A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin

by Tom McLoughlin

  When audiences first saw the shower scene in Psycho, they thought, If they’re showing this now…How much worse is it going to get? In the same way, In a Child’s Name teased people. It made them want to see more.

  But then the second half didn’t have a moment to match it. That horror element was just a bridge between what plays like two different movies: a murder mystery and a courtroom drama. Did you, on some level, approach the miniseries as two separate movies?

  I had to look at it as a cohesive whole, but I also learned pretty quickly that with TV movies you really are doing a series of shorts. We needed a cliffhanger at every commercial. These things have to be very carefully structured. You have a certain amount of time for the first act, second act, third act…They follow a very, very rigid format. You have to build to something at the end of each act, and the standard technique is to move in on a close-up of one of the characters at the end of each act. Then the music swells and you cut to the soap commercial. I did not want to fall into those clichés. If I was going to work within that formula, I wanted to do something different that had a more visceral impact.

  So I had to look at it as a whole. I knew it had to build to something at the end of the first night that would make audiences want to come back the second night. And even though the second night didn’t have anywhere nearly as many action sequences, I had to find moments that would deliver visually…like the scene where the Michael Ontkean character, Ken Taylor, is escaping from jail. I kept looking for ways to make this seem more like an independent film and less like a TV movie.

  Basically, if I’m given an opportunity to make a movie, I’m going to make the best piece of cinema that I can possibly make, and put as much of myself into it as I can. Scorsese talked, in his documentary on American movies, about the “director as smuggler.” If you have a low enough budget and the producers are only concerned with the production schedule, you can smuggle in all kinds of ideas, moments and theories, to make a film full of personal contributions. On big studio pictures or big network shows, everything is micro-managed and so many people are going over every detail that you can’t get away with that as much. You have to deliver what is expected for the genre…but when I get scripts that are basically TV movie formulas, I work as hard as I can to turn them into something else.

  When shooting ended on In a Child’s Name, we had nine days to edit a four-hour movie together. We had two editors working on it in different rooms and I was jumping back and forth between rooms. It was very intense. When I watched the cut with the producers, I was very disappointed — so it was a great surprise to me when the movie got such incredible reviews and through-theroof ratings. [16]

  Did you approach In a Child’s Name differently than your previous films because of the fact that it was based on real events? How much artistic license could you take with the story?

  In my mind, I divide my projects into “movies” and “films.” For me, One Dark Night, Friday the 13th, Date with an Angel and Sometimes They Come Back are movies. They exist in a “movie realm,” where everything is mythic or metaphorical. When I made the leap into true-life stories, with In a Child’s Name, I had to try to figure out what I wanted to say and how to express it without fictionalizing real-world facts.

  On one level, you want to stick to the facts…but a lot of times the facts are not dramatic enough, so you have to add elements or take away elements to heighten or streamline the storytelling. With In a Child’s Name, it helped that the movie was based on Peter Maas’s book. When I read the initial script, I remember thinking, That’s not very exciting and that’s not very cinematic. I went back to the book and started highlighting things in there that I thought could be more visual, and then I went to the producers with my notes and said, “Can we do this and this and this? It’s in the book…” It all came down to a legal issue. If we follow the book, the author bears responsibility. If someone sues us, we can say, “It was in Peter Maas’s book and we bought the book…”

  Of course, there’s always a disclaimer at the end of every movie that says: If there’s any resemblance between this and anything real, it’s a coincidence. No matter what you say up front — “based on a true story” or “based on real events” — there’s that legal disclaimer so that you can take artistic license with the storytelling. I think the viewing public is caught between wanting a compelling story and wanting to know that the things they’re watching really happened. These movies are always a dramatic interpretation of real events and real people. We have to build conflicts within the characters and between the characters, and then resolve those conflicts dramatically. It’s not just facts and information. You need elements that are cinematic.

  I’ll give you an example. With In a Child’s Name, the Valerie Bertinelli character’s family is Catholic and very close-knit, very loving. So I went with a warmer color palette when we were focused on them. Their house is filled with pictures of their family, and the camera shots were connected and moving all the time. In the set design, we used a lot of brick, to convey history and stability. For the murderer’s family, I used a very cool palette — cooler blues, grays — and a more static frame, with more space in the frame to show isolation. There were absolutely no pictures on the wall; no warmth. That was the beginning of looking at this story as a film. It wasn’t a movie, although the Luminol scene is certainly something out of a movie — it’s a very Hitchcockian scene.

  But it had a greater impact because it was juxtaposed with so much realism…

  When you know you’re doing a real story, you try very hard to play by the rules of real life and to be true to the real people. You want the story to be theirs. You also want it to be believable. When things didn’t seem real to me, I would suggest new dialogue and just improvise the scene with the actors. Then, once we all got more comfortable with the scene, we’d bring back the words in the script. Suddenly the performances seemed more connected to what was on the page.

  Capra did that too. Except sometimes he didn’t bring the “real words” back. He just re-wrote the dialogue on the spot.

  John Cassavettes and other independent filmmakers will say, “Here’s the scene and you’re the actor, figure it out from there.”

  But when you’re dealing with a TV network, you can’t even change a comma in the script without approval. You’re working with producers who say, “We cannot change anything unless we get the network’s okay.” And I’ve learned over the years that you never have enough time to get the okay. Sometimes I just take a chance and shoot a scene two different ways. I always have to do what makes the scene ring true for me. That’s not about asserting my ego. It’s a matter of finding the best way for an actor to convey what they need to convey and make the scene believable. I had to take another “somebody stole my baby” TV movie and make it fresh, and make the characters distinct and honest.

  We had to do that for both families, because both sides believe they are right. Even the Taylors, the David Huddleston/Louise Fletcher family, believed they had God on their side. They had their church, their minister, and a group of people who reassured them that they were doing the right thing: “You are the grandparents. These people are trying to take away your son’s baby.” Meanwhile, they were in complete denial about the fact that their son was a killer. One of the main themes that I have running through my work is bad parenting creates bad children…and then those bad children can grow up and hurt your children.

  There’s a great moment in In a Child’s Name where the killer is reciting a prayer and he can’t get out a line about his soul. It’s as if you’re suggesting that he doesn’t have a soul. Was that your idea?

  I’m not sure where that came from. I remember talking to Peter Maas, who said that the killer wanted to bury his wife and perform a sort of religious burial for her, and that he attempted to recite a psalm but didn’t know all the words. He only knew the beginning of it. He couldn’t remember the rest, so he ended up just saying “forever and ever, amen.” In reali
ty, it was just a case of a guy who didn’t know the words. But I like your interpretation better. Because that’s the thing — he was always [devoid of conscience]…He really did drive around with her body in his trunk. He really did go to his ex-wife’s house afterwards and have sex with her. And she saw nothing in his behavior that made her think anything was wrong.

  All this reminds me of something that Wes Craven has said. In his films, he always comes back to the idea that a person’s childhood environment fundamentally shapes who you are as a person, for better or worse. He says that’s where monsters come from. He’s even referred to Freddy Krueger as “the ultimate bad dad,” an authority figure whose sole purpose in life is to torment children…

  To me it’s still about children hurting children. Even as adults, sociopaths are still thinking and behaving like children. They’re still getting back at the schoolyard bullies or dealing with unresolved issues with their parents — and they’re hurting real children in the process.

  It’s interesting that Valerie Bertinelli, who played the protective mother figure in In a Child’s Name, went on to play serial killer Laurie Dann in A Murder of Innocence. How did you cast her for In a Child’s Name?

  Valerie was already on board when I was hired as director. In general, the casting process was all about finding good actors that the network would approve, because the executives wanted to have final approval on every person in the movie. There were a lot of fights over a lot of actors. Getting Louise Fletcher was an amazing coup. And she was great because the sweeter she was in that role, the more frightening she became. David Huddleston — same thing.

  The big find was Chris Meloni [who plays Jerry Cimarelli]. I had a casting director who was dead set on him. Junie Lowry, who’s a very highly respected casting director, brought him back three times until finally I finally broke down and hired him. And he turned out to be one of the best actors I’ve ever worked with. Chris and I just clicked. I could talk to him in shorthand and he intuitively got what I was saying.

  There are a lot of wonderful actors in In a Child’s Name…Karla Tamburelli, Tim Carhart, John Karlen, Carolina Kava, Vinnie Guastaferro, Joanna Merlin, and my lovely Nancy…They all just really bonded as a group of actors as well as the characters. I really lucked out.

  After In a Child’s Name was a big hit, were you inundated with directing offers?

  It was that lucky streak that some people have when they first come out of film school and they’ve made a short that everybody is excited about. They get their first big feature and if it works, they can ride that wave for quite a while. I had been able to make a few films and now I was in demand. I went from total obscurity to being one of the top five directors in television movies…which was not quite what I had envisioned for myself. I wanted to be doing features, genre movies — but I was in a situation where I was getting all the best TV movie scripts, and I couldn’t ignore that.

  One of the scripts that was being pushed the hardest was a CBS property called The Fire Next Time. It was very expensive global warming movie, produced by Robert Halmi, who was responsible for a number of high-profile miniseries on TV during that time period. His investors had very deep pockets. He reminded me a lot of Dino [DeLaurentiis] — he was one of those great movie moguls in the old school sense. I read the script, and it was an overwhelmingly huge story that would need to be filmed in a number of states, with a lot of production resources.

  At the same time, Something to Live For: The Alison Gertz Story came in. It was a much smaller piece with a really good script. I loved the fact that it revolved around one character. At first I thought, I really didn’t know much about this world. I wasn’t sure I was the right person to do a “woman’s picture” like this. What I did know was horror. I remembered the scene in The Exorcist where Regan has to go through this horrible battery of tests. Something to Live For has a similar sequence. She’s disoriented; she’s confused; she can’t understand why these horrible things are happening to her or why she’s sick. I knew right away how I wanted to shoot that. I used a lot of subjective camera to put the audience in her head, so they could feel the high fevers, the confusion, all the needles and tests and horrible things that she had to go through.

  The script by Deborah Joy Levine had so much emotional weight that I basically said to Halmi, “I’m going to do this one first. It’s only seventeen days in Los Angeles, and then we’ll get back to work on the script for The Fire Next Time.” That was shocking to everybody, particularly Halmi. Much to my surprise, he did wait for me. I really didn’t think he would, but he did. So I did Something to Live For, then started on The Fire Next Time.

  The first half of Something to Live For is all about trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. Was it harder to tell the second half of the story, once she knows she has AIDS?

  In the second half, the main issue becomes: What do you want to do with your life now that you know you’re dying? The new conflict was about acceptance. She’s saying, “Alright, I have AIDS…Why can’t I still have a boyfriend? Why can’t I still try to have a normal life?” That conflict provided the emotional punch of the second half.

  Was that the story that the real Alison Gertz wanted to tell — the secondary conflict?

  Yes. The original script was called Alison. Just Alison. We thought that was great. Especially since Elvis Costello had a song called “Alison.” Molly Ringwald [who played Alison Gertz] said, “You’ve got to get that song.” But since it was an ABC TV movie, they needed a title that sounded like a TV movie — so it became Something to Live For: The Alison Gertz Story. That title presented it not as a movie about somebody dying of AIDS, but as a movie about someone who’s determined to do something meaningful with their life. That’s why the real Alison Gertz was on the cover of People magazine. [17] That’s why she was newsworthy — because she survived for a really long time. Right up until her death, she was still going to schools and speaking out about safe sex. To me, Alison was a real hero.

  When she came to the set, I remember she looked me in the eye and said, “Thank you. This is my legacy.” She died about six weeks later, but she knew her story would live on. I’ve had so many people tell me that they saw the movie in sex education and health classes. And it won an award from the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington D.C. because over so many viewers called the 800 number that appeared after the movie aired, all of them seeking information on AIDS. (Remember this was 1991.) So from that standpoint, the movie actually saved lives. That was the last thing that I expected. It was only my second TV movie, and I chose to do it mainly because I thought of it as an emotional modern-day horror movie.

  I remember seeing The Ryan White Story on TV when I was a kid, and it affected me because Ryan White was about the same age when he got AIDS. I have to imagine that young women who grew up watching Molly Ringwald in The Breakfast Club and Sixteen Candles were personally affected by Something to Live For. How did the producers manage to get her on board?

  It was a labor of love for everyone involved. We didn’t have much money to do it, so the actors basically worked for scale, or a little above scale. And I’m talking about Molly Ringwald, Martin Landau, Perry King, Leigh Grant. All incredible actors. They wanted to help tell this story.

  After Something to Live For, you immediately went to work on The Fire Next Time…

  The Fire Next Time was extremely challenging on so many levels. First off, we had to do casting here in Los Angeles, then we had to do additional casting in New Mexico, Louisiana and Pittsburgh. So I had to keep flying from place to place for local casting calls, all the while trying to get everything together in L.A. with the script and the crew.

  The good thing was that I had two great leads: Bonnie Bedelia and Craig T. Nelson. Bonnie’s amazing in that she can play so many different types of characters with such intelligence and strength. Even in her most vulnerable moments, there’s still an incredible sexuality about her. She never loses that femininity. She would ha
ve made a really wonderful 1930s, 1940s screen actress — a Barbara Stanwyck type, but even sexier in a lot of ways. She is a force to be reckoned with, and when she and Craig got together — there was a strong chemistry there, and sometimes I just had to get out of the way because I had these two actors who were such strong actors and personalities.

  Craig had reservations about me being the director on this movie. He had worked with some great directors, and I wasn’t the Howard Hawks / Sam Peckinpah kind of guy that he’d usually want for a tough, dramatic picture like this. So I had to do everything I could to convince him that, although I’d never done this type of picture before, I had done my homework and I honestly did understand these kind of movies and I was determined to make this good.

  On the first day of shooting, we were out on the Mississippi River doing the opening scene on the shrimp boat, where Craig is talking about how bad the shrimping business is becoming…Craig takes acting very seriously. He’s always questioning whether there’s something more that he could add to a scene, and I’m one of those directors that will keep going as long as the actor feels he’s got another way to try it. So we kept going until there was literally no more time. Unfortunately we just hit one of those walls. We reached the six hour mark and had to break for lunch. Craig noticed that the A.D. kept whispering in my ear between takes and he finally said, “What’s going on?” And I said, “He’s concerned about the lunch, but don’t worry about it. Let’s keep going.” So we did another take and I thought it was really good. And I said, “Alright, let’s move on.” He said, “You don’t want to do another one?” I said, “No, I think that was good.” He said, “You really do, or you just need to stop because of lunch?” I said, “No, I really think it was good.” But I could tell he didn’t believe me, and we didn’t have any kind of working relationship yet. We hadn’t built up any trust. That’s the key word in any relationship with anybody in this business. Many actors, because they’re so vulnerable and sensitive regarding their craft, want to make sure that you did not walk away before they came off as good as they want to come off.