By Darrell L. Hope

Martha Coolidge (left) directs Halle Berry on the set of Introducing Dorothy Dandridge, photo by Sidney Baldwin courtesy of HBO

Newly elected by acclamation to the post of First Vice President of the DGA, Coolidge recently talked to DGA Magazine about her profession, her latest project and how she negotiates around the pitfalls of the industry.

I'm very honored that the work I've done for the Guild is appreciated and I've been asked to come back and do it again. And I loved working on the Creative Rights Committee. I think it's just an incredible way to get to know the business and to see what directions the business is going in, good or bad. The tendencies we see today are certainly alarming.

Number one is the alarming growth of shortened post. The changes in technology have caused people to believe that they can get things quicker. There are benefits to the new technology, but we all know that when you shorten the cut, that damages the movie.

We're seeing problems in casting. We're seeing problems in prep. We're seeing problems with scripts not being ready for pre-production. I think we have made a huge step in the new negotiations with the complete revelation of the below-the-line budget to the director at all times. This puts into a preferred practice how you arrive at a real budget, which has to do with hiring the UPM, hiring the ADs, getting the production designer on, doing the scouts, and reviewing all the pertinent material before you actually come to a conclusion what a real budget is. That is such a benefit to the studios, directors, the networks and the television producers as well.

I've found that I've gotten more respect for being aware of the issues, and just saying, "Look, this is the way things are done." But what's really important is to do it as much in advance as possible. If you wait until after the problem is over—for example, you let the producers sit in the cutting room for your entire cut, it does no good to complain after that, that you didn't get your cut. There's very little we can do to recuperate lost creative rights after it's over.

The people we need to reach the most are the young directors in the Guild who are not aware of their creative rights at all. On my first studio picture, I had no idea I had any creative rights whatsoever. They were massively violated during the production of that picture and I didn't have a clue. You need to learn your rights. You need to read the book and know what your rights are and defend them one way or the other. You don't have to do it yourself. You can call the Guild. But if you don't know that you have them, then you're in trouble.

It is important for directors all over the world that there is such a thing as the DGA. We have such a thing as a director's cut because of collective bargaining and directors uniting. We are even important to the Canadians, who maybe are taking our work. But the fact is they are taking the work because they don't have the rights we have. They don't get the money we get, they don't get the residuals we get, and the fact is sooner or later they're going to wake up and realize this.

But the DGA is important to foreign directors in particular because of the inequities all over the world in terms of what directors are paid and under what conditions we work. When those conditions are undercut that forces us into a position of rollbacks. So if we have a group of directors from Florida, Connecticut and Seattle, Washington, who are willing to not have a cut, then they can start denying every director a cut. If we are faced in collective bargaining with the producers coming at us and saying, "We can show you 20 directors who don't care if they have a cut," it undercuts the ability of all directors to do their work.

I've always felt that there's far more interesting detail in real life than there is in fiction, so I love the variety and surprises of real life. I think the challenge in a biopic or a story based on true-life events is that you have to shape them into a story. People's lives don't necessarily work as a story. They can have great events in them, but they're not necessarily a whole piece. I felt that was what I brought to Dorothy Dandridge.

Essentially, when I came in on the project, it was really her whole life from childhood on and it had a biopic feel to it in a sense that it was "this happened, and then this happened," but it didn't have a story feeling to it. I felt that we needed to cut the material down and I needed a way to make the whole piece cohesive. The more I learned about Dorothy the more I realized that she was a very introspective person who was constantly in search of happiness. She would stay up all night and talk on the phone. That fact triggered in me, "Wait a minute. What if the entire movie is a phone call? And this particular night—the last night—is an attempt to come to grips with certain aspects of her life." The other thing about Dorothy Dandridge is because she is dead; we will never know the truth so I intentionally left certain things as unknowable. I actually feel that's one of the most successful things we achieved in the movie. You could look at it one way, or another way and both make sense.

I felt she handled it in exactly the right way. She was involved with the development of the script. She was involved with hiring me. She had a lot of strong feelings about the material, and a very strong interpretation of what she was interested in and why, and who Dorothy was. But once we started in rehearsals, pre-production and production, she understood what a huge challenge this role was and really took on the role of actor. I felt it was wrong to involve her in every small producerial decision in the picture. When it came to a big deal like cutting one of her favorite scenes, which was in danger for a while—the Academy Awards exterior, a very expensive scene that was certainly right for the movie, everybody loved it but we didn't have the money to afford it—boy did Halle go to bat. But the acting job was so huge on this film that she knew exactly where her work lay on this film and really attended to it.

 

Costar Klaus Maria Brandauer with Coolidge

In a sense, you had to almost direct two movies because there were not only the amount of music and dance numbers you staged, but also the dramatic story. What were your impressions when you first looked at this?

I was very excited because I love working with music. I've done it since way back when with Valley Girl. I think it brings a special energy to the set and just affects what everybody's doing. In this case it was a relief because I knew that 20 minutes of my movie was pre-ordained. We were doing Carmen Jones the way Otto Preminger did it and recreating Dorothy's nightclub acts. We even got the kinescopes of her "Ed Sullivan Show" performance. It's not that we did them identically, but we got a real feeling for what Dorothy did later in her life with those numbers. Knowing that 20 or 30 minutes of your movie is going to be these things you can start to work really early on them. So my job was to trim the script down so that the rest of the movie would fit and not leave a lot of stuff on the cutting room floor. In fact there's nothing left on the cutting room floor. It was shot to length.

I was very insistent on that. I came on the film something like ten or twelve weeks before we started shooting. I said "I need eight weeks of prep," and at eight weeks the art department was started. I had my production designer, James Spenser, on the show. I had the costume designer knowing she was starting, and that was critical—Halle has about 84 changes in the movie so that was a big deal. We had almost 40 sets and it's period Hollywood. By little less than eight weeks Halle was in tap rehearsals. By seven weeks we started the Latin numbers and continued the tap rehearsals all the way through so each week Kim Blank, our choreographer, and I added another dance. We did the pre-records a week prior to shooting. In a movie we would have probably started earlier, but we had the benefit of Halle knowing for a long time she was going to do this part so she was very prepared.

When I came on I read everything I could and looked at every single piece of footage I could, interviewed everybody I could and just jammed myself. We met the real Earl (Mills), of course, and the real Geri (Nicholas), who Dorothy's on the phone with. We got over two hours of tape of Dorothy singing, at least two hours on the Nicholas Brothers, and the books. It was days and days of reading the material and the history, but I found that I started to get a feeling for who Dorothy was, who Otto was and get a view of this story.

Doing a television movie is exactly like doing a feature, only quicker so that you essentially find that you're doing twice the work in half the time. You become extremely efficient about decision making. It made the show one the most positive creative experiences I've ever had. There was total creative trust from HBO. They really gave me the freedom to work with Shondra Rhimes, who had written the original script, and accomplish my vision—this idea about this phone call. I left holes in the script and I knew what the transitions were going to be but we didn't have time to put it on paper because we were rewriting so much else. We had to rewrite it in the order we shot it. It's not the way you want to do a movie, but it made this particular movie have a very definite structure and an intuitive feel and a spontaneity that was really terrific. I just felt everything worked out. Every scene was formed by the latest information that we had and I think it was a really positive experience for all of us, particularly the close knit group of Halle, Shondra and myself, and secondarily Klaus and Brent. It was a really terrific experience.

It was a fabulous team. It was an incredibly complex movie and nobody worked harder than the ADs. I actually am in great awe of what they accomplished because it really was monumental. Anybody who sees it can see how complex the extras, the dancing the playbacks, the wardrobe…

We recreated Preminger's Carmen Jones scene in the commissary. We had to pre-rehearse the extras or we never would have made it through the day. That was probably the most ambitious single day I ever shot in my life. It came out great because of the ADs. We had 60 extras on set playing the extras in the movie, another 30 extras playing the crew, all the additional actors, plus the real crew. We couldn't pre-rehearse the extras playing the crew so we had to train the cameraman, train the focus-puller, train the sound guy, and train the playback guy… What a day. It was one of these things where you really depend a great deal on experience so one of my prerequisites on this show was to hire people with an enormous amount of experience and that made all the difference in the world.

I had to balance bringing in as many ethnic people as I could on the crew, and at the same time the fact that my right and left hands are my key crew members and I had to work really fast so it was very important for me to work with people that I knew. So I balanced that as well as I could and did a lot of research on who was available that I didn't know. All the African-Americans that I knew were working, which is good, but that's because there are not enough. I'm talking things like sound and production design--it's shocking how few African-Americans are in the Art Directors Guild. It's the same with camera, editing, all of it. There's not enough yet.

There have been criticisms that too many films on what could be considered African-American subjects, have been made by non African-Americans.

I think people should direct movies that they love. I think we should not exclude African-Americans from loving any kind of movie they want to direct, and we should not exclude any other person from directing any kind of material. I mean, some of the greatest women's movies in history have been directed by men. I think it's wrong to exclude people. On the other hand, never has my awareness been higher of discrimination in our country, in our world, and certainly in this business. I was extremely aware of it before, but only minisculely in comparison with now.

As a woman I'm extremely aware of gender discrimination so I can have a small appreciation for what racial discrimination's like, but only small. It is so depressing that things have not changed all that much from the issues that are brought up in Dorothy Dandridge. And although we may not be scrubbing out pools—although in this culture we have done things like that about AIDS—fear and prejudice is everywhere. We're doing things that are more subtle but are just as damaging.

Movies are a way of going inside of other people and seeing life from another perspective. This is why, as a director, I love dealing with material that is not where I come from. I want to do a western, I'd like to do Lawrence of Arabia, and I loved doing Dorothy Dandridge. It's an extremely important movie to me and I felt that as a woman I could bring a special perspective to the material. I think that Halle was extremely wise in picking me to direct it because, even though I'm not African-American, I had the deepest appreciation for the responsibility I held of bringing this very important piece of American history to the screen. But I also think that I have a unique ability with actors that is very important in this picture and very right for this particular picture.

I think Halle picked me because she probably liked me in the meeting. I had some insights into the material. I think she felt very strongly that this was about a black woman, but Halle has very strong feelings about performance. She wanted to insure that her performance was really shepherded and I think she made the right decision. We worked together really well and she puts out a performance that's 150% of anything anybody's ever seen her do. She had the stuff. I knew it when I met her, and it's an extraordinary performance.

Looking at Dorothy and talking to Halle about how to prepare for this part, I said "The biggest thing is that Dorothy Dandridge wore every emotion and every thought on her face.. That's why she was so interesting outside from her beauty. Halle has the beauty, so that's not an issue. So that's what Halle really worked on and really achieved. I think Dorothy has gotten tremendously short shrifted by Hollywood history and American culture and we're going to do something about that. That's a very important. What is surprising is who does know her and who doesn't. There are many young blacks who don't know who she is. That's why I like the title: Introducing Dorothy Dandridge. If you know her it's about the fact that she was introduced into Hollywood and became a worldwide star. And if you do know her and you think you know her, wait till you see this movie because there are things about Dorothy that you do not know.

 

You also explored some of the harsher brutalities of Dorothy's life. The scenes where she is assaulted, first by Auntie and later by her second husband, are chilling. With all the recent controversy about media violence were you worried about these scenes of domestic violence?

Abuse of children and abuse of wives is far more common than gun abuse and the most common violence in this country. We cannot support censorship in any way. It is extremely important that we can deal with these serious subjects on the screen, which includes guns, but absolutely has to do with being able in moments like this in this movie to deal honestly with the kind of abuse that human beings perpetrate on each other. It is a terrible thing and if you can't show it and you can't talk about it, then how can you ever, ever have freedom of speech?

It was very important to me that the Auntie assault and the husband assault were extremely upsetting. It's a very upsetting thing. These relationships were devastating to Dorothy and certainly the early relationship is responsible for part of the masochism that caused her to be so accepting of the later violent relationship.

If you're worried that there's going to be a difference of opinion about how you're going to present something, you need to tell the producers, before you're hired, if there's something really extreme about how you see something. In this case I did cover some of the tougher material in the first interview. What was great was that's what HBO wanted. They like edgy material and want a realistic presentation. They wanted to stick to the truth in these particular matters. I think that even though we're seeing a swing against violence, we're going to have a bigger problem still with companies telling directors to put violence into movies than the directors going overboard the other way. For example in television movies I've heard a lot of stories of people being told "You have to have a death in the first act." But if there's something you're worried about that's controversial, it's better to cover it before you actually get the job so you know the people will stand by you and defend you to a network or a studio that is having a problem. That's very important. You can't fight the battles all by yourself.

I can't talk too much about it, but basically I'm very excited about it. I've always loved science fiction. It is a very realistic approach to a slightly futuristic view of the world. It's going to present tremendous challenges to me as a director which I think are very important. I've known Jim for a long time and he's always known this about me. So when he offered it to me, I was thrilled. So I'm having a very exciting time developing it.

It's important to diversify all types of stories. It's why I support independent filmmaking, all ethnic minority filmmaking, and women's filmmaking. I'm not the same as another woman. I don't have the same likes and dislikes. I have another slant on life. I grew up on cowboy movies and I want to do sci-fi. People are shocked. One of our more esteemed directors actually said to me after the announcement of Mars, "How are you going to do this space thing?" I happened to be sitting next to Mimi Leder and I knew what he meant, but I didn't want to hear it. I said, "Well, she did space." And she said, "Yeah, I did space." He said, "No, I mean most of your movies are intimate personal dramas." It's such a big subject. One: that's all I've ever been given the opportunity to do, let's just start there. Two: it took me years, by the way, to get out of teen comedies. All I was given for years was teen comedies. I was pulling my hair out going crazy in high school. One critic actually said, "When will they let this woman out of high school?" Finally I did Rambling Rose and that changed my material to something else. But the fact is nobody's making intimate personal dramas anymore on the movie screen. There's so few. And personally, I went into movies to make things like Lawrence of Arabia. I'd love to do the next 2001 or 2020. You can't predict because of a person's color or gender what their favorite material is or what they're going to identify with. I finally gave him the polite answer, "Well I've always loved science fiction." And this is somebody who knows me and really loves me. "How are you going to do this?" Excuse me? Take one, scene one…

Ageism is huge. That's one reason I made the point about all the Academy Awards on the crew. I wanted an experience crew. Generally because of the salary situation and that the HBO deal is very low, and also because the work is very hard, the company and producers tend to say, "Let's get new young people." But the facts are 1: this is about Hollywood in the ‘50s. 2: it was an extremely ambitious show and I know that an experienced person who's dedicated and loves their work is going to work just as hard as any young person and be able to make much quicker and more knowledgeable decisions and save money. Most of our departments gave money back. It was done with tremendous responsibility on the part of the entire crew and a constant negotiation, which, of course, any low-budget thing is. But the fact was that this was an older crew in general and it was better for this movie that way. Ageism is a huge problem and if you look at the employment statistics right now in Hollywood. The people who are massively unemployed are the older members of our community and it's really depressing.

Martha Coolidge (right) prepares Dorthy Dandridge star Halle Berry for an upcoming scene, photo by Sidney Baldwin courtesy of HBO

It does. That's why we fought so hard to get the full revelation of the budget. You want people to know what they're doing. I've never understood why a studio will take a $100 million dollar movie and hire a first time director. That is beyond me. It's one thing to say, oh let's take a chance on a guy or girl with a $15 million dollar movie, but I do not understand why the bigger the risk, the more risk you take. I know there's an element of fresh, new… But I also think there's an element of fear of people who have an opinion, a reticence to get involved with visionaries. You either hire the real visionary, the Jim Cameron and try to get him to do a movie and know you can't push him around, or you get somebody who you can tell what to do every step of the way. But you know what, that's not really directing. It's not what we do. I really encourage directors to gain experience safely. Start with something they understand, do it well and grow with your experience and become more and more responsible as you move along and more able to realize your vision.