Stuck in Lion's Gate Turnaround

"The opening has these two cops played by Denis Leary and Steve Buscemi. They're talking about various body ailments, and they pull up in front of a burger joint arguing over whose turn it is to buy lunch. Leary gets out, complaining about his back, and goes in and orders. At that moment, a guy drives a pick-up truck right through the front window. He jumps out with an AK-47 and starts blowing people away in the burger joint. Denis is the only customer in there with a gun. He takes cover, jumps up, and is about to shoot the guy when his back goes out. Denis slips on a puddle of ketchup, cracks his head on a metal bar, and is out cold. His gun goes skittering across the floor and lands in front of this little eight-year-old kid, who just stares at it. The lunatic gunman has stopped to reload. The kid picks up this big gun and walks up, puts the gun to the lunatic's back, and pulls the trigger. BAM! And that's how my film begins."

Would you like to see that movie? It sounds pretty good. And Tom DiCillo isn't pitching a new script. The writer/director is talking about a finished film that's sitting on the shelf. Double Whammy is a done deal.

The problem is with how the deal got done.

DiCillo's written and directed five indie films released by five distributors. Miramax handled Johnny Suede in 1991, which brought in good reviews and gave Brad Pitt an early starring role. Living in Oblivion was a well-timed 1995 indie comedy about indie films. Sony Pictures Classics did pretty well with that one. Trimark released 1996's charming Box of Moonlight, and the underrated The Real Blonde was released by Paramount in 1997.

So DiCillo sits in his Upper West Side home a successful director. Yet he's also very frustrated. He's trying to save Double Whammy?which, ironically, is his most commercial project yet.

"With this one," DiCillo explains, "I went back to ideas about filmmaking that really excited me. I'd seen The Asphalt Jungle again, and I just loved how the tension builds in that film. My favorite fiction is crime fiction from the 40s and 50s, and I wondered why I'm making these kind of artsy movies. I wanted to make my own kind of crime suspense film. That was the original intent of Double Whammy, to tell a crime story with all the basic ingredients of what makes cinema exciting."

His first problem came when he tried to cast a real beauty as the chiropractor who further screws up Leary's world. "I began with the company that financed my last two movies, but things hit a snag when I wanted to cast Elizabeth Hurley. For whatever reason, I was told that I had to cast somebody like Joan Cusack. I've nothing against Joan Cusack, but that didn't make sense. I said, 'What about Madeleine Stowe?' No. 'Julianne Moore?' No. That's when I realized something was screwy. I needed Elizabeth Hurley to provide this classic sexuality. Look at Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. I'm sorry, but that's not Joan Cusack."

DiCillo got Hurley, but his problems didn't end there.

"I was close to going into production, and parting company with my old backers really threw me into a void. Then I got in touch with this company, Gold Circle. My film was the first one they ever financed. A gentleman named David Kronemyer was in charge, and he loved the script. For good reason, too. Look at the cast that I had: Denis, Elizabeth Hurley, Steve Buscemi, Chris Noth, all set to make the movie for $4 million. We shot here in 2000, finished on budget, got accepted in Sundance and got a number of offers?one of which came out of a meeting at Sundance with Lion's Gate."

At this point, some fans of independent cinema will sense trouble. Lion's Gate has a reputation as a bold distributor that steps in to save troubled films. The company took over Dogma after Miramax decided to pass on it. Lion's Gate was the distributor that dared to handle American Psycho and Monster's Ball. However, Lion's Gate also has a reputation for picking up certain indie films with great fanfare, and then dumping these movies straight to video, something DiCillo had apparently never heard.

"I was hearing enthusiasm for my film," responds DiCillo. "That's all I could go on. They wanted this movie, and I'd known Mark Urman at Lion's Gate for about 15 years. Nothing was ambiguous. Lion's Gate had plans for releasing the film in 40 markets. I've had bad experiences with distributors before, so I certainly wasn't naive. My agent at William Morris was instrumental to the deal, and Gold Circle had final say. They bought the movie for a million dollars."

What follows is a classic tale in the entertainment industry. A week after Sundance, David Kronemyer called up DiCillo to say that he was leaving Gold Circle. Not long after, Mark Urman was gone from Lion's Gate.

"That," relates an understated DiCillo, "was my first sign that something bad could happen. But I kept being told that everything was fine for a September 2001 release. The trade papers even had it as the release date. Then the tragedy happened at the World Trade Center, so we moved to April. But Elizabeth Hurley became pregnant, and she would be unavailable to do the big national press. Everyone agreed it would be better to push back the date. And then April came, and my phone calls weren't getting answered."

As DiCillo tells it, he had to invent a fiction to get back in the loop. He sent an e-mail to Tom Ortenberg at Lion's Gate, claiming that Entertainment Weekly was doing a story about films delayed out of Sundance. "I got this response," explains DiCillo. "'I wouldn't do the story. They're just looking for dirt.' I wrote him back: 'Tom, I'm confused. What kind of dirt?' No answer. So I contact Paul Brooks at Gold Circle, and that's when I'm told that they're not releasing the film."

?

Unknown to DiCillo, Lion's Gate had held a general test screening of Double Whammy in California. The audience response wasn't good. Lion's Gate then arranged for Gold Circle to keep the million dollars?which is being paid off over several years?in return for freeing the company from any obligation to release the film in theaters. There's the Lion's Gate tradition at work.

"Now Paul Brooks keeps his million dollars," explains DiCillo. "He doesn't have to worry about his boss, who's one of the guys who founded Gateway computers?and who spent every fucking day on the set posing for pictures with Liz Hurley. I had to cast the guy's karate teacher in the film before he gave me the money. That's what I do for Gold Circle, and I don't even get anybody telling me that they're sorry. The company just wants to maintain their relationship with Lion's Gate, and keep that million dollars in the plus column."

But it's not like Lion's Gate is going to burn the negatives. The company still has the video rights. And the rest of the investment is made back on foreign sales. Denis Leary and Elizabeth Hurley aren't newcomers to going direct-to-video.

"When I make a film," DiCillo explains, "I don't expect to get on the cover of Premiere magazine. I don't expect my box-office numbers to be listed in the newspapers. But every one of my films has been based on a personal desire to will this thing into being. This film, in particular, was a superhuman effort that took incredible contributions from a number of people. They all gave me an amazing gift. All the performances are spectacular, and we're not willing to just sit around because we all have money and nobody gives a shit."

?

Denis Leary sounds like he gives a shit. As a producer and actor, he's fought a similar struggle for a fine film called Monument Ave.

"The positive side" of going straight into the video stores, he tells me, "is that good work finds a place in DVD and video sales and rentals. The negative is that when it comes to theatrical releases, you're up against the current Nicolas Cage project that's probably a piece of shit, but is opening on 1600 screens. The film industry is reversing the mentality of the 70s, where companies would release films and let them grow, which is how films would succeed.

"The thing about Tom?which could also have been said about Ted Demme?is that you have to love a director who's that passionate about sticking to his ideas and bringing them to the screen. There are so many directors who are nameless and faceless and just churning it out. I could have done other projects, but I wouldn't have had as much fun. I'm more interested in having a good time than being in Utah for 10 weeks making a giant piece of shit for a ton of money."

"I've had to struggle to fund every single one of my films," DiCillo explains. "This is going to make raising the money for my next film a million times more difficult. And if Lion's Gate had put a test screening in as a condition in the contact, I would have never fucking signed it. The worst thing that Lion's Gate can say about this movie is that it didn't test well at one screening. The best I can say about Lion's Gate is that they handled this with all the grace and dignity of garden slugs."

Which brings us to the recent insult that Lion's Gate's added to injury. Two of the company's recent theatrical releases were shining examples of indulgent indie dreck. Vulgar was a boutique production from Kevin Smith that was about a clown's homosexual rape. Ethan Hawke directed Chelsea Walls, a dreary talkfest that might have been based on one of his sleep-inducing novels.

"Look what it takes to get your attention now," DiCillo says. "Todd Solondz essentially puts his finger up his own ass, sticks it in your nose and laughs when you smell it?but he gets attention. Neil LaBute does a movie in which two men abuse a poor helpless woman, and gets attention to the degree that Maureen Dowd in The New York Times calls him up when she's struggling with a column about relations between men and women?as if this guy is some kind of overseer of gender politics. I wish somebody would ask Lion's Gate why they gave Chelsea Walls a theatrical release over Double Whammy."

Actually, just the first part of that is a pretty good question. Tom Ortenberg didn't return phone calls, though. DiCillo hasn't heard from him, either. "To this date," he says, "not a single phone call. Nothing. I tried to discuss just releasing the film in Los Angeles and New York to see what happens. I didn't even get a response. Paul Brooks is telling me that if I'm lucky maybe I can find a distributor who'll release the film theatrically after Lion's Gate sells it to cable."

Meanwhile, nobody knows if they aren't already approving the video box art over at Lion's Gate's L.A. headquarters. "They probably don't even have to give me notice before a video release," concedes DiCillo, "but they could make more money by selling it to Showtime or HBO as a premiere film. At least then they'd have to wait to roll it out on video. My best hope is that Lion's Gate has forgotten about the film. Then we might still have a bit of a chance."