Tod Lippy: Is either one of you from New York?

James Schamus: [Laughs.] Who’s from New York? Are you?

Ted Hope: I read the obituary in the Times of the guy who wrote the obituaries in the Times over the weekend, and one of the lines was, “He was the quintessential New Yorker, in that he had spent three months in New York, then moved to Los Angeles, where he spent eighteen years hating it and wanting to get back to New York before he finally returned.” [Both laugh.] My mom grew up here, but I didn’t move here until I was nineteen.

What about you, James?

JS: I came after graduate school in Berkeley.

TH: I would say that, in an odd way, I never felt relaxed until I moved to New York. There was so much going on I didn’t have to worry about finding something interesting to do. I knew that there would always be something interesting to do.

James, why did you come here after graduate school?

JS: I was actually still in graduate school, having finished everything but my dissertation, and I thought it would be interesting to check out for a semester what the film business was like, so I took out a student loan and proclaimed myself on independent study, flew to New York and got stuck here, basically.
   I got here on January 1, 1987. The night after I arrived there was a cocktail party in the neighborhood in Brooklyn I was staying in, and I met a guy named Jack Lechner who was leaving a job he had had as story editor at a small company called Program Development Company. At the time they were making a lot of theater-for-television stuff for American Playhouse. They would tape, for example, a Sam Shepard play with John Malkovich—

TH: True West—

JS: True West, and then put it on American Playhouse with Lindsay Law. I contacted them, and they said “Hey, if you want an internship, come on by.” But already that afternoon I had landed a job as director of theatrical distribution for Troma, and so I declined because, you know, I had this big job. When I think about it, it was ninety-nine dollars a week. I’d come directly from Berkeley, where the weather was great, the people were incredibly groovy, the coffee was good—remember, this was before New York had good coffee—and I’d go to work in the morning, slogging through this slush to get to the Troma building on Ninth Avenue, for these guys who I know are heralded often as, you know—

TH: “The kings of independent film”—

JS: The kings of independent film. But you know, when I was there, maybe they were just having a bad week. Anyway, I lasted a week and a half—basically, I just couldn’t take people screaming at each other all day. But I did manage to walk out with a lot of great one-sheets—Surf Nazis Must Die, Toxic Avenger, all that kind of stuff. So I ended up doing an internship for Program Development.
   Now, here in New York, by “internship” you mean “slave labor,” and the first day there, I said, “Maybe I should look at the screenplays you guys have here in development, just to see what you’re doing.” I took home, I don’t know, 14 or 15 scripts, including four different drafts of a script based on the life of Clara Bow, which the company was developing at the time. I stayed up all night and read everything, and came in the next day with a two-page proposal to rewrite the Clara Bow script for next to nothing—something, just so I could survive—and after a couple of little glitches, I landed that job.

TH: It took James a little time to return to his screenwriting roots...

How about you, Ted?

TH: I had dropped out of college, and had been working for various arms of Ralph Nader’s organization out in Oregon. I started the Oregon Public-Interest Research Group’s canvas, and it was incredibly successful—

JS: That’s going to sound really nice, Ted. “It was incredibly successful, and Ted was the sole reason for its success. In fact, it was a stunning, astonishing success.”

TH: Whatever. There were many reasons why it was successful, Oregon being such a prime place to do door-to-door canvassing, but it was like the first time something had actually gone right for me—somehow that really depressed the hell out of me, so I decided I really had to get out of there. I started applying to schools, and I’d always wanted to go to film school but felt that it was really self-indulgent, and I shouldn’t do it. But because I was so depressed that day, I filled out my NYU application and NYU ended up giving me more money than the other places I applied to, so I decided to go. At that time I thought I would make radical documentaries.
   So it brought me to New York, and while I was at NYU I answered an ad in the Village Voice and got a job for a small film company inspecting their 16-millimeter prints. They had a big non-theatrical business. While I was there, they released their first big hit film, which was Nightmare on Elm Street, and I was soon able to become their first paid script reader.

This was New Line, right? Didn’t you both end up there as readers?

TH: Well, right around that time James had come in and pitched New Line a silent, black-and-white Wooster Group version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame starring Willem Dafoe. And the week before, I had delivered my coverage of Whitley Strieber’s alien abduction book, Communion. I found it really fascinating, and recommended that they hire Godard to direct it, because I loved that in its efforts to show that the material was true, the book created a bad narrative. I’m sure they thought, “This guy’s coverage is not exactly what we were looking for…”
   So I was kind of aligned with this nutbag who had just come in to pitch us this Wooster Group thing.

JS: But I was already doing coverage for them.

TH: Maybe.

JS: Yeah. I was doing really, really great—in fact, astonishingly successful—coverage for them.

TH: Well, Janet Grillo suggested the two of us meet, and given that James was somebody who was addicted to good coffee, he suggested that we meet at De Robertis coffee shop in the East Village. He’s always been driven by the quality of the caffeine.

JS: I really tried to get Ted to work on this feature-length video that we were doing at the Wooster Group which ended up being called White Homeland Commando, but Ted was busy doing Frankenhooker…

TH: No, they didn’t hire me on White Homeland. But one thing we discussed was our mutual affection for Raul Ruiz’s films—

James, you ended up producing his feature The Golden Boat, right?

TH: Well, I ended up getting a job at the same place James had just left—Program Development Company. It had become Vanguard Films, John Williams’s company. I started there just after coming off of AD’ing Basket Case II, and I had been there about four or five months, and nothing much was happening. James got money together for The Golden Boat and offered me the AD gig, but we were getting close to getting the money for Trust, Hal Hartley’s film. And I had to make a big career decision—do I go off and work with this guy that I had a good time getting drunk with—Raul Ruiz—and this guy that I like, James Schamus, or do I stick it out maybe two or three more weeks and see if we get money for Trust. I opted for the latter. I think it was about the same time as Thank You and Good Night, wasn’t it?

JS: Yeah, I was working with Jan Oxenberg, helping her complete this really interesting film that she had gotten funding for from a lot of different sources, including American Playhouse. It was a film that eventually took her almost ten years to finish. But I think it was really a signature piece for that era.

TH: One of my mom’s favorites.

JS: On the one hand, a documentary about the death of the filmmaker’s grandmother, and on the other hand, a real inventive mix of genres and approaches to filmmaking, inspired by this documentary situation.

Speaking of “signature pieces,” can you characterize for me what was happening in New York at that particular moment—the late eighties—as far as films, particularly indie films, were concerned?

JS: When we were starting out, there was this very interesting hybrid—three or four strands of production which New York still retains the archaeological traces of. One was B-movie production, and really, B-movie production that was supported by an ongoing stream of pornography production. So that crews that were working on the porn productions and were trying to break into more professional movies as a rule had resumes that listed their B-movie credits. For example, when I was on the set of The Golden Boat, we had Annie Sprinkle do a cameo walk-on—fully clothed, by the way. And the second she came on the set, the entire crew was like, “Hey, Annie! Haven’t seen you in a couple of months!” So people were really getting their training on these films, because there was still a fair amount of 35-millimeter pornography production at that point, although it was beginning to wane.
   The second strand was that the NEA, state or private foundations were funding a lot of 16-millimeter work that was documentary and experimental. So there was a whole group of filmmakers that were coming out of short-form experimental or long-form doc/experimental work. This is where Christine Vachon and Todd Haynes and the whole Apparatus Productions thing comes in, in that little room on Lafayette Street. There was a whole ethos of grabbing a little money here and a little money there. So that was another river flowing in.
   Then there were the independent distribution companies that had sprung up in New York, many of which had been based on the college circuit—particularly New Line, Miramax—who were picking up European art films and finding a way to base their assumptions about the film business in the arthouse cinema that New York really had so much of at that time. In the early nineties, these theaters kind of disappeared, but now they’re slowly coming back in a more institutional form—Walter Reade, Film Forum, all this other stuff.
   Finally, you had the center of all media—electronic media. The television studios were here, so you had a lot of higher-end, studio-based video stuff.

TH: You could even break it into a fifth or sixth strand at that time, too, frankly. In addition to porno stuff there were all the horror films going on—

JS: That’s why I said B-movie.

TH: And then there was also the beginning of the home-video business. I remember there was a film that got made that a lot of people I knew worked on; it starred Philip Bosco as a cab driver who wants to be a Shakespearean actor.

JS: Oh, yeah...

TH: All these kind of “quality,” Playhouse-type films that were getting funded by these New York distributors. For instance, as soon as New Line had a hit with Nightmare on Elm Street, they got their first video deal...

TS: One of the first big infusions of capital. Like with Vestron, which was based in Connecticut, there was a real flush of money that came in. So you had this kind of coagulation of different kinds of filmmaking that the home video money fueled into feature-length narrative. It was coming from all different pockets of filmmaking activity in New York, but different, obviously, than what was out in L.A.

TH: It was how I really learned how to make movies. I came out of film school—I didn’t stay there very long—and I didn’t even know what a production assistant was. I was lucky that I had this script-reading gig. And then I ended up getting hired by a producer who made these kind of sleazy horror films. He thought I could write coverage for him to get his movies made and he started hiring me to do business plans, which I knew nothing about, but it taught me a lot. Same with my friends—Bob Gosse, who PA’d with me and is now a director and was one of the founders of The Shooting Gallery—and Hal Hartley’s cousin, though not really; they thought they were cousins, but they weren’t—

JS: Just kissing cousins.

TH: Bob worked for a company called Cinema Sciences. They had one of these video deals. They would basically shoot three movies simultaneously, with the same cast. They’d hire some name actor to come in for a day or two of work, and they traveled with sets of paramilitary costumes, Civil War uniforms, Revolutionary War uniforms, gangster costumes, and they’d just go in and just run the same actors. Then they’d give the footage to a screenwriter to try and make it fit, to piece it together. And they would be shooting this stuff, you know, using car headlights for lighting.
   Anyway, Bob would talk to Hal Hartley about how they got these movies made, and meanwhile I was working on these horror films. I got hired by another company, called Films Around the World, to find locations where they could shoot an entire movie. Basically, you’d have a three-week prep, and that would be it. They’d be casting young men and women who were willing to run around in their bathing suits, and one guy who’d wear, like, a heavy monster costume. The one I’m thinking of was called Doom Asylum. We found this place where they performed the first lobotomy in New Jersey. It ended up being a tuberculosis clinic for a while, but it was abandoned by the time we got there.
   With that one, we had started production and were casting and there was still no script whatsoever. So the screenwriter sort of cobbled together a script, and the movie came out to seventy-one minutes, We had a contract to deliver eighty, so we used all this public domain footage. You know, we built a “lair”—it may have been in the old Good Machine offices—and the monster sat and watched these old movies on TV so we hit the eighty minutes.
   There was also this guy, Chuck somebody out in Queens, who would shoot the softcore and hardcore porn at the same time...

JS: Oh yeah, Chuck Vincent. Didn’t he die of AIDS?

TH: Yeah, he did. So all of the same crews would go from the Apparatus Productions to the Cinema Science productions to Chuck Vincent’s movies. So anyway, that was kind of how we figured out how to do a movie like The Unbelievable Truth for $65,000. It was like, the basic rules came down to: you had to shoot in nine days; all the locations had to be within walking distance of one another; you’d shoot on a two-to-one ratio, boom.

And you had a crew that was not only experienced, but willing to work for peanuts.

TH: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I thought everybody in film put orange gel over headlights. I thought that was how you made movies.

James, what was your experience in L.A. when you were out there in 1988?

JS: Well, I ended up writing another screenplay, after the Clara Bow one, that got a lot of good reads, and was being cruised by a major agency. An agent there promised me he’d set up twenty-five meetings for me and all this stuff, and lend me all this money—tens of thousands of dollars. The screenplay was based on Richard Price’s first novel, The Breaks. In any case, the option was running out a week later. I’d come on to do the rewrite really quickly, because they’d had it in development for several years, and it was a really expensive option. Anyway, we literally had a week to set it up.
   I landed in L.A. at noon on the first day of the 1988 Writers’ Guild strike. The entire town just shut down. I mean, no one would take a call, except for a couple of very sleazy people who will remain unmentioned. So it was my introduction to the Hollywood side of the screenwriting business. I met a lot of people out there, and learned a few lessons.

Such as?

JS: Such as, I thought I better get back to New York and learn how movies are really made—understand the process—before I put myself in a business where writers in particular were being very well paid but turned into gigantic, overweight, macho, whiny, sniveling, ego-driven maniacs. I mean, people were insane. [Laughs.] Not that I’m not an overweight, sniveling egomaniac, but at least I’m in New York.

TH: Prior to moving to New York I had gone to L.A. once to see The Clash when I was nineteen or something. I didn’t go again until Wedding Banquet got nominated for an Academy Award. That was my first real trip there, and I was completely petrified. Dependent on James—I didn’t want him to leave my sight. “I have to drive in the city? Oh my God!”

James, you’ve said before that “you can create your own version of the film business in New York.” Could you both elaborate?

TH: I don’t know about James, but I was pretty ignorant about the whole thing, and I think that was probably the greatest advantage I had. That whole line, “If I knew then what I knew now, I probably wouldn’t do any of it.” I just really wanted to make movies that I wanted to see, and had a willingness to just go forward and get it done. And there were enough people in New York who had a similar energy and commitment that a lot of it ended up happening. So I guess in a sense it’s true. But it wasn’t so preconceived.

JS: Yeah. I had dinner with Ang [Lee] last week, and after a while we lapsed into the “So whatever happened to so-and-so...” thing. And I turned to him and said, “My God, we’re old enough to be having these conversations. This is frightening.” But anyway, looking back, you can find patterns to things you’ve done which in the end are as much determined by environmental factors as anything else. But the fact is, a number of confluences, many of them structural and economic, as we’ve discussed, but also quite frankly political, helped create the scene in New York, and the so-called independent film movement.

What do you mean by “political”?

JS: Well, I think there are two things. One is that there’s a kind of residual but long-forgotten politics to independent feature filmmaking in New York that really started in the fifties with people like Abe Polonsky—

TH: Shirley Clarke—

JS: Well, yeah, Shirley Clarke. A lot of people engaged from a social/political point of view who were creating a kind of destiny for their filmmaking that was outside of the system. And a lot of that was being influenced by some of the hype around companies that were here, like United Artists, who really had the publicity ethos of being “creator-driven” in terms of their economics. So the residual feel of that still informs a lot of what we’re about.
   But really, fundamentally, the decision to make feature-length narrative films puts you in an economic sphere of activity that by necessity is going to be dominated by Hollywood. Dominated not only economically, but also ideologically. I look at what we do and no matter how aesthetically daring, and bold, and provocative and new and original, we’re really committed to doing work within a very narrow bandwidth of aesthetic and political activity. We don’t step out that much because if you do, the hatchet comes down.
   At the same time, within that very narrow range of activity is a very wide range of potential audiences. So you’re trading off constantly in terms of those two sides of the business.

TH: When I came to film school here there was a very vibrant, Super 8, no-wave, downtown New York film scene. Nick Zedd, Beth B., Lydia Lunch—all those people. I had a romantic notion about the times of Warhol’s Factory, all that stuff. So there were these little film showings, and I went and wasn’t connected to the movies at all, but it seemed like these people were successful. Their movies were getting shown, and it was exciting. It seemed to me that if you made your movies and you really believed in them and pushed them, there was some way people would see them. Plus, I didn’t have any clues as to the economics of the business. I was working at New Line, and they had this great library of Pasolini films, you know, mixed in with Evil Dead and so on, and I just felt that, because these existed, somehow everybody was making money.

But your definition of success at that point wasn’t directly linked with financial concerns?

TH: I didn’t see a difference. If it showed on the Lower East Side, then it meant it worked somehow.

JS: Just to interject one factoid. The Golden Boat was made with this mixture of grant money, tiny little overseas investments, tiny little this, tiny little that, and we made it in two long weekends. Didn’t cost much at all, but the fact is, it never made any money. But I remember when the film was selected for the New York Film Festival. At that moment, everybody who invested in and worked on the film truly believed that I as a producer was hoarding the incredible amount of money that must have been made because the film was showing at the New York Film Festival.

TH: I remember the New York Film Festival where Blood Simple and Stranger Than Paradise premiered. I had, like, the cheap seats up front to see Blood Simple, and all of a sudden the Coen Brothers get up on the stage, and I recognize them from my local supermarket. They were always there buying cold cereal after midnight when I was there buying cold cereal after midnight. I was like, “Oh my God, it’s those stoners from the neighborhood!” And like two days later, after seeing Stranger Than Paradise, there was Jim Jarmusch on the subway. Somehow it just felt really possible.

That certainly hasn’t changed here.

TH: That’s true. Todd Solondz told me that a month or so ago he went to see some movie at the Angelika on Saturday afternoon, and as he was waiting to get in he noticed that he was standing next to Wes Anderson and Vincent Gallo. He was like, “God, we’re all such big losers, going to see a movie by ourselves on a Saturday afternoon.”
   And I’ve experienced that in reverse now, too. When I was a PA, all of the people that were above me I just looked up to like real gods, and since then I’ve been able to collaborate with them—Michael Nozik, Bob Colesberry, the whole production world—and having that awareness, knowing that these people I’d PA’d with were now directing their own films. It was all right there, and the reason that people are here is not because they want to drive that cool sports car—

JS: Well, some of them do, and that’s their right.

TH: But there’s that hunger to really make the movie.

A very broad question: how have things changed since you’ve founded Good Machine, both for you and for the city as a filmmaking center?

JS: We just don’t look as good as we used to.

TH: At that time, I wasn’t aware of producer collaborations that extended beyond, you know, Rollins/Joffe. None of it seemed accessible. There wasn’t a way I could go in as the young filmmaker and meet some of these people. Now, there’s a huge proliferation of producer-driven, director-driven companies. I think that there are more points of access. To me, at least, it felt like if you wanted to make an independent film of any sort you could never even get to a producer who had made movies before, let alone one of the film companies that financed them. Now there is such an apparatus of things sucking things in.

JS: Well, basically, when I started out, anybody who would introduce themselves as a “producer” was by definition somebody who’d never made a movie before, and never would. You know what I mean? All those people with the business cards printed up? Now, for better or worse, although the American independent movement sells itself on the auteur, writer/director concept—and I think that’s legitimate—in fact, structurally, it is very much a producer’s cinema. The auteurs themselves function as producers in many ways. We ourselves emerged as characters or “figures” at a time when structurally we were able to adapt the concept of producer to a situation that was crying out for it.
   You see now, quite frankly, that that construct is more and more marginalized in the studio system. I used to think that writers got treated badly out there, but the producers are really taking a beating now that the studios themselves “know how to produce.” Obviously it’s a pathetic mistake, and part and parcel of mismanagement. But there’s a reason for that mistake. It’s not that people are stupid, it’s just that there’s this structural change taking place and people haven’t adapted to it yet.

TH: There are a couple other things that have changed that I’m aware of. First of all, back then it was tougher to gain the proprietary knowledge associated with producing. I got hired for jobs because I’d done script coverage and no one else had, because I knew how to do a budget on a computer. You know, because I had the Teamsters’ phone number and I knew where to buy recanned film stock. All that stuff is so available right now—budget templates, information on crews—so that a person who’s PA’d on one film who’s relatively intelligent can get access to that information. It took me two or three years to accumulate that originally. So I think that’s changed and allowed people to get movies made.
   Also, the awareness of how to go out and then bring your film to market was something that very few people knew how to do. If it wasn’t for Jim Stark, in some ways, talking about how to go about all of this, we wouldn’t have had the courage or the knowledge to do it. Now, everyone knows when you go to Sundance, how to handle Berlin...

JS: There were two kinds of discourse about independent film ten years ago that were replaced by a very different public discourse. I remember when I was editing the precursor of what is now Filmmaker magazine, called The Off-Hollywood Report. We filled it up with stuff like, “How to Shoot Car Scenes”—you know, how to rig cars if you don’t have anything to rig them with. Really kind of artisanal approaches, which had a kind of kick-shit ethos attached to them. And the other discourse was a real high-art, aestheticized approach to discerning what was valuable in any kind of independent film. So you had these two tracks: on the one hand, this very get-your-hands-dirty thing, and on the other hand, this extremely rarefied, analytical approach to understanding film.

TH: And you also had the people who did both. I remember grips arguing on film sets I was on about how long a close-up should be held, or talking about Michael Snow’s films, things like that.

JS: I remember taking a one-day 16-millimeter filmmaking workshop at Collective for Living Cinema. which seems so ephemeral now, but it was one of those institutions in that period that were so important.

And there was Millennium Film Workshop, founded by Ken Jacobs.

JS: Now this has all been displaced into what I call a kind of personality model, in terms of discourse about film. Very much about people like me and Ted, or people like Todd Solondz, how these people do what they do, what their tastes are, how they mix business and aesthetics, blah blah blah. And again, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, anything incorrect or invalid, but it’s a discourse that hovers around a very particular economic model of what independent film is.

TH: Also, when we started out, we were able to bring our film, The Wedding Banquet, to market as producers. You’d meet the foreign buyers, have access to the two or three people in a given territory who would actually buy these films. You’d do that deal, and have a level of trust that was sometimes warranted and sometimes wasn’t. These companies that became the investors in movies grew to be big conglomerates. Now you’re dependent on a Good Machine International, or Miramax or New Line to place your films in the right hands. That part of the knowledge/information circuit is no longer accessible.

So that has adversely affected your ability to get product into the market?

JS: Well, that is simply an index of a fundamental problem, which is the relationship between the cost of making a film and the cost of bringing it into the marketplace. The maturation and saturation of the so-called independent marketplace and the arrival of really deep-pocketed, sophisticated, structured capital into the system has meant that, on the one hand, you can make a movie for three dollars, but on the other hand, it’s going to cost a million dollars to get that film into the marketplace—even one little tiny toehold into the marketplace. You can open an arthouse film, or a foreign-language film, for less than $100,000, and see if it can grow, but frankly, you’ll fail.
   I don’t know of a successful release that has spent less than $100,000—by “success” I mean a release in which the economics were in a real relationship to the negative cost of the film and the recoupment of that cost.

TH: Around the time we started Good Machine, Bingham Ray and Jeff Lipsky had founded October Films here, and one of their first releases was Life Is Sweet. And I remember their eighth-week gross had surpassed any prior week gross on a per-screen average. Those days of being able to get a film out there for a while, get some good reviews, get Roger Ebert or somebody to champion it—they don’t exist anymore. And it starts to affect the kinds of movies that get made—at least the ones that get financed. So that’s changed tremendously.
   The other thing that I always find really interesting—and it kind of goes from the independent world into the studio world—is that change in definition of producer. Originally it was the guy with the business card and the Rolodex; the guy with the good idea. Then it was the guy who did that but also sort of oversaw the production. Then it was the one who did that and brought money to the table. For a long time, that’s what distinguished independent film—financing a movie like Walking and Talking, or Safe, took year upon year and five or six companies. Now, also on the studio level, the definition of producer is the person who brings in a big chunk of the money. In another year, the only people with studio overhead deals will be those companies that also bring money to the table.
   By the way, now I think it’s gone another step, if you look at the Blair Witch model. Now you not only have to come up with the good ideas and the connections and the know-how and, the money, but you also have to bring your audience to the film before the film is ever shown in public. How else do you open a movie with word of mouth on day one?

It’s a tired question, but are you planning on getting involved in this whole digital-video phenomenon? There are a number of other New York production houses—Open City, GreeneStreet—which have started specialized DV divisions.

JS: Actually, we are making a gigantic announcement next week: we’re buying AOL.

TH: We did the first digital movie, by some people’s accounts: Love God. It’s not something that we have as an agenda item, though. We’ve certainly explored it for different films, but you know, we make movies, and some will be shot digitally, some shot 35, some 16.

Ted, you mentioned several years ago how the most successful marketing of a recent film was the Pamela Anderson–Tommy Lee sex video over the Internet, asserting that traditional distribution venues for independent filmmakers were for the most part a dead end.

JS: Pure bluster.

TH: No, I actually think, frankly, that Blair Witch is an offshoot of that kind of phenomenon.

JS: Actually, I think there is something essentially true about what Ted was saying in that article, which ties in with what we were saying about the role of the producer. At this point, you’re going to have to figure out new ways to cost-effectively find and deliver an audience to your movie that is not simply the expenditure of P&A for national TV, etc. You’re gonna have to get your photograph on the back of the milk carton and make sure that people are staring at it when they’re eating their cereal after midnight.

TH: And I think that audiences want something that feels authentic—not to say it will be authentic—and that sort of thing really informs both the Pamela–Tommy video and the South Park guys’ Spirit of Christmas short, as well as Blair Witch. The audience could feel like “this is our own,” not something that one of the seven major media companies had preconceived and developed. People always hate to compare the music business and the film business, but it’s the way that records are still broken—starting a single in the dance clubs before it gets radio play, and before the album comes out. A perfect example is when Guns ’N’ Roses were signed to a major label. The first thing they did was release an independent album on an “indie” label, so they could get their authenticity in place.

James, you were recently quoted as saying that Good Machine is now doing “the pseudo-independent Hollywood thing.” What does that mean?

JS: It means that the economics of the so-called “independent” film business have become simply a simulacrum of Hollywood, just on a more miniaturized scale, which requires you to bifurcate your potential audiences, and means you address more specialized and specific audiences. So therefore you can look either smarter or dumber, depending on which direction you want to go. And you make films that are specific to a target audience, the size of which relates to the overall cost of your budget and the marketing. It’s no different from what Hollywood does, except for the fact that at the end of the day, the thresholds now in terms of casting and budget are economically higher than they’ve been in the past.
   Something that’s been absolutely successful about Ted and myself, I should say, is that we’ve never been snobs. We haven’t worn our eclecticism on our sleeves as some great value, but at the same time we’ve always recognized that great movies can cost a dollar or $200 million. The economics of them impact on what they are, but they don’t necessarily impact on the valuation of them as aesthetic/cultural objects, so we’re having a great time making movies the studio way, the independent way, the digital way, the whatever way.

Not that long ago Good Machine signed a first-look deal with Universal, and before that you had another similar two-year deal with Fox. Have you ever considered opening an office in L.A.?

TH: I think we felt if we opened a Los Angeles office, the vacuum, the magnet, the black hole—whatever it is you want to call it—would draw all of our attention in that direction. We like our lives here. It also helps to think about other things. I’m slightly obsessive, and I don’t know how I’d get my mind off the movies I’m working on if I didn’t wander the streets of Manhattan, which instantly give me something else to think about.

JS: It’s not like we’re placing a distance between ourselves and all those “evil Hollywood Types,” but rather that we’re able to use our ignorance about who had lunch with who, or which spec script is going out on Friday, or whatever, to clear out time to do stuff that we think is really interesting and cool and important. So it’s a real luxury, quite frankly, to have that distance. And Ted’s right, I think that if we opened an L.A. office—which some day we may, by the way—it would serve as a kind of vacuum for everything else to get sucked into, because all the agents, all the managers, all the studio execs would be having lunch with whoever was in that office...

TH: I used to say we had to be in New York because we were more dependent on Europe for our independent films, but frankly, these days we have to be in New York because we’re more dependent on Europe for our Hollywood films! Because of that whole co-financing thing, we need the response of the international community for the big-budget films. With the small films, it’s different: You make a film and you want everyone to be unaware of it until it goes to Sundance or whatever, and then they can respond naturally to it. But when you’re trying to make Ride with the Devil, or even Happiness, you have to make sure that Europe knows about it even before L.A. does.

You mentioned the “who-had-lunch-with-whom” paradigm of L.A.—isn’t there some version of that here in New York as well?

JS: You’d have to ask Ted, because I never go out. Here’s it’s more about who’s having sex with who, which is much more interesting.

TH: I think it’s that way out there, too...

JS: I’m always so surprised at how collegial the film world is here. It’s amazing. I mean, we work with just about every person who could be conceived of as our competition in New York. Actually, the only person I have a long-running feud with in New York is Ted. But from Christine Vachon, or Jim Stark, or Larry Meistrich, to a lot of the newcomers, like GreeneStreet—I hate to use that word “community” but it just feels right. You don’t have a feeling of a specific pie that has to be carved up. You feel that people are generating situations and energies that are helpful to each other.

I assume you don’t get into bidding wars with, say, Shooting Gallery over a spec script, then.

TH: It’s never happened. I think some of it is that it’s never been an easy time to make films in New York. I talk to people in L.A. and they tell me how hard last year was: “Nobody got any movies made.” Well, it’s always kind of been that way in New York. And you know that you’re not going to get a movie made unless somebody gives you that little piece of information here, and another person gives you something else over there. We’re across the street from The Screening Room, which is now a really well-programmed theater. Often you’ll go in there for a drink and they’ll be three or four other downtown film people there, and you’ll get to talking and somebody will say, “Oh, you should show that to so-and-so,” or, “Call this person.” It’s always been that way here because the feeling is that it’s so impossible to get a movie made, each time it happens should be a cause for celebration whether you’re involved with it or not.

Good Machine is known for cultivating long-term relationships with directors, Hal Hartley and Ang Lee being perhaps the two most obvious examples—

TH: One of the first things James and I did when we decided to work together was to draw up a list of directors we wanted to work with. Among them was Ang Lee. I’d wanted to work with him since I’d seen his film at NYU, and I thought he was too beyond my reach—which he was, for a while.
   What this whole relationship with directors comes down to, I think, is a real love of film, rather than a love of the business side. I really want these people to make movies. Hal and I stopped working together for a while because there really wasn’t a need for either of us to work with each other, but during that whole time I never stopped asking myself what I could do to help him get his movies made.

Could you talk a bit about your development process with the directors you work with?

TH: Well, James and I early on adopted this credo of “production as development.” First of all, you have to hear the stories that people want to tell, figure out what the current climate allows for in terms of budget and then work out how you’ll hit that number. For example, do you want to make the sacrifices you’ll need to make to get a star in the lead? We usually have a very conservative approach as opposed to saying, “Yes! We’ll get Cameron Diaz and Brad Pitt and then this little indie film will become a big hit!” So you work through that and figure out what the right number is going to be for this piece. Then you determine who the folks are who want to work in that venue, in terms of the buyers, the financers.
   Then you have to figure out how to get it into the marketplace. I’m always really nervous about knowing when to introduce a script into the marketplace—how do you get it to the point where it’s really going to allow people to focus on it the way it should be focused on? And that’s really tough, because people need feedback. You may bring things out too early, but then that input level helps the director to go back and do another series of rewrites.
   Basically, our development process is about allowing someone’s skills to reach the level where they will get somebody to give them the money they need to make the movie they want to make.

It sounds like a relatively intensive process.

TH: It’s funny, I had an experience with a director we’re doing a first feature with that’s technically independent, but which in a lot of ways is kind of “Indiewood.” I was meeting with him and the writer and the other producer, and it was a six-hour story meeting where we only dealt with three or four scenes. He’d already had several films in studio development prior to this, and he said, “I don’t see why anyone wants to make these indie films. It’s so hard! The studio didn’t care about what I was doing with the final scene. I never had a story session like that. I want to go back to Hollywood!”

I’m assuming the process would be somewhat less laborious—at least regarding the script­—with more seasoned directors...

TH: Oh, yeah. After three or four films, what I can personally give a director starts to get rather limited—other than my experience and passion and a couple of good ideas. But with those first, second and third films you really kind of work them through the process of exactly how they want to make movies and what matters most, let them know what compromises are necessary for the choices they’re making. And that remains incredibly rewarding for me on a personal level, although it means frequently that someone’s going to go off and do movies without me. But, hopefully, there’s always that desire to still work together.

Are you guys sick of talking about Happiness? l read recently, James, how you pitched Todd Solondz’s script—not an easy sell—to potential financers with a sort of post-Marxist soliloquy about late capitalism’s overproduction of desire and the inability of the social structure to absorb that excess properly, resulting in pedophilia and the like in suburbia. I couldn’t quite imagine what those pitch meetings must have been like.

JS: It was weird because it worked. I really did end up doing that, it was my shtick. We did that pitch in Cannes.

TH: That’s been your shtick ever since our first meeting at the coffee shop. “Capitalism is the manufacture of desire.”

Did Universal read the script before you went into production?

TH: I have no idea.

JS: Don’t know.

TH: I think October had a level of autonomy that allowed that movie to get made, and people that were committed to making that film. There probably wasn’t much of a desire to see it at Universal until after it won the Critics’ Prize at Cannes.

TS: Well, it was interesting, because what on the one hand was the downside of working within this “Indiewood” system, this faux-independent Hollywood system—being under the heavy hand of corporate censorship, that is to say—was at the same time their Achilles’ heel, because Universal, and their parent company, Seagram, really didn’t want to be seen that way. So we could sort of use the system to negotiate a distribution deal that allowed the film to find its way into the marketplace. But again, those are very specific negotiations, and it’s sobering to think that there is an enormous amount of censorship we practice unconsciously that keeps out some of the other things. This experience made it clear how certain things can get in and stay in, once they work, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a wonderful world and late capitalism is groovy for everybody.

TH: At the end of that whole cycle, we were trying to figure out if there was a way to release an R-rated version on video—which we ended up not doing. We thought about putting a black bar across certain scenes that said “Censored.” We were told we could put in the black bar but we couldn’t use the word “Censored.” So, in essence, “censored” was censored.

Do you ever find that you turn down a project because its prospects for commercial success are limited, despite great promise?

JS: Oh yeah, absolutely. Look, there are two things to say about that. One of the things that we have to do in terms of exercising our judgment as producers is to have an instinct for the relationship between the budget and the market. One of the luxuries of being self-identified as “New York independent filmmakers” is that we’re not scared of the lower budgets, so long as we think there’s a marketplace for them. They don’t have to be crossover indie hits—although, these days the system is set up so that if you don’t think that way, you almost don’t have a chance of making a film. But for us, still, we try to work within producible margins, even if the system is really working against that.
   That’s the biggest change from years past. You used to be able to nurture a film and let it grow, but now, however much the movie is made for, in order for it to receive distribution, someone along the way must believe that it can eventually get to 1,000 screens. I mean, I’m overstating the case, but the system is set up in such a way that if you don’t believe that could be a possibility, there’s an enormous disincentive to getting involved. And so what we’re trying to do is figure out a way to say, “Hey, if it costs a million, you can make 1.3 million, you’re good.” Whereas in fact the system says, “No, you can’t do that anymore.” I remember when Poison broke a million at the box office and there was a sense of almost unreality to the magnitude and significance of that achievement. Now, no matter how tiny your film is, getting a million dollars is like, “OK, so they paid for the party.”

Are you going to distribute any more films?

TH: Hopefully not. I mean, if we were in the same situation I’d do it again, but I can’t say I’d like to repeat the Happiness experience. Unfortunately, there are films we’re drawn to that will cause trouble, so maybe if it’s cost-efficient...

What are you working on right now?

TH: I think we have a handful of really difficult movies to get made right now, and some of them might have distributors come on because it’s a “cool” project, hip and daring or whatever, and it shows their indie cred, but on the other hand, what will happen at the end of the day? I now know enough to go through the what if thing every time.

Well, in the end, Happiness did quite well. What about movies like Safe, which appeared on virtually every critic’s best-of-the-decade list, but barely registered at the box office?

TH: I know, it made like $200,000 or something.

How many movies—movies that are not only critically lauded, but actually have the potential to change perceptions—like that can you make a year?

TH: Well, that’s the reason you make the movie, because you feel you have the potential to do that. Up until a certain point, I really thought that Ride with the Devil would have that kind of impact. It was an even bigger entertainment, and it seemed like people would really grab hold of it. And yet it’s really kind of a similar experience, but one that cost thirty times the budget of Safe. There’s nothing more demoralizing than walking through that.

JS: It was basically dumped by the studio. Did you notice that the ads for it were basically the size of postage stamps? We thought it was kind of a nice little movie...

TH: We wanted to go see it at the Kendall Square Theater in Boston at Christmas, and you had to go to the 4:30 screening—it was the only time it was playing.

JS: But you know, I have to say that I was surprised at my own lack of professional jealousy when I saw the whole slew of really interesting studio films this year that were doing well. So many people at the top of their form.

TH: It was invigorating. I had a period where I was a little down, and frankly what brought me up was that I saw a bunch of fantastic Hollywood films.