17. July 30, 1990 — Vol. 34, No. 4.
18. In her autobiography, Losing It And Gaining My Life Back One Pound at a Time (Simon & Schuster, 2008), Bertinelli writes that they looked up when they heard “an ear-splitting squawk that I swear to god sounded like someone saying ‘Fuck off!’” Afterwards, she decided “I don’t want to be this woman anymore.” She says that that the role “took me as far away from myself as I’d ever been…My job was all about showing emotions, yet in real life I went to great lengths to avoid them, which put me in conflict with myself.” (See pp. 157-158.)
Tom on the set of Sometimes They Come Back.
Tom with cast members portraying the Silvano/Cimarelli family on the set of In a Child’s Name.
Tom with Molly Ringwald, making Something to Live For.
Tom, Martin Landau and Nancy McLoughlin on the set of Something to Live For.
Richard Farnsworth, Craig T. Nelson and Bonnie Bedelia on the set of The Fire Next Time.
Ashley Jones and Paul Rudd on the set of The Fire Next Time.
Nancy McLoughlin in The Fire Next Time.
Craig T. Nelson, James Henerson and Richard Farnsworth.
Valerie Bertinelli in Murder of Innocence (CBS, 1993).
Nancy and Shane McLoughlin in Murder of Innocence (CBS, 1993).
Jean Smart, Luke Edwards and Bradley Pierce in The Yarn Princess (ABC, 1994).
Blythe Danner and Brian Dennehy in Leave of Absence (NBC, 1994).
Kirk Douglas on the set of The Lies Boys Tell.
Tom, producer Patricia Meyer, and the principal cast of The Lies Boys Tell.
Jason Robards and Brenda Fricker in Journey (Hallmark, 1995).
Meg Tilly in Journey (Hallmark, 1995).
The McLoughlin family at Paddington Station in London, 1995.
The McLoughlin family at Paddington Station in London, 2005.
Part V: More Myths & Monsters
Ghosts and innocents / Arthur Conan Doyle, Harry Houdini and the power of imagination / Yes, Burbank, there is a Santa Claus / “Survival movies” / Exit elves? / Meeting Marlon Brando / A Hawksian love story / The return of The Exorcist / Tone wars
FILMOGRAPHY
THE TURN OF THE SCREW (A.K.A. THE HAUNTING OF HELEN WALKER) (CBS, 1995)
PRODUCED AND DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY HUGH WHITMORE. BASED ON A NOVEL BY HENRY JAMES
STARRING VALERIE BERTINELLI, ALED ROBERTS, FLORENCE HOATH, DIANA RIGG
A nanny believes that the children she is caring for are becoming possessed by ghosts.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF CHRISTMAS (LIFETIME, 1996)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY BART BAKER
STARRING SHELLEY LONG, BRUCE KIRBY, BARRY BOSTWICK
A woman struggles with her father’s insistence on being Santa Claus, 365 days a year.
FAIRY TALE: A TRUE STORY (ICON, 1997)
DIRECTED BY CHARLES STURRIDGE
SCREENPLAY BY ERNIE CONTRERAS. BASED ON A STORY BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN & ARTHUR ASH.
STARRING PETER O’TOOLE, HARVEY KEITEL, FLORENCE HOATH, PHOEBE NICHOLLS
Two young girls convince an entire country to believe in magic.
“LEAVING L.A.” — PILOT (ABC, 1997)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY NANCY MILLER
STARRING CHRIS MELONI, MELINA KANAKAREDES
A day in the life of Los Angeles coroner’s investigators.
THE THIRD TWIN (CBS, 1997)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY CINDY MYERS. BASED ON A NOVEL BY KEN FOLLETT
STARRING KELLY MCGILLIS, JASON HEDRICK
A criminologist falls for a younger man while investigating his killer clone.
BEHIND THE MASK (CBS, 1999)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY GREGORY GOODELL
STARRING DONALD SUTHERLAND, MATTHEW FOX
True story of a doctor who is saved by a mentally ill patient, and subsequently becomes his closest friend.
ANYA’S BELL (CBS, 1999)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY DAVID ALEXANDER
STARRING DELLA REESE, MASON GAMBLE
A socially awkward boy and an elderly blind woman become friends, and draw each other out of their shells.
“THE OTHERS” — “THETA” (CBS, 2000)
DIRECTED BY TOM MCLOUGHLIN
TELEPLAY BY FRED GOLAN
STARRING JULIANNE NICHOLSON, GABRIEL MACHT, MELISSA LAHLITAH CRIDER, JEANETTE BROX
Three young paranormal investigators help a demonically-possessed teenage girl.
In 1995, you got back to your horror roots and made an adaptation of Henry James’s ghost story The Turn of the Screw.
That was a thrill because I am a huge fan of The Innocents [Jack Clayton’s 1960 film adaptation of the same story]. I didn’t think I could make a better adaptation than that, but I took the chance to try a different approach to the story. I wanted to make the kids more sexual, which I thought would be really creepy, and I wanted to enhance those Victorian gothic details — to embrace James’s combination of love and fear.
Basically CBS said, “We’ll do it if Valerie Bertinelli plays the governess.” I said, “That won’t work. I’m not going to ask her to do an English accent — because even if she did it brilliantly, nobody would buy it. She’s America’s sweetheart!” They eventually convinced me that the character could be an American governess. Valerie did a terrific job, but I don’t think she ever felt 100% comfortable doing a period piece.
I focused a lot on the kids. They were incredible young actors. The boy Alec Roberts [who played Miles] was amazing. When he smiled, I could see this old soul inside of him. To me that was fascinating. And Florence Hoath [who played Flora] was so smart and so captivating. They really did seem like adults in some of their scenes — like when Miles kisses the governess and then sits back on the pillow and gives her this smug, seductive look. I couldn’t tell him to give that look — I can’t even remember what I said to him or what he was thinking — but he got it. And it was very creepy.
The Henry James novel works because it effectively puts the reader into the governess’s head. It’s a document of subjectivity. Did you approach the film the same way — telling the story from her perspective?
What The Innocents did so well was convey that this is absolutely happening. The ghosts are absolutely real. There’s no gauze on the lens to make you wonder. There’s nothing dreamy about their appearance. Likewise, I tried to keep the coverage really simple. What you see is what’s really there. It only got more stylized toward the end of the movie, when Quint is coming down the stairs. In that scene we take the governess’s now maniac perspective, but overall the ghost scenes were more objective.
The first time we see a ghost in the film, it’s only a fleeting glimpse. Later, the ghosts are featured much more prominently. In general, do you think it’s more effective to feature the ghosts or leave them somewhat to the audience’s imagination?
I did not want to make a moment out of that first scene with the face in the glass. Thinking back on it now, I should have made it even shorter. It should have been so fleeting that she thinks it could have been her own reflection. It’s just a tiny pebble in the water. Those moments build and build to the point that, in the end, we completely believe that Miles is being completely corrupted and that the governess has to save him. Ultimately, I always go back to what Capra said: This is a people to people medium. If you care about the people, you go along for the ride. I wanted the audience to be totally invested in all these characters, no matter how surreal the circumstances.
You crafted a much more visually elaborate final sequence than the one in The Innocents — with these wildly impressionistic shadows and Quint looking like Nosferatu.
I was never happy with the ending. It never got as big, emotionally, as I wanted it to be. I tried a lot of in-camera effects that weren’t as successful as I’d hoped — li
ke when the room starts to get dark.
What I had in my mind was shadowy fingers going up the wall and across the ceiling. Even a decently-rendered CGI effect would have done the trick, but there was no budget for that. There was so much pressure to get through everything as quickly as possible that I really didn’t have a chance to refine.
What I think worked well was the death of Miles. If you haven’t read The Turn of the Screw, I don’t think you’d expect him to die — so that sequence is a real shock. We originally temped the sequence with Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. To me the familiarity of that piece enhanced those images much better than any original composition ever could.
After so many years of making reality-based stories, is it hard for you to go back to horror?
Horror, to me, is more challenging now. The easy thing to say is that audiences have seen so much horror that it’s hard to shock them these days. I don’t believe that, because movies like The Sixth Sense and The Others can still work. The audience can still get just as invested in the story and still be just as surprised by the outcome. The challenge is getting audiences to get emotionally invested, so the first thing I always look at is character because the characters are what pull me into the story.
I also loved shooting in England. A lot of the crew members had worked on the classic Hammer horror movies. Tony Imi was my director of photography, and we lit the movie like one of those old Hammer films and tried to make it feel like it had been made during that particular time. Because Valerie was an American in England, there’s that “stranger in a strange land” quality. When we got to the actual haunting, I wanted to convey a sense of hollowness. I wanted to emphasize the idea that she’s lost in a big place that she doesn’t know very well, and it’s all disorienting. That was the tone.
The greatest thing that can happen to a director is to read a script and know immediately what the tone of the movie needs to be. Then your goal is to maintain that tone through prep, through the shoot, and through post — right down to the ending credits — so that it feels cohesive. Even if you’re trying to achieve different emotional content within different scenes, the story as a whole never moves away from that basic tone and point of view that you, as a storyteller, bring to it. That’s the ideal.
Fairy Tale: A True Story is similar to The Turn of the Screw in that it asks the audience to suspend their disbelief in the supernatural. How did you get involved with that one?
It started when I went to Paris to study with Marceau. My trip to over there was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. I’d just left everything and everyone I knew — my girlfriend, family, friends, the band. I got to Paris and I was about to check into the Hotel Des Arts in Montmartre. I walk in; I’m exhausted; I haven’t slept in two days; I’m trying to get the concierge to understand me. Then I hear a voice: “Hey, are you American?” I turn around and it was Albert Ash. He was from Fresno, California. A few years later, he became part of the L.A. Mime Company.
Now cut to two decades later and I’m a filmmaker, Albert came to me and said, “Did you ever hear about the true story of the two little girls who photographed fairies?” He had this idea of doing a TV series about “myths, truths and the greatest cons in history”: Bigfoot, The Loch Ness Monster, and this story. I was trying to get out of television, so I said, “What about doing the fairy story as a feature?” We met many times and talked out the story over a period of months. I thought we should bring the mother into the story, and that the girls should plan this con not just as a lark, but for a better reason. In our story they do it because Elsie’s brother, who recently died, really did believe in fairies. They wanted to give Elsie’s grieving mother a sense that she could perhaps connect with her son, through his beliefs.
Albert wasn’t confident enough to write the script alone. He wanted us to do it together, but I was directing a lot at that point and didn’t have the time. But we wanted to pitch it around town. So we worked out the story, got some pictures and put together a presentation, and started presenting it to pretty much anybody that would listen. Albert did most of the pitching because he’s so animated. I would try to keep certain things grounded while he would go off on details, so we made a very good pitching team. We always got the same response: “Well, this is interesting…Sweet story, but it’s got three problems. It’s about girls. It’s a period piece. And it’s British.” I remember one person said, “If you change it to boys and set it in present-day America…” We were like, “Boys and fairies?” They said, “Well, then, maybe it can’t be fairies. How about tiny aliens?” We were hitting one brick wall after another.
One of the toughest things in Hollywood is pitching something really original. If there’s not already something out there like it, then most people can’t see the potential. If you go in and say “It’s sort of like E.T.” then they might be open to it. No one was connecting with our story. Finally, after almost two years of taking it around the industry, we pitched it to Wendy Finerman, who had a deal at Paramount. We only knew her from Hot to Trot, the talking horse movie. So we felt we had pretty much hit bottom.
Afterward, she mentioned that she had seen my film The Yarn Princess. She asked me how Jean Smart had prepared for her role, and I said that we went to a place up in the Sylmar area called Tierra del Sol and visited with some of the mentally-challenged people there. She said, “Oh great, because I’m doing a movie right now about a mentally-challenged man. I think I’ll take Tom up there.” I didn’t think much about it at the time. About a year later, along comes Forrest Gump — produced by Wendy Finerman for Paramount.
Much to my shock, she contacted me and said, “The next movie I want to do is Fairy Tale.” Suddenly we had this amazing opportunity. I had been willing to make the movie for four to six million dollars, and try to find some cheap way to do it — maybe as a co-production with the BBC or something. We knew we had to do it in England. We knew we need English actors and we knew period shooting would be expensive, so we figured we’d have to really minimize the locations and the spectacle. Now suddenly it was going to be a thirty-two million dollar movie with an Academy Award winning producer attached.
We looked for the best writer we could find for this kind of material. My lawyer Alan Wertheimer represented Ernie Contreras. He was brought in and we thought he was the right choice to write the screenplay. By this point, we were regretting the fact that we had not written the original screenplay. Even if it had to be rewritten, we would have been more strongly attached to the property. So, word to the wise out there: write the screenplay yourself. It will help you down the road when your dream project becomes a reality.
Now I’m going to these meetings at Paramount with Sherry Lansing, the head of the studio. She couldn’t have been nicer about the project. At the same time, I had just been given the green light on my adaptation of The Turn of the Screw, after years of trying to get it off the ground. So I said, “Sherry, it’s going to take a while to get the script in shape. So I’m going over to England for seven or eight weeks to shoot. The good news is that I’m going to be casting girls for that project, so I can pre-cast for Fairy Tale.” She said, “Great.” I took off for England. Then the tide turned. Paramount wanted a “name director” for their thirty-two million dollar film.
Lasse Holstrom was approached to direct. He read the script and loved it. I had to make a phone call to Paramount and say, “In the contract, it stipulates that I’m attached as director.” But the fine print said that I would get to be a director, a writer or producer. I was thinking that I’d get all three credits, but the wording was “either/or.” Ultimately it came down to someone saying, “If you want this movie to get made, you can’t stand in the way.” For me, that was a major heartbreak. This was a story I was really looking forward to doing. It was a longtime passion and I knew I could bring something wonderful to it.
That said, one of my favorite movies is My Life as a Dog [directed by Lasse Holstrom], so if anybody was going to take the reins, I w
as thrilled that it would be Lasse. From that standpoint, I said, “Okay, I want to see this movie get made.” I licked my wounds and moved on.
In the meantime, a movie called The Indian in the Cupboard was released. Beautiful movie, very well done…but it did not make much money. Then Warner Brothers released A Little Princess by Alfonso Cuaron — another childhood fantasy with a period setting — and it didn’t make money. Suddenly the thirty-two million dollar budget for Fairy Tale became eleven million, and Lasse was smart enough to know that all these special effects that he’d planned would not be possible on that kind of budget. So he left the project.
The great fear was that the whole thing would fall apart. I began lobbying to come back as director, and there were some discussions about me doing it. Then Mel Gibson stepped in to produce the film. The new deal was that the movie had to be filmed by an exclusively British cast and crew. So once again I was out. They started looking for a British director and hired Charles Sturridge, who had done Brideshead Revisited and the Gulliver’s Travels miniseries that Robert Halmi produced.
He shot a pretty straight-ahead movie. There was nothing terribly inventive about his coverage, but he is an artisan and he surrounded himself with the best of the British crews. They had a visual effects company that really wanted to break new ground with the fairies, and it was actually quite amazing what they pulled off. I was able to get Florence Hoath, who I had worked with on The Turn of the Screw, in the movie and of course she was brilliant.
A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin Page 16