First Time Director. Gil Bettman

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СКАЧАТЬ Matt adored the script (almost as much as he loved himself) and had absolutely no intention of making Never Too Young to Die any campier than any Bond film. This was because Matt was completely clueless when it came to anticipating how an audience would react to his film. Like most low budget producers, he underestimated the audience and assumed that they would not see his movie for what it was. When I told him, a week or two into preproduction, that as much as I loved and adored the script I still thought it could be improved, and suggested that I take a pass at it, he looked at me a little suspiciously and told me, “Come in on Saturday and we'll do it together.” Then, he held up his pen and informed me imperiously, “Any changes in the script are going to have come through this pen.”

      That should have been my signal to bail out on Never Too Young to Die. But I came in that Saturday and the Saturday after that and the Saturday after that, thinking if I persisted, I could bring Matt around to seeing it my way. And, in fact, I brought him around some. In the version of Never Too Young to Die that went before the cameras, the villain, very ably played by Gene Simmons, was a hermaphrodite. He dressed in drag, did a live stage show, and like a sort of anthropomorphized killer frog, stuck his monster tongue down the throat of any female who came within range. So I got Matt to camp up a few scenes, but with camp, half measures are not effective. The Rocky Picture Horror Show does not flicker in and out of camp. It goes all the way. Matt, like an overgrown 10-year-old, was in love with most of the Bond genre clichés. He insisted that many of them be played straight. At many moments, the final film takes itself completely seriously, which prevents it from sailing into the realm of the absurd, where it properly belongs.

      It would be unwise to try to dictate any hard and fast rules on when the first time director should hold his nose and jump and go ahead and make his first film with a shoe-salesman-cum-producer, even though the film is inherently flawed, and when he should bail out and quit the project. Every case will be different, depending on the producer and the scope of the crucial changes with regard to content that he is forbidding the director to make. I would advise every first time director who is at loggerheads with his producer over script changes or casting decisions to have a very sober conversation with himself about whether his ultimate goals as a director are going to be met by directing a film that is inherently flawed.

How to Be Almost Producer-Proof: Write the Script

      Because I am not a great writer, I had to launch my directing career as a hired gun — a director for hire, as opposed to a writer-director who generally shops a script he has written along with himself as the director of the proposed project. When it comes to low budget breakthrough filmmaking, the hired gun is always at a certain disadvantage. My experience was a testament to this. Since I was a hired gun, my producers first acquired the script and then hired me. Therefore, I was dependent on the taste and judgment of my shoe-salesman-cum-knock-off-artist low budget producers. If you are a writer-director, several other scenarios are open to you by which you, the producer, and the script can come together. They are all vastly superior to those that that one must face as a hired gun.

      Please do not delude yourself into thinking that you are a writer-director rather than a hired gun, and that you can further your directing career by directing from your own material, unless everyone you show your scripts to tells you that you are a great writer. When your friends give you feedback on your scripts, and it is mixed — some positive, some negative — hear them! They're your friends. They are bending over backwards to be kind. If the best they can do is to give you a mixed review, forget it. You aren't a writer-director. Not yet. You are not going to be doing yourself any favors trying to break through directing from a script that you have written.

      Putting it simply, you are wasting your time unless you know that you are at least as good as the following writer-directors and their breakthrough scripts: Woody Allen ¡What's Up, Tiger Lily ?, Francis Coppola /The Godfather, Brian D e Palm a/Sisters, Martin Scorses t/Mean Streets, Oliver Stone Platoon, Bob Zemeckis/Back to the Future, James Cameron/Terminator, Spike Lee/She's Gotta Have It, Jim Jarmusch/Stranger Than Paradise, John Styles/The Return of the Secaucus Seven, Gregory Nava/El Norte, Joel Schumacher/The Incredible Shrinking Woman, Michael Mann/Thief Christopher Columbus/Heartbreak Hotel, Cameron Crowt/Say Anything, John Yiughts/Sixteen Candles, Joel Cotn/Blood Simple, Kevin Reynolds/Fandango, Quentin Tarentino/Reservoir Dogs, Kevin Smith/Clerks, John Singleton/Boyz in the Hood, Neil LaBute/In the Company of Men, Paul Anàttson/Boogie Nights, Alexander Payn t/Citizen Ruth, Wes Anderson/Bottle Rocket, Kimberly Pier et/The Boy Next Door.

      The advantage of shopping yourself as a director with a script under your arm is that if it attracts the attention of a producer and he tells you he wants to make it into a movie, then your worries are over. Because, assuming that your script is breakthrough material, then your producer is not a shoe salesman but the real thing. To single out your script from the many that cross his desk, he has to be a producer with brains, guts, and taste. If this is the case, he will actually help you make all the hard choices that you will have to make in the course of rendering your script into a finished film.

      Two other scenarios for success: Number one, he is a shoe salesman who wants to make your script because you have included enough mainstream elements that even a shoe salesman can spot it as a saleable product. Or, number two, the quality of the script has attracted other bankable elements, like a known star, so that the shoe salesman can rest assured that the film made from the script will make money on the star's name alone. Amazingly, sometimes film art and the film business just, by chance, overlap in this ironic fashion. If this is the case, your worries are almost over. Your knock-off-artist-producer has unwittingly handed you a great script to direct from: your own. You won't have to endure the maddening ordeal which every hired gun has to face when he gets hired by a shoe-salesman producer — to talk or trick the producer into doing a rewrite so you can make a movie that is truly worth the effort. You've dodged that bullet. Now, all you have to do is find a good, if not a great, cast and then pray that the producer actually manages to come up with the bucks needed to get the script shot. In any case, you are way ahead of the game.

      At one point my career brushed up against Quentin Tarentino's in a way that led me to believe that the people who ran the company that put up the money to make Tarentino's breakthrough film, Reservoir Dogs, were really just shoe salesmen who were funding the film — not so much because they were able to perceive that a great movie could be made from Tarentino's script, but rather because they could see that there were enough bankable elements attached to the script so that, no matter what, they would make money on the project. This same producing team, I will call them Sheila and Simon, had volunteered to put up $1.5 million to produce a film from a script called Car Crazy that I had co-authored for Universal Studios, but which Universal had decided not to green light and had put into turnaround. This meant that any company could produce the script, provided they compensated Universal for the fees that they had paid to me and my writing partner — a mere pittance, since my writing partner and I were unknowns and had written the script for Writer's Guild scale. Sheila and Simon said their company, Sheman Productions, was interested in doing this, so my partner and I met with them. At the meeting they told us how much they loved the script to Car Crazy, which was the story of how a small-town, ail-American teenage boy comes of age and gets the respect he hungers for by building the fastest hot rod in town — sort of Karate Kid meets American Graffiti. They told us they loved it so much they would give us $1.5 million to make it ! Furthermore, they had so much faith in me as a director they would let me direct ! All we had to do was get Keanu Reeves, Christian Slater, or River Phoenix to agree to star in it. Little mind that, at that time, Reeves, Slater, and Phoenix all had at least a $2 million asking price for their services on any picture. As to how we would pay the star and have any money left over to make the picture, neither Sheila nor Simon had any advice. That was our problem.

      Later on, at a party, Sheila told me, in so many words, that they had made the same generous offer to Tarentino, provided he could СКАЧАТЬ