by Mark Duplass
MARK: Yes. Palm Springs.
JAY: Warm.
MARK: A place where people can get a fresh start.
JAY: Uh-huh.
(We consider what comes next. Suddenly Mark puts his hand on my knee. This means something has come to him in what we call a “flop”—i.e., the idea is nearly fully formed.)
MARK: Alice’s husband passed away last year. She’s had a hard time. She’s dressing like their daughter now, jeans and T-shirts, trying to find out who she is and who she wants to be. She read an article in The New Yorker about how older women who lose their husbands often enter lesbian relationships. The comfort and understanding is there among women, and as they approach the end of life…you know, that kind of comfort becomes more important than the previously crucial element of sexual attraction when looking for a mate. She hasn’t told Jean this, but she had an affair with one of the local female librarians. To kind of try things out. It made her realize two things. One, she can enjoy sex with a woman. Two, the next woman she wants to have sex with is Jean.
(I smile. This is pretty good. And we both watch the two ladies as they giggle and enjoy each other’s company. The thought of them finding love at a late age is terrifically exciting to both of us.)
MARK: But Jean is married. Not a great marriage, which she is the first one to admit. But still, it’s a vow. And Alice is nervous as to how to broach the idea of the two of them being together. Spending their last years laughing and traveling and enjoying life off the life insurance money she has just received.
(Mark spends himself here. And looks to me with a nod that I can jump in now. That Mark has hit the wall and needs me. I like being needed.)
JAY: So Alice has booked a trip for them to Palm Springs. A predominantly gay male community. The liberal sexuality will surround them, potentially setting the stage for this conversation Alice so desperately wants to have with Jean.
MARK: But she’s terrified.
JAY: Fucking terrified! Jean is her best friend! What if she offends Jean? Scares her off? Or, even worse, Jean politely says no and things are forever changed between them with the knowledge that Alice is harboring more than platonic feelings toward her.
(We look at the smiling face of Alice. It takes on a new light. As if we can feel the tension and the fear of how much she wants things to work out with Jean. And that the laughter is just a game. Interesting how our projections, which are no doubt utterly false, can change the way we perceive her.)
MARK: But in the end Alice has to go for it. She has to follow her heart.
JAY: For what is life if a life is half-lived?
MARK: Good one.
JAY: Little over the top?
MARK: Kinda, but it totally worked. This is big stuff. Love. Friendship. End-of-life stuff.
(We both nod. Feeling it. Loving these two women and what they will be going through in the next few days. This game is so fun. We could play it forever. And probably will. Then we take a breath. Our story seems to be done, at least for now.)
MARK: I don’t think I can do the Chinese food. I just don’t want that in my body while I’m stuck on a plane.
JAY: Agreed. Jamba?
MARK: Jamba.
(Cut to: Ten minutes later. We are in the Jamba Juice line and I am having a thought. When I have these kinds of thoughts, usually my face changes. Mark notices immediately and checks in with me.)
MARK: Whatcha got?
JAY: I’m having another thought.
(Mark knows what this means. While he is really good at getting those stories on their feet in his “flop,” I am usually the one tasked to make that story more unique and nuanced upon further introspection. I’m the one who saves us from the somewhat mediocre first draft of a story. I am supposed to take it to a deeper level. It’s a lot of pressure. Mark knows this and genuinely appreciates it.)
JAY: What if Jean was the one who read the New Yorker article about women entering lesbian relationships later in life? And when reading it, she couldn’t help but think that Alice was in that very situation. Recently widowed, liberal sensibilities, even hanging around that librarian a little bit lately. And Jean, who is a classic overthinker, started to wonder…“Oh no! Is Alice angling to turn our relationship into something more than platonic? Did she ask me on this trip to…pitch me on it? I mean, we’re headed to Palm Springs, for Chrissake!”
(This makes us laugh. Always a great sign.)
MARK: Meanwhile—and I think this is where you’re headed—Alice actually has no such intentions with Jean.
JAY: Absolutely not.
MARK: She just wanted a fun girls’ trip to cheer her up around the anniversary of her husband’s death.
JAY: Yep. But because Jean is paranoid, every time Alice puts her arm around her or fixes her hair for her—even offers to share an entrée—Jean tenses up and closes off to Alice…
MARK: …who can’t help but wonder, “Why is Jean being so weird with me?” This is soooo good.
JAY: It all culminates in a big fight at the craft fair. Jean ultimately apologizes for projecting that shit onto Alice, and Alice is able to laugh it off because they are old friends who have been through so much. And things return back to normal.
(Here, I let it sit. I’m done. And I must admit, I did a good job rebooting this idea.)
MARK: But they don’t fully return to normal.
(And now Mark has a new idea. This is our collaboration at its best. Building on each other’s ideas. Improving them. And having fun.)
MARK: Because the well has been poisoned. The fact remains…Jean’s marriage is not healthy. And Alice is looking for a partner, though she doesn’t know where to begin. So Jean shows her the New Yorker article…so they can have a good laugh about it.
JAY: Which they do.
MARK: And they have a big, fun, fancy dinner to celebrate getting over that weird moment.
JAY: Lots of rosé.
MARK: Tons.
JAY: And they go for a drunken swim back at the hotel.
MARK: And order room-service french fries and more wine back in Jean’s room.
JAY: And watch something kinda dumb and romcom-y on pay-per-view.
MARK: And feel adorably “naughty” because of all the bad language.
JAY: And stay up late talking about how much fun they’re having. And how Alice has all this money now and they should travel more together. Enjoy their lives. There’s not much time left.
MARK: And they find themselves practically quoting that New Yorker article.
JAY: And then it just gets quiet. And each thinks how wonderful it is that they can have a raging party together but also just sit in silence too. How rare that connection is.
MARK: And they just smile at each other as the air in the room starts to shift.
(We nod at each other, waiting to see who is going to be the one to make them kiss. Who has the best idea for how it should go down. We smile at each other, sucking on Jamba Juice, waiting for the idea to come. We are way too pleased with ourselves and our stupid little airport game. And we’re oddly fine with that.)
SHOOTING BAGHEAD a fucking blast. A cast and crew of about ten of us all went down to Austin for three weeks of hell, but the best kind of hell. We were up all night, running around in the middle of the woods like idiots. We were making up ways to do stunts that ended up looking amazing. Everyone was doing every possible job: Jay shot the main camera, I held the boom pole, we all (including the actors) hung lights in between scenes, and we all lived and cooked together. We would discuss ways to improve scenes moments before shooting them. We’d throw out the script and improvise when we were inspired. Most important, with no one to answer to or explain ourselves to, we followed our own impulses the whole way. We came away exhausted but oddly invigorated and inspired in a way we hadn’t felt si
nce shooting The Puffy Chair two years earlier.
On the studio front, we held up our end of the development bargain with Cyrus and Fox Searchlight during this time. We developed a sense of compromise through the script note process that neither party was unhappy with, if not altogether excited by. And the project moved forward toward our mutual goal of us directing the movie once Searchlight was happy with the script. In short, we were a marriage in peril, but we were in therapy and hoping to work it out.
There was some good news on that front. We sent an early draft of the Cyrus script to our friend Jonah Hill, who happened to be a big fan of The Puffy Chair, and he really flipped for the lead character of Cyrus and agreed to play the role. From there we scored John C. Reilly, Marisa Tomei, and Catherine Keener as our other three leads. So in terms of casting, we had a dream scenario. We just needed Searchlight to be happy enough with our script to greenlight the movie. Which, as you might imagine, was a long and somewhat painstaking process. To be clear, we understood why they were nervous. We hadn’t made a movie for more than $50,000, and the budget for Cyrus was coming in just under $7 million. They wanted to secure their investment, make the script as airtight as possible before committing all that cash. But the drawn-out script notes were wearing us down, and we were losing our inspiration for Cyrus over the course of the lengthy, microcosmic development process.
Back on the indie scene (why does this suddenly feel like sports reporting?) we had just gotten word that Sundance had accepted Baghead. The programmers loved it, and (as opposed to The Puffy Chair) we were being given a prime-time screening slot in a more prestigious division. The movie was not perfect (we did make it quickly and with reckless abandon), but it was inspired and people were responding to its freshness. When we showed up for our premiere, the theater was not only packed but every buyer was there in full force. It seemed that the air around this film was different, ready for explosion, but we had also experienced the lull of The Puffy Chair taking an entire year to sell, so we didn’t want to get our hopes up.
As we watched Baghead play at its premiere, we felt great. When we got up afterward for the Q&A session, we saw some film buyers we recognized scurrying out of the theater on their cellphones. We locked eyes at the back of the room with Josh Braun, our sales agent and dear friend and collaborator, who gave us a wry thumbs-up. Even though we were both suffering from a mild flu, we were secretly hoping that this would be our first experience with the famed Sundance bidding war.
For those of you unfamiliar with the film festival environment and Sundance in particular, there is something kind of insane that happens during these January weeks up in the mountains. People are altitude-sick, excited, rushed, and panicked they will miss out on a film sale. And when a great movie pops up, it will sometimes go all night and into the wee hours of the morning with different studios and buyers vying back and forth with the sales agent. So when we came out of the theater that night and Josh said, “Get in the car, it’s going to be a long night,” we were snotty and feverish but ridiculously excited.
Our first meeting was with a medium-size buyer who had already put in a lowball bid to try to buy the movie before anyone else. And they put a timer on it to pressure us to take it before they could be outbid by a bigger company. It was already worth more than we paid to make the movie, so we were instantly relieved that we would at least not lose money on the film. We were, as our dad always said, playing with the bank’s money at this point.
Right before we entered the condo, Josh pulled us aside and handed us a cellphone.
“What’s this?”
He told us that about ten minutes into the meeting that cellphone would ring. We were to look at the phone, look at each other, and excuse ourselves from the meeting and thank them for their interest.
“Why?”
Josh smiled the knowing smile of James Bond. It was a smile that said, “Let the games begin.” We couldn’t have been more excited. And, sure enough, right in the middle of the meeting our phone rang. We did our best (likely terrible) acting job and quickly scurried out of the meeting.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t a bluff. We actually did have another meeting set up. We were going to rendezvous with an intern for a large studio (which shall remain anonymous) who was waiting for us, in his pajamas, in the parking lot of the movie theater where we screened. It was now about one A.M., and we were dropping off a film print to him so that he could drive it all night from Park City to Los Angeles and show his boss the film first thing in the morning.
I mean…come on. Seriously? This just kept getting better. The only problem was, we were now feeling guilty because we hadn’t yet shown up to the after-party for our own film. But Josh informed us that we were not allowed to go to that party. Because film buyers might be there, and if they saw us there they might feel that we weren’t directly engaged in the sale of the movie, and we wanted everyone thinking that we were in a condo somewhere meeting with another buyer. To drive that Sundance bidding frenzy if possible.
We took another meeting with a big distributor, and it was clear within a few minutes that they didn’t want to buy the film but only wanted to get face time with us and pitch us on some other movie they were making. After that disappointment, we got a call that one of our favorite distributors was interested. Their junior person and one of the partners had seen it and loved it, but the other main partner was sick in bed with the flu (probably the same one we had) and had not made it out to see the film. He was currently in bed watching it on a DVD screener that our sales agent had delivered to him an hour before. And while he was only halfway through, he knew that he liked it enough to meet with us and discuss the film.
So at about 2:45 A.M., we headed over to his condo deep in the snowy woods of Park City and took a meeting with one of Hollywood’s most elite film executives while he was still in his pajamas. It was not unlike the climactic drug deal scene from Boogie Nights, except that Night Ranger wasn’t playing in the background and we were all doing peppermint tea instead of cocaine. And it ended much more harmoniously.
He loved the movie. We all liked one another. They were going to send us an offer within the hour.
Exhausted and fully adrenaline-crashed, we headed back to our cheap little condo. It was about four A.M. We found the only place open and ordered a pizza and some beer. We paid way too much for it while we waited in a daze for the phone to ring.
At four-thirty we got the call. Sony Pictures Classics, which had put out some of our all-time favorite movies, was offering us almost half a million dollars to buy the U.S. rights to our tiny movie Baghead. But they wanted us to answer right away. We couldn’t wait for the other big studio to see our film print the next morning via the pajama’d intern driving all night in the snow back to Los Angeles. We were not allowed to wait for the next screening where someone might outbid them.
We looked at each other and knew instantly that we would take the deal. That we had gambled on ourselves and won. That we had somehow managed to make this movie exactly how we wanted to make it, and we had made much more money for ourselves and our cast and crew than if we had done it with traditional studio financing.
We thanked Josh, who we still work with today, and hung up the phone. Our pizza and beer came and we had a little of it, but not a ton because we were utterly wiped out. But before we went to bed that night (oddly enough, in twin beds in the same room, although not in the same bed, that would just be weird), there was one more conversation to be had.
MARK: Dupiss?
JAY: Yeah, Dupes.
(Pause.)
MARK: What are we gonna do about Cyrus?
JAY: Was just thinking about that…I don’t know.
MARK: Cuz…that movie is feeling hard. And I’m having this feeling that it’s not gonna get any better than making movies with you, the way we always have. On our own.
JAY: Me too.
> (Pause.)
MARK: Fuck.
JAY: Yeah. Fuck.
IN DECEMBER 1981, I was five years old and I was rummaging through a dense closet in the guest room when I found a stack of presents. They were wrapped in green and red paper. By this age Jay had already taught me how to read, so I could make out the labels.
TO: MARK
FROM: SANTA
It was a bit of a dizzying moment for me. I tried to do the basic math. Yep, it was still early in December, so it wasn’t Christmas morning yet. Were these left over from last year? That seemed unlikely, and even if that was true, why would the presents be buried behind all of my parents’ summer clothes instead of under the tree where Santa normally put them?
I did what I always did in situations like this. I went to get my big brother and ask him what was happening. I was able to drag Jay away from his Erector set for a moment to show him my confusing discovery. I didn’t get to see his face the moment he saw the presents because I was behind him, but I remember feeling his body go rigid. He stayed very still. And he very specifically didn’t look at me. He simply said, “I’ll be right back,” and left me standing there. I was little (and dumb) so I just waited there for what must have been at least ten minutes. Then Jay came back and sat me down for a talk.
What I didn’t know then was that Jay used his ten minutes to speak with my parents. Not being privy to the actual convo, legend has it that it went something like this:
JAY: Guys, Mark found the Santa presents in the closet.
MOM: Oh no.
JAY: I told you guys you should have hidden them better.
DAD: What did you say to him?
JAY: I didn’t say anything, I just came to talk to you guys.
(Head shaking and regret from some guilty parents. Then…)
JAY: Let me go talk to him.
Mom: We should be the ones to tell him.
JAY: Hold on. Don’t do that yet. He’s only five. He’s not that smart. He’s kinda dumb, actually. I think I can work on him.