A Strange Idea of Entertainment: Conversations with Tom McLoughlin

by Tom McLoughlin

  When my kids were going through those times where they were not doing well in school, I was terrified that they would do what I did and just drop out. Thank God they were not as rebellious as I was. Even if they go into show business, where a high school diploma doesn’t necessarily mean much, they’ll still have that feeling of personal accomplishment. I look back on dropping out with a lot of regret…but at that time I was 100% sure of what I was doing with my life, and high school just didn’t fit into my rock star life. My bullheadedness allowed me to pursue other dreams as crazy as mime, and going into the extremely competitive arena of writing and directing feature films. Remember I was the clown in the bear suit saying, “Mr. Frankenheimer, I’m going to direct one day.” In my heart and mind, I was so sure that I was going to make it. And it wasn’t that I thought I could bulldoze my way through. It really was about persistence. I thought maybe I won’t be a filmmaker until I’m sixty, but I’m going to make it.

  Honestly, I’m still not at the point where I have made the movie that I want to make. I don’t even really know what that movie is, but I know I haven’t made it yet. I haven’t had that feeling of total accomplishment. I’d love to leave behind something like It’s a Wonderful Life, or E.T., or Rocky, or The Exorcist. Something that affects and changes people the way those movies affected me. I promise you that neither fear nor age are going to stop me from pushing towards that goal until the coffin lid closes.

  You’ve said that One Dark Night and Date with an Angel are the films that feel the most personal to you…and yet you didn’t have final cut on either one. To me, Sometimes They Come Back and The Fire Next Time seem more like expressions of your view on life — because, in the final reel, they come down to hard choices between Heaven and Earth, idyllic fantasy and harsh reality. The main characters get to glimpse a more peaceful world, and yet they choose to walk back into the storm — to fight another day. But you haven’t yet made the movie where the lead character decides that he can let go — that he or she has done what they came to do, and can move on to that better place…

  Wow. I never thought about that. You know, originally, I wanted to end Date with an Angel with the embrace and the whiteout indicating that she had taken him to Heaven. For me it was like the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, where Richard Dreyfus walks in [to the spaceship]. We wanted to see him do that. He looks back at Melinda Dillon and she smiles and Truffaut says, “Go on.” And we’re sitting there in the audience, saying, “Yes!” We so want to be him and go.

  That was the ending I wanted in Date with an Angel. I was in my early twenties when I originally wrote that screenplay, and I knew someone whose friend had died from a brain tumor. He had headaches all the time and when he finally learned what was causing them, the tumor was so big that it was inoperable. And then he was gone. All I could think was how unfair that was. But maybe if God, in His goodness, sent down somebody as beautiful as Emmanuelle Béart to take you…it wouldn’t be such a bad way to go.

  Of course, to most people, getting on a flying saucer and dying are two very different experiences. Not to me. Who can say if you’re ever going to come back from either of those adventures? And the Jim Saunders character would be getting out of a great deal of pain…So I’m back to my favorite Peter Pan quote. “To die will be an awfully big adventure.”

  The alternative is to keep fighting. Keep making movies until the coffin lid closes…

  And be ready to keep getting hurt. If you really want to make movies, you better accept the pain because that’s all it’s about at certain points. Thankfully, there are also times when things are so wonderful that you totally forget all the hurt. Then the process starts over again. Every time you begin a new project, you’ve got to say to yourself, “Am I willing to go through this all over again?” For me, the answer is always yes.

  I still tell aspiring actors, musicians, writers and directors that the trick is learning to endure the flame. Fire is attractive and compelling, but stick your hand in it and see how long you can hold it there. Most people have to give up. Success comes to those who keep trying — those who keep building up scar tissue and enduring the pain a bit longer each time. You have to convince yourself that you don’t mind getting burned, that it’s better than giving up. You stay in show business because there is no way you could accept doing something else. You can’t not do it. So you have to succeed on some level.

  Every time I finish a project, I feel like that’s it. It’s over. I feel like I’ll never get another job. I really, honestly feel like that. Last night, I dreamed I got onto a new film and I was running around, trying to find the locations, trying to figure out my relationship with the producer…For a filmmaker, it’s always a scary thing at the beginning because you don’t know the sensibilities of the other people you’re working with, and you’re praying that somehow you’ll all see eye-to-eye. At a certain point in this dream, I’m arguing with someone about what I want to do. I finally say, “You know what? I don’t even have the script!” And the producers look at each other, confused. Then one of them said, “You haven’t read the script?” Suddenly I’m thinking I shouldn’t be saying this. Why have I agreed to take this project before I’ve read the script? Have I become so desperate that I’ve agreed to make a movie and I don’t even know what it is? It was the worst feeling — knowing that I’m supposed to be the guy in charge, and yet I don't have a clue what I’m doing. What does it mean? I don’t know. Maybe inside I should trust that I’ve been making movies long enough that I can get the script and figure out a way to connect with it and make it work. I know I’ve still got more work to do.

  If I died today, I wouldn’t be ready to go. I’d be arguing with the man in the clouds that there’s been a mistake. “You’ve got to send me back. I haven’t accomplished all of my missions.” Like Warren Beatty in Heaven Can Wait: “It’s not my time, Mr. Jordan.” Will I ever make that film that defines me? Will I ever make a film that contains all the elements to become a classic? God only knows. But the desire is what keeps me going.

  Julia Ormond and Tom on the set of The Wronged Man (Lifetime, 2010).

  Tom and Daniel Sunjata on the set of At Risk (Lifetime, 2010).

  Andie MacDowell and Tom on the set of The Front (Lifetime, 2010).

  Part VIII: Tommy Lives!

  This interview took place on August 28, 2013.

  In the spring of 2009, you flew to Toronto to shoot At Risk and The Front back to back. I know you aren’t happy with how those movies turned out. What went wrong?

  They offered me those Patricia Cornwell movies a year before I did The Wronged Man. I read them and dismissed them. I just couldn’t find the humanity in them, or anything I could relate to. I said, “I can’t say yes to two scripts that I think just don’t work.” And it wasn’t just the scripts. If you go onto the Patricia Cornwell websites, you’ll see that her fans overall didn’t like those books. I kept looking at that and thinking, If her fans don’t even like these stories, is this really a good idea?

  When Lifetime was ready to greenlight the movies a year later, they came back to me with the same scripts. So I said “no” again. At that point, there were some difficult things that were going on within my family and I felt like I really should be home at that time. But my representation and my family were encouraging me to go — because “this how you make a living and this is what you love to do.” Part of me thought that maybe once I started the movie, I would be able to escape into a fictional world…but I also felt guilty about that, because I felt like I was abandoning my family. And there was also a part of me that said, “How am I going to escape into a world I don’t care about?”

  The bottom line was financial. It had taken so long to get The Wronged Man made, and I hadn’t been working during that period.

  Our home needed major repairs and I had two kids in college at the time, so money was going out but not much was coming in. Now suddenly I’m being offered two movies simultaneously. And the producers are sayi
ng that they want these movies to feel big. They want them to have feature film scope. And now I start rationalizing: Well, if I can make these movies look big and spectacular, that might be interesting . . . I made a choice that I swore I would never make, and I paid for it.

  The second I arrived in Toronto, I had this feeling that I had sold out. Sold my soul for money. Abandoned my family during an important time. To me, it was the darkest hour. I can’t say it was the darkest hour of my life, but it was my darkest hour creatively, because I lost my desire to do the very thing that was in my blood since birth. I didn’t even want to watch movies during that period. It completely shut me down.

  And then during prep, I learned that the budget had been severely cut, and we had to reduce the scope of everything. Key scenes had to be cut due to budget and time restraints. It turned out to be the most miserable filmmaking experience of my life. Every morning I woke up thinking, I should just call and say I can’t continue, that I have personal issues at home and I’ve got to go home. As much as I wanted to say “I’m the wrong guy for this job,” I could not quit. I’ve never quit anything once I committed to it. I had this image of tying myself to the helm of the ship. Whether we crash or not, I’m going to stay at the helm. My family eventually came to Toronto, but I was still couldn’t get away from the feeling that I was doing something that I had no passion for.

  You’ve said that this was a reality check for you — that, in hindsight, you see your experience on those two movies as a kind of life lesson. What did you learn?

  I have never taken a movie that I didn’t have some kind of passion for. I knew better, but I did it anyway. In hindsight, I ask myself: Did I take those movies because I knew it was time for a change? Because it definitely forced me to change. I was sent to movie jail and couldn’t figure out how to get out. I had to stop for a while, and really think about what was next.

  I was excited because your manager seemed to be pushing you back toward the horror genre at that point. As a horror fan, I was very curious to see what you’d come up with.

  I think that was the easiest way for someone to re-market me. One Dark Night, Jason Lives! and Sometimes They Come Back were some of the bigger successes of my career. And I love doing horror. But I haven’t done it in a long time, so now the question becomes: Can I go back to horror and create something new?

  My manager sent me a script that I thought had a lot of promise, called Imitation. The thing I really liked about it was that it was completely surreal. I’ve added touches of surrealism in stuff I’ve done over the years, but this was just a wild ride into a dead man’s fantasy life and I found that incredibly cool. I saw it as an attempt to do a full-on, pedal-to-the-metal mindfuck — sort of a Mario Bava / Dario Argento-type thing, but revolving around a very relatable character. When I was collaborating with the writer, that was my main contribution: trying to humanize [the main character] enough that the audience would accept all the crazy stuff that happens around him.

  Screen Gems was interested in the project, and then Intrepid, the company that did The Strangers (2011). Intrepid seemed really gung ho and I thought it was going to happen, but they decided to wait and see how their movie The Raven (2012) did before moving forward. And The Raven didn’t do very well. The company eventually shut down.

  At the same time, my manager and I were trying to develop the book series Generation Dead — about a group of zombies in high school — into a TV series. To me, that series was about empathy for the outsider. It taps into that experience all teenagers go through. The zombie kids are the freaks that get made fun of in high school, because they’re “brain dead” and not as physically capable. It’s obviously a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but to me the outsider theme was cool enough to make it work.

  We went around and pitched Generation Dead to all the major networks, but nobody wanted to do zombies for television. This was before The Walking Dead [23] [and Warm Bodies]. [24]

  This must have been around the time that your wife Nancy threw you a sixtieth birthday party at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. What was it like being back there, thirty years after you shot One Dark Night in the Cathedral Mausoleum, and then being toasted by so many people that you’ve worked with over the years?

  I remember thinking, Holy shit, is my career over? Is this the equivalent of someone’s AFI tribute? After this, I’m going to go home and sit in front of the television for the rest of my life, waiting for my old movies to come on. Like the scene at the end of The Comic (1969) with Dick Van Dyke.

  That last scene always scared me. Dick plays this old silent movie star named Billy Bright, who wakes up at four in the morning and turns on the TV. It’s the morning show and the host is saying “Here’s something from way, way, WAY back. An old Billy Bright movie.” The final image is this sad old comic at five in the morning watching his epic film. That has always stuck in the back of my mind. Especially when I was doing physical comedy. Could that be where it all ends? What do you do when you get old and you can’t do what you loved doing the most?

  The day after the party, I went back to the cemetery to thank them. I started talking to Theodore Hovey, one of the administrators there, not just about the party but about my long relationship with Hollywood Forever. How I shot One Dark Night there in the Cathedral Mausoleum, how I wrote my Friday the 13th movie there. Across the street was the Pierce Brothers Mortuary where I saw Peter Lorre. And on the other side of the fence was the Paramount studio, where I met Nancy, and where I had an actual studio job as a story editor on Friday the 13th: The Series. I said, “This place has meant so much to me. If I were ever going to choose a burial place, it would be Cathedral Mausoleum. But I was told while making One Dark Night that there aren’t any more spaces left.”

  And he goes, “Well, it’s interesting you should say that.” When the new management took over the cemetery [in 1998], they found out that there were actually some crypts in the mausoleum that had not been sold. And he said, “Would you like to see them?” And I got this tingling sensation in my spine. I had this overwhelmingly positive feeling: This is something you’re supposed to do.

  So we got in a little golf cart and cruised over. The first two crypts that he showed me were way up at the top, and I wasn’t interested in those. Then he said, “There’s one other one that I think you might like better.” And there it was…I don’t know how to explain it except to say that it just had this feeling that this was going to be my final home. My heart started racing and I’m thinking, I don’t know why the hell I’m so excited about a crypt… but the part of me that is so intrigued about what happens on “the other side” was incredibly excited. For me, this was a calling.

  My wife Nancy wasn’t very happy about it at all. Especially because I did it without asking her about it first. She obviously didn’t think that throwing me a birthday party was going to turn into planning for my death. But then neither did I!

  Suddenly here was a chance to do something that I never even thought about, much less planned for. I felt like this really was the setup for my third act. I wasn’t quite sure what that was, but I knew it had something to do with the subject matter of my first four movies. One Dark Night was about using bio-energy to reanimate the dead. Jason Lives was about bringing Jason back with a lightning bolt, so he’s now a walking corpse that cannot be killed. Date with an Angel was about a guy dying and an angel coming to take him away, but she falls in love and stays on earth instead. And then Sometimes They Come Back…The title says it all.

  On top of all of my personal connections to the place, there’s also a “strange idea of entertainment” aspect to Hollywood Forever. There are guided tours, conducted by “the woman in black,” Karie Bible. [25] She takes people around the cemetery and tells them all the Hollywood legends. I’ve always loved that kind of stuff — cemetery tours and ghost walks — and I’m thrilled to think that maybe one day I might be a part of that. Cinespia has movie screenings and concerts there on summer nights. People bring picnics and
sit on the lawn. And during the Day of the Dead celebration, they bring art and decorate the mausoleums. I’ll get to be a part of all that! To me, that’s like continuing to entertain people after I’m dead…but not actually gone.

  Most people think that when you die, it’s over. For me it’s not over. That’s the real third act. I can’t tell you much more because I don’t know any more about it. I have to get there first.

  Do you have a plan — like Raymar — to come back?

  Not exactly. I’m mostly thinking in terms of bio-energy. We know that we all emit energy, and my belief is that sometimes that energy exists in the form of ghosts and spirits. My thought is that if I can put enough of my own energy into that space [inside the mausoleum] over the next few decades, then very possibly my “presence” could remain there after I’m gone…and be experienced by certain individuals who believe and are open to it.

  I’m not talking about coming back from the dead, or about becoming a ghost who can’t move on. I’m talking about leaving something behind that other people might sense, feel, hear, or see. It’s like leaving behind a reel of film. You could call this my contribution to Hollywood Forever.