What Just Happened? (11 page)

Click.

‘We got till Monday.'

Traditionally, the first day of shooting, getting that first shot
in the can
, was an exciting and tension-filled time. It was the signature that said, ‘This baby is launched.' There would be no going back. After all of the nasty wrestling that it takes to get a movie set up, the first shot heralded that the movie was, for sure, going to get made. The studio usually sent you a basket of fruit or a leather folder. Past acrimony was replaced with sentiments of ‘break a leg' or ‘knock 'em dead.' Unfortunately, when Monday morning arrived,
we were still uncertain if Alec was going to show up sans beard ready for work. Many calls were traded, but not even his lawyer knew where this was going. Were we to break out the champagne or shut the sucker down? By this time, the entire cast and crew were invested in the suspense.

As we were huddled by the frozen lake preparing to film the first setup, Alec finally arrived in a large SUV and quickly walked into his trailer. Lee and I only caught a glimpse, but he was clean-shaven. The crew was about to cheer but they knew better. Our feelings were mixed. We were pleased that we were going to get on with it but pained that with Alec so pissed off the next ten weeks could be difficult. I remember when he finished with hair and makeup and arrived on the set. I tried to stand off in the distance slightly hidden by one of the large fir trees. I didn't want my presence to come off as gloating. As the first shot between Hopkins, Alec, and Harold Perrineau was in final rehearsal by the camera, I couldn't help but notice that when Lee was talking, Alec would look only at Hopkins. Direct eye contact between Tamahori and Baldwin was nonexistent for the remainder of the shoot. As for my appearances on the set, I remained one hundred feet from Alec at all times, as if I had been served with a restraining order.

Once this impasse got reduced to what Hollywood classically calls ‘a dick-waving incident,' the downward spiral of tensions became irreversible. I suppose there was no sense grousing about it; I should have found a way to avoid it. In the end, Alec's performance was applauded as truly excellent. John Burnham paid the price by losing his client. The oddest admission of all, however, is that, looking back, I am not convinced that Alec's performance or the ultimate box office fate of the movie would have been affected by the beard one way or the other.

Months later, I asked an actor friend of mine why Alec would have been so insistent on not shaving his beard. What sort of funky Stanislavsky decision would make him so committed? My friend said, without hesitation, ‘Alec probably thought he was a little too heavy and he didn't like the way his chin looked.'

‘
The Bookworm
is a terrible title.
Bookworm
is a terrific title,' Mamet was beseeching me on the phone, but apparently he wasn't getting my drift.

‘Let me explain myself. Fox's marketing division doesn't like
The Bookworm, Bookworm, Green Bookworm, Any Sorta Bookworm
.'

‘
Bookworm
is a good title.'

‘They want to change it.'

‘Isn't this a little late in the game?'

‘It's very late in the game, we open in three months.'

‘They're ridiculous.'

‘They never let you down.'

‘What's the next step?'

‘They're making up lists.'

‘What do we do?'

‘We think of another name or they think of another name.'

‘I like
Bookworm
.'

‘I know. Unfortunately, it's not going to pass the shopping-center test.'

‘I see.'

‘Dave, I know it's hard to believe that, after all of this work, one's fate can be sealed by a group of pet-store owners in a suburb.'

‘Ain't it so.'

Once a movie is completed, it gets turned over, so to speak, to the ‘marketing' wizards whose job it is to sell the movie. These people
try to figure out the best plan to convince tens of millions of people to leave their houses, park their cars, wait in line, pay their money, and sit through a movie on the opening weekend. If people collectively decide not to come out on that first Friday night, the movie sinks like a rock and ends up in video bins. Marketing seems like a heady, volatile job with much reponsibility. With all of the precarious success and failure of movies, you would think that the people who have these jobs would get hired and fired like fast-food cooks, but nothing could be further from the truth. If a movie fails miserably, they may execute the director, the writer, or the producer at sunrise (leaving them at the least on life support, hoping to get another chance), but as it turns out, the only one safer than a studio head is the head of marketing. It's never his fault.

How so? Without getting too tedious, marketing approaches most releases with what I refer to as the ‘diminished expectations method.' After seeing the picture for the first time, the head of marketing (who in this case is Robert Harper) usually scratches his head, proclaims that this movie's going to be a tough one to sell, but that they'll do their level best to pull the rabbit out of the hat. This, of course, puts the filmmakers and the film executives on their heels because after all the work that has been done, if you can't sell the thing, the whole process becomes a hopeless exercise. It's as if the surgeon comes out in the middle of the operation, shaking his head saying, ‘I'm gonna have to dig deep on this one, pull out all the stops, and then sew him back up. I don't know, but this might be a good time for prayer.' If the patient lives, the doctor is a hero. If the worst occurs, it was God's will, a patient who had no good reason to live. The doctor, always blameless, simply goes on to the next patient.

Bob Harper has been at Fox for over fifteen years. He took a brief time-out to try his hand at movie producing, but like his cohort Tom Rothman smartly scurried back to the safe asylum of corporate security. At first glance you're struck by his calmness. Always casually dressed in the latest Banana Republic uniform, he conducts his meetings while occasionally taking practice putts on his carpet. Even though he was a minnow in the News Corp food chain, back in his secluded set of offices he was, to quote Tom
Wolfe, ‘master of his universe.' Except for the occasional blockbuster or a mega result from an preordained sequel, most of the movies that Harper devises campaigns for fail. This fact is ameliorated by the larger fact that most movies fail. Harper was accustomed to dying on Friday night only to be reborn on Monday morning ready to service the next Fox movie waiting to come out.

I noticed that Harper looked ten years younger than his age. Come to think of it, the marketeers at other studios also had that youthful glow of imperturbability. Harper was clearly onto something. His fountain of youth was knowing how to duck. If a movie worked, it was a goddamn great campaign. If a movie failed, well, you get the drill, the movie had an incurable cancer. He had properly warned all concerned that he had tried his best. If required, he was able to act as if he were truly saddened by the film's demise. He didn't get all misty-eyed, but he wanted the filmmakers to believe that this loss was his loss too. It was always a helluva performance.

After Harper saw an early rough cut of
Bookworm
, he told me that it was a very good movie (there's that
good
word cropping up again), but, of course, he had some grave concerns. I'm quite sure he gave the same response to Chernin, Mechanic, Rothman, et al First, he said we were going to have to do something about
that
title, since his gut told him that it was going to turn people off. I asked whether the title should be tested, but Harper said testing titles was a waste of time. He didn't trust the results. ‘You can test movies or trailers or even one sheets [movie posters] at random shopping malls,' he said, ‘but not titles.' When he uttered the word
Bookworm
, his face would pucker as if he were trying to rid himself of the remnants of a fart. He said, in this case, ‘I have to trust my insides.' Mechanic and Rothman shared his vision.

And, by the way, Harper wanted everyone to know that this was going to be a difficult movie to
sell
. The demographics were shit. Hadn't we realized that the favorable audience for Tony Hopkins and Alec Baldwin skewed over thirty? And surely, everyone knew that movies with lots of action skewed under thirty. No getting around it, action was our soup du jour. Just when we begin to care for the photographer's assistant, our bear viciously rips him to pieces and
eats him. According to my calculations, if Harper's analyses were right, there would be no age group interested in seeing this movie. Oops, does this sound familiar? This was exactly what Mechanic had said before we ever started to make this picture.

My expectations were diminishing.

Wasn't marketing telling Mechanic that we were doomed from the start? Well, in a sense, that's right. The tacit communication from marketing goes something like this: ‘You guys that “green-light” these movies and you guys that “make” these movies should have asked me first. I know what
they
want and what
they
don't want. But, since y'all didn't ask me, we here in marketing will do our level best to serve this turkey that you all cooked.' Since marketing is the last stop on the film's journey, the natural inclination is to not piss these marketing guys off.

So, once Harper gave his dire prognosis, I was eager to be polite and ooze gratitude. I thought I needed his support more than ever.

‘Tell me what we should do, Bob.'

‘Well, for starters, let's change that title …'

He was about to say
Bookworm
, but the word had become too distasteful.

‘Sure, Bob, if that'll help.'

‘That'll be a big help.'

‘Hey, whatever works, you know me.'

I should have lost my producer's license with that remark.

For the next few weeks, while a trailer was being cut and different one sheets were being prepared, numerous lists of titles were made. Here were some of the choices:

Ambushed
To the Ambush
The Ambush
Wild
Wilder
The Wild
Into the Wild

Wilderness Now
Deadhunt
Deadfall
Precipice
On the Precipice
Over the Precipice
The Edge
Edge
On the Edge
The Bear Killer
The Bear Roared
The Bear and the Brain
Roared
Bloody Betrayal

At one time or another we had everything on this list but
If You Come to See This Shitstorm, We'll PAY YOU
.

I read the list to Mamet over the phone. When I finished, he was only able to utter, ‘Oh, God.'

For those of you who saw this film on TV or happened to drift into your local cineplex, you know that we settled on
The Edge
. It's as if a committee of monkeys, of which I was a charter member, were trying to land a 747 in bad weather. Like most collective decisions made in the name of creativity, we ended up choosing a banal solution that would by definition be the least provocative and the least objectionable just to gain a consensus. Years later, I remain so dithered by the process that I can only refer to the film as ‘the bear movie.'

Opening weekend,
The Edge
grossed $7.8 million in 2,150 screens, putting the movie in third position. No one from the studio called Tamahori or me with the news. The number one movie,
The Peacemaker
, grossed $12.3 million. Four weeks later, it became apparent that the domestic gross of our picture would settle around $30 million. Hardly a smash hit, and yet not a total wipeout. Compared to other recent Fox debacles such as
Firestorm, Newton Boys
, or
Chain Reaction
, we looked virginal.

When I saw Mechanic from my office window on the Tuesday following the opening, I was more than aware that we hadn't spoken since Friday. He was alone making the long trek from the administration building to the commissary, dwarfed by the kitschy murals painted on the sides of the large soundstages. As he passed under the sixty-foot-high rendering of Darth Vader dueling Luke Skywalker, I put all irony aside. I decided to intercept him and commiserate.

‘Hey, Bill. How's it going?'

‘It's lunchtime.'

‘Sure is.'

He didn't look quite so sanguine up close.

‘I know. I know. It's not a homer, but I'm thinking “ground rule double.”'

‘We're projecting the movie to lose ten million dollars,' he said stoically.

‘Really.'

‘That's right.'

‘You know this even before it's released internationally?'

‘That's right.'

‘Even before the DVD comes out?'

‘Pretty much.'

‘What if—'

‘Hear me, we're going to
lose money
.'

‘I see.'

I assumed with that sort of forecast, Mechanic must be smarting from his own Murdoch/Chernin-inflicted rope burns.

We eyed each other, both of us awkwardly unfulfilled. Throughout the entire production, Bill had remained a supportive and generous influence. His disappointment was genuine. In the end, however, he was a victim and a slave to the numbers.

He kept walking.

I wanted to keep it cheery by adding, ‘Say, Bill, maybe we can call it an “infield single”?'

But I decided to let it go.

‘Didja know Mike makes the best margaritas in the city?'

‘Jerry, everyone knows this.'

‘Mike is a Czech bartender.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘And Dan Tana is a Greek with a name change.'

‘Yeah.'

‘And Dan Tana's serves Italian food with margaritas.'

‘There is a point here?'

‘I believe there is.'

‘What?'

‘America is such a land of opportunity.'