Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good (12 page)

“In my experience, the movie doesn’t begin and end when the lights go down and the lights come up,” Harvey proclaimed, while cracking open another Diet Coke. “If you’re really good at your job, the movie begins long before they get to the theater. And if you’re a fucking magician? It never ends—even after the credits roll.”

It could’ve just been some bullshit a movie mogul says to kids who’re tryin’ to make good, but I actually saw his words in practice a few months later when
Clerks
screened at the WorldFest-Houston. After the flick, Mos and I got up and did Q&A—which had developed into more of a slacker joke-fest, as I couldn’t take
Clerks
or it’s production as seriously as most other filmmakers treated their films at film festival Q&A’s. How could I? The flick was ninety minutes full of dick jokes, set in a convenience store.

So while I tried to be informative during the Q&A, I tried more than anything else to be entertaining first and foremost. If someone puts you in front of a crowd with a microphone in your hand, I’ve always felt it’s your duty to give ’em a little bit of a show. Dial it up and snap into performance mode so nobody gets bored or starts to wonder, “Why are they letting this fat guy talk to me?” At that particular Q&A, Mos and I were on fire that evening, regaling the audience with tales of getting the cat to shit on cue. When the laughs were done and the folks were filing out, I overheard a conversation between a pair of exiting audience members: two dudes around my age at the time, maybe a little older. Their exchange went
exactly
like this.

Guy 2 didn’t dig
Clerks
, and that might’ve been the end of it. He might’ve never sampled my wares again. But by simply talking and telling stories about the making of the movie, I’d reached him: He’d now likely try something else I made in the future. The movie hadn’t ended when the credits rolled because we kept the experience going. And somehow, it buttressed what’d gone before—which was weak in Guy 2’s mind.

That only works, however, if you get ’em in the door in the first place. But how do you get ’em off their couches and into the theaters?

You make a little noise.

As Miramaxkateers, we were taught to always use the press to our advantage—manipulate it, even, if you could. Commercials and newspaper ads or billboards for a movie were cost-prohibitive. The press, however? Cheap and voraciously hungry at all times. Lots of inches to fill every day in those newspapers, Harvey’d remind us, pointing out that
someone
had to give ’em something to write about. And with almost
every
Miramax release, he somehow found a way to get people talking, long before the flick was playing anywhere
near
them—without heavy marketing spends in other media. That’s because Harvey’s marketing campaigns in the mid-’90s weren’t based on TV spots: They were based on creating a story around every movie so that there’d be press interest, with or without movie stars.

When
Clerks
went before the Motion Picture Association of America’s ratings board in 1994, the flick received a prohibitive NC-17. Normally, this X-rating replacement was reserved for films that depicted sex and adult themes that stopped just shy of penetration.
Clerks
was given the
NC-17 rating solely for the salty dialogue and for concepts that were
discussed
—not even
visualized
. Because we talked about snowballing, sucking thirty-seven dicks, and accidental corpse-fucking, we were grouped with
Henry & June
and
Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!
Classy company, but those films at least had some nipples in ’em.
Clerks
didn’t even have
talk
about breasts, let alone present a tit for audience approval. There’s nary a nip-slip in the flick.

Although they were Disney-owned at that point, Harvey still hadn’t shaken all of the tricks of the trade that’d built his little company into a now-Disney-owned cinematic juggernaut. So while I saw the NC-17 rating
Clerks
was given as a curse, worried I’d have to eventually make cuts or alter my flick to get an R rating, Harvey saw it as a windfall of publicity. He insisted this was a case of censorship, this rating, so he hired
Reversal of Fortune
legal mind and O. J. defender Alan Dershowitz to rep the film against the Motion Picture Association of America.

It had all the subtlety of using a bazooka to pitch Wiffle Balls, but it was incredibly effective: There was an instant slew of media coverage as Harvey spun the voluntary ratings system into a battleground for freedom of speech. Scott and I sat with Dershowitz at a press conference, where the legendary lawyer insisted his teenage kid should be able to watch
Clerks
as a precautionary tale
without
needing permission from a parent to do so, because the moral of the story he wanted his son to be able to learn was so essential: Go to college or you’ll end up like these two losers behind convenience-store counters.

When the time came to actually face the MPAA and argue
for an R over the NC-17, we were repped by a Miramax lawyer. Alan Dershowitz, it seemed, only had been retained for that press conference to kick-start publicity. But pay him to actually be a lawyer on the film’s behalf? Why bother! All that freedom of speech and anticensorship talk was hot air, as Harvey told us that if the MPAA upheld the NC-17, then editing out the objectionable material was going to be our next step. We’d take on the establishment to a point, but only for the noise it created. Mercifully, even without the Dersh, we got the MPAA appeals board to overturn the rating that day, without having to make a single cut.

I’d asked Harvey if the Dershowitz stunt was expensive, and he responded proudly that, all in all, the entire process cost less than the airing of one television spot in primetime on network TV.
Clerks
was being buzzed about in media circles that it likely would not have been discussed in otherwise were it not for the faux First Amendment circus Harvey created.
Get the movie noticed
was the Miramax mantra.
Shoot it out of a fucking cannon if you gotta, but get the movie noticed. By any means necessary.

At Warner Bros., when it came to opening a movie, things were decidedly different. They’re a publicly traded entertainment conglomerate. They have gobs of money to make
and
open movies. And they don’t rely on blind items in the press or scandals that land the flicks on the op-ed pages of the newspapers; they just buy full-page ads for posters of their movies. There’s no shuck and jive; they simply carpet-bomb a movie into the public consciousness through every media platform that’s legal. When their flicks are in theaters, you may not choose to see them but you will
know
they are there. It was quite a thing to behold and so completely foreign to me, as well as counter to everything I’d been taught about film exhibition by Harvey.

Post–
Cop Out
, Warner Bros. started talking to me about directing more films at the studio. I’d proven that I could weather a pretty bad storm and still bring a picture in under budget, and for that, I’d earned a place at the WB table—my reward for surviving Willis. Granted, these weren’t films I’d
write
and direct: WB had scripts they wanted me to make first, so I’d just be a director for hire on their projects. But if any of those flicks worked really well at the box office, I could always try to guilt them into letting me direct something
I’d
written.

I was entering a new stage in my career that I never imagined I’d get to: groomed to be a studio filmmaker. I wouldn’t be expected to find the money or beg the crew to perform for less than standard wages. I wouldn’t be expected to sleep three hours a night in production, and there’d be second and third units running simultaneously, each with their own director and crew. I could pay the cast what they were worth instead of asking them to take cuts. I could
host
the movie, be the guy who makes everyone comfortable, basically overseeing the show.

I was set to say yes when I remembered a panel from Frank Miller’s seminal graphic novel
The Dark Knight Returns.
Long retired from being Batman, Bruce Wayne races a Formula One car and nearly wrecks it. As the car’s about to eat it, Wayne’s internal monologue is beautiful:
“This would be a good death …”

And while it’s not blowing up in a fiery car wreck, hosting movies for a living would’ve been a good death for me: I could’ve spent the rest of my life hiding from myself
inside a movie studio, getting paid a king’s ransom to make pretend with someone else’s stories. What’s the difference, right? A movie’s a movie.

Then I remembered the follow-up line Miller penned for the once and future Batman that appears in the very next panel, as he jerks the wheel and changes the course of his destiny …

“But not good enough.”

And suddenly, there was that nagging, stupid voice in my head again—the one that whispers, “Never take the path of least resistance; because nothing worthwhile is easy.” I recalled my Gretzky training: not the training I actually did with Gretzky himself (that’d be zero), but instead, all the time I put into reading about and studying this paragon of character and sportsmanship. Did I want to rush into the scrum again with everyone else? Or did I want to figure out where the puck was
going
to be?

And from my position on the ice, it looked like the puck was traveling someplace indie as fuck.

So I thanked Jeff Robinov and all the good folks I worked with at Warner Bros. during
Cop Out
—none of them the art-destroying studio Stormtroopers with which Miramax had filled our heads—and I started looking for
Red State
money instead.

Red State
had been a long-gestating experimental flick I’d been threatening to make for a few years. Here was a windmill at which to tilt: a script I’d written years prior that was conceived about as far from the path of least resistance as one could get. It was a dark little comic book of a movie about three boys who go into the woods to find sex, and instead find God.

As I was writing
Red State
, any time I felt like I knew where the plot was going I assumed that meant the audience would’ve figured it out as well. So instead of writing a traditional narrative in a three-act structure, I opted to go for a genre mash-up movie that’s impossible to get ahead of: Whenever I knew where the story was going, I simply switched gears and jumped off that track altogether. As much as I love
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, you know the main characters are gonna fall for each other; it’s predictable. I wanted to make a flick that was as unpredictable as a terrier on heroin—a fever-pitched funhouse nightmare with lots of uncomfortable gallows humor and no clear path out, where the bad guys didn’t wear hockey masks or carry chainsaws; they protested at funerals. My models were
Race with the Devil
—a 1970s Peter Fonda picture about a weekend getaway spoiled by satanic sacrifice—as well as the normalcy of the geriatrics next door in
Rosemary’s Baby
. Compound that with lots of Tarantino, pile on some Coen brothers, and let it simmer for five years, while everyone passes on financing it.

While I was waiting for Seth Rogen to say yay or nay to playing the lead in
Zack and Miri Make a Porno
, I wrote
Red State
in three days and submitted it to the Weinstein Company—looking for essentially the same
Clerks II
budget. But both Harvey and Bob passed on
Red State
—the first time that’d ever happened in my Weinstein tenure. It was confusing as fuck since the script was classic Miramax: weird, outside the box, actor bait, inexpensive, and ballsy.

The problem was that we weren’t at Miramax anymore.

By the time Harvey and Bob got divorced from Disney, Miramax was no longer the little distribution company that
released Hal Hartley’s
The Unbelievable Truth;
it was making expensive, studio-size movies like
The Aviator
. When they opened the doors at the Weinstein Company, the mantra was simple: sure things. With Harvey insisting it was a horror movie that Bob should make, and Bob insisting it was an art-house flick Harvey should make, if
Red State
was ever going to get made, it’d have to happen
without
the Weinsteins.

It’d have to happen without my longtime producer Scott Mosier as well. After helping me tell my stories for over a decade, Mos was on a vision quest to tell his
own
stories. So I turned to my friend and former fellow Miramax mendicant Jon Gordon and asked him to produce
Red State
. Jon had been Harvey Weinstein’s assistant when Miramax picked up
Clerks
in 1994 and was largely responsible for every flick I’d ever made at Miramax after that, since he was the guy who signed my production company, View Askew, to a first-look, overall deal at the emerging mini-major. We became fast friends, bound by our belief in the cinematic Camelot that was our home. Jon was another dyed-in-the-wool Miramaxkateer who’d started interning with Harvey while in school, and went to work at Miramax the day he graduated from college. The two of us saw ourselves as Defenders of the Faith, hopelessly devoted to the Miramax indie ethos.

But during the post-Disney-divorce great migration to The WC, rather than watch Miramax Redux become a mainstream-encrusted mockery of itself, Jon scored a studio gig running Universal for a while—a clear indicator that Camelot was no more. When he left Universal, he came to the same conclusion at which many of us who were educated
in the Weinsteinian ways eventually arrive:
Harvey raised me to do this myself.
Sooner or later, like Jason Bourne, your training kicks in … and motherfuckers start getting punched in the mush.