Hey, That Wasn’t in the Script!

Mother Teresa spends a lifetime serving others. After decades of feeding and sheltering the world’s hungry and homeless, she is visited by God.

“Selflessness has long been your way of life, Mother Teresa,” intones God. “Now it is your turn. What would you like? Name your desire, and it shall be granted.”

“Well, since you’re asking,” Mother Teresa replies, “what I really want to do is direct.”

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The notion of a career in filmmaking does conjure an aura of power, glamour, mystique, history and immortality. The very word “director” connotes authority. And today it seems like everyone--OK, everyone except Mother Teresa--wants in.

Submissions to this year’s Sundance Film Festival increased by over a third from 1995. NYU received 1,200 applications from aspiring movie makers for its 1996 film program (fewer than one-quarter were accepted). Multi-picture studio deals are now routinely kick-started by not just low-budget films but virtually no-budget films.

But an education in cinema--which now rivals the cost of a professional degree--might be the most “worthless” major since philosophy. When I graduated from NYU with a bachelor’s in film 17 years ago, most of my classmates wanted to play the studio game and make polished, big-budget features. Only one actually went on to do so: “Home Alone” director Chris Columbus.

In 1980, 35% of all first-time studio directors were film school graduates. By 1992, that number had jumped to 72%. That year, M magazine ran a cover story featuring NYU alumnus Martin Scorsese, and calling the film school degree “The MBA of the ‘90s.”

Curious about this growing phenomenon, I contacted department chairs at the country’s five major film schools four years ago. I screened films of 40 or 50 recent graduates, many of whom were talented and, when I met with them, quite personable. But in the ‘90s, during a creative slump in an adverse economy, it seemed that the odds of legitimate success as a feature filmmaker were off the chart. I finally narrowed it down to seven.

Despite the long odds, each one of these pretenders to the Tarantino throne is firm in the belief that his or her name will someday become an adjective like “Chaplinesque,” “Capraesque,” or “Hitchcockian.”

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“My father was into gadgets,” recalled 1989 Columbia graduate P.J. Pesce, now 35. “We got a microwave in the ‘60s when it was still this huge thing that you had to approach with a Geiger counter, and it would take an hour to cook a hamburger. He also had these 8-millimeter cameras.

“In the back of my house was a lake, at the bottom of which was this white clay, like what all the natives are covered with in ‘Apocalypse Now.’ We would go down and cover ourselves with it. I must have made this movie ‘The Attack of the Clay Monster’ three times, minimum. The first time it was really primitive, just filming the clay monster going around and picking my sister up and stuff. The second time, I conceived a story. I didn’t know about editing. I didn’t even have the concept of a moving camera.”

At Columbia’s film school, Pesce had an idol for an instructor.

“Martin Scorsese came to teach at Columbia, and I was one of eight people chosen to be in his class. Everyone else had to sneak in.

“Our class met at Sound One, where Scorsese was finishing post-production on ‘The Color of Money.’ It was amazing--here’s this guy, who made this movie, ‘Taxi Driver,’ that was the most important movie in my life when I was 16, and still was--and I was going to meet him.

“So the first day, we’re all totally afraid we’re gonna say something stupid and Scorsese’s gonna throw us out or something. I had written this script the first year that I thought was kind of dopey. But I thought I would read it because it never failed to get a laugh.

“The script was about this old Italian grandfather who comes back from the dead and wants to have sex with his grandson’s girlfriend. I started reading this thing, and I was doing all the accents, and I was terrified. If it goes bad, I’m an idiot, and I’ve made a bad impression.

“But it went well, and Scorsese actually started kind of laughing. He encouraged me to rewrite it, and then I did and said, ‘OK, let’s shoot it,’ and he said, ‘No, no, no. You gotta rewrite it again.’

“In the original ending, the girlfriend doesn’t actually do it, and they go off all happy. And Scorsese would say, ‘What do you think about the ending?’ And I’d go, ‘Well, I guess it’s kinda sappy.’ And he’d go, ‘Yeah, what would be the truthful ending?’ And I’d go, ‘The old man would [sleep with] her, and the kid would be upset.’ And he’d go, ‘Yes, it’s a comedy, but yes, that’s the truthful thing--and in fact that’s the funniest thing.’ ”

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Liz Cane, a 1992 graduate of UCLA, was a finalist for Paramount Pictures’ annual directing fellowship.

“I met with Michelle Manning, who’s a VP,” Cane said. “They asked how I would feel about working in TV. I said, ‘What I really want to do is write and direct feature films. I don’t watch TV.’ I saw their faces drop. Michelle said, ‘You ought to know that 98%-99% of what we do at Paramount is TV.’ Then I said, ‘But I think any directing’s good experience--maybe there are some good things going on in TV.’ It was just an awkward moment.

“What’s hard for me right now is I feel like I’m judged in an instant. I feel like I need an acting class for this stuff--improvisation and acting are good skills to have in this business.”

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Bernard Joffa, a 1991 graduate of the American Film Institute, received an Academy Award nomination that year for his student film “Senzeni Na? (What Have We Done?),” and was immediately approached by top agencies.

“I got offers from ICM, the William Morris Agency and Triad,” said Joffa. “The academy suddenly made me a connection.

“I did a lot of heavy-duty dining at fancy restaurants. Kate Mantilini for breakfast, Orso for lunch and Le Dome for supper. I had a Yugo, and it was always great fun to arrive at the valet parking, because no one would run up to my car.”

Joffa was selected for the Paramount Fellowship, for which he received an office on the studio’s lot and a $25,000 salary for the year. During that time, he interned on the set of director Philip Noyce’s “Patriot Games.”

“I became a fly on the wall,” says Joffa. “Being on the set, you learn so much. The hardest thing is to keep quiet.

“One day I was sent on an errand and couldn’t watch that afternoon’s shoot, and I came back, and Philip’s sitting at a video monitor, and he says, ‘Come look at this shot.’

“The shot called for two doors to be in the frame. The person choosing the wrong door, it would take him to his death in a basement. If he chose the right door, he would have gone into the bathroom.

“Philip shows me the shot, and you can only see one door, which meant that the audience wouldn’t know he had a choice. I said, ‘Philip, it’s not going to work. There’s no tension there.’ He thought about it, then called an assistant to look at it, who agreed with him that it was OK. I said, ‘I may have made a mistake, but that’s what I think.’

“The next morning--the first shot of the day--Philip was re-shooting the shot of the doors. He had obviously thought about it and agreed with me that it wouldn’t work. A few hours later, Mace [Neufeld, “Patriot Games’ ” veteran producer] comes running onto the set and calls Philip and takes him away, and Philip comes back looking very troubled and worried. Then the VP in charge of the production from Paramount comes up to me and says, ‘Bernard, you’re in trouble. Mace wants you off the set, and Philip wants you to stay on the set. We’ve struck a deal with Mace. If you stand 15 feet away from Philip, you can stay. So I said, ‘I certainly don’t want to stay if Mace doesn’t want me to be here.’ And the executive said it was actually Paramount’s picture, so I should stay.

“That afternoon, they project the dailies from the day before, and Bob Rehme [Neufeld’s producing partner] sees them. He says, ‘Philip, that’s not going to work. You can only see one door there.’ And Philip says, ‘Don’t worry, Bob, we re-shot this morning.’ ”

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In 1993, Marco Williams, a UCLA graduate film alum by way of Harvard University, found himself being courted by an industry legend to direct.

“I had a couple of meetings in the past two weeks with Dawn Steel,” Williams, who is African American, said at that time. “They have seen a lot of Afro-American directors for this project, which is called ‘The Power of No.’ It’s a modernization of Aristophanes’ ‘Lysistrata,’ in which the women of a Greek town tell the men they will no longer continue to have sex with them if the men continue their warring ways.

“It’s been updated and now set in urban America, where the warring is gang activity. It’s about empowerment and choices.

“I told Dawn, ‘I could see how you would want a black woman to direct this.’ She said, ‘All I know is that I definitely don’t want a white man.’

“I was in a meeting with five other people who work for Dawn. I had read the script three times and outlined five or six sections in terms of what my cinematic treatment would be.

“They said to me, ‘This is a comedy--how do you feel about doing comedy?’ Now, people will tell you that I am about as serious as a heart attack. But I am sensitive to comedy. I made an analogy that I got from Richard Marks [a UCLA instructor]. He said that the key to directing is having an emotional connection to the material.

“As I was leaving, Dawn said she would call me later but I really didn’t expect her to. When I got home, the phone rang and she said, ‘You’re our guy. We’ll set up a meeting with the Touchstone people.’ I dropped two prints of my student film at ICM for David Hoberman and the other Touchstone executives to see.”

Averaging budgets between $80,000 and $125,000, directors’ tests are a fairly common practice for studios considering to work with new filmmakers. The full deal for the director’s services on the feature must be negotiated before the test is done.

“We dressed a set on Disney’s back lot, and then we did an interior on a stage,” Williams said a few weeks later, just after his test for “The Power of No.”

“Dawn was there with all the producers. It was funny. In the morning, as it was their wont to observe since they are the producers, they were there in full force. But after a couple of hours, I was just making movies, I wasn’t paying attention to them. In the beginning I was, ‘Here, there, what do you think of this?,’ soliciting their input and involving them, but after a certain point, I was just making a movie. I consider it a movie, even though it was just scenes. The Disney people showed up later.

“The editor started on Friday, and hopefully at the end of today or tomorrow he’ll have a cut to show me. And then by the end of this week I should have a director’s cut, and we’ll show it to Dawn. From what I understand, Disney is going to look at it in 16 days or so. It’ll be in the neighborhood of 10 minutes long, like a short film.

“Disney has a little more time than I would have liked to make a decision. It boils down to 15 business days, so three weeks under an exclusive thing, and then 30 days with a preempt status, if I had something else (offered). So it’s effectively two months, a curious thing to me.

“My feeling is that Dawn is committed to making this movie, and I know she was very pleased with my work and is still committed to me as director. If Disney didn’t want to do it, I have a sense that Dawn would like to take it somewhere else.

“I really feel, in some sense, that this was as much a test of me as it was of the material. It’s not obvious Touchstone or Disney material. I mean, there are enough references to female and male body parts that it’s enough to make you think, ‘There’s no way Disney is going to do this.’

“I guess it’s the way the movie business is, but I staked my whole summer on this thing, and at the rate we’re going, if they were to say yes, we wouldn’t be shooting it until the beginning of the new year. It’s like deep-sea fishing, and you’ve got a big one on the line. You don’t want to get it practically to the boat and have it slip off the hook.”

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In 1993, I accompanied P.J. Pesce to New Mexico, where he directed “The Desperate Trail,” a western starring Sam Elliott, Linda Fiorentino and Craig Sheffer.

“Sheffer and I had a major blowout,” Pesce said the first day of shooting. “I really wanted him to shave his mustache. I mean, his character is described as ‘open and gregarious,’ and the mustache looked unfriendly. He said no. I said, ‘Think about it, I’ll think about it.’ I didn’t sleep all night thinking about this [expletive] mustache. This morning I saw him, and I said, ‘The mustache has to go.’ He said, ‘Forget it.’

“He said, ‘Look, this is my 17th movie. It’s your first.’ I said, ‘I don’t care, that mustache is wrong for the character.’ He said, ‘Fine. Get another actor. I’m walking.’ I said, ‘Fine. I don’t know how I can direct you if you won’t give me what I want.’ He’s just a brat, a [expletive] arrogant brat.

“The [expletive] that’s gone down in the last two weeks has been unbelievable. This was a $1.1-million movie a month ago, and we were telling the production company, MPCA, there was no way to do it. They wanted to cut the train stuff and the bank robbery. Everyone said we needed $1.6 million to do it.

“Then we got Sam Elliott, and everything changed. We went to Trimark. TNT offered $2.5 million, and we took it and just walked on Trimark. I OKd Craig and Linda over the phone. Then I called Craig, and he didn’t return my calls for a day and a half. I scheduled dinner with him here the first night and he blew me off. He had dinner with Linda instead.

“If we had had a chance to work together for a week before the shoot, none of that [expletive] with the mustache would have happened. Sheffer and I didn’t trust each other. We were like dogs, sniffing each other out.”

Despite “The Desperate Trail’s” winning the best director prize at the 1994 Hamptons Film Festival, MPCA and financier TNT elected not to release P.J. Pesce’s western theatrically.

“I don’t think they ever had any other plans,” Pesce said. “They say, ‘OK, great, thanks. We’re going to make $2.5 million for your labors, for which you were paid $50,000.’

“Why did I put all my imagination and thought in, for a flat rate? These guys will make money off of this movie for years and years to come.

“Look, if Satan would have come with a contract and said, ‘Your soul, and that’s it,’ I would have said yes. And they know that. Does that make it any less wrong to exploit someone and their intellectual property in that way?

“I’m 33. In five years I’ll be 38 years old. I would like to have directed another three movies. I would like that at least one of those be a small, character-driven comedy that I really care about. I would also like to have done a studio movie of the sort that I now know I could really do. Something like ‘Midnight Run,’ which is a great, smaller studio movie.

“And I would like five years from now to have enough money in the bank that it’s not an issue. Preston Sturges said something like, ‘Money should not be a player. You should never have so much or so little of it that it’s an issue.’

“In spite of all the bitterness and cynicism, I’m really grateful. From the three years before and after me in film school, I could count the number of people on one hand who have directed one feature, let alone two. OK, I’m not in the situation that Quentin Tarantino is in, but I’m a working Hollywood director.”

“The Desperate Trail” was released on video by Turner Home Entertainment in December 1994. It ran on Turner Network Television several times during the week beginning July 9, 1995. Reviews were mostly positive. Earning a 4.5 Nielsen rating, “The Desperate Trail” was the second-highest-rated basic cable program the week it aired.

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In a 1994 New Yorker interview, Pauline Kael was asked what kind of person it takes to become a movie director. “Let’s be brutal,” Kael said. “It takes a person who can raise the money to make a movie.”

Kael’s response was brutally accurate. However, financing features no longer means raising millions of dollars, as acclaimed movies costing well under $100,000 have heralded a golden age of guerrilla filmmaking. This generation’s credo may well be, “Forget the car for graduation, Mom and Dad--finance my directorial debut.”

If film school alumni are learning anything after graduation, it’s probably this: No one really cares if they can direct. What studios and independents really want is material. “New directors should be concentrating their efforts on getting together a script that they can attach themselves to,” says Bobbi Thompson, a veteran William Morris agent. “Whether it’s one they write or collaborate with a writer on, or one they can acquire. Some sort of material, preferably a screenplay, that can be their calling card in meetings and hopefully get made, that has value.”

Few executives can resist looking at a new speculative screenplay. The odds of getting an original script made are pretty slim, but more often than not, a sold spec will result in future writing opportunities, a proven path to directing.

But few young filmmakers have the money or connections to participate in Hollywood’s ongoing romance with best-selling novels and comic books, star salaries, sequels and remakes. And this blockbuster mentality is virtually blind to the possibilities of creative work from new talent.

Meanwhile, the debate over the value of film school rages on. But if it has no other purpose, perhaps affording filmmakers the opportunity to take artistic chances is value enough. “It’s about doing,” says Gillian Armstrong, who attended two film schools in Australia before going on to direct “My Brilliant Career” and “Little Women.” “The year that I was out in between [schools] I had quite a shock. I realized that that time was really precious. You rarely, in the professional world, have the chance to express yourself as an individual.”

In 1969, future Oscar winner Robert Benton (“Kramer vs. Kramer”) was subjected to a director’s test before being hired for “Bad Company,” from his and David Newman’s screenplay. “The camera was set up and we started working on the first shot of the test, a long tracking shot. I saw the actors in costume. They were working--this line didn’t work, that line didn’t work.

“At that moment I thought, ‘If I don’t do this for the rest of my life, I’m gonna die.’ ”