My Year of Flops (44 page)

Nathan Rabin:
When did you start working on the screenplay for
Joe Versus The Volcano,
and how did the story evolve?

JPS:
What happened was, I wrote
Joe
as a spec screenplay, and I said to my agent, I've never said this before, “I think Steven Spielberg might like this.” She sent it off to him, and then the Writers Guild strike hit. When I won the Academy Award for
Moonstruck,
I was on strike, so that was in 1987. While I was out there, Spielberg called me and said, “I read this screenplay. I really like it. I want to make it, and I think you should direct it.” And I said, “Okay.” And he said, “We should meet.” And I said, “I can't, I'm on strike.” And he said, “You can meet me as a director. The directors aren't on strike.” And I said, “Oh, okay.”

So I went over, and we talked, and we hit it off. We ended up working together for the better part of five years.
Joe
was one of the things we did, but we hung out and did a lot of stuff until I couldn't
take the whole thing anymore and went back to New York. Actually, I worked with him from New York for a while too, but I just had to move on into other stuff.

So then when the strike was over, we went into pre-production and did the film, but it was a big, drawn-out preproduction. It was five months of pre-production, and then like a 70-something-day shoot, and then six months of postproduction. It was endless. So by the time it was over, I felt like my whole life had dried up and blown away. Then when the movie got this bad reception, I just thought, “Man, I've sacrificed everything to do this. I've been away from home for so long that I don't have any friends anymore, and I never want to go through this again.” So that's what sort of drove me away from directing movies for a few years.

NR:
I've read that you had trouble with Warner Bros. making the film.

JPS:
It was a very basic thing. In pre-production, I storyboarded the entire movie. I brought in Mark Canton, who was one of the heads of Warner Bros. at that time, and I think Terry Semel. Terry Semel and Bob Daly were the heads of Warner Bros., and then Mark Canton was under them, him and Lucy Fisher. I went through this certainly with Mark Canton, Lucy Fisher, and I basically showed them the entire film, and they loved it. They said, “This is great, fantastic.” Then I started shooting the movie, and they were like, “What's this?” And I said, “This is the movie.” I shot exactly what I said I was going to shoot.

They were astonished and frightened of this at every step of the way, and I felt like I was in some sort of surreal conversation. I was like, “How can they be surprised?” I was so forthcoming with this information. They began to send voluminous notes to me about things that I should cut, things I should do differently, and I would have none of it. I offered to leave. I said, “Look, I'll go home,” and this was in the middle of shooting. It happened three different times. One time, I called the car to take me to the airport, and each time they would back down. And they would say, “No, no.” [Indistinct grumbling.]

Then the line producer came to me and said they weren't going to release the money to build the volcano, and this is—I don't know exactly how far, but it was way into the shoot. And I said, “What are they gonna call it,
Joe Versus The
? [Laughs.] What are you talking about? What do you mean they're not going to build the volcano?” They tried to hold this over my head, that they weren't going to build the volcano, and I said, “Of course we're going to build the volcano. What the hell are you talking about?” In the end, they had to release the money, and we built the volcano, but it was that kind of thing all through the movie. So it was very wearying, because all I was getting back was complete non-enthusiasm and negative comments and threats, and I was like, “I don't need this shit, let me go home.”

NR:
It seems like one of the reasons people responded to
Joe Versus The Volcano
was that it had a very clear, unique vision. That seems to scare studios.

JPS:
It didn't connect with the broad audience. People went and saw it. It sold some tickets and it had its fans, but it was just a different time, you know? I just did a play, and there was some joke in the play, and before Barack Obama was elected, people laughed at the joke, but after he was elected they stopped, because it was a cynical joke.

And suddenly everybody was a true believer again, and that's how fast the culture changes sometimes. When I did
Joe,
I said to the cameraman, “I want you to treat the camera like it weighs 5,000 pounds and is difficult to move.” Because I was just desperately tired of the highly mobile camera that was just doing these circular shots around round tables for no reason in movie after movie that I was seeing. I wanted to make a movie that was shot differently, that was edited differently, and that left significant time for the audience to have thoughts and feelings. So if an audience didn't want that time, they thought the movie was slow. I was saying, “No, spend some time within this frame, there's some stuff going on in this frame. Give yourself a second to pick up what it is.” And they were not there. They were someplace else. Though, you know,
Joe Versus The Volcano
wasn't
a financial failure. It cost $39 million, including Tom, and made $40 million.

NR:
Why do you think it was perceived as a failure?

JPS:
I think these things just sort of take over in a culture, and it came out of New York, because the
New York Times
hated the film and gave it a very bad review. It was a film that wasn't in sync at all with the times. A lot of audiences just didn't seem to have that music in them. They were in a different place. The rhythm of the film was very different for them. In the intervening years, it seems as though quite a lot of people have found that rhythm.

Full Circle Case File #1, Take 2:
Elizabethtown

Originally Posted January 25, 2007; Revised

I'd like to end with a return to the beginning. Three years ago, I began a long, strange trip through cinematic failure with an essay about 2005's
Elizabethtown,
the first My Year Of Flops Case File, and one of the primary inspirations for the series. When we first contemplated turning My Year Of Flops into a book, my editor Keith proposed that I revisit
Elizabethtown
at the end of the process. I've now seen the film three times; the first before it came out, the second for the first My Year Of Flops entry, and now for the very last Case File of the book.

The idea was to look at the film that began it all with fresh eyes, to see how, or if, the journey changed me. Had I, in the parlance of lobbyists, gone native? Had I spent so much time trying to see the good in films generally considered unambiguously bad that I was capable of appreciating anything, no matter how wretched? So I decided to rewatch
Elizabethtown
shortly before turning in the book, and I was shocked, horrified, and strangely delighted to discover just how radically my take on it had shifted. This journey has changed me. I'm in a better place emotionally. For example, I no longer consider joy and happiness my enemies. So I'm a much more receptive audience for Cameron Crowe when he evangelizes for community, kindness, and
common decency. Three years of My Year Of Flops have instilled in me an eagerness to see the good in everything.

Elizabethtown
is a remarkable specimen in the history of cinematic failure, in that it is both a flop and a meta-meditation on failure. So when its characters deliver aphorisms about the secret glory of failure (“Those who risk, win.” “No fiasco ever began as a quest for mere adequacy.” “You have five minutes to wallow in the delicious misery. Enjoy it, embrace it, discard it. And proceed.”), they seem to be commenting on the film and preemptively consoling its creator.

When I first saw
Elizabethtown,
it rattled my soul. I was apoplectic. I came close to stopping random strangers on the street and complaining about it. Though I had been primed by months of bad buzz, I could not believe that a man as talented as Crowe could create a film this singularly, devastatingly bad.

Elizabethtown
is incredibly ballsy in a girly-man sort of way. If, as the Smiths proposed, it's easy to laugh and hate but takes strength to be gentle and kind, then Crowe is the world's strongest man and
Elizabethtown
is his masterpiece, a film of hardcore niceness and explicit sensitivity.

The film is an auteurial endeavor in the truest sense: Crowe lurks proudly behind every unnecessarily verbose wisecrack, every lovingly handcrafted bit of homemade philosophy, every cutesy exchange. And that bugged the hell out of me the first time around. And the second time around. I resented that the film was populated less by human beings than magical sprites whose lives seemingly revolved around teaching a sad young man that it's a wonderful world even if you're responsible for the athletic-shoe design equivalent of the
Hindenburg.
Rewatching it I found this vision of the universe as infinitely kind oddly touching. In the past few years my defenses have become less formidable, perhaps because the world has been very kind to me as well; I have a wonderful girlfriend, a great job, have put out some books, and inexplicably have a semi-indulgent audience for my foolishness.

After watching
Elizabethtown
three times, I became a cultist by default. I have spent 369 minutes in Elizabethtown. I came to know
the geography awfully well. I discovered that I was looking at
Elizabethtown
all wrong. As a film about human beings residing in the American South, it's preposterous, overwritten, mannered, and precious. But as a big-hearted fairy tale populated by enchanted creatures that takes place in a Kentucky that exists only in Crowe's imagination, it's strangely irresistible as well as preposterous, overwritten, mannered, and precious. I checked my cynicism at the door and gave myself over to the beguiling tenderness of Crowe's vision. (And to the music in his iPod.
Elizabethtown
is ragingly imperfect, but its soundtrack is a thing of beauty.)

Our maddeningly blank hero Drew (Orlando Bloom) begins the film as the man behind the most disastrous product launch since New Coke: Mercury Shoes' Spasmotica. Drew's boss, Phil Devoss (Alec Baldwin), runs Mercury Shoes as a cross between a dot-com start-up at the height of the Internet bubble and a benign cult. Its employees aren't just worker bees, they're “denizens of greatness.” At Mercury, success is a secular religion and failure is heresy. So when Drew is flown to company headquarters to face a grim reckoning, the employees regard him with looks of pity mixed with scorn.

It's the closest Drew will ever come to attending his own funeral. This invites the question, “Why would a successful company like Mercury invest nearly a billion dollars in a shoe without testing it extensively?”

In moments like this, it's important to remember that
Elizabethtown
is an American fairy tale. Fairy tales play by a different set of rules. No child has ever demanded to know the scientific basis for Snow White being woken from an endless slumber by her true love's kiss. Crowe plays everything big. So it's fitting that Drew's boondoggle should be world-class and unprecedented. Any fool can accomplish failure. It takes a special kind of dreamer to lose a company a billion dollars.

Drew decides to commit suicide, but before he can head to the great corporate retreat in the sky, he receives a call from his sister, Heather (Judy Greer), informing him of their father's death. Suddenly he has a reason to live. He'll head down to the titular
locale, drop off his beloved father's blue suit, then head straight back home and commit suicide. Here's what his lifetime checklist looks like:

Little does he suspect that the entire world is conspiring on a massive plot to turn his frown upside down and restore his lost faith in humanity and himself. The conspiracy of joy's chief agent is an almost psychotically perky stewardess/Manic Pixie Dream Girl named Claire, played by Kirsten Dunst. Claire decides she's going to fill his soul with sunshine even if she has to kill him in the process. While bidding Drew good-bye, possibly for the last time, she leaves him with the parting words, “Look, I know I may never see you again, but we are intrepid. We carry on.”

When Drew finally hits Elizabethtown, every front lawn becomes a Norman Rockwell painting: children bouncing ecstatically on a trampoline, a shaggy-haired kid mowing a lawn, American flags waving happily in the breeze. Everyone shoots him a smile and a wave that implicitly says, “You seem to be suffering from a crippling, perhaps failed-shoe-related suicidal depression. That's nothing a few enchanted days in our magical town won't cure.”

That night, Drew's girlfriend (Jessica Biel) dumps him by phone as he juggles calls from her, his sister, and Claire. In Crowe's benevolent world, when Jessica Biel dumps you, you literally have your next gorgeous love interest on the other line. That night, Drew and Claire fall in love over the phone in a thrilling sequence that captures the butterflies and manic energy of fresh infatuation. Suddenly, the breathless bigness of Crowe's dialogue seems perfect. What is flirtation, if not an attempt to make ourselves seem cooler, smarter, and infinitely more clever than we actually are? Drew and Claire are trying to impress each other with their wit, wisdom, and verbal dexterity just as thoroughly as Crowe is trying to dazzle us.

Drew reconnects with his family at a potluck where cousin Jessie Baylor (Paul Schneider) announces theatrically, “This loss will be met with a hurricane of love.” I nearly groaned when I first heard that line; by the third time, it struck me as equally cringe-inducing and heartwarming, in large part due to Schneider's laid-back charm. If anyone can sell that line, it's Schneider. Jessie epitomizes everything I love about Crowe. He easily could have come off as a cartoon redneck, but when Schneider's character tells his father (Loudon Wainwright III), “I teach [my son] about Abraham Lincoln
and
Ronnie Van Zant, because in my house, they are both of equal importance,” it's ridiculous, but also glorious. As someone who venerates music, former teen rock journalist Crowe is not one to cast judgment on, well, anything. So if Jessie is disproportionately proud of the time his old group Ruckus almost opened for Lynyrd Skynyrd, there's something sweet and endearing about that as well.