LOST AND FOUND
In 1987 Norman Lear hired me to run his newly announced production company, ACT III PRODUCTIONS. When you start a film production company, you want to find a movie to make immediately to let everyone know you are a serious player in the film world. A producer named Harry Gittes, a friend of Jack Nicholson, brought me a film package that interested me. Aside from being a good producer, Harry’s claim to fame is that Jack named his Chinatown character after him!
Harry brought me a script written by John Sayles called BREAKING IN. John is one of my favorite writer/directors. Attached to the project was a Scottish director named Bill Forsyth. Bill had directed a movie I was quite fond of called GREGORY’S GIRL.
Harry had also attached Bert Reynolds to the film.
I optioned the project, and started looking for financing. This was a harder sell than I thought it would be. Finally, Sam Goldwyn Jr. said his company would finance the film.
In retrospect, I should have known something was wrong during the creative meetings Bill and I had with Sam before we began production. Sam kept describing the film as a “Buddy movie”, a comedy similar to Bert’s hit film SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT. During these meetings, Bill was very quiet. I thought this was his Scottish style, but I soon learned that I was very wrong.
Here is the poster Sam designed for the movie:
As we began shooting it became clear that Bill had an entirely different movie in mind. He told me AFTER the film had been financed and we were in production in Portland, Oregon, that he saw the film more as a subtle, morality play. The story Bill was going to tell was about a lonely, elderly man taking a wild young man under his wing and teaching him the difference between right and wrong.
The stark contrast between Sam’s POV of the movie and Bill’s became crystal clear when we viewed the rough cut of the film. Sam was furious, yelling at me, telling me I had lied to him, and that this wasn’t the comedy he bought. He threatened to withhold the remaining funds he owed us unless we recut the film to make it “more
funny.”
After we screened the rough cut, I had to get away and took a long-planned holiday with my family in St. John’s in the Virgin Islands. After a few days of finally getting some rest, my phone rang. It was my Production manager,
“ I’m sorry to bother you, we waited as long as we could to tell you, but I think we may have lost all the reels of the film.”
In the eighties, a movie was shot on film and edited on large reels packaged in a silver can. If the actual reel was missing, there was no digital cloud to back up your work like we have today.
I have a confession to make. I knew the film was insured for five million dollars. If the reel was lost, Sam would get his money back and I wouldn’t be in the middle of this creative battle between Sam and Bill.
A few hours later, my phone rang. It was my production manager again.
“It’s okay, we found the reels. They had fallen out of the back of the private plane we hired to ship them to Toronto. They were scattered all over the tarmac at the airport.”
Now that the reels were recovered, I was still stuck in the middle between what Sam wanted, and what Bill wanted. Sam had the final cut of the movie.
I went to Bill and said “look, we have to make some changes to make Sam happy.
He still owes us a lot of money.”
Bill looked at me, pointed to the film on the big screen, and said,
“This is my painting. I have finished my painting.”
And, he got on a plane and flew back to Scotland.
And, I fired him, and recut the picture myself.
The irony is, even with all the problems with this film, this is the best-rated movie I ever produced. You can look it up. Breaking In had better reviews on Rotten Tomatoes than The Breakfast Club, Birdy or Fried Green Tomatoes.
Critics loved Bert’s limp and his “subtle” performance.
Who knew?