by Patricia Troy; photos by Kate-Lesli Hay
The DGA Award nominees for Dramatic Specials shared their experiences about craft, vision and the wickedly humorous little things that happen on the way to realizing the bigger picture at a panel discussion held at the DGA headquarters in LA in early March.
The honorees included Uli Edel (Rasputin, HBO), Robert Harmon (Gotti, HBO), Anjelica Huston (Bastard Out of Carolina, Showtime) and Betty Thomas (The Late Shift, HBO). The fifth nominee, John Frankenheimer (Andersonville, TNT) was out of town working on his latest production. The evening was moderated by director Mike Robe.
Strikingly, all of the nominated specials were produced by and for cable outlets. This fact seems to support the opinion expressed at previous long-form directors panels that the networks have shyed away from commiting to character-driven, complex or controversial dramatic fare in favor of headline-of-the-week stories cast with episodic television celebrities. All of the panelists credited moving and well-written scripts, outstanding actors and a large degree of on-set autonomy as major factors in the successful outcome of their projects.
But even in cable, the artistic and creative vision of the director can provoke intense reactions. Mostly notable was the firestorm that surrounded Huston's directorial debut, Bastard Out of Carolina. The project, which was picked up by the Turner organization after Showtime dropped out, dealt with the issues of domestic violence and child sexual abuse. The scenes that depicted the rape and brutalization of the young girl in the film became a sore point for Turner.
According to Huston, "On the first scene involving molestation I chose to make no concessions other than to shoot it head on, as I'd been encouraged to do by the executives at Turner. So when it came time to show them some of the film I didn't feel as though I'd gone beyond any stipulated boundaries. In fact, I was rather proud of myself and thought those scenes were pretty successful. Ultimately, I understand that Mr. Turner saw those scenes and then it was rejected."
Huston continued, "I don't know that he ever read the script. I fancy that he didn't. I can only speculate as to why he didn't allow [the film] on his network, but I think it was the one that got away." Huston's film was later shown at the Cannes Film Festival and picked back up by Showtime to enormous critical and popular success.
Uli Edel had no communication problem with the executives during the making of Rasputin -- it was the actors and crew that didn't understand him. The German director shot on location in St. Petersburg and Budapest with an English, Russian and Hungarian cast and crew that spoke five languages in all. "What happened in Russia," Edel related, "was that we couldn't start until noon because of the translation problem, so every morning we knew we'd lose half a day. And when you have so many languages involved, you just hope everyone is getting the same information. I was surrounded by translators and I didn't even know what was being said. Everybody would be talking in whatever language and then someone would say, 'Okay, let's shoot.' I just sat there thinking, 'Oh, shit!'"
Edel was saved by a pre-production process he normally throws out once he goes to shoot. "I storyboarded the whole movie at home so that I knew exactly what shots I really needed and what I could cut. I never use them later. But because nobody could talk to each other, I would hold up the storyboard for the shot and point and say, 'Everybody look, this is the shot we're doing.' And it worked."
Robert Harmon had to fight to get Armand
Assante aboard as the lead character in Gotti, not because of
financial demands or 
executive
mob decision; it was the real Mob! "Armand was a little
skittish because of the subject," explained Harmon. "I
guess he'd had experiences in his life where he played other Mob
people and the results for his life have not been pleasant. He
was very concerned with what it might mean to him personally to
play John Gotti, for which I don't blame him. But I was really
intrigued by the fit of actor and part. I thought it was
irresistable, especially when I met [Assante]."
Another factor in choosing the project was Harmon's background as an essentially visual director. "When I first read the script it was extremely verbal," he said. "Just wall to wall talk. My immediate reaction to that was, 'No thanks.' But I was interested in the subject and intrigued by the challenge of trying to make something visual out of a script that was essentially non-visual."
Thomas had a similar experience when she agreed to direct The Late Shift, but with a feminine twist. "My mother said, 'Don't do this film,'" she laughed. "That's always the sign that you should do a film. The script was based on the book and had a reality feel, but it was flat. I liked the subject a lot and realized that because the script was so nice and flat, I could do anything I wanted with it. That started to be an exciting thing for me. I thought there was a lot to play with -- it was fun. That was the great part. And the mother thing."
Her biggest challenge? "Probably the make-up thing," responded Thomas. "I ended up having to reshoot the many chins of Jay Leno, trying to light it properly. That chin took on a life of its own."
To Thomas' chagrin, the entire project took on a life of its own when HBO asked for her rough cut shortly after production. As Thomas retold it, "They said they needed it and that they were going to run it on HBO 3. 'Don't worry,' they said, 'We're just doing this because we have to air it before December 31 so we can write it off with the IRS. Don't worry, nobody watches HBO 3 anyway.' So I said, 'Why do you have it if no one watches it?'
"Well,
two guys who were critics watched it and wrote reviews about
it," she continued. "It was a nightmare. People were
saying, 'It's [not good], it doesn't have good music, blah blah
blah.' Then suddenly I hear Dave [Letterman] has a copy of it in
his office and people are telling him it's the movie about his
life. It was a rough cut!" But I love 'em over there at
HBO."
In spite of the stress of having Turner drop Bastard Out of Carolina before it was completed, Huston said, "I couldn't have paid for this opportunity. If I had gone to film school I would be way out of pocket by now for the kind of experience that this turned out to be."
For Thomas, her stress came in post production. "I had Bob Cooper at HBO," she laughed, "who is so ready to give you notes, I'm sure he went to film school. Then I had Ivan Reitman as my executive producer who hired me, and I thank him forever for that, but once he saw the film, he said, 'Hey, I like this. Let me get in here and see what works.' So then I had a director as a producer wanting to come in and make changes and Bob Cooper giving Ivan trouble. Everybody has ideas -- you just try to make little compromises to please other people and hold onto the big stuff that seems important."
As for the future of television movies, Thomas summarized the panelists' attitude when she commented, "I've done network. I've done features. People would ask me why I was doing an HBO film and I told them, 'This is the best script I have.' It was the best stuff. I think [cable] is a great chance for directors to have some freedom and take on difficult subjects and explore them." Asked about the constraints of money and time inherent in cable production, Thomas responded, "After doing TV I thought, 'What are we gonna do for thirty days?" In filmmaking, Einstein's theory of relativity needs a rewrite -- it isn't the mass, it's the medium.
Patricia Troy is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
