CHAPTER 1
A DAY IN THE LIFE

On the way to my office in Manhattan today, I passed a movie shoot on the street, and was hailed by the second assistant director, a hearty girl from the Bronx I used to work with. "It's this nightmare low-budget movie," she explained, and then started the litany: "I mean, it's eight o'clock, and crew call's in twenty minutes, and there isn't any coffee, and everyone is late, and the grip truck went to the wrong location and the APOC just quit, the sides aren't here, and the D.P. wants a light we didn't order…"

"STOP!" I said. "I can't hear this!" Low-budget filmmaking is like childbirth. You have to repress the horror or you'll never do it again. I bid her good-bye and continued on my way, past the $800,000 dollar movie set where the crew looked like a bunch of thirteen-year-olds with tool belts and baseball caps. A lone production assistant desperately tried to keep an eye on two open vehicles while homeless people milled around, attentive. The craft service table—the mandated food and drink station—was especially grim: a jar of iced tea mix, a black banana, a handful of broken chips, some used paper cups. That sums it up, I thought: a pathetic table in the middle of nowhere with nothing on it you'd eat in a million years.

This is the romantic world of low-budget filmmaking. It's the world in which I've toiled for fifteen wearisome, exhilarating years, working for little money on the kinds of movies that seldom end up at the local multiplex. And unless someone gives me forty million dollars to make a picture about bisexual rockers, or a sympathetic pedophile, or a woman who wakes up one day and realizes that modern society is slowly poisoning her to death, it's the world in which I'll stay. That I'm forever "independent" makes me a little sad—until I arrive at my office and see the posters for the films I've produced, provacative and risky films, on which I've felt like an intimate collaborator: Poison, Swoon, Kids, Safe, I Shot Andy Warhol, Go Fish, Velvet Goldmine. Hollywood producers often have to eat worse than black bananas.

The office of my company, Killer Films, is packed with assistants and interns and is woefully short on working air conditioners. My desk is a mess, strewn with papers relating to ten or more projects, some in development, some in pre and postproduction, and some on the verge of release. All they have in common is my name as a producer.

The job of producer is one of the great mysteries of the moviemaking process. When I'm asked what producers do, I say, "What don't they do?" I develop scripts; I raise money; I put together budgets; I negotiate with stars willing to work for said (generally meager) budgets; I match directors with cinematographers, cinematographers with production designers, production designers with location managers; I make sure that a shoot is on schedule, on budget, on track; I hold hands; I stroke egos. I once had to bail an actor out of jail (for gay-bashing, no less). I give interviews explaining what producers do, especially producers of independent, low-budget movies by directors who struggle to put their singular visions on the screen, however much of a challenge those visions might pose for the so-called mass audience. I sit here at my desk with the phone ringing, the fax machine clicking, the assistants and interns running in and out, getting a buzz from the power.

And sometimes I sit here stunned at my powerlessness. Basically, a low-budget movie is a crisis waiting to happen. You stretch every one of your resources to its limit, and then you constantly push that limit. You have to be creative on your feet, because if something goes wrong (and something always goes wrong), you can't just throw money at it. You have to take scary leaps off high buildings, knowing that the landing might be hard.

I'm fortunate to have had a miraculously easy landing with the first feature I produced, a movie written and directed by Todd Haynes called Poison. The theme was transgression, and the approach was the opposite of straight. The film consisted of three different stories woven together, each shot in a different style: a black and white horror film, a mock-documentary, and a lush, homosexual prison romance. In script form, it was just tough to read. Half its funding came from Todd's extended family and their Los Angeles friends (among them, amazingly enough, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan's Island and The Brady Bunch), the other half from foundations and arts agencies, including (and most notoriously) the National Endowment for the Arts. What nearly brought the endowment down would help us make our names.

The movie had won a prize at the 1991 U.S. (Sundance) Film Festival in Park City, Utah, and had been picked up by a small distributor, Zeitgeist. We were anticipating a tiny art house release. Then, an amazing thing happened: Two weeks before the scheduled release, the Reverend Donald Wildmon, an antipornography activist and the head of the American Family Association, saw a favorable review in Variety that mentioned the film's homoeroticism and also cited its partial NEA funding. So he sent letters to every member of the Senate and the House, saying, in effect, "Are you aware that this film, which was made with your tax dollars, is filthy, pornographic, and homosexual?"

The upshot was chaos. Our phones literally did not stop ringing. We made all the papers. We made Entertainment Tonight. Previously, performance artists like Karen Finley had come under fire for using taxpayers' money to do naughty things with yams and chocolate syrup, but movies capture the public and media's interest in a way that "minority" arts don't. This was the first time the wrath of the Religious Right was being directed at something that more than a handful of people at a time could actually see—something that could actually show up in your hometown. The head of the NEA, John Frohnmeyer—that poor fellow, banished shortly thereafter—came out in support of Poison. He organized a screening in Washington, D.C., after which a member of the Far Right was quoted in the Washington Post as saying that the movie was so filthy she wanted to take a bath in Clorox.

The bottom line was a fifty-thousand-dollar opening weekend at the Angelika Film Center in New York City—a record that wasn't broken for years.

Poison is a good example of how it's easiest to make a movie when you don't know what you're doing. Ignorance makes you fearless. I didn't know how risky limited partnerships were. I didn't know that we shouldn't have gone into production without all the money in hand that we needed to finish the film. I didn't know that a thousand dollars for production design was a bad joke, and that the costume designer would be spending nights in my apartment sewing prison uniforms. If I knew then what I know now, I never would have made the movie. That's the paradox of low-low-budget filmmaking. You have to expect the worst, plan for the worst, and repress all thoughts about the worst.

All first independent features are done with sleight of hand. They're built on contradictions, and their driving force has to be passion for the project. That's the exhortation under every how-to in this book.

I've been passionate about movies all my life. My parents took me to Patton when I was seven years old: They liked it, they thought I ought to see it. In Manhattan, where I grew up, there were theaters nearby—the Thalia and the Metro—that showed movies in repertory such as Rules of the Game and The 400 Blows. The mid-seventies was the tail of the last great era in American filmmaking, the time of The Conversation, Mean Streets, and Nashville, when mainstream directors and writers could still wrestle with difficult truths, and pose questions for which they had no easy answers. Video hadn't arrived yet: If you loved a movie and wanted to watch a scene again, you had to go back and sit through the whole thing. I sat through The Poseidon Adventure five times.

As an undergraduate at Brown, I could study film only through the semiotics department, which meant an immersion in theory. I spent a year in Paris studying with Julia Kristeva and Christian Metz and going to lectures by Michel Foucault, then returned to Brown to make the requisite impenetrable student movie. Did all that semiotics and structuralism have an impact on my producing? I don't know, but I did see some interesting stuff: Straub, Robbe-Grillet, Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating—films that might be hard to sit through now but that deepened my understanding of the medium. I've gotten into trouble with colleagues for saying that the aesthetic of some young directors seems closer to Three's Company and Full House than to Renoir or Truffaut, but I can't retract my underlying conviction that the more you know about the history of film, the better you can imagine its possibilities.

I didn't go to film school. I know, lots of people learn the basics there. The problem is that everyone who comes out says, "I want to be a director." Somebody has to make the coffee.

When I came back to New York in the summer of '83, I made a lot of coffee. Thus began a series of jobs that I hoped would teach me all I needed to know to make independent films. I wanted to understand the structure of a movie crew. (I was, after all, a structuralist.) As a gofer, I'd go-fer drinks, props, equipment, and, at the behest of one notorious producer, cocaine. On an independent movie, you can usually get a job without having any prior experience as long as you're willing to work for free. (I paid the rent by working all night as a freelance copy editor for high-priced law firms. In the eighties, you could make twenty-five bucks an hour just for sitting around and waiting for some jittery associate to drop a brief on your desk at three in the morning.)

I had a lot of jobs: assistant editor, location scout on music videos, second-unit coordinator, second assistant director. One of the most useful in terms of my future producing was script supervisor. That's the person who sits with a fat, annotated copy of the shooting script and a Polaroid, making sure there's continuity from one shot or sequence to the next and that you're getting all the coverage you need. I was stationed by the camera all the time, so I learned how a low-budget film gets "covered"—how you can shoot a scene with a minimum number of takes and angles. Bare-bones movies tend to skimp on coverage, because film stock is often the greatest expense. On a studio picture, it's the opposite—film is the least expensive thing in the budget, a fraction of a big star's salary.

The movie I remember most from those early years is Parting Glances, a superb-looking gay drama made for a few hundred thousand and released in 1986. I did a lot of jobs on that one, including acting as an extra in the party scene. They needed someone to synchronize the sound on what they'd shot every day, so the director, Bill Sherwood, would come back from filming at one in the morning and watch dailies with me.

Copyright © 1998 by Christine Vachon and David Edelstein.