Foreign Sales Rides Again

In addition to Foreign Sales Lady there is Foreign Sales Guy, and the simple fact, as I have learned today, is that Mr. and Mrs. Foreign Sales don't like the movie. They were expecting a THRILLER. That's what they sank their Euros into. The movie is, and always was, from the time it was just a little mega-bestselling-novel waiting to grow up into a cable movie, a romance with a light bit of thriller shot through it. They read the book. They read the script. They were still expecting a THRILLER. And somehow they think it will be more of a thriller with slower, more "European" cutting and those dag-blasted Wide Vistas they will NOT SHUT UP ABOUT. Here's what I don't get about the Foreign Sales Duo: F.S. Guy was born in New Jersey and is as American as Mt. Rushmore. F.S. Lady was born in NYC and is as NYC as Nathan's hot dogs. So why, why, tell me, please, WHY, do they now speak with the cultivated Euro-Germanic accents of reception clerks at an upscale boutique hotel in a newly gentrified neighborhood of Berlin? I lived in France for a while. Did you catch me talking like LeBeau in Hogan's Heroes?

Truth be told: it hurts. I want everybody to love my movie. EVERY SINGLE PERSON EVERYWHERE. And here's a confession that's not easy to make: after my transatlantic call this morning I went to www.imdb.com, source of all things movie and TV, and looked up every movie on which Mr. and Mrs. Foreign Sales are credited as producers, and gloated over the horrible reviews and low user ratings they received. And got all unhappy that there was one movie on there that people actually seemed to like. That's how much of a grown up I am!

Locked!

Last night at about 9:15 PM I locked picture. No more cutting, no more editing: the movie is what it is. From now on it's just people asking me which bird sounds I want in which forest scenes and deciding on exactly what frame the music cue should start in a love scene. And yes, one frame one way or the other can have a huge impact on what you, the viewer, will feel watching the scene. The big surprise at the end of the process was that the head of programming for the network had no notes on the cut she saw. None. Zero. We asked the underlings at the network: is that common? The underlings at the network said: No, she always has notes, lots of them. My mind, wouldn't you know, went straight to thinking that she watched it, threw up her hands, said "It is what it is, I don't even know where to begin, just air the goddam thing." But you know what? Most likely she thought it was working fine and didn't need any messing with. Which, by the way, is not quite the same thing as loving it, or thinking that yours truly she might want to hire to direct another movie for her network...

Regardless of all that: My movie made it through. The notes I got only made it better. Anything that's on screen or not on screen I can't blame anybody for. So when you watch it, address all complaints not to the management but directly to your waiter.

Tomorrow I cut the international version, which has to be five minutes longer. That means putting back in five minutes of stuff we cut out because it was dull, or didn't work, or wasn't needed for the story. The Foreign Sales Lady, who lives in Munich, tells us that we need more scenes with big wide vistas because Europeans, when they watch American movies, want big wide vistas, which they don't get in Europe. Yeah. I can just see some guy standing in a video store in Dusseldorf trying to decide which video to rent and going "Wow, Helga, let's get this one, it's got big wide vistas in it." An agent I know once told me that she and her husband were going out to dinner with Foreign Sales Lady one night in Munich and she went to meet Foreign Sales Lady at her office and walked in the door and saw her husband extravagantly fucking Foreign Sales Lady on the rug, an image I can not get out of my head every time I see or talk to Foreign Sales Lady. When Foreign Sales Lady says wide vistas I just see a wide vista of Foreign Sales Lady, who is herself something of a wide vista, to be honest, riding some guy on the rug in a slick Munich foreign sales office while the guy's wife stands at the doorway wondering what just happened to her life.

The big question, now, is: what's next? I'm pitching three pilots this week. I'm sitting here at my desk prepping the pitches. Sketching out the characters. Coming up with possible episodes. Figuring out how I can gracefully cancel the meetings because I DON'T FUCKING CARE ABOUT ANY OF THEM. They're not show ideas. They're hare-brained get-rich-quick schemes. Maybe I'm just tired after the intense rush of work on the movie. Maybe I'm genuinely evaluating my life and my work. But either way all I want to do is NOTHING. I've actually spent the morning calculating how long until I can retire (I think 13 years) and how much a month I'll have to retire on at the current rate of income and pension and social security etc. etc. etc. Does anybody else feel this way about their career? That they're ready for the golden pastures?

One More Wicket

I got my grade from the L.A. office of the network today (that's the second level of command, not the top.) I think it was an A-. It might have been an A. Hard to tell. But definitely above B+. I'm happy about that. I think I'm employable in the future on that network. There were, however, two performances they had a problem with.

One of them they're right about and I'm embarrassed by it: it was the first day of production and I let the heroine's angry, sad, abused, white trash mother run too hot--that is to say, she was picking splinters of scenery out of her teeth when she was done. We went back in today and played some of her lines off camera, found other takes, cut a few things. I think it'll work now.

The other performance they're wrong about. Universally, with only one exception--and you, a reader of this blog, know who you are--everybody thinks the sexy rich spoiled-yet-vulnerable sister of the hero steals the movie. That she lights up every scene she's in. That she's going to be a star. But one of the L.A. Executives has never been crazy about her, not from the first moment she was cast. This would be fine except that this Executive asked me to delete or trim my favorite moment in the movie, when the character improvises a country western song about her recently dumped country western singer husband. I think it's totally winning. It also happens not to be trimmable--the way it's shot you can't cut into it. In the email I just sent the executive listing all the changes we made and how WONDERFUL her notes are and how much BETTER the changed scenes are (true, actually, but you have to lay it on really thick in these cases) I snuck in a mention that the country western song moment wasn't trimmable. We'll see what the fallout is from that one.

So all's good. And now it goes to New York. To the Big Cheeses with whom there isn't, I don't think, much discussion. In fact I'll most likely never talk to them--I'll be talking to underlings who live in fear of them and need to come back to them with a great big YES to everything. Or that's where my mind's going right now. I'm probably wrong, as I am in most of my predictions. At this very moment--6 PM PST--the movie is being dropped at Fedex for the eastbound flight. They have, contractually, two business days to respond, so what with Columbus day and the weekend, I'll get the notes on Wednesday.

You'll be the first to hear what they say.

LATE BREAKING NEWS

This email just in from the Executive after she got my email about the changes we made today:

This looks fine... thanks for such a thoughtful, visually rich movie..your vision both in the adapting and directing of this book are really inventive and masterful..a pleasure.

Other Hands, Other Paths

La International Star is doing a guest run on a high-end dramatic series right now. I saw an episode tonight. She was STUNNING. A fantastic performance, controlled, nuanced, deep. So now I can't lay all the blame on her for the fact that she wasn't entirely any of those things in my movie. Because in other hands she shone. I'm in a quandary over this. Was it the nature of the role? The inherently melodramatic nature of the character she played in my movie? Or did I somehow simply not find the key?

Plus. Plus. During the episode the network ran mini-promos for the high-end series I turned down a co-executive producer gig on in order to direct the movie. The movie's winding down, that show's gearing up... I'm not really regretting the choice. Just realizing that we never know which life path a decision will lead us down, and seeing those promos was a view through the veils of fate at a might-have-been alternate destiny. Was that the way to early retirement, a full time gardener, a little apartment in Paris? Or was it the way to an unhappy season on a so-so show?

What DO I want from my future? Screw the full time gardener. Yeah, I'd like an apartment in Paris. But a hotel room there every five years will do fine. (More time than that between visits to Paris and I start to get the DT's.) (I know how obnoxious that sounded but guess what, I'm not deleting it.) So what DO I want? I don't need a bigger house than the nice, not-very-big, comfy homey one I live in. (I bought it twenty years ago so my mortgage is lower than the rent on a one bedroom apartment.) I'm dumping my fancy car this week for something smaller, more sensible and with better mileage and I will never go back to fancy. I live in blue jeans and shirts bought on sale at the Gap and probably always will. My union pension, just as it stands, will enable my wife and me to live at the level we live at now if we're reasonably careful. So, given all of that, what does it matter how well I direct international stars or whether I choose to produce a big-deal series or go off to direct a mid-deal movie? Really?



What right do I have, ever, to complain about anything?