‘MODERNS’ FINDS ITS TIME, PLACE

MONTREAL —  Paris in the ‘20s. The Left Bank. Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray. A young Picasso. Postwar giddiness, intellectual fervor, a revolt in the arts. Out with the old values, in with the new. Have another cognac.

What a time! What a place! What a setting for a movie!

At least, it seems like a great setting for a movie.

But not many people who finance films think so. In the last 12 years, since writer-director Alan Rudolph wrote his first version of “The Moderns,” the script has been rejected more than 100 times, according to Rudolph. And he’s been counting.

“I was told that ‘The Moderns’ actually appeared on somebody’s research as the most rejected script in Hollywood,” said Rudolph, who has made five other movies while shopping “The Moderns” around.

“At one point, Esquire magazine talked to us about publishing it (as the most rejected script). I said, ‘I don’t want it to end up being a trivia question. The movie is going to be made some day.’ ”

That day has come.

“The Moderns,” a sort of nostalgia fable that Rudolph says is part Passion play, part melodrama and part soap opera, is finally being made. Not in Paris, where the American dollar is weak, but in Montreal, where it is strong. It is not being made because ‘80s Hollywood has suddenly fallen in love with ‘20s Paris, but because the current economics of independent film making and distribution has made it possible--barely--for Rudolph to get it financed.

“The Moderns” almost went into production 10 years ago with a $5-million budget and a cast that included Mick Jagger and Keith Carradine. It is being made now with Carradine, John Lone, Genevieve Bujold, Linda Fiorentino and Wallace Shawn on a budget of $3.7 million.

Although the air gets very still when you ask either Rudolph or Alive Films co-chair Carolyn Pfeiffer about it, “The Moderns” is also being made now because Jon Bradshaw--Pfeiffer’s husband and Rudolph’s co-writer on “Moderns”--died of a heart attack last November.

“Carolyn and I started talking about ‘The Moderns’ being our next movie when we first met 12 years ago,” Rudolph said during a break on the film’s set here recently. “When Bradshaw got involved, he became obsessive about it. We could have gone on forever trying to get the money we thought we needed. When he died, we said, ‘Let’s get this thing done.’ ”

Rudolph and Pfeiffer say the deal between Alive Films and Nelson Entertainment, a video company that Alive has been working with since it was part of Avco Embassy, is a bad one. Pfeiffer first put development money into “The Moderns” in 1975 and the project has been with her and Alive ever since. But to get Nelson to put up the $3.7 million, Alive had to relinquish almost all of its rights.

Alive will release “The Moderns” theatrically in the United States and Canada. Nelson has all other rights--worldwide video, pay-TV, syndication and foreign theatrical. Alive will be paid a distribution fee and will recoup its advertising costs, but it will not get into profits until Nelson has been repaid its $3.7 million.

That means it’s going to be hard for Nelson to lose anything, and very hard for Alive to make anything. Rudolph and those cast and crew members who agreed to take smaller salaries in exchange for participation in profits won’t participate unless “The Moderns” is a huge theatrical hit.

“It’s a bad deal for all of us,” Rudolph said, “but I can’t gripe. People are putting up some money and I’m getting the movie made. I wouldn’t trade this experience for anything.”

Pfeiffer said it’s a deal she would not have made on any other picture.

“Let’s face it, as much faith as Alan and Bradshaw and I have had in ‘The Moderns,’ people weren’t lining up to give us the money,” Pfeiffer said. “Nelson did not have to make this movie. When they bought the company from Coca-Cola, they could have pulled out. It wasn’t their favorite project, either. But they didn’t pull out.”

The labor of love is a cliche in Hollywood, and the studios may doubt that there are any film makers who would sincerely prefer making movies to making money. But “The Moderns” and other independent hard-sell projects, fueled by passion and little else, seem to make the point.

There is a parallel between what is going on among American independent film makers today and the free-spirited artists and writers who tested their wings in Paris in the ‘20s. Independent film makers are an amorphous group--they aren’t a small clique getting together in Gertrude Stein’s salon to carp about the stifling artistic environment. But largely through today’s video-fueled film economy, they have been chipping away at conventional studio wisdom about what people want to see.

With the critical and box office successes of such recent independent films as “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and “A Room With a View,” the financial doors are opening a crack wider for people like Rudolph to get pet projects off the ground.

The odd thing about the rejection slips for “The Moderns” is that its basic storyline appears to be far more commercial than those of either “Choose Me” or “Trouble in Mind,” Rudolph’s last two releases. “The Moderns” is a love triangle mixed with intrigue in a glamorous, exotic setting. Old Hollywood loved the formula.

“In the ‘40s, they would have made this movie in a second,” said Keith Carradine, who is starring in his fourth Alan Rudolph film. “I feel sorry for the guys at the studios. They have been forced to shut off their intuition. . . . ‘Paris in the ‘20s’ is all they look at. They say, ‘Who cares about that?’ ”

Carradine met Rudolph during the making of “Nashville” in 1974. He played a vagabond singer in that film and won an Academy Award for the song “I’m Easy,” which he wrote and performed. Rudolph was Robert Altman’s assistant director.

The next year, Rudolph cast Carradine in his first feature, “Welcome to L.A.” During the editing of that movie, Rudolph wrote his first draft of “The Moderns” and asked Carradine to play the lead role of Nick Hart, an American expatriate struggling to begin a painting career in Gertrude Stein’s Paris.

Mick Jagger agreed to play Bertram Stone, Hart’s adversary in love and art. Producer David Puttnam, now chairman of Columbia Pictures, commissioned a script after Rudolph pitched his idea for “The Moderns” and was going to produce it with Carolyn Pfeiffer, who had met Rudolph when both were working for Altman.

“When I met Alan, he had just written ‘Breakfast of Champions’ for Altman,” Pfeiffer said. “Everybody loved that script, including (the book’s author) Kurt Vonnegut. What Alan does brilliantly is re-create moods. I loved the idea of ‘The Moderns.’ ”

Pfeiffer and record producer Shep Gordon, who are now the principals in Alive Films, put up the development money for “The Moderns,” but before it was ready to go into production, David Puttnam joined Casablanca Record and FilmWorks, where he produced “Midnight Express.” The script for “The Moderns” stayed behind with Pfeiffer and Gordon.

“I thought it had the most wonderful sense of period that I’d ever encountered in a script,” Puttnam said of Rudolph’s original version. “But I also thought that the narrative collapsed in the second half. I gather that the script they’ve got now has nothing to do with our script.”

Rudolph said that the sense of period is about all that remains from that first script. In fact, it was the lack of structure that brought Jon Bradshaw into it.

“Bradshaw kept saying ‘structure, structure,’ ” Rudolph said. “We used to get drunk and argue about it all night. But we ended up with structure.”

Rudolph said there have been several brushes with a production go-ahead on “The Moderns.” In 1978, he was six weeks from starting up in Paris when his financial backer insisted on a guarantee of a major studio release. End of deal.

There were other teasing moments when it looked as if the money would be there, but most of the activity with “The Moderns” was split between rewrites and rejections. Rudolph said that when he was working with Bradshaw, a noted magazine journalist, they were like an old vaudeville team pounding agents’ doors for an audition.

“We would write a version, get it rejected, then rewrite it and get it rejected again. We sent it to every studio, then when the studios changed hands, we sent it back. They’d reject it again. After ‘Choose Me,’ friends called and said, ‘We want a co-production deal for France, what do you have?’ I said, ‘I’ve got something that’s perfect’ and sent them ‘The Moderns.’ They rejected it. They said they wanted something that was either all-French or all-American.”

Carradine and his character have both aged in the meantime, and Carradine says now, he identifies more than ever with Nick, a painter whom Gertrude Stein scoffs at in the picture as being too old--at 31--to fit in with the young American artists then in vogue.

“There are so many parallels between my character’s position within the picture and my own career as an actor,” Carradine said. “I haven’t been as thwarted as Nick has been, but I’ve taken my lumps. I haven’t been in any really successful movies. I’ve been chewed up by the critics a little bit.

“When Nathalie (an art dilettante, played by Geraldine Chaplin) says to me, ‘I’ve followed your career with interest and concern. . . . I always believed you would be more successful by now,’ I really enjoyed standing in front of a camera and having that said to me.”

On the surface, “The Moderns” is a story about two men--Nick, the struggling artist (Carradine), and Stone, the wealthy art dealer (Lone)--who are in love with the same ambitious woman (Fiorentino). The plot eventually turns on a scheme to dupe the art dealer into buying Nick’s forged reproductions of paintings by Cezanne, Matisse and Modigliani.

The range of characters on the sidelines includes a young and moody Ernest Hemingway (Kevin J. O’Connor, a scene stealer last year as the Jack Kerouac-styled poet in “Peggy Sue Got Married”), the stern art-community den mother Gertrude Stein (Elsa Raven) and gossip columnist Waldy Balm (Wallace Shawn), who is based on a journalist who actually made a living sending social notes about American expatriates back to the States.

Montreal-born Genevieve Bujold, in her third Rudolph picture, plays the only art dealer who sees the value in Nick Hart’s paintings.

The story does drift into the dreamlike states that people either love or hate about Rudolph’s films. But the director is being restricted by his own passion for the period. What “The Moderns” is really about, he said, is counterfeiting--”counterfeit art, counterfeit emotions, counterfeit times.

“It’s a metaphor for the corruption of our lives,” Rudolph said. “It has to do with the relative truth we all live in. Truth is whatever gets the most applause.”

Rudolph admits to a fetish for Paris in the ‘20s, but he doesn’t believe he has over-romanticized it. Paris was the center of cultural and artistic activity, of fashion and philosophy, and it did attract the best minds of the time. But it also attracted some of the great frauds.

Out of the mulch came “the moderns,” the people who broke out and set the standards for all the cultural counterfeiting that has gone on since--certainly in the arts, certainly in Hollywood and certainly in Rudolph’s movie.

Montreal for Paris?

“We would love to have shot this movie in Europe,” said art director Steve Legler, who has been busy finding Left Bank look-alikes in Montreal, a port city founded by the French in the 17th Century at the base of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

“But we couldn’t have done it in Paris anyway. It doesn’t look any more like Paris of the ‘20s than Montreal does.”

Rudolph said he would have been charged triple time for shooting at night in Paris and with the French franc sitting on the American dollar’s chest, there was no chance of filming there on a $3.7-million budget. He estimated that it would have cost an additional $1.5 million.

Montreal is a city of many faces. It has been used for Moscow, London, New York, even Detroit. Most of “The Moderns” is being filmed indoors--in a Masonic temple, in City Hall, in some empty store fronts--but there are a couple of critical exteriors set up on the narrow cobblestone streets of Old Montreal.

Rudolph is using a union Canadian crew. The union rules drive him crazy, he said, but “the crew is terrific.”

“They have a film-making attitude here that is really good,” Rudolph said. “They know what they’re doing and they want to help make a good movie. They’re not just waiting around for a lunch whistle.”

Rudolph has not worked exclusively as an independent film maker. The urge to earn a good living has struck him occasionally and he’s responded. It’s hard to resist when a studio is willing to shell out $5 million for something like the 1980 “Roadie,” a juvenile farce that Rudolph directed starring the O-shaped rocker Meat Loaf, and the 1982 “Endangered Species,” a weak would-be thriller about cattle mutilations in the West.

Pfeiffer, who produced “Roadie,” said the idea for the movie came up in her apartment one night and she made the deal with United Artists almost immediately.

But to “The Moderns,” the studio said what everybody else had said: “No, thanks.”

Rudolph, 43, said he used to worry about working within the system, but knew he wasn’t quite cut out for mainstream Hollywood. When he showed his script for “Remember My Name” to his agent, he said his agent resigned.

“He said, ‘I don’t want to represent you. I don’t understand what you’re doing. You’re too insular. You don’t see the world at all. You just see what you see and I don’t get it.’ ”

After a few attempts at conforming, Rudolph gave up.

“I realized what a mistake that was. The truth is, I want to be insular. I can at least trust that. I’ll just do what I do and see what comes along that I can accept.”

Rudolph said he agonized over his decision last year to direct “Made in Heaven,” a $10-million special-effects love story due out this fall from Lorimar Telepictures. He knew all the potential problems of doing a major movie--particularly the loss of creative freedom--but said he liked the script and decided to go ahead. When it was over, all his fears had been realized.

He said everyone agreed with his vision of the film before he began, and he said he got nothing but encouragement while he was shooting it. But when it was finished, they wanted a different movie.

“I said I didn’t want to do the movie if it was going to be dominated by special effects. I don’t know how to do that kind of movie. I want the illusions to happen live, like in theater. Everyone agreed. When it was over, they wanted special effects.”

Most of the debate was over the ending, Rudolph said. The studio wanted one ending, he wanted another. They compromised on a third.

“I’m not disappointed with the movie; I’m disappointed with the process,” Rudolph said. “I should never do anybody else’s writing.”

Rudolph said he is far happier, even with the restrictive budgets, doing films like “The Moderns.”

The crew is small and intimate and made up mostly of Rudolph regulars. Japanese cinematographer Toyomichi Kurita is doing his second Rudolph film (he did “Trouble in Mind”). Production designer Steve Legler is on Rudolph No. 4, as is producer David Blocker, 31, the spitting-image son of the late actor Dan Blocker (“Bonanza”).

But how far can careers travel on good times?

Ultimately, even Hemingway outgrew the charm of the movable feast, of being young and broke in Paris. As Rudolph can testify, people who finance independent films are as reluctant to share the profits with film makers as the major studios are, and they are often just as creative at hiding them.

Rudolph made “Choose Me” for $985,000 for Island-Alive. The movie, largely perceived as a hit art-house film, grossed $7 million in the United States and has played several times on pay TV. It’s also a strong video release and has been exploited in international markets.

Yet Rudolph said his last statement from Island Pictures (the movie rights remained with Island when it split from Alive) showed the movie still $300,000 in the red. Russell Schwartz, the new president of Island, refused to comment.

“I have done six independent films and, other than salary, I haven’t seen a nickel,” he said. “You can only make these movies if you can get people to defer salaries (accept less cash in exchange for profit participation). But it’s hard to keep going back to the same people and telling them they’ll see something at the other end when they never see anything at the other end.”

Carradine, who has bitten the bullet on four Rudolph films, said that the financial people are preventing other film makers and actors from working in low-budget independent films.

“The people putting up money consider what they’re doing investing,” he said. “What they have to realize is that when we take lower salaries, we’re investing, too. It’s still money out of our pockets.

“As it is, if the film works out wonderfully, everybody wins but us. If that part of the system would change--if people knew they would benefit same as everyone else--you would see people flocking to work for less. The cost of film making would plummet.”

In the meantime, the independents will operate in their own Left Banks, bumming francs for croissants and trying to find a popular forum to express themselves. Maybe that’s what draws Rudolph to the Paris of the ‘20s: the notion that people who needed intellectual elbow room found it there and enjoyed the company.

“It was just a time and place where everything came together,” Rudolph said. “There was nearly a decade where the major accomplishment in our civilization was art and literature and fashion. Writing, painting, thinking. . . . It happened all at once, in Paris.

“There is no way (the movie) can be an extension of Paris in the ‘20s. It is simply about the breath that was being taken. If it was inhaled in 1926, maybe we can exhale it in 1987 and it will still be as sweet.”