First Time Director. Gil Bettman
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money to make and sell the product. But when it came to understanding the process by which the product that they sold was made, they were about as clueless as a shoe salesman when it comes to making shoes. This is why during the years when I was directing low budget films there was one Fatal Attraction and at least a thousand knock-offs. It took one producer who actually knows good content when he sees it to establish the trend: Michael Douglas. He read the script and had the guts and the brains to get the script made into a film, because it was a great script, not because erotic thrillers were “in” that year.
What the first time director has to try to figure out is whether he is working with a real producer, like Michael Douglas, or a shoe salesman. This is a very hard call to make, especially during the early stages of preproduction. At this stage, the first time director has known the producer for all of a couple of weeks…a month at the most. It is hard to get a solid fix on anyone's true capabilities that fast. And then, since the producer is a human being, he is going to be a jumble of contradictions.
I explained earlier how the script for Crystal Heart was fatally flawed, and how I did serious damage to my relationship with Pedro trying to get him to understand that it was pointless to shoot a love story in which the audience never gets to see exactly how the boy and the girl fall in love. I also knew that another project I directed, Never Too Young to Die, about the son of James Bond which was going to be made on a $3 million budget — when real Bond films were running about $40 or $50 million a pop — would never fly and just look like a cheap rip-off. Its only chance was if it acknowledged what it was, made fun of itself, and came off campier than the campiest moment in any Bond film. I could not admit any of this to the producer, Matt. It was clear that 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