Riding high on the improbable success of Pulp Fiction, Danny DeVito's company, Jersey Films, set out to corner cutting-edge talent. If improbability is the game, they couldn't do better than let Steven Baigelman, who'd never held a camera, direct Feeling Minnesota, the first script he ever sold. And, as if that weren't improbable enough, they got Keanu Reeves to star in the film.
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Used to be when you were young you wanted to be an astronaut or a star pitcher or Jim Morrison or just plain stinking rich. Today, everybody wants to be a "director," despite the fact that no one knows for sure what a director does or what is required for him or her to do it well. Young writers in particular are no longer content to make a bundle typing nonsense and letting someone else botch the film. Now they have to ruin their own scripts.
Blame it on the lure of power and fame. After all, who would you rather be, Robert Zemeckis or Forrest Gump scripter/nobody Eric Roth? Needless to say, the industry contributes to the problem: Hollywood producers today would sell their grandmothers to cannibals for a chance to be the first to present the next Quentin Tarantino with a three-picture deal. Don't bother telling them that, sure, you could get a Reservoir Dogs, but you're more likely to end up with Boxing Helena. Or. come to think of it, Johnny Mnemonic -- or Newsies, The Basketball Diaries, Just Cause, Amos & Andrew, PCU, Little Odessa, Kalifornia, or Search & Destroy.
Of course, Jersey Films. Danny DeVito's too-hip production company, hit three cherries with this exact formula when they signed Tarantino to direct Pulp Fiction before he'd shot a foot of Reservoir Dogs.
All of which brings us to Steven Baigelman. Who? Not an unfair question. Baigelman came out of nowhere (Toronto, actually) to snag a deal with Jersey to direct his first movie of his first script sale. Feeling Minnesota, which stars -- no, not Steve Buscemi -- Keanu Reeves, along with Cameron Diaz, Vincent D'Onofrio, Tuesday Weld and Courtney Love.
I talked to Jersey Films executive Stacey Sher to find out how, Tarantino karma or no Tarantino karma, DeVito's organization rationalized letting a Canadian greenhorn loose with a camera and Keanu Reeves.
''You just get hunches, you know what I mean?" she told me by way of explanation. "Steven had 'directed' it on the page, so it seemed pretty obvious that he should do it." Pretty liberal use of the word "obvious," even by Hollywood standards. "He had no experience shooting, but he had experience as an actor, and he understood the story," Sher continued. "There are risks, but the risks are very large when you hire a C-list director to direct an A-list piece of material -- I'd rather take a risk with the author."
Doesn't that seem a little like, say, paying someone a $1 million advance on a novel because you were impressed by their handwriting? Or have we all been bamboozled by auteur nonsense, and the fact is, anyone can direct a movie with enough support?
When I meet Baigelman for what turns out to be his first authentic interview (I can't help wondering whether he's had his first nervous breakdown yet), I'm curious to know what it's like to have Hollywood put such faith in you.
"I am very lucky, I know." says Baigelman. "I was hoping to direct one day, to take the obvious route many writers have taken [once] the films [they've written] make a ton of money or win an Academy Award. I thought, if I was lucky enough, maybe..."
A script sale is lucky; Baigelman won the cosmic lottery. He got to direct his own script, and he got a star whose presence would guarantee that Feeling Minnesota would get released for better or worse. Your local video store is jam-packed with the products of first-time directors who worked with names that were names, sure, but not names that saved the pictures from the straight-to-video syndrome.
Keanu Reeves has always been game for working with rookies ( Speed and Johnny Mnemonic were both directed by first-timers), but Baigelman was a rookie even by rookie standards, having never set fool on a set before, and Reeves was an $8 million man. Speaking of which, there was a paycut involved to provide Reeves with an additional disincentive.
"I can't believe how little money he took." Baigelman exclaims. "He did it for lunch money. Keanu has said he came to audition, but from my point of view, he did not audition -- we met. But that's a clue as to why he became involved -- he doesn't think like a movie star. He's an actor, and he thinks about what's going to excite him. When he called and said he'd like to do the movie, he had no idea we were going to say yes."
"How does a first-time director deal with Keanu's reported 'total immersion' style of acting," I ask Baigelman. After all, Daniel Day-Lewis may be a total immersion pain in the ass too, but he's brilliant. I heard from Keanu's costar Dina Meyer that on Johnny Mnemonic he actually starved himself during the shoot because his character was slowly dying. In Feeling Minnesota, he plays an ex-con train wreck in a family of train wrecks -- you'd think there'd be some war stories.
"The more I spent time with Keanu before we went to Minnesota," says Baigelman, "I perceived that he's very much like this character. I told Keanu that if he wanted to, to be himself. I wanted this to be the guy from River's Edge and the guy from Bill & Ted and the guy from My Own Private Idaho wrapped up in one. The only thing he did in terms of immersion was smoke. I got him addicted to nicotine. The character [has this habit where he] flips the cigarette in his mouth. We were driving down the street in Minneapolis in pre-production, and there was Keanu walking along in broad daylight practicing his cigarette flips."
"He has a scalding reputation for cranky shenanigans on the set." I offer delicately.
"Yeah, but I don't know if that's so recent. I certainly heard the same things you heard, but I would bet that if you did research on the set of Speed or Johnny Mnemonic, you'd find that he didn't misbehave in any fashion. On this movie he was extraordinarily polite. He has his days, he can be an asshole like I can be an asshole, like you can he an asshole, but there's nothing extreme about him. Never once did he pull a movie star stunt. None of that shit."
In conversation, Baigelman comes off as genuinely levelheaded, self-effacing and generous in his assessments of people. Perhaps its exactly those simple, solid qualities that made Sher think she could put all of her chips on him and not eat herself alive with worry. Not every writer capable of coming up with the off-center originality of the Feeling Minnesota script turns out to be a guy with his head screwed on straight. Though being an indisputable nice guy may not count for much on your reśumé', it certainly might have helped Baigelman with some of directing's trickier tasks. Like sex scenes.
"Keanu hasn't humped around in movies before, has he?" I ask. ''Except that sleeping bag session with lone Skye in River's Edge."
Baigelman kicks it around. "He had sex in My Own Private Idaho, right? Y'know, in Italy he meets that beautiful girl. But Gus Van Sant did it weird, didn't he, as stills or something. Well, here there's sex but no nudity."
"What kind of sex scene is that?"
"It's very erotic, actually. They fuck in a bathroom, all over the bathroom, and then on the floor. Cameron's in her wedding dress, and humps Keanu in the bathroom on her wedding day."
"Did you find directing sex scenes difficult?"
"The truth is, it's more difficult for the actors than it is for me. These are two really hot people who have some attraction for each other -- they liked each other as people -- but they knew their parts, they knew their scenes, and I shot the sex scenes very basically. There's no bright shaft of light coming through the window with smoke and soft, bad synthesized music playing. It's not 'Red Shoe Diaries' or whatever. The most difficult part was keeping Keanu's thing inside the jock. If it fell out. he'd put it back and go on. That was the only problem logistically."
"You had him wear a jock?"
"You have to, because they're humping and nobody wants an accident. It was just an accepted thing."
"How did you react to the whole thing?"
"I had a boner. I knew something was working, something was going on. Keanu and Cameron looked like they were enjoying themselves. That's their job. Their enjoyment certainly translated to me."
For Diaz, the doe-eyed ivory goddess from The Mask, this film represents a leap beyond looking lovely while Jim Carrey's face ties itself into taffy knots.
"Cameron very much wanted to prove herself as an actress here," Baigelman confirms. "[Unfortunately] that first sex scene was her first day of shooting. It wasn't supposed to be, but we had a weather problem and the other set wasn't ready. But she did fine."
As if Baigelman didn't already have enough on his plate, he cast Courtney Love in a small role as a waitress. Inasmuch as she shot her scenes not long before pounding on a few Lollapalooza audience members in the middle of a concert. I wonder just how directable she seemed to Baigelman.
"The thing I can tell you about Courtney, she is relentless about what she wants," says Baigelman. '"In the classic sense, she's somebody who'll stop you in the street and tell you her life story. If she hooks onto you, she just opens up. She's tough, but she's an open sore, and you want to just hold her. There's a fascination too, because I'm a guy from Toronto who was bar mitzvahed. I don't know rock stars."
"So, does she have a screen career ahead in your opinion?"
"She's got a small part, but she's very good. So good that on two occasions when people were seeing footage, they said, 'Hey, that actress looks a lot like Courtney Love. It's a huge compliment to her, because she never draws attention to herself as Courtney Love, the rock star or 'the widow of' or anything like that. She just played the part. She really is a waitress in this movie. She wears orange polyester, and she let me dye her hair."
It now seems that Baigelman might get credit for jump-starting Love's movie life. Milos Forman has since cast her as Larry Flynt's junkie wife in his film about the Hustler publisher's life. "Milos Forman came to the cutting room to look at her and subsequently met with her many times and liked her," says Baigelman. "I think that if Milos Forman thinks she has something, then she has something."
Courtney Love is a smart casting move for Baigelman, because whether Feeling Minnesota turns out a masterpiece or tommyrot, it has instant cachet of a sort. It is recognizable to the Seattle-fixated sector of the moviegoing public as a must-see. The possible too-coolness of the whole project can even be read in the title, which, in case you were wondering, comes from a Soundgarden song ("I just looked in the mirror/Things aren't looking so good/I'm looking California and feeling Minnesota").
"I had the title before the story," Baigelman says. "A distribution head at New Line suggested we change it to Speed 2 -- I thought that was a good joke. You'll remember, though, that Movieline voted us worst title of 1995, before we even went into production. So there you go."
All things considered, Baigelman seems to have borne the brunt of success and chaos calmly so far. The question is why, instead of leaving him to pound at the city gates for a decade or two, Constantinople surrendered at the merest glint of his war flag. How did he get to the point where Jersey Films could take its nut so gamble on him?
After halfhearted stints at acting and painting, Baigelman began to write scripts. "I probably stuck with it because I was too embarrassed to switch careers again. I started calling people at random and telling them that I was this writer and I had this amazing script and if they didn't read it, they were going to miss out on something. I had my wife call agents, producers, and talk about this hot new writer..."
"She actually did that?"
"I swear to God, Before there were too many questions asked, she was already into the spiel. Most people would blow us off, but there were enough people who read the scripts."
There were definitely people who'd read -- and liked -- Baigelman's script Feeling Minnesota. In fact, Baigelman was preparing to sell Feeling Minnesota to a studio that had picked out a director for it, when he was approached by Stacey Sher of pre-hot, pre- Pulp Fiction Jersey Films and offered the impossible dream: to direct it himself. '"It was Stacey's idea completely,"' he confirms.
"Where in God's name does such an idea come from?"
'"I don't know. I honestly don't. She said the way the script was written, it indicated that the writer should direct it."
Jersey Films set out to support Baigelman, once they put their rookie in motion. "They make sure you're prepared," says Baigelman. "They never make you feel stupid." As Baigelman points out, the strategy has worked before, big time. "Jersey Films is independent-minded. Pulp Fiction cost $8 million, but every studio turned it down. Miramax made over $200 million with it, and suddenly it's not so taboo to support a first-time director. The basic premise with [Jersey topper] Danny DeVito was, 'It's your script, why the fuck shouldn't you direct it?' It's not brain surgery, it can be done. They're the first people in my experience out here that made me a promise and kept it."
My first day at a new, undemanding desk job used to give me the runs, but the first day of directing your first movie with Keanu Reeves, Courtney Love and an army of crew members waiting for you to tell them what to do? My large intestine would seize up like an old Dodge with an oil leak. Was Baigelman terrified?
"Not really. If there was one thing I didn't know anything about it was cameras, but I knew about actors. We had a sort of 'preshoot.' so I was able to get my feet wet in a not-so-dangerous way. There's this montage -- that may or may not be in the film -- of Keanu walking around Minneapolis. We shot it with a skeleton crew, just me and Keanu, and that was my first day of shooting. It was orchestrated that way by the producers. They made sure I had a good first day."
"Weren't you at all afraid of a crash-and-burn? So many first-time directors--"
"The Graduate!" Baigelman blurts.
"Wasn't his first. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was."
"Either way, two fucking great films."
"Mike Nichols is the first thing off the top of your head? What about the last 20 years? Is that the kind of career you'd like? Regarding Henry, Biloxi Blues, Heartburn. Working Girl..."
"I see what you mean, although I liked Working Girl. If I could have his career, get the power he has, get to make whatever movie I wanted. I'd be fine. Is anyone's career free of failures? It's just as hard to make a bad movie as it is to make a good one. I know that sounds like Pollyanna bullshit, but I mean it."
You may be thinking, as I am, that no matter how cutting-edge ballsy Jersey Films thinks it is, it's absurd to build an empire on top of huge question marks like Baigelman. But remember: we're not talking about real estate or the Styrofoam cup industry, where you're genuinely insane to let inexperienced employees into the front office. We're talking about Hollywood. When you see what veterans like Roland Joffe and Demi Moore can do to The Scarlet Letter, letting Steven Baigelman direct a small-budget Keanu Reeves movie doesn't seem quite so section eight, does it?
"Would you have done what Stacey Sher did?" I asked Baigelman.
"The truthful answer?" Baigelman weighs it. "Probably not. Hopefully she made the right choice."
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Michael Atkinson wrote about the on-screen aging of movie stars in the November '95 issue of Movieline.