘If you come any closer, I am going to pull the trigger.’

  You remember six months earlier, when I was talking to Robert De Niro at the Peninsula Hotel about doing The Edge and he had some major concerns about acting with a mechanical bear? Well, undaunted and in the best tradition of Sammy Glick, I rolled up my other sleeve and revealed a different kind of timepiece that might catch his eye.

  ‘You remember Great Expectations?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m just asking, do you remember Great Expectations?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘The Dickens thing.’

  ‘Of course, I know.’

  ‘Do you remember the convict who ends up being the benefactor?’

  ‘Vaguely, I think so.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Oh. We’re developing it into a modern-day movie.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘The convict’s gonna be a great part.’

  ‘It doesn’t have a bear in it, does it?’

  ‘No bear.’

  ‘I might get interested.’

  ‘How interested?’

  ‘How many days?’

  ‘I don’t know, the script isn’t done yet.’

  ‘How many days do you think?’

  ‘Well, it’s a substantial cameo, goes throughout the movie.’

  ‘How many days?’

  Bob was trying to find out if the studio would be willing to compress the convict’s schedule. This means shooting all of the scenes with the convict consecutively, then interspersing those scenes throughout the film during the editing. The advantage to Bob would be that he could get all of his work done in a short time and still make the same amount of money. Maybe, he would have time to fit in another movie while this one was still shooting. This can put great strain on the production. By shooting out of sequence, the ability to change things that might not work is always compromised. Sets and locations often have to be duplicated. It often adds considerable costs to the overall budget. Nonetheless, if you want or need an actor badly enough, you learn to dance on a pinhead. Based on my preliminary meetings with Fox, I knew that we were going to need De Niro or somebody else just as significant.

  ‘Who knows, if we compress the convict’s schedule, maybe seven to nine days.’

  ‘Seven days. I could get very interested.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  From Bob this was almost a commitment. I was tempted to do something foolish like say ‘We’re not going to need a read-through on this one, are we?’ But, I sensed that for whatever made him tick, Great Expectations was something that would fit into his master plan. I knew I was one big step closer to getting a movie made.

  I’d like to say that Ethan Hawke was my first choice for Pip, that I saw all his movies and loved them, that I fought the studio like a producer with great integrity, and that finally, against all odds, I got them to commit to the underdog. Not the case. John and I would spend endless hours going over wish lists, but the pickings were slim. We were hoping for Brad Pitt or even Keanu Reeves, but they turned us down flat. Many of the young actors out there who were excellent and who had sufficient standing to help us get the movie financed were not responding. When I got the call from Bryan Lourd at CAA that Ethan was willing, I was relieved. I knew that Ethan was enough of an actor on the rise to stimulate Fox, especially with the spice that De Niro’s flirtation provided. John and I had some concerns, but after so many turndowns, it was no longer time to focus on artistic chemistry. I had shifted into full producer mode: Let’s get this movie made no matter what. Ethan was a good actor. Trying to marshal all of my optimism, I thought maybe he could carry the movie.

  I kept De Niro current with the progress of the script, and meanwhile, he did his homework. Bob always did his homework. He saw the David Lean movie. He read through the Dickens book. When the script was ready, he read it and reconfirmed his enthusiasm. One last hurdle. I waited anxiously for Bob to come out of the screening of A Little Princess, knowing he had to approve of Alfonso.

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘Uh … seven days is good.’

  NINE

  I’m Driving a Pinto

  Sarasota, Florida, is particularly hot in July. When you have less money to spend on a movie than your director wants to spend, it feels even hotter. I made several proclamations before we started filming. I told Alfonso that I would get him lots of money to make this movie. I told Bill Mechanic that we could do this movie in sixty-two days and we would stay on budget. I told Alfonso, who wanted more work on the script as the start date neared, that Mitch would be available and willing to accommodate him and that we could get this work done while we were shooting. Disagreements or artistic differences would be no problem; I would be there to referee. When Ethan Hawke said that he also had script concerns, I smiled and told him we welcomed his input. When the cinematographer, Emmanuel Lubezki (A Little Princess, Birdcage, Sleepy Hollow), nicknamed Chivo, registered much concern about the size of his lighting package and the pace of the schedule, I told him not to worry. We would find a way to make it all work. Also born and raised in Mexico, Chivo, who looked like an undernourished Kenny G, was, like his childhood amigo, a ‘perfectionist.’ No matter how good things were going, he always had that hapless expression ‘You’re killing me, can’t you see, you’re killing me.’ You know where this is going. Somebody was going to get pissed off. Maybe everybody.

  Perfectionist is a nasty word. I remember when Michael Mann was in the middle of shooting Heat. He had just completed the bank robbery sequence in downtown Los Angeles, which had taken longer to film than any other bank robbery in the history of cinema. We were desperately over schedule. Arnon Milchan, one of the investors with Warner Bros., came to the set with his entourage to try to convince Michael to pick up the pace. While we were waiting in Mann’s trailer for him to break for lunch, Arnon asked me if there was anything in the schedule that Michael could shorten to get back on time. ‘Gosh, I don’t know, Arnon; you know Michael, he’s a perfectionist.’ The mere use of the word made the entire group physically ill
. Even I felt a little shaky. While to some it might have conjured up unyielding artistic integrity, to the bank it screamed, ‘I don’t understand the word compromise. Secure your knee pads.’ Michael entered the trailer. Arnon repeated his plea while Michael quietly listened. He even occasionally nodded with concern for Arnon’s predicament. Finally Michael stood up, looked at his watch, and said, ‘I’m afraid lunch is only thirty minutes. If I don’t get back now, we’re going to fall another day behind.’

  The temperature in southwest Florida was in the nineties and the air was thick with humidity. Alfonso and I were standing in front of the large Venetian Gothic mansion, Ca d’Zan, on Sarasota Bay, which was going to serve as our primary location. This imposing structure had lavish gardens and a slightly nutty touch, probably because it was built by one of the circus Ringling brothers. Over the last ten years it has remained a minor tourist attraction for the dispossessed. For our purposes, the location was to serve as the crumbling estate of Ms. Dinsmoor, the eccentric rich aunt of Estella (Gwyneth). The descriptive line in the script read, ‘Paradiso Perduto [the name of the crumbling estate] is the land that time forgot.’ Alfonso took this line seriously. He spent tens of thousands of dollars transforming the well-kept structure and the meticulous gardens into twenty years of dilapidated rot. Following the script, remnants of a wedding that had never taken place were now decaying in a vast garden covered with dead palm fronds and overgrown brush. All that was missing were live rats, but they were on order.

  ‘Come here, I want to show you the wedding cake,’ Alfonso said excitedly as we walked through the maze of the garden. He was content. He had finally snagged De Niro for the convict, cast Anne Bancroft for the eccentric aunt, and added two wonderful actors, Hank Azaria and Chris Cooper, to join Hawke and Paltrow. Glazer was turning out different variations on the script. And we were spending money at a furious pace, trying to keep up with his imagination. It was getting tight.

  As we sidestepped a grand piano encrusted in mud, leaning awkwardly against a busted bandstand, I said, ‘I think you’ve just about done it, don’t you?’

  ‘Ees going to be great, I think, huh?’

  ‘I think it’s great now.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re almost there.’

  Two women and a man all dressed identically in khaki Bermuda shorts strolled on the grounds taking photographs. One of the crew motioned for them to stop, and as they started to walk away, the man turned to us, held his nose, and said disappointedly, ‘Boy, they’ve really let this place go downhill, haven’t they?’

  We both nodded and smiled.

  ‘See, it’s making them sick. I think we’re there,’ I said.

  It was a couple of weeks before we were to start photography, and considering that costs were already bursting, the mood from Fox was remarkably quiet. I soon learned why we seemed to be flying under the radar. A month and a half before we started photography, Titanic began filming. The scale and the costs of that movie were so immense that until we got into real trouble, no one at Fox paid any attention to us. We were the little Negro stepchild who occasionally needed another pair of shoes, while the other kid was off building a nuclear bomb. When the name James Cameron was uttered above a whisper, Mechanic, Rothman, et al. would jerk their heads upward and downward as if they were jolted by a fire drill. When we completed the first eight days of shooting, we were already a week behind schedule, and no one from Fox had even called us.

  Let me take an ugly left turn for a moment, if for no other reason but to keep both of us enthused. Mechanic and Rothman didn’t tell Cuarón or me that a pivotal scene in Titanic – one that centered the entire romance in the film – was identical to one in our movie. Whether it was a grand coincidence or an accidental stealing or something even darker, I don’t know. Both main characters were burgeoning young artists hired by the rich girl to be drawn nude, resulting in love, romance, and sex. We never saw the Titanic script, but if you look at both movies, it would be clear that Fox had to hold our little movie from release until the monster drank first. If we had anything fresh to offer, it was preempted. We were steamrolled.

  By the time we were in release, critics, and no doubt half the paying audience, were commenting that this must be the year of the young artist who paints his girlfriend naked. But since we didn’t have enough money, or the inclination, to sink an ocean liner, this love story was our best shot, our only shot. By the time Great Expectations was seen, Titanic had already grossed five hundred million dollars. I admit that the big boat going down was their denouement. Nonetheless, when Gwyneth removes her shoes, unhooks her bra, slides off her panties, and asks a twittering Ethan, ‘Do you want me standing or sitting?’ what else could the audience feel but ‘been there, done that.’ We were as fresh as an I Love Lucy rerun.

  ‘What sort of twisted logic would get you to compare Titanic to whatever you’re doing?’ Jerry asked.

  ‘There was a run on young artists as a theme. No one told us.’

  ‘Get over it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to do.’

  ‘Oh, boy.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A movie producer that pretends, oh, that’s good.’

  ‘Facts are facts, Jerry.’

  ‘I believe you’re taking this whole thing too personal.’

  ‘That’s very accurate.’

  ‘Weren’t you the one that said a producer is merely the mayonnaise?’

  ‘Well, thank you for remembering.’

  ‘Mayonnaise!?’

  ‘That was a long time ago.’

  ‘What exactly—’

  ‘It means we’re supposed to—’

  ‘I know what’t means.’

  ‘Supposed to make things go more smoothly.’

  ‘I think your exact words were, “Producers are the mayonnaise between the talent and the money on the way to making a shit sandwich.”’

  ‘Not exactly how I put it, Jerry.’

  ‘Do you know what happens when you leave mayonnaise out in the sun?’

  ‘Gosh, let me guess … it goes off,’ I uttered, continuing to be Laurel to his Hardy.

  ‘If I were you, I’d be spending more time in the shade.’

  That made him laugh. I took a big gulp of the Chianti.

  ‘My God, don’t they serve hard liquor here?’ he asked.

  ‘Only wine.’

  We were seated in the center of Giorgio’s, a small Italian restaurant located at the mouth of the Santa Monica Canyon across from the Pacific Coast Highway. Sandwiched between a gay bar and a bikini shop, Giorgio’s is a tiny hot spot that caters to the famous and tries its best to cater to the less than famous. The waiter, reminiscent of Joe Pesci down on his luck, had just brought the obligatory free starter of shaved octopus with steamed potato. While he started to run through the specials, Jerry, now in rare form, was mocking the waiter with macho Italian hand gestures. Actually, I’m not sure what he was doing. He grabbed his balls with his left hand, stiffened his right forearm, and made a fist. I guess Jerry was getting a bit too heady from sitting at such a prime table. Even Giorgio waved to him from the kitchen, figuring that he must be somebody. Jerry was so splendidly out of the loop that his eccentricities seemed comical. I indulged him.

  ‘Don’tcha think,’ Jerry said, ‘the water level for producers is getting irrepressibly low?’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘Mind if I’m direct?’

  ‘Do I have a choice?’

  ‘If you didn’t have Bob De Niro’s home phone number, you might not have much of a producing career.’

  ‘Oh, that’s gone too far.’

  ‘Hey, according to you, you’d send a script about an all-girls school to De Niro. What’s with that?’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘You think you’d get that masterpiece of yours made if you only had Joe Mantegna’s number?’

  ‘Bob was good casting.’

  ‘Who cares?’

  ‘It was an artistic ch
oice.’

  ‘Oh, let’s not go artistic again.’

  ‘What would you call it, Jerry?’

  ‘Desperation.’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘What happened to the producer’s motto “I saw, I conquered, I came.”’

  ‘We’ve grown up.’

  ‘Hoo haa. Hoo haa.’

  There he goes again with that bad Pacino imitation, and again he started banging the table trying to control himself. Elena, Giorgio’s daughter, who ran the room, looked over, concerned. She backed off when I held up my hand indicating that all was cool. This was going to be a long night. I was suddenly feeling a pang of regret that I didn’t do drugs anymore. I had to pace myself. Anyway, Jerry’s credibility was in the margins. That caustic bastard. He was burnt. Hell, there was a lot more to this producing thing than just getting ‘Bobby’ on the phone. Wasn’t there?

  The grind had begun.

  I was on a plane returning from Canmore, Canada, to Miami, Florida. It was my third trip in the last four weeks. I had just gone through the horrendous beard incident with Alec Baldwin, and my nerves were brittle. I had waved good-bye, leaving Baldwin clean-shaven, fat, and pissed off, and Lee Tamahori unsettled—although they both had Elle Macpherson around for company. That’s right, if you’ve been paying attention, both The Edge (that bear movie) and Great Expectations were shooting at the same time. This required a lot of traveling and a lot of accommodating.

  The thunderstorms in Miami forced air traffic control to keep us spinning and bouncing for an extra hour before landing. I soon found out that it mirrored what was happening on the ground. Over the last few weeks, with the pressure building, Alfonso was getting racked. When filming was going well and dailies looked fine, he was excited and motivated. When things got rocky, he got rocky. When you’re in the middle of the stampede, and you’re a new director, all kinds of monsters can surface. Usually, the director gets sick during filming and has to work with the flu for several weeks. In that sort of weakened state, directors are manageable. It was too soon to know how Alfonso was going to fare, but his health was fine. As the plane jerked on the tarmac, I had the ugly recognition that the real ‘tough’ stuff hadn’t even begun.