IN FOCUS: WRAPPING IT UP
Mary Glucksman profiles six new independently-financed features.
THE NICKEL CHILDREN
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| The Nickel Children. PHOTO: DANIEL ZACEK. |
“Americans are more aware of child prostitution in the third world than in their own cities,” Glenn Klinker (Dark Justice) says. His sophomore feature, The Nickel Children, stars Tamara Hope (The Deep End) and Reiley McClendon (Fly Boys) as young runaways determined to survive with dignity but losing ground every day. “[The film] opens your eyes to how innocent kids are lured into life on the street,” Klinker says. “Their destiny is pretty obviously predetermined. I was talking to [L.A. organization] Children of the Night, and I met a girl who was a child prostitute and is a lawyer now — but nine out of 10 of her friends are dead.”
Klinker, 34, spent two years in a Temple University film program before heading to Hollywood to steep himself in production. “That’s where I learned everything I know about filmmaking — I did every job I could to stand next to the director,” he says. Producer Ryan R. Johnson says that Nickel makes Thirteen look like an after-school special. He had had the Eric Litra script on his shelf for eight years when he launched Pretty Dangerous Films last spring with partner Kevin Ragsdale after six years working his way up through Peter Guber’s Mandalay Entertainment. “It was the one I always remembered and compared to everything else out there that got labeled ‘edgy’ or ‘groundbreaking,’” he says. Johnson cites the budget as “well under the $2-million mark. We’ve got a fund that covers genre stuff — horror and thrillers — and gap financing for the high art no one else will touch.” (Pretty Dangerous is a partner with Muse Films on Asia Argento’s adaptation of JT Leroy’s story collection The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things, also in postproduction.)
The 35mm Nickel shot in L.A. in November with John S. Bartley (The Matthew Shepard Story) as d.p. Also in the cast are Jeremy Sisto, Tom Sizemore, Mark Boone, Jr., Max Perlich, Maeve Quinlan and Marsha Thomason.
Contact: Ryan Johnson at ryanj@prettydangerousfilms.com
CONFESS
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| CONFESS. |
“It’s very Marx and Engels,” Schaefer says. “She shapes his raw anger in more and more political ways, and he ultimately rebels. There’s a twist at the end that’s very dark. We’ll see how it plays.”
Schaefer, 32, was about to begin a Ph.D. in political theory at Columbia University before switching to film and founding commercial production facility Cicala Filmworks in 1997. He met CONFESS producers Ben Odell (Corn) and Jonathan Stern (Oxygen) when the project was read at the Fifth Night Screenplay Reading Series in New York in 2001.
Odell says the film was made for “less than an InDigEnt budget” with help from two Panasonic Digital grants, including a 24-frame SDX900 camera package and postproduction support. CONFESS was shot in New York in December with Leland Krane (Under Hellgate Bridge) as d.p. “We got thumped with a blizzard on our first day, so we worked it in,” Schaefer says. “Terell comes out of the Port Authority [Bus Terminal] in the snow with neon in the background, and that looks really good.” Also in the cast are Melissa Leo (21 Grams), William Sadler (The Shawshank Redemption) and Glenn Fitzgerald (Series 7). The filmmakers will launch the Web site c-o-n-f-e-s-s.com by the time they hit the festival circuit. “We’re assembling raw material for postings now — we were shooting footage for that even before we started shooting the movie,” Schaefer says. “The Web site will be online with no explanation that it’s related to a film. The idea is to let word-of-mouth build.”
Contact: Ben Odell at BenO@centrifilms.com
THE DYING GAUL
Campbell Scott and Patricia Clarkson play dirty tricks with Peter Sarsgaard in The Dying Gaul, Craig Lucas’s adaptation of his 1996 play and his first turn directing for the screen. Sarsgaard plays a gay screenwriter too wrecked by his lover’s recent death to resist the advances of a bisexual producer (Scott), whose wife retaliates anonymously through an Internet chat room. “It’s about somebody whose grief is so powerful he’s disabled,” Lucas says. “It’s a human tragedy about self-delusion. The lies they tell themselves are all quite small, but a lot of little lies can add up to tragedy.”
Lucas’s previous film adaptations of his plays include Reckless and Prelude to a Kiss and the original screenplay Longtime Companion, all of which were directed by Norman René, who died in 1996. Lucas wrote the screenplay for The Secret Lives of Dentists for Holedigger Films in 2002 and was fine-tuning the Gaul script when Holedigger said they would make the film if he directed it. “I threw away the play and told the story with a fresh eye,” he says. “I know the material in a way I might not if it had been written directly for the screen.”
Gaul’s late-fall 35mm shoot with Bobby Bukowski (Saved) as d.p. ranged over L.A. from the Paramount lot to Malibu. The film is set in 1995, when studios routinely balked at putting gay characters in big-budget films. “It’s interesting how quickly we forget things,” Lucas says. “It’s been only nine years, but [the behavior in the film] looks like it’s from the ’20s.”
Contact: George Van Buskirk at george.vanbuskirk@verizon.net
THE WOODCUTTER
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| The Woodcutter. PHOTO: CAROLE SEGAL. |
Gabrielle Savage Dockterman’s first feature, The Woodcutter, stars Danny Glover as a haunted Vietnam veteran living alone in the Pacific Northwest woods until a war buddy (David Strathairn) shows up and leaves him with his 10-year-old daughter. “I liked the idea of a man who had never reintegrated into society after the war being transformed by the love of a child,” Dockterman says. “It’s powerfully moving with some surprises that will get people talking.” She found Ken Miller’s script through an online writers’ forum and developed it with him and writer Nancy L. Babine.
Dockterman graduated from Harvard University in 1983 with an engineering degree and then spent 15 years creating interactive educational media. “I never considered film as an occupation,” she says, “but we were developing cutting-edge software and, as the technology progressed, we shot actors and used story to engage viewers. Without realizing it, I was learning film.” Woodcutter was jump-started when Dockterman went to Sundance and met producers Isen Robbins and Aimee Schoof (Brother to Brother). “They introduced me to [casting director] Adrienne Stern, and she got it to Danny’s agent. He was our first choice, and he said yes as soon as he read the script.” Linda Hamilton (The Terminator) and Ron Perlman (Hellboy) co-star with 12-year-old Zoë Weizenbaum in her debut.
The 35mm Woodcutter shot for five weeks in the Vancouver woods with Ken Kelsch (Big Night) as d.p. and moved to Washington, D.C., for the film’s final scene at the Vietnam War memorial. Emmy nominee Sheldon Mirowitz is composing an original score.
Contact: Isen Robbins at isen1@hotmail.com
HAVOC
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| Havoc. PHOTO: DANIEL ZACEK. |
Add Barbara Kopple to the list of esteemed documentary filmmakers transitioning to narrative. Kopple makes the switch with Havoc, a tough teen drama about hip-hop–loving L.A. rich kids looking to juice up their lives with gangsta posturing until a drug deal with Latino gang members lands them in real trouble.
“It brings two cultures together in a volatile way through drugs and sex and teaches that the most innocent intentions can have consequences,” Kopple says. The script, by Traffic writer Stephen Gaghan, is a reworking of a spec that made headlines in 1995 when 17-year-old first-timer Jessica Kaplan sold it to New Line for $150,000. Media 8 — the people who made Monster — assumed the option several years back. Anne Hathaway (The Princess Diaries) and Bijou Phillips (The Door in the Floor) star.
Kopple won Best Documentary Oscars for Harlan County, U.S.A. in 1976 and American Dream in 1991. She has directed episodes of Homicide and Oz and developed several dramatic features before Media 8 tapped her for Contact: Mark Damon at markd@media8ent.com
THE GREAT NEW WONDERFUL
“I didn't want to get boxed into doing broad comedies,” says director Danny Leiner (Dude, Where's My Car?), who gets back to his indie roots with The Great New Wonderful. Set in the year following September 11, the film weaves together five New York tales that are linked, Leiner says, by the characters' “common experience of cathartic moments in their lives. [September 11] is an undercurrent ‹ a specter but not the up-front drive. The movie is dark, sad and also incredibly funny. Because we're all over the five boroughs and different strata of New York, it's a love letter to the city, too.” Leiner developed the Sam Catlin script with producing partner Matt Tauber for their new Sly Dog Films. The cast includes Maggie Gyllenhaal, Edie Falco, Tony Shalhoub, Olympia Dukakis, Tom McCarthy and Naseeruddin Shah.
Leiner, 38, was one of a wave of SUNY Purchase film grads who transformed indie film in the early 1990s, most notably with the launch of the Shooting Gallery, where founder Bob Gosse produced Leiner's first feature, Layin' Low. Low got Leiner into television, where he worked extensively, from Sports Night to Freaks and Geeks and Felicity. Wonderful is the first film financed by Serenade, a digital-only outfit from producers Leslie Urdang, Michael Nozik and Amy Robinson and director Michael Hoffman that, like InDigEnt, will keep budgets to low six figures and share profits with cast and crew from first dollar.
Shooting on Wonderful begins March 17 with Harlan Bosmajian (Lovely and Amazing) as d.p. “I'm excited to get back to the days of the Shooting Gallery, when we were running and gunning through the streets of Brooklyn,” says Leiner. “You don't get to do that when you have 20 trucks lined up on a block.”
Contact: Matt Tauber at matt@slydogfilms.com
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