The First-Timer's Cut is the Cheapest

The success of some of these first-timers has shattered the mystique that used to surround film directing. Dale Pollock, the president of A & M Films, remarks candidly, "I know I shouldn't say this, but if you surround a first-time director with a great director of photography, editor, production designer and first a.d., almost anybody can direct a movie." Or as Lili Zanuck put it sensibly when discussing her debut on Rush, directing "wasn't brain surgery." Even John Landis, a director not known for his humility, acknowledged this point during the Twilight Zone trial. One day he was chatting with the court stenographer and mentioned how impressed he was with her technical facility. She downplayed her skill and said, "I could never direct a movie." "Don't be silly," Landis shot back. "If you can drive a car, you can direct a movie."

This isn't to say anyone can direct a great movie. But if a first-time director has a rock-solid script and an expert cast and crew, he'll manage, whereas a gifted director with an incoherent script will flounder. George Gallo admits that he depended on his cinematographer, Steven Fierberg, when he was directing 29th Street. "I didn't know anything about lighting," Gallo says. "But I would tell Steven I wanted a scene to look like a scene in Mean Streets or the war room scene in Dr. Strangelove or an Edward Hopper painting, and he knew what I meant. I would describe the effect I wanted, and he would execute it." Michael Bortman, who directed his first film, Crooked Hearts, after writing the script for The Good Mother and several successful television movies, notes that he learned a great deal from his excellent cinematographer, Tak Fujimoto (who has shot most of Jonathan Demme's movies, among others). "I had great respect for Tak," Bortman says, "and at the beginning, he really carried the whole production. I almost apprenticed myself to him. It was a great education."

Yet Bortman concedes that his inexperience may have hurt the film. In telling this disturbing tale of a dysfunctional family, he was aiming for subtlety. He didn't want the family to appear freakish; he was hoping the first impressions of a nurturing brood would only gradually be undermined by more troubling revelations. "The tonal questions were very sophisticated," Bortman says, "and I was only dimly aware of just how difficult they were. If I had made another film before that, I might have been more aware of how to achieve that balance I wanted."

Still, whatever its flaws, Crooked Hearts was an honorable, intelligent work that failed to find an audience primarily because it was downbeat (and because it wasn't sufficiently promoted by the financially strapped MGM), not because it was incompetent. Some other recent efforts by first-time directors more clearly illustrate the hazards of entrusting difficult films to novices. Michael Karbelnikoff, whose experience had been in commercials, certainly wasn't up to the demands of an ambitious gangster film like Mobsters. Terry Hughes, who had done most of his work on sitcoms like "The Golden Girls," had no idea how to achieve the delicate whimsy attempted in the script of The Butcher's Wife. Jerry Rees, a Disney animator, may have had an understanding of visual style, but he was completely at a loss when he had to handle two temperamental stars like Kim Basinger and Alec Baldwin on The Marrying Man.

It isn't only these big-budget studio movies that suffer from the inexperience of their directors. Leonard Schrader had written a couple of decent scripts, but in trying for a baroque visual style in his directorial debut, Naked Tango, he toppled into utter fatuity. Michael Tolkin, the writer-director of The Rapture, had written a slender Hollywood novel called The Player, and chiefly on the basis of that, Fine Line allowed him to direct an ambitious tale of contemporary religious fanaticism. Not only did Tolkin fail to bring any imagination to the heroine's apocalyptic religious visions, he seemed incapable of staging the simplest two-character confrontation scenes with any energy or fluidity.

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