Rebels on the Backlot (10 page)

While Miramax lived for the
New York Times
, Shaye had little use for the cultural elite. He was interested in the
Wall Street Journal
and the bankers who read it. As New Line grew, another philosophy came to burnish Shaye’s reputation: “prudent aggression,” a
phrase he had painted by artist Ed Ruscha and hung in a frame in his Los Angeles office. Shaye used this mantra to seduce successive investment banking firms to float him ever-larger sums of cash—$75 million in 1990 alone. New Line’s profitability was lauded in successive articles in business magazines, and Shaye seemed to forget that he once cared about making good movies. He opened an art-house division in 1990, Fine Line, as a gesture to the movies he once loved. But it was the pronouncement of the
New York Times
of which he was most proud, from the pen of William Grimes in 1991: “A film company’s success story: Low cost, narrow focus, profits.” The article was bronzed and hung on his wall, as was a subsequent paean by the
Times’s
Bernard Weinraub in June 1994: “Dues paid, a Hollywood upstart joins the mogul set.”

The Weinraub article ran less than a year after Shaye sold his company to Ted Turner’s Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., for $667 million in cash and stock, about $100 million of which went into Bob Shaye’s own pocket.

I
N 1990
D
AVID
O
WEN
R
USSELL WAS STRUGGLING TO FIND A
toehold in the nascent Manhattan independent film world. He waited tables for a catering company and tutored high school kids on their SATs (along with James Schamus, a screenwriter and later film executive at Universal). Among his many other jobs, Russell waited tables at Alan Alda’s daughter’s wedding; he later cast Alda in
Flirting with Disaster.
He also bartended for Rupert Murdoch.

Russell finally got a break when he began dating New Line executive Janet Grillo. Grillo believed in him, and she had shepherded a number of urban hits for the young studio, including
House Party
and
Pump Up the Volume.
It was Grillo who in 1990 brought to the studio Russell’s new spec script,
Spanking the Monkey
, a bizarre comedy about a young man’s incestuous relationship with his mother. Originally called
Swelter
, Russell had scribbled it in a fever during a seven-day jury duty stint in Manhattan.

The script read like a drama. Russell had intended it to be a comedy.

Either way, it was very strange.
Spanking the Monkey
was a revenge fantasy based on Russell’s unhealthy (though apparently not literally incestuous) relationship with his own mother. As a teen in the summer of 1980, Russell was stuck at the family home in Larchmont, New York, a wealthy, white suburb north of Manhattan, caring for his mother after she had broken a leg in an auto accident. His father, a sales executive for Simon and Schuster, was away on business, as he often was. The premise is the same in the movie (in the film the father is a philanderer); it’s about a teenaged son stuck caring for his attractive, bedridden mother in suburbia. Their relationship slides from emotional manipulation into sexual manipulation.

Maria Muzio Russell, the filmmaker’s mother, doesn’t appear to be such a monster, but according to Russell, she was even worse than the person he depicted. Other family members describe her as an upper-middle-class alcoholic housewife with great dreams for her gifted but introverted son. According to Russell and others, she was a master of the art of passive aggression and sometimes aggressive-aggressive behavior: she berated Russell constantly, then ignored him, becoming physically abusive but also reveling in her precociously intelligent boy. Grillo, who married Russell in 1992, recalled the haranguing phone calls she’d get from Maria Russell when they were a young married couple in Manhattan. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve spoken to you?” she’d hiss down the phone lines. After a while Grillo wouldn’t answer the phone after 4:00
P.M.
, because it was probably Maria Russell, in a drunken rage. But she was also, according to Grillo, “charismatic, smart, warm, funny, generous, sophisticated, informed about the world. That was always there.” And she physically resembled Grillo in many ways.

Matt Muzio, Russell’s younger cousin who looks a lot like David, agrees that Maria Russell was openly abusive. “David’s mother was abused as a child, psychologically and physically, and she didn’t have the strength to say ‘It ends here.’ David’s mom wasn’t an achiever. She sat home and drank. And she pushed David.” Muzio recalled one day when the Russell’s family cat was
killed, and Russell’s mother took him aside and simply told him, “The cat died.” Then she went into the other room to be with some friends who were visiting, and left David alone in his room. “His coping with that kind of thing was to run away, into a fantasy world, into his own imagination,” said Muzio. But the pain of that rejection endured, and Russell wrote precisely how he felt about the incident in his philosophic 2004 movie,
I Heart Huckabees.
The movie’s hero, a young man named Albert Markovski (played by Jason Schwartzman), is searching for meaning in life, and ends up in his parents’ apartment, telling the cat story to actress Isabelle Huppert, who tries to convince him that the world is all chaos and random suffering. “You were embarrassed about feeling sad for the cat,” Huppert tells him. Then she turns to the mother, played by Schwartzman’s own mother, Talia Shire, and says, “Your home is a lie.” She tells Schwartzman-Markovski (in other words, Russell), “You were orphaned by indifference. …You were trained to betray yourself.”

Russell’s father, Bernard Markovski (yes, the name of the main character in “Huckabees”), traveled often, so was physically distant as well as emotionally absent. One painful line in
Spanking the Monkey
came from Russell’s real life, when his mother told him that his father had never wanted to have him. In the movie—and, according to Russell, in real life—she said this to draw her son closer to her, to explain why he should be grateful for her affection. He registered it as a moment of manipulation.

And when as a young adult Russell told his parents he wanted to be a filmmaker, he recalls his mother’s making this cutting remark: “Well, why don’t you just jump in a shark tank and swim with sharks? You’ll have a better chance of surviving.”

All of this pent-up resentment came pouring out in
Spanking the Monkey
, and surprisingly enough the sentiment connected with a very unlikely movie executive. “I read the script. I quite liked it,” recalled Bob Shaye. “It was difficult and arguably dangerous.”

New Line bought an option for a few thousand dollars, saying they’d make it for a budget of $1 million if Russell could get a movie star who could help guarantee an audience to the risky subject
matter. Unfortunately, casting the role of the mother was almost impossible. Any actress over forty years old who was famous enough to help win an audience for the movie was not about to risk her career playing an incestuous mother with a first-time filmmaker. Russell finally got Faye Dunaway to consider the role and flew out to Hollywood to meet her at her mansion to pitch the project. It was his first time in Tinseltown. Dunaway served the wide-eyed Russell cappuccino in her guesthouse and told him about all her adventures with Warren Beatty during the filming of
Bonnie and Clyde.
Then Russell told her about
Spanking
, trying to convince Dunaway that taking the role would improve her relationship with her own thirteen-year-old son.

“She laughed in his face,” recalled Grillo, who greeted the disappointed Russell on his return to New York. After several months of championing the film without success, Shaye finally passed. Instead it took the next two years for Grillo and Russell, with producer Dean Silvers, to get the film made independently, scraping together about $80,000, half from a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a New York State Council on the Arts grant. The other half was raised from investments of up to $1,000 that Grillo and Silvers sold off as shares to friends and family. But even that wasn’t enough to finish the film, and with half of the script in the can in 1993, they had to turn to a film completion fund for the rest of the money.

To save money, Russell had made a deal with a motel in upstate New York to make a promotional video for them in exchange for letting the crew live there during the shoot. The crew was grumpy and suspicious. Russell recalled, “They’ve all made more movies than you. You’re like, ‘How do we light that?’ And they’re like, ‘Grumble, grumble …incest guy …he’s making us pay attention to this disgusting piece of shit.’ So that was really arduous.”

For the filmmaker, the experience felt dangerous and thrilling. “There was something in me that compelled me to do it. It was autobiographical, except the extremeness of it, and the literalness of it was not. I remember feeling very liberated when I wrote it,” Russell said. “And there were still great feelings of liberation in making
the movie, reclaiming something that she appropriated, by making your own point.”

Fine Line executive Ira Deutchman and a few colleagues saw an early screening of
Spanking the Monkey
at the DuArt Film Laboratories’ office on Fifty-fifth Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan.

He didn’t get it. Neither did Bob Shaye, who wasn’t happy with the way the film turned out. “I expected a twisted drama,” Shaye said. “It turned out to be a black comedy. I was disappointed. Dismayed.” Deutchman passed. “We didn’t see what the hook was,” said Deutchman. “We didn’t know what it was. Would this subject matter attract an audience?”

They thought not. But then the film was accepted at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, and Deutchman went to see it again in Park City, this time in a room with an audience. At the much-anticipated first screening, with most of the major distribution executives present, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein got up and left after the first few minutes of the film. You could count him out of the running for any bid on the film—and anyone who happened to see him leave. But the audience laughed, rather than recoiled. They cheered, they hollered. At a party at the River Horse Café later that night along Main Street, Deutchman told New Line chief Bob Shaye that he wanted to buy
Spanking the Monkey.

Shaye replied, “Over my dead body.” Deutchman bought it anyway, though he knew that if the movie failed Shaye would use it as a chit against him.

Shaye wasn’t happy about the deal, but neither, it turned out, was Russell. Deutchman had made a low-ball offer (it just covered the cost of the negative, $155,000), the day before the film festival was to end, and told Russell the offer would expire by the end of the award ceremony the next day. Russell and producer Dean Silvers knew that if the film won an award—as was buzzed at the festival—the asking price would automatically rise. But if it didn’t, they’d run the risk of losing the New Line offer altogether. Russell decided not to risk losing the deal and shook hands with the executive backstage before the awards started. Minutes later
Spanking the Monkey
won the audience award. Russell felt like New Line had
held him up. (Russell does not remember being anything but happy with the
Spanking
deal.)

Spanking the Monkey
performed more than respectably for an indie movie, taking in $1.3 million. The investors got their money back. Russell won critical acclaim and the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay.

But his rancor toward New Line would later contribute to Deutchman’s demise at the studio, and to the end of Grillo’s career there.

T
ARANTINO RETURNED FROM THE 1992
C
ANNES
F
ILM
F
FESTIVAL
a changed man. He’d gone to France an unknown; he returned as the most talked-about filmmaker in America. His pal Scott Spiegel had an attic filled with articles about him from the
Hollywood Reporter, Variety
, and
L.A. Weekly.
He was rich: TriStar Pictures and Danny DeVito’s company, Jersey Films, paid him nearly $1 million to write and direct his next film, which would be
Pulp Fiction. True Romance
was coming out.
Natural Born Killers
had been sold. Overnight, Quentin Tarantino had become the voice of a new generation, a maverick upstart who was telling traditional Hollywood to watch out. The studios, he warned, were antiquated and out of step. “In the 80s the studios could predict what worked and what didn’t,” he told the
New York Times
in a major Sunday profile, another sign of his arrival. “And that’s what the 80s were—one movie you’d already seen after another. Suddenly that’s not working anymore.” He said: “The audience wants something different. And that’s the most exciting time to be in the business—every 20 years or so, when what worked for the studios suddenly doesn’t work anymore. When the audience is fed up with the standard stuff and crying out for something different is when exciting things happen in Hollywood.”

Tarantino happened to be precisely right: The times were changing. New, young, angry voices were emerging: John Singleton’s
Boyz N the Hood
, a raw depiction of gang life in the inner city, had won strong critical support and unexpectedly brought in $50
million at the box office. Robert Rodriguez, an unknown young Hispanic director from San Antonio, had caused a stir with his $7,000 Spanish-language gun-slinging
El Mariachi
, shot in his hometown using friends and family in the cast. But if change was coming (and it was), Quentin Tarantino was its principal ambassador. Everyone wanted to meet him and shake his hand. Out at restaurants, people—important people—would stop by to interrupt and say things like. “I’ve just finished a script for Simpson and Bruckheimer, and I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t seen
Dogs,”
as one did. Or producer Julia Phillips
(Taxi Driver)
would take a moment at his table to say that
Reservoir Dogs
“made me want to make movies again.” Tarantino drank it all in, then retired to Europe for four or five months, where he took
Reservoir Dogs
to film festivals, granted something like four hundred interviews, and worked on
Pulp Fiction.