by Mark Duplass
(NOTE: Through the years there have been a lot of conversations like this. Me being a bit of a wild card that needs managing, my parents befuddled as to how to deal with me, and Jay being the level-headed negotiator that kept the Duplass household on track. A little bit like Tom Hagen in The Godfather.)
When Jay sat me down, he carefully explained to me that when he was five years old he also found presents in the closet and got confused. He told me that he went to Mom and Dad and they explained the whole situation. That, if you really think about it, Santa has so much work to do on the actual Christmas Eve that he couldn’t possibly deliver all the presents that very night. So he enlists the help of parents all around the world to do some early delivery of presents to lighten his load on the actual day. And we were one of the lucky families Santa had chosen for a predelivery of sorts. Mom and Dad hide the presents ahead of time in early December and then place them under the tree on Christmas Day. And that’s how it works.
Jay leaned back, smiled, and peered into my eyes for signs of disbelief. I remember a weird tingling feeling inside. My bullshit detector was going off. But at the same time, the person I loved and trusted most in this world was looking at me with loving eyes and talking to me. Plus, let’s be honest, I really wanted to believe in Santa Claus. Still, I was skeptical.
So, for the next week, Jay ran an exhaustive campaign to reconvince me that Santa was real. It included geography lessons about the world’s truly dizzying size. Census information from our burgundy Encyclopedia Britannica set about the sheer magnitude of the world’s population. And then some very basic math about how fast Santa would have to travel to get it all done in one night. I wasn’t smart, but I was old enough to understand that Santa dropping all those presents in one night to every kid in the world was an impossible task. So I decided to drink Jay’s Santa Kool-Aid and buy back in.
And for the next two years I was a true believer in Santa. Until some dickhead kid on the bus bragged about there being no Santa and ruined it all again. But before that, Jay bought me two more magical Christmas seasons believing in Santa because he knew me well enough and cared about me enough to make it happen.
OKAY. WE DON’T really know anything about this stuff. But we somehow made a really good chunk of money buying some young, cheap stocks (with very little savings) that eventually skyrocketed. We recommend that you try to do the same. Set aside a month where you don’t go out to eat. Use that savings to invest in a stock that you think has upside. Which stock? Good question. It’s hard to figure out which stocks to buy. We’ve taken an approach that is fairly simple but works well. We only buy stocks of companies that we use, love, and believe in. We also limit it to stocks of which we have fairly intimate knowledge. For instance, we read the film industry trades every day. We know which companies have the best employees, best success rates, good reputations, etc. We feel we are in a unique position to know which media companies have a better chance at succeeding than others.
An example. In 2002 we were renting DVDs from a new mail order business called Netflix. Their customer service was great, it was cheap, everyone we showed the company to loved it and kept talking about it, so we bought a slew of shares in 2005 when they were only $20 apiece. Now, they are worth about fifty times that. Of course, we wish we had bought a lot more, but that purchase single-handedly funded one of our smaller films with its profits.
So look around in your life for that small company that no one really knows a lot about but you believe could be big. Get in early.
AFTER WE SOLD Baghead to Sony Pictures Classics at Sundance, there was a definite shift for us back in L.A. The noise about our sale and how we made the movie spread quickly through the industry. We began getting offers to direct movies that were already greenlit. Not great movies or great offers, but offers nonetheless. One of the financiers (the one who had asked us to change the ending of Baghead as a condition to funding the film) sent us a particularly telling email that said, simply: “Crow not so tasty.”
In short, companies were coming around to seeing how our way of doing things had its value. And one of these companies was Fox Searchlight, which called to congratulate us on our Baghead sale. On this same call, because this is the irony of how the world seems to work, they officially greenlit Cyrus to production. It was, technically speaking, a filmmaker’s dream come true. A major studio was greenlighting our movie! They were going to give us millions of dollars to direct our movie!
But it wasn’t that simple. Not only were we just beginning to realize that we could make movies on our own dime in the exact way we wanted to make them, but the sale of Baghead had proven that those little indie movies could be just as lucrative if not more so than some studio paychecks.
But we had put all this work into Cyrus and we still very much loved that story. So we promised to clear our calendars the next day and take a slow, thoughtful, objective read of the current Cyrus script and talk about it afterward. It was a while before I called Mark or he called me. Certainly longer than the ninety minutes it normally takes to read a script.
When we finally connected, we didn’t have to say a thing. We both felt the same way. After all the rewriting and back and forth with the studio over the past year, we hardly recognized our little movie anymore. A screenwriter much more experienced than us once described the development process as a series of small steps away from your home. You build a home, then the studio starts asking you to take tiny little steps away. So you do. They are just tiny steps. But at a certain point, you look up to get your bearings and you discover that you are not only down the street, you’ve taken a few turns as well along the way, and you can’t even see your fucking house anymore.
And that’s exactly how we felt with Cyrus. But we are not irrational divas or fussy auteurs. We are practical, and we wanted to find a way to make the movie work. So after much discussion among ourselves and our incredibly patient producer, Michael Costigan, we decided we would tell Fox Searchlight that we only wanted to make the movie if we could go back to a much earlier draft of the script. One that represented a decent compromise of our original vision and a few of the key notes that they felt strongly about. Again, we have been to therapy, we know about compromise and intensely difficult collaboration because of our own complex relationship, so this solution seemed like a fair one.
When we presented it to the studio, we could tell that they weren’t happy, but we also had the actors’ support in this cause, and this is when we realized how powerful actors are in this business. Most likely, Searchlight agreed to our request in order to get the movie rolling and to keep the actors (who were paid well below their quotes in order to work with us) happy. Cyrus was greenlit and we just hoped and prayed that the studio would be a bit more laid-back during production than they were during the writing process.
At the same time, there was a whole other challenge that we faced in the making of Cyrus. We hadn’t made a movie with a cast and crew of more than ten people since Vince Del Rio—the biggest piece of shit we’d ever created. Yay! Needless to say, we were a bit afraid of opening up our tiny, family-friendly creative process to an entire union crew of more than a hundred people. Our whole filmmaking philosophy was built on keeping things small and intimate on set so that we could focus on the two core tenets of our ethos: Get good performances and tell a good story.
Luckily, we hired the greatest assistant director in the world in the form of Cas Donovan. Cas was a fan of our little movies, had worked on huge movies, and vowed to guide us and protect us through our first big-budget movie experience. Which she did. As much as she possibly could. But there were times when the machine of a big movie would get in the way.
For instance, the first take we did of the film was a rather intimate scene between John Reilly and Catherine Keener. When we yelled cut, it was like a tornado hit the house. Crew members rushed in from every possible entrance, fixing hair and makeup, resetting props,
adjusting lighting, tweaking lavalier microphones. And while they happened to be awesome people doing their jobs very well, as far as we were concerned they had obliterated any ounce of genuine intimacy we had built. So that night we had a meeting and discussed a new way of working.
The next day we told our crew that we would be treating every scene as if it were a nude scene: Only the essential people needed to film would be allowed on set. Everyone else would watch from a monitor outside. And when we yelled cut, no one was allowed to come into the set until the scene was done (unless it was an emergency of some sort). This process helped us maintain the intimacy and feel of our smaller films. And the actors really seemed to love it. In particular, we could tell they enjoyed that our attention was focused solely on them and not the more technical elements that often suck up directors’ time and energy.
After a few days, things seemed to be dialing in. Our studio was watching all of our daily footage and had some comments here and there, but they were small things, so we just proceeded and assumed everything was fine. Around day four, things changed.
We got word that some of the executives wanted to come by the set to speak with us about some “concerns.” We asked if it could wait. After all, it was a long shooting day and we wanted to get some sleep and see our families for a bit. But they insisted that it was important. So after we shot for thirteen hours, a van pulled up outside of set and we were ushered inside to have a conversation with our executives. And the crucial element that could not wait to be discussed was…throw pillows.
Yes. Throw pillows.
It seemed there was a growing concern that the beginning of the movie looked a bit too “brown” and “down” in our lead character’s apartment. Now, to be clear, these executives were likely carrying the message from one of their bosses who saw some dailies and thought the movie looked “depressing.” One of their bosses who knew that the people who came to see Fox Searchlight movies were women over the age of thirty-five, and those women liked things to look nice. So maybe some throw pillows would help liven things up a bit! And we understood this line of thinking. But it was a particularly hard pill to swallow at this moment. Ushered into a van like criminals, after an all-day shoot, being asked to reshoot a scene because it needed more throw pillows. All we could think was “But this character is a depressed divorcé with no money…his apartment is supposed to be brown. And down. He wouldn’t have fucking throw pillows.”
The thing is, Mark didn’t just think this. He said it. Loudly. In fact, he pretty much screamed it. And then something very interesting happened. They were all taken aback. I came right in, and while I didn’t yell, I reinforced Mark’s point. More emphatically than we had ever done before. And we told them why they were wrong about that choice. And why we decided to dress his apartment that way. And how that was the way it should be. And that we didn’t want to reshoot the scene. And then we told them we needed to get some sleep so we could be fresh for tomorrow’s thirteen-hour shoot. And we left the van without being polite or validating. We buried the good Catholic boys inside of us right there and went home. And from that moment forward, they pretty much let us do our thing. Which was a wonderful and terrible thing in the end.
It was great because we, to this day, are endlessly proud of that movie. But it also meant that during the entire development process, when we were trying to listen, trying to compromise, trying to validate the thoughts of our executive collaborators, we were somehow perceived as either being weak or, even worse, lacking in clear vision. And the moment we started yelling was the moment they started backing away and allowing us to do more of what we wanted.
In the end, our collaboration with Fox Searchlight on Cyrus was (on the whole) a successful one. We got to make the movie we wanted to make. They were happy with it. It was well reviewed and made them a few million dollars of profit. As to our creative conflicts at the time, we get that we were likely a bit too young and naïve to truly understand what a studio movie required of us, and they get that maybe they could have been a bit more trusting that we knew what we were doing (we are actually all friends and laugh about it now).
But the one thing that sticks with us still is our fear that this industry (whether it’s aware of this or not) doesn’t actually reward the tenets of validation, listening, and hugs. That instead it rewards that baseball-cap-wearing, gum-chewing, cocky young director who yells at people to get what he wants. That somehow the disgusting behavior of fear, intimidation, and yelling is an expression of a filmmaker’s “vision” and one that merits support.
And we talk about this phenomenon all the time. About how we always imagined we would have one foot in the indie world and one foot in the studio world. And how one of those two feet kinda feels a little rotten and soul-sick sometimes. And how it has affected the way we make movies today in a significant way.
WHEN MARK AND I were little, we started a slew of businesses together. Mostly they involved a lot of theorizing of how we would dominate the world through a certain product and its inevitable financial windfall, and then the idea would fizzle before we could actually make anything. And the reason for the fizzling was often due to Mark’s lack of attention span or inability to enact our plan because he was four years my junior.
This is when our friend Brandt entered the picture. He lived across the street from us and was in the grade below me. In general, he played extremely well with me and Mark (he was and continues to be one of the nicest and purest souls on the planet), but every now and then there were things Brandt and I wanted to do that Mark was simply not old enough to do. We tried to be nice about it. We never threw it in his face that we were going to ride our bikes to the mall without him. But I could tell it burned him a little bit here and there.
One weekend, however, Brandt and I concocted a business plan of our own. I can’t remember anything about the actual business except that we were terrifically excited about the name:
J&B, INCORPORATED.
Jay and Brandt. J&B. Its genius, as far as we were concerned, was in its simplicity. And also the fact that there was an existing logo we could co-opt from the brand of cheap Scotch. So we went to an empty lot in our neighborhood, “borrowed” wood scraps from the abandoned construction, and set about making some sort of box that would serve our business. Exactly how it would serve us I have no recollection, but we just wanted to build some shit, so that’s what we did. I don’t really remember what Mark was up to at the time, but this was the kind of summer day we’d normally spend together. He was just gone and on his own trip somewhere as far as I was concerned.
When we finished assembling the box, we spray-painted our “J&B” logo on it and stepped back to examine our creation. It was lopsided, unstable, and really stupid-looking. We were pretty proud of ourselves.
At dinner that night, I remember my mom pulling me aside and asking me if I would be willing to include Mark in the new business venture. And I remember it really made me upset that she asked. Being only nine years old, I couldn’t identify why it bothered me, but I think I understood deep down that I was a very good big brother who almost always included Mark, and I wanted a pass on this particular project. And I was upset that my mom didn’t see that and offer me that pass. I can’t remember what I said, but I remember bucking her on it. Saying something about the fact that it was Brandt’s and my idea and that we should be able to do it alone. She was truly surprised that I fought back, as I was always such a good little mama’s boy. And she let it go. I also remember being pissed off at Mark, assuming he’d told on me.
That night when we went to sleep (in the same bed, as usual), Mark and I didn’t talk much. It felt gross. Like there was a distance. But I still felt I was right to want to do this business my own way, with my friend Brandt, without Mark.
The next morning when I woke up, I went into the backyard to check on the box. The first thing I noticed was that there was no box. There was, howeve
r, a pile of rusty nails and rather violently torn apart pieces of wood. As if the Tasmanian Devil himself had torn through our neighborhood to take great vengeance upon my box.
Our dad was at work and our mom was also out, and I remember seeing Mark sitting in the living room watching TV. But I could tell he was waiting for me to find the box. He didn’t look at me. He waited for me to come to him. Now, I’m the older brother, but there is something just fucking intimidating sometimes about Mark. There’s a deep darkness there. I share it. But to see it in a five-year-old kid who has just destroyed a (sort of) solid wooden box is a little daunting. But I didn’t give a shit. I was feeling like Jeffrey Lebowski and Papa George Bush at this point: “This aggression will not stand.” I turned off the TV and waited for Mark to look at me. It took him a little bit. He turned his head and stared at me. He said nothing.
JAY: You want to tell me what happened to my box?
MARK: What happened to your box?
JAY: You didn’t see it?
(Mark didn’t answer at this point. Well played.)
JAY: Someone took a hammer and destroyed it.
(Long pause.)
MARK: I’m sorry that happened.
JAY: Did you destroy my box with a hammer?
MARK: Nope.
(Long pause.)
JAY: Did you destroy my box with any other kind of tool?
MARK: Nope.
(Long pause.)
JAY: Did you have anything to do with my box ending up like it is now?
(At this point Mark went silent. I nailed him. But I was also thinking, “How the fuck did he do that without a tool?”)
JAY: I’m going to tell Mom and Dad and you’re gonna be in huge trouble.
MARK: I don’t care about that.