Movies Til Dawn

Dear readers and friends: thank you for your encouraging comments and for the encouraging bump in readership I'm seeing happen on this blog. That's because of you--clearly somebody out there is telling somebody else about our mission. If I can prevail upon you all to send a link about the movie to one person on e-mail, that would be huge. You can send them a link to this blog. Or to the movies very nice website. Or to our Facebook page--all those links are visible in the right hand column of this page. By the way, the trailer can also be seen on Hulu as well as Yahoo Movies. The point is: "City Island" is the people's movie. It's a movie that belongs to the audience. It won the audience award at a major festival (Tribeca). It seems to speak to audiences. And it needs audiences to support it to have the life we think it deserves. Thus, I've been calling on you guys who read this blog to feel empowered to help "City Island' along--because the movie ...

Now, if you were looking to finance a movie what would you think of the following package: Star actor (Andy). Highly well-known and super respected actress: (Marcia). Super hip indie-queen (Chloe). Very hot up and coming guy with big movie coming out (Steven). Script that people love because it's both accessible and smart, warm and clever. (You know...) Director with some awards behind him. (Me). My thought would be that based on the projected budget--somewhere under ten million dollar--this is a pretty good risk. The name value of the actors alone should protect your investment even if the film doesn't turn out too well. Add to this that the directors films have won festival plaudits and that he always delivers on time and budget (and I do, I really do--I'm simply not built to be an Antoine Fuqua...having grown up in the indie film world, I always make my days and respect my budget). The whole thing sounds like as good an investment as can be made into the notoriously diff...

I met Marcia Gay Harden at the Four Seasons Hotel in LA, where she was getting ready to do a slew of promotions for a very good movie she did with Richard Gere called "Hoax" (concerning the author Clifford Irving, who wrote a fake autobiography of Howard Hughes). It must have been mid-morning on a weekend, because the dining room/salon was eerily empty--she walked in looking around a little perplexed, as if everyone had been evacuated for some reason. We introduced ourselves, I told her how much I liked her work, she said nice things about the script. And then an interesting thing happened: she began to interview me. Or so it seemed. Rather than let the meeting be about me checking her out for the role (which it never really was to begin with), she made sure--with grace and skill--that the shoe was on the other foot; was I a clear-headed, together enough filmmaker for her to be willing to work with--that seemed to be the guiding vibe of the first part of our conversation. I l...

So there we sat, Andy Garcia and I, miles away from the actual City Island (dig above ariel view) yet determined to find a way to make "City Island" the movie happen. I can honestly say that I never doubted we would--but I also knew the journey would be filled with the usual dead-ends, heartbreaks and non-starter attempts. Andy suggested sending it to a few companies that might seem likely homes for the material--after all, we were bringing a script, a star and a director and thus were entering with more than the usual artillery, which is generally a good thing. I believe we went out to Sony, Fox Searchlight and Paramount Vantage. All three passed. Now, while this isn't unusual at all--what's truly unusual is when they want to do something--it still always chips away at a little bit of your heart. It's like somebody turning down your kid for something your kid wants to do. (Like maybe he wants in on the wrestling team but is too wimpy? I don't know--you know ...

Okay, so trailer-wise we were off a couple of days. Don't sue me, sue Yahoo whose page didn't refresh. Never mind, don't sue anyone. All is forgiven. Click here to see our awesome trailer in HD. The making of City Island continues Monday. I'll tell the story of how we finally got our cast and financing together and began shooting. On February 1, I'll begin a 27 day blogathon which will cover the 27 days of the films shoot--using old blogposts with production stills, reports, call sheets (assuming I can find them) and clips of outtakes. By the end of February we'll be done with the shoot and onto post-production and through March I'll cover the circuitous route the film took on its way to winning the Tribeca Film Festival Audience Award and finally wending its way into theaters on March 19th of this year. As of March 19th, we'll be in "reel time"--(pun, not misspelling). That is, you'll be experiencing the reception and fate of the movie l...

One afternoon in winter of 2007 (between Thanksgiving and Christmas is my memory is accurate) I drove out to the San Fernando Valley, to a modest house where I was scheduled to meet Andy Garcia. The house, which had been an early home of his and his families but was now used as an office, was filled with memorabilia--pictures, letters, awards etc.--attesting to the incredibly rich and varied career Andy has had over twenty plus years in the business. In time I would come to think of the house as the Museum Di Andy-Garcia--but on that first day I paid only cursory attention to the stuff surrounding me. Instead I was face to face with an actor I'd long admired and a man who, clearly, was the Vince Rizzo I'd been looking for for five plus years. We sat in the garden and talked of many things--life, music, movies, family. Personally, I think this first conversation between an actor and filmmaker is the most important one. Nothing creative need come out of this first meeting--for n...

Item: Click here tomorrow (THURSDAY) to see the on-line debut of our trailer on yahoo movies. This is a terrific platform for our launch (or is it a launch for our platform?) and I'd love to hear what you think of the trailer--I myself like it a lot. Item: The movie opened (or is about to open momentarily) in France and got an excellent review in Le Figaro. Click here to read it. If you don't speak or read French (like me) then all I can tell you is that they give the movie three out of four stars and say Andy Garcia is excellent. Item: The on-line writing of "Making City Island" will continue with gusto tomorrow, Thursday. I thought I'd give us all a mid-week break so you can catch up with previous chapters (I assume you have no other life than following my book...) and so I could...regroup. A chapter a day? Madness. Not even Louis L'Amour could keep up that pace. Enjoy the trailer tomorrow. Meanwhile, for comparisons sake, below is the official Spanish tr...

I wish I could honestly portray myself as so driven, so filled with mission, so unchallenged by dissapointment, so brimming with gumption (which, as we all know, derives from the root word "gump"), that I awoke the morning after the option on my script had been dropped and got right to work on finding another way to make the movie then known as "Make Someone Happy." But I didn't. Though I wasn't really bothered by losing my first set of producers--ultimately we were a bit too far apart on the way to get things done to make a good creative marriage--I can't say that I suddenly felt freed to pursue the making of the movie in a fresh, bold way. The truth is, I was tired. Tired of having spent close to two years screwing around with the project to no avail...tired from having directed another movie which I was only moderately satisfied with (the editing and scoring were taken out of my hands and I'm not shy about saying that the movie suffered because o...

A good Monday to you and welcome to my on-line book-in-progress, about the making of my movie "City Island", which opens in theaters on March 19 in limited release (New York and LA) and in ten more cities in the following weeks. Please avail yourself of the contents of this blog in the archives or just follow along as I tell the tale of how the movie got made--soon to include production stills, clips from behind-the-scenes stuff, call sheets, angry e-mails and other ephemera. And look for our trailer, debuting on-line later this week (more info tomorrow, I promise). And mega cheers to our leading lady, Julianna Margulies, on her Golden Globe win last night! By far the worst state your as-yet-unmade-unfinanced movie project can fall into is one of inertia. This is generally the death knell for most would-be projects, the state of mind that causes everyone to lose interest, hope and faith. It generally comes either at the outset of things (as in: nobody's interested in yo...

Before moving ahead with the snail-like progress of "City Island's" journey, allow me to recount a brief episode that occurred shortly before the departure of Michael Chiklis from the project. It's important to recount this little moment because it's easy to remember the hardships in getting a movie off the ground and yet somehow we forget the little perks that go along with the process. Yes there are frustrations galore--but there's also the nice restaurants where meetings are held, the occasional first or business class ticket bought on somebody else's dime, the exotic trips to film festivals made with the vague hope of promoting an unmade (and probably unfinanced) film... ...and then there's lunch with Kim Cattrall. Somehow she'd gotten the script for my movie--I'm not sure why or how or who gave it to her, only that I know we didn't offer it to her. We weren't really offering it to actresses yet, since we were still in list-land ab...

I knew Michael Chiklis from his then newish show, "The Shield", as well as his turn playing Curley Howard in a surprisingly good TV biopic about the Three Stooges. His acting was dynamic, he was tough and he also had a pathos that I thought might make him a good Vince Rizzo. He was Greek, not Italian, but who cared really? The other thing I liked about him was that, while he was certainly well known, he wasn't a mega-over-the-top-super-duper-A-list movie star...in other words, we stood a good chance of getting a fairly quick reaction as to whether or not the script was for him. And we did. Almost immediately we got word from his agent that he really liked it! Never before in my career has the first actor I've sent something too evinced immediate interest. I was in New York but hopped on a plane to LA to have a lunch meeting with him. My producers seemed pleased and I was delighted. Michael and I met and liked each other quite a bit. I saw a version of Vince Rizzo in t...

The first casting meeting on any project is, by far, the most enjoyable, delusional experience of the entire movie. You sit around tossing out famous name after famous name, roundly rejecting many or pretending to take others under careful consideration ("DeNiro?" "Nah, too old!" "Pacino?" "Love him!" "Eric Roberts?" "What?" "Just Kidding..." etc.) The actual likelihood of getting one of the big names is not confronted at this early meeting--indeed, the sky's the limit in the first cast meeting, with only our imaginations to stilfle the proceedings. In the case of "City Island" (or "Make Someone Happy" as it was then known), we brought on ace casting director Sheila Jaffe ("The Sopranos", "Entourage", dozens of movies etc) who I'd worked with on my previous films and we all went to Ca'Brea, a trendoid West Hollywood boite where we proceeded to loudly consider and d...

The book about the making of CIty Island continues. But not before a brief, italicized moment of reflection and a welcome and explanation for any new readers out there. Who are we, you may be asking? Why are we writing about a movie you've never heard of? Well, I'm the writer/director of the movie "City Island" which opens on March 19th of this year in New York and LA before going wider around the country. And in these desperate days for so-called "indie" cinema, we are reaching for any and every way imaginable to get the word out that "City Island" is a really funny, very charming movie that deserves a good long theatrical life before wending its way to the shelves of Wal-Mart, the screens of HBO and the vapors of the viral world. So join us for this little on-line book that I'm writing on how the movie got made. And tell your friends to follow the progress. Clips from behind the scenes, productions stills and more will be posted as we go alon...

I had a wonderful screenwriter friend, the late Lester Pine ("Popi", "Claudine") who had a number of memorable and succinct phrases about writing that have stuck with me for years--usually delivered in a slightly gangsterly "de's and dem's" delivery. Once I was pouring through his stack of screenplays and I said something sensitive like: "Jesus, you've written a lot of stuff that hasn't been made" (I was a teenager...) He looked at me wistfully and said: "Kid, the pile keeps gettin' higher and higher." Contained in that response is everything you need to know about the peculiarly counter-productive problem faced by the writer; you can't succeed as a writer if you stop writing. However, everything you write stands a much greater chance of not getting anywhere then it does of succeeding. Thus writing is both a show of optimism and a courting of failure; not to do it is to fail at the outset. To do it is to fail by...

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Do you remember the sense, on the morning of the 12th of September, 2001, of the air being let out of the tires? Of a collective, wheezing deflation of spirit? The reactions were, in retrospect, cosmically large yet weirdly particular. Chief among them was: why bother doing anything? It was as if the stunning, massive and catastrophic attack--and its success and our failure to see how easily accomplished and inevitable it was--rendered all other human endeavor kind of...pointless. In New York the effect was, of course, magnified. Not only was all typical endeavor pointless, but all roads pointed to only one endeavor worth pursuing: clean up the rubble at Ground Zero. Why was this so important to accomplish so quickly? In retrospect I wonder if it was the same instinct that led to Miramax's unfortunate decision to immediately recall all prints of their films and erase the World Trade Center from their logo: a collective shame that was felt about the attack and our own naivete regard...

Unlike most other projects, the histories of which grow distant and foggy with the passage of time, I can nail down the exact date and time of the creation and execution of "City Island." That's because it all happened during the shattering month of September, 2001. One morning during that Labor Day weekend, I awoke having dreamed a movie. Two ideas had been crashing about my head of late, neither of which seemed substantial enough for an entire screenplay. One had to do with a man who worked in a prison and discovered a prisoner who he thought might be his son. The other had to do with a man who accidentally got on a long line which turned out to be for a movie audition and--surprise!--wound up becoming a movie star. The former story had its roots in a tale I'd heard on reality television as well as a similar situation that had happened within my own family. The second story is, supposedly, how Walter Matthau became an actor. In my dream, the two stories fused seaml...

So we begin. The act of writing a book about the making of any film suggests the film has already achieved an importance in the eyes of the world which requires the tome to be added to the already sagging bookshelves of cinemaliterature. More often then not such books are contrived after the movies have passed into legendary status ("Star Wars", "Titanic", "Making of Gone With The Wind" etc.) and are looks backward at momentous production histories which seem to have been prematurely infused with a sense of destiny. Then there are the books about the catastrophes. The classic, of course, is Steven Bach's "Final Cut"--about how Michael Cimino's "Heavens Gate" literally destroyed United Artists. My favorite in this genre, though, is Ted Gershuny's apparently forgotten "Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture", an account of the doomed death march of Otto Preminger's penultimate production, the execrable "Rosebud...

Greetings all and welcome to a new decade. Let me first apologize for the paucity of posts over the past week and a half. And then tell you what a relief it was to be able to focus on something else--in this case, watching a load of movies currently in release sent to me via the Academy. Liked "Crazy Heart" with Jeff Bridges and the Coen Brothers movie, "A Serious Man", a lot. Also enjoyed a strange film with Joaquin Phoenix and Gwenyth Paltrow called "Two Lovers" which I managed to not even hear of when it went into general release earlier this year--was this the film that Phoenix was supposed to be promoting during his now infamous David Letterman appearance? If so, my heart goes out to the films writer/director, the humorlessly named but quite talented James Grey. And now back to myself. Beginning this coming Monday morning, January 4, I will commence the writing of my book, "Making 'City Island'" on this blog. (Drab title, I know, but...