Mr. Know-It-All, page 7
I brought my agent, Bill Block, with me to the showdown meeting, which pissed the execs off because they wanted to bully me alone. I said no. They basically countered with “You’ll never work in this town again.” And I said, “If I do the version of the film you want, it will be so bad I’ll never work in this town anyway, so what do I have to lose?”
In fairness, I did listen to some of their notes. I tried different structures in the editing room, but since I rejected their “happy ending,” rewrite ideas all seemed impossible. The script just wasn’t written that way. Besides, no matter what we tried, some people would love it, some people would hate it. We were never going to appease the middle. The story of my life. The worst possible scenario in Tinseltown.
I quickly retreated to Salt Lake City, where we recorded Serial Mom’s beautiful classical score by Basil Poledouris, played by the Utah Symphony, making sure we provided just the sheet music, not the violent visuals that went along with it, in case there were any extremist Mormon members. Halfway through the session, I got the frantic phone call alerting me that Liz Smith, then the most powerful syndicated gossip columnist in the country, had headlined her column that day “Leave Serial Mom Alone.” I had told Kathleen the whole nightmare that was happening with the executives, and without telling me, she blabbed the whole story to her friend Liz. Thank God! It worked. The studio executives were now the bad guys trying to wreck a dark comedy that cool preview audiences loved. Thank you, Liz! Thank you, Kathleen, for this great sneak attack against Hollywood interference. Savoy was furious. Studio heads ranting! Executives screaming mad! Threatening me. Yet they couldn’t take it out on Kathleen because they had paid her millions to do the picture (well deserved) and needed her to promote the film internationally (which she did, even demanding a Mercedes truck from a German TV show, which she eventually got after rejecting their offer of a sedan). My executive blamed me personally, but since the studio now believed mid-America would hate the film (later tests in Garden City, New York, also reported “below average” results, with focus groups complaining the film “was in poor taste”), the marketing department figured they better keep me around for whatever audiences were left.
I guess the studio was right. Even though we had a great official, out-of-competition screening at the Cannes Film Festival (“Boy, this beats the Oscars,” Kathleen whispered to me as we paraded up the steps of the Palais to greet the festival president, Gilles Jacob—always a huge supporter of my films), Serial Mom flopped when it opened wide in America on the first beautiful spring day of 1994. After a long, tough winter, nobody went to see any movies that weekend; they all went outside to become one with nature. Even a lovely review in The New York Times couldn’t save us. We lasted about five more weeks in the theaters and finally grossed a total of $7,820,000 on a budget of $13 million plus prints and advertising.
“But my pictures are like backlist book titles,” I always argue in damage control. “They don’t fade away. They last way past their sell-by dates.” “Serial Mom, which in hindsight predicted the O.J. madness, always gets screened on television on Mother’s Day,” I like to point out, adding, “I even get a free laugh today when the movie is screened in revival houses and one of the potential victims says, ‘I love Bill Cosby pictures,’ way before his recent sexual assault conviction. Another reason for Serial Mom to kill her.” But studios don’t care. A cult film is the last thing they want, and I don’t blame them. “Cult” means three smart people liked it and nobody paid to see it. I didn’t want a cult film, either!
Do I feel bad that Savoy Pictures lost money on Serial Mom? I would have felt guilty if the friends I had borrowed money from to make my earlier trash epics hadn’t gotten their money back, but Hollywood studios’ entire business is based on a gamble. I did make the exact film I wrote and they approved. Instead of trying to make the audiences who didn’t like the film like it, they should have plotted how to make the ones who would like it love it more. But I have to admit they were doing their job. If one of the movies they greenlit loses money, they lose their job. That’s why I never name the suits who gave me such creative trouble. They gave me a lot of money to write and direct Serial Mom (even if I did have to threaten lawsuits to get the final payment). I cashed all the checks, didn’t I? All’s fair in love and war, I guess, once the show business dust has settled. Savoy Pictures went out of business three years later. I didn’t. But my real Hollywood days were over. I may have clawed my way to the top, but now it was time to learn how to slide back down to the bottom.
TEPID APPLAUSE
From here on in, none of the movies I made turned a profit. But do you think that stopped me? Midcareer is the time to realize that failing upward is the only way to go, but it’s a tricky thing to pull off. Show business never takes place in reality; it combusts in the heat of the moment, so turn up the gas, light a match, and make your reputation explode. You have to love the press. Read it every day. Make tabloid news stories your personal soap operas. Pretend you’re on a talk show when you’re just home in your apartment. Try speaking in only sound bites for one whole day on your job. Once you understand how the media works, then you both can use each other—one for free material, the other for unpaid advertisements. It’s a dance of mutual exploitation where both partners win. If you make as much noise as you can in the media and still keep a sense of humor about yourself, both the public and future investors will look the other way at your box office disappointments. You’d think the powers that be would know better at this stage of the game, but luckily for us, they never do.
Pecker, my “nice” movie, got made mainly because Japanese teenage girls loved Edward Furlong and he had agreed to star in the title role. Eddie was young, hairless, and androgynous; just what they line up for at the box office in that country. He was so hot in Japan that a record label talked Eddie into recording a rock-and-roll album that was only distributed there. He told me he was mortified at the final product, but I made him give me a copy and it still sits on my office shelf, unopened but worshipped.
In 1997, foreign sales still mattered. Well, they still matter now but only the Chinese ones. I hold China responsible for wrecking the worldwide independent film business as I once knew it. Chinese movie producers don’t want comedy anymore, they don’t want pesky movie stars whose salaries eat up profits, and more important, they don’t want wit. They want $100 million comic-book/video-game/sci-fi tentpoles that celebrate one thing—special effects. They want science projects.
Cam Galano at New Line Cinema, who helped run the foreign sales division there, is solely responsible for getting Pecker made. I was back at the Cannes Film Festival with the whole New Line gang hawking international sales of the twenty-fifth anniversary director’s cut of Pink Flamingos. In the heat of the festival wheeling and dealing (always the best time to get overpaid), Cam talked a Japanese distributor into committing to part of Pecker’s budget, and once they came aboard, other countries fell into line and Bob Shaye, bless his grouchy soul, agreed to finance it for America. We even signed some deal memos on a napkin at the terrace of the Majestic Hotel. Yes, movie business clichés are true, and when they happen to you, it can be a beautiful thing!
Before we even started shooting there was trouble. The Motion Picture Association of America rejected our attempt to register the title Pecker as soon as New Line tried, calling it “obscene, profane or salacious.” We immediately fired back that Pecker was not pornographic in any way and that the title referred to the main character’s nickname, which he received, as explained in the script, “because he never ate properly as a child—always pecked at his food.”
When the big day of arbitration finally happened at a hearing in Los Angeles at MPAA headquarters, I was there as the star witness. I couldn’t believe it. Here I was, a grown man appearing in court over my right to use the word “pecker”: I was well prepared. “No angry child carves the word ‘pecker’ in his school desk,” I argued. “No misogynist men demand that women ‘suck their ‘pecker,’” I shouted like Clarence Darrow to the stupefied faces of the humor-impaired arbitrators. “And what about all the other filthy double-entendre titles you have approved in the past?” I challenged, like an outraged Perry Mason. “How about Shaft? Octopussy? Spaceballs? In and Out? Even Barbra Streisand’s Nuts!” I shouted as if I were making the closing statement of a capital case.
And you know what? We won! The only time I ever defeated the censorious MPAA, who agreed “by unanimous decision” to overturn the rejection of my title. John Waters’ Pecker was ready for the marquees.
Critics always thought that Pecker, “a rags-to-riches tale of a goofy, cute eighteen-year-old blue-collar kid who works in a Baltimore sandwich shop and takes photos of his loving but peculiar family and friends on the side and accidentally gets turned into a star in the New York art world,” was autobiographical, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t naive. Pecker was. I wanted New York to discover my early works; they just never did until way later. I wasn’t blue-collar either, even though I wished I were. True, there once was rumbling from my core acting troupe that I was getting rich from my movies and they weren’t (the way Pecker was from his photographs), so the main eight people who were the most involved in those first productions banded together and decided who should benefit, and I agreed to give them 25 percent of the profits to split. Today they, or their heirs, still get 3 percent each of the titles up to and including Female Trouble and Divine’s estate gets 4 percent. I believe in the long run they did better with me than they would have if they had Screen Actors Guild residuals.
Pecker was really inspired by the lives of Diane Arbus and Nan Goldin. How did that little kid holding the hand grenade in that Arbus photo feel when he saw the six-figure auction price of that fleeting moment in his young life that day in Washington Square Park? Proud, it turns out. I knew there had been a lot of complaining from Nan Goldin’s subjects years later about her success with their portraits showing raging alcoholism, drug addiction, even suicide, but I always pointed out that Nan had picked up the tab of their restaurant dinners for years, gave many of them prints of their portraits that would today be worth a fortune, and received little back in return.
Yet in a way, I knew how they felt. One year I invited Nan to my Baltimore house for breakfast the day after my annual Christmas party, and she showed up with her camera. “Oh, no, you don’t.” I blocked her. “I have no desire to see a picture of myself with a bad hangover hanging in Matthew Marks Gallery next year no matter how artful it may be.” She seemed to understand.
The Japan Times later called Pecker “a Disney film for perverts” and I guess that’s pretty accurate. We had a wonderful cast: Christina Ricci, Martha Plimpton, Brendan Sexton III, Mary Kay Place, and Lili Taylor. Before Eddie, I had tried to cast Beck, who was just beginning his musical career, as Pecker, but he seemed amused and mystified about why I wanted him for the role since he had never before acted, and he turned me down nicely.
As soon as we went into rehearsal, I realized Eddie was depressed in real life. He had made his name in the business by playing mopey, damaged young men, and while he was a great actor, comedy did not come easily to him. Directing Eddie Furlong was like doing auteur push-ups. Each take I had to build his energy level up to a normal actor’s before I could yell, “Action.” He was still with his girlfriend Jackie, who had started her affair with him when he was sixteen and she was his thirty-two-year-old on-set schoolteacher. “They tried to put me in jail,” she once complained on set, and even though Pat Moran mouthed “No wonder” behind her back, I didn’t judge. I liked Jackie. She got Eddie to set on time and made him promote the film during production, activities I’m not sure he would have been capable of on his own. All that really counts is the final performance, not how it was achieved. Eddie Furlong was Pecker! Nothing else mattered.
Almost the entire film was shot in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. Once a white working-class community notorious for racist housing segregation, today it is hipster central and is fast becoming our own Brooklyn, New York. Almost none of the original locations in Pecker are still there except for the sub shop where Pecker was supposed to have worked. Pecker’s Place, the redneck bar that became the rage for visiting uppity New Yorkers in the script, is long gone. Originally known as B-J’s, it was a semi-notorious redneck dive where I used to hang out in real life, and which I later wrote about in Role Models, but it’s torn down now and was replaced by an H&R Block. Pecker’s family home in the movie burned to the ground after the owner mom’s son accidentally set it on fire while she was getting her hair done. Is there a more Baltimore story than that?! The Spin n’ Grin Laundromat is now a hair salon, and the Fudge Palace, actually the Atlantis, the onetime male strip club located right next to the prison, is now Scores, a supposedly high-end gentleman’s titty bar.
I do, however, still have the talking Virgin Mother statue in my attic, the one that Pecker’s grandmother (played by the late and great Jean Schertler) believed talked to her. Sometimes I think I hear her mumbling “Full of grace” upstairs the way she did in the film, but then I realize I’m just hearing things.
One thing I’ve learned—you can be too budget conscious once you’re back making nonstudio films. Pecker’s 1998 cost was $6 million, which seems like a lot today, but at the time (before fucking China) was a fairly routine budget for an independent movie. One of the overly thrifty producers of Pecker said toward the end of the shoot that we didn’t have enough money left to film the interior of the bus for the credit sequence, so we never got to show Pecker photographing the two black girls with the amazing hairdos or the white lady shaving her legs on board. About a week after production had wrapped, Janice, my editor, horrified me by announcing she had just completed putting together the rough assemblage of the film and it was only eighty-three minutes long—even before we had cut out a single frame. A nightmare! I panicked and frantically alerted the producer, who wasn’t even still in Baltimore. He never informed New Line but took postproduction money he was hoarding and brought Eddie Furlong back to Baltimore. We cast the bus-riding extras, hired the same crew, and shot the entire scene with New Line none the wiser.
Another joke we had never had the time to get because of the overly threadbare shooting schedule was of Little Chrissy, Pecker’s sugar-addicted younger sister who turns rabid vegetarian, snorting a pea through a straw off a plate like cocaine. I begged the producer to let me go back to the location and get that shot, too, and he OK’d it. When the film was released, this gag got the biggest laugh in the entire movie. Coming in under budget on a film, I learned from this experience, is a stupid thing to do.
We kept other secrets from New Line, too. During the shoot I had an “art attack” myself, just like Pecker. I noticed right from the first day that the key grips and camera assistant were drawing a picture for me every time they put down gaffer tape marks on the floor for the actors to hit so they’d stay in focus. Realizing that these hurried gestures, color coded for each character, would be ripped up and immediately destroyed after the shot was completed, I started photographing the involuntary blueprints in context. Now I could document the only thing left on set that is never supposed to be seen in a movie still—the actors’ tape marks. I was celebrating an abstract sense of passive directorial control that couldn’t be put to market testing. Maybe I was just being paranoid over the movie’s chances at the box office. If you didn’t buy a ticket in a theater, maybe you’d be moved to buy one of my “anti-stills” and want to hang one up on your wall. When the same producer who later pulled off the reshoot finally figured out what I was doing art-career-wise midshoot, he asked half-jokingly, “Since you are taking these photos on company time, do I get a percentage of the sales if you later show them in an art gallery?” Luckily I said no right away, so when I did have a show years later at Gavin Brown’s gallery in New York (arranged by my art dealer, Colin de Land), nobody from production showed up trying to collect.
Even though Pecker was the only one of my later films to be rejected by Gilles Jacob for official selection by the Cannes Film Festival, for being “not offensive enough like your other usual stuff,” the movie did have its fair share of sex scenes. “Tea-bagging” became the newest rude sex act I could introduce to the public. It involves dropping your balls on a partner’s forehead as sexual foreplay. Yes, it’s a fleeting moment, but it’s safe, you can’t get pregnant, and it’s more common than you’d initially think. After all, aren’t many women accidentally tea-bagged when their husbands climb over them nude in the morning to get out of bed? In the U.K., tea-bagging means dipping the testicles into the mouth of your partner like in a cup of tea, but I went for the more family-friendly R-rated American version. Once the Republicans started their far-right spin-off groups known as tea-baggers, it became obvious to the news media that these conservatives were unaware of what tea-bag meant to a small but more sexually advanced minority of members of the Democratic Party. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC tried to explain on her show, but she started breaking up and you could hear her crew behind her laughing on set right on the air.
