Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I didn’t know what to make of this when Beaks originally suggested it, but I like the fact that he’s supporting a female director. It’s so damn difficult for women to get a foothold in what is still a male-dominated game that I’m willing to throw bandwidth behind her, even if the current film looks like a bit of fluff. Sometimes, directors just need that one hit and that little bit of clout, and then suddenly we see the real filmmaker who’s been waiting to play. At any rate, here’s the always-readable Mr. Beaks:
Yes, Dennie Gordon directed JOE DIRT, and, no, she’s not ashamed to admit it, though she’ll certainly allow that the unabashedly silly, mullet-happy David Spade vehicle, executive produced by his low comedy brother-in-arms Adam Sandler, was an inauspicious first feature for a classy television veteran with a Yale pedigree, particularly in terms of its critical reception. But it’s not like she didn’t see it coming.
“Adam warned me. He said, ‘I’m telling you, we’re going to get beat up bad. You know… we’re going to make a pile of money. People are going to love it, they’re going to laugh at it, it’s going to be huge, it’ll be on the shelf forever at the video store, but buckle up. You have no idea.’” Dennie lets loose a survivor’s laugh, the kind one enjoys after narrowly driving out of a potentially fatal scrape on a rain-slickened freeway. “Honey, I did have no idea. I was, like, on the floor when the reviews came. I could not believe how much critical… we just got blasted! And people personally picked me out. ‘This Yale Drama School, David Kelley protégé, what is she doing playing in the mud?’ Oh, my god, the vitriol! They took me down.”
Luckily, Dennie’s likely to avoid such stinging slings and arrows with her sophomore feature, the charming, lighter-than-helium confection WHAT A GIRL WANTS, starring Nickelodeon phenomenon Amanda Bynes and an impressive assemblage of British thespian talent including Colin Firth, Jonathan Pryce and Dame Eileen Atkins. It’s in anticipation of this film’s April 4th release that I’m hanging out in the Beverly Wilshire chatting with Dennie over quickly cooling cheeseburgers (I simply don’t have the wherewithal to pull off the lunch interview yet). Having just finished a photo shoot, Dennie’s decked out glamorously in a black turtleneck, and periodically surprises herself at just how damn good lookin’ she is today. Our conversation is wide ranging, from her graduate work at Yale to her possible future collaborations with Alpha-Anglo Firth, (note to Dennie: pursue fervently), but, mostly, it’s about this most recent picture where her deft comedic touch, honed over a decade of praiseworthy, award-winning (she won a DGA Award for TRACEY TAKES ON) television work with some of the medium’s most respected names – David E. Kelley, Ed Zwick & Marshall Herskovitz and Aaron Sorkin – is very much in evidence. A loose remake of a lesser-known comedy from Vincente Minelli called THE RELUCTANT DUBUTANTE – according to Dennie, “All we took from Vincente Minnelli was, ‘Okay, a girl in America goes to England, and goes to all these balls, and her dad’s in England, and she falls in love with the guy who plays at the parties,’ and that was it” – WHAT A GIRL WANTS is a modern day fairy tale of a fiercely independent American teenager who wants nothing more than to meet her father, who happens to be a prominent British politician. In other words, it’s a familiar clash of cultures where the hip young Yankee initially frustrates, but eventually disarms her English counterparts. There’s no new ground being broken here, but the sure hand of Dennie Gordon keeps the proceedings light and never less than entertaining (call me a sissy if you want, but I’ll cop to owning a well-worn DVD of BRING IT ON without an ounce of shame). Clearly, Dennie’s on the road to resuscitating her good critical reputation after her much maligned wallow in the Sandler sty. (Not that she’s ashamed at all! Really!) Or, in the director’s words, “I always say this movie is the sorbet that clears the JOE DIRT palate”.
But let’s back up, shall we? Yale School of Drama? For this native of the dinky hamlet known as Robbinsdale, Minnesota, her acceptance there was akin to hitting the big time. “I always considered getting into Yale my first big break,” says Dennie. “You know, having gone to school in the Midwest. They (Yale) get a thousand applicants per year in the directing program, and they only take four. So, that’s like…. ‘Wow!’ And, then, I think theater’s going to be the rest of my life. I’m here, I’m next door to New York City, I’m living in Connecticut: theater will be my life. And I did a lot of plays there; (Christopher) Durang and Wendy Wasserstein were in my class, and Ted Tally, who wrote SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. We had great writers in our group, and we were doing some really cool stuff. And I really felt like I would be doing theater. I would be perfectly happy. But I kept putting projections of film and stuff into all of my plays – in the design – and Stanley Kauffman, who was then-critic for The New Republic said to me, ‘Honey, I think there’s a filmmaker bursting to get out of you.’ So, with his pushing, beckoning and recommendations, I got into NYU film school. But I realized very quickly, ‘I don’t need to go to three more years of Grad School, I need to get working’. So, I started out in television in New York City… as a P.A., doing talk show stuff. But I just really couldn’t wait to go shoot a film. So, when I came to California, there was a program called the Discovery Program that David Puttnam had just started with Showtime. I wrote a film based on a short story by Andre Debus, the same short story Todd Field used for IN THE BEDROOM, only I did a little thirty minute version of it, and it starred John Mahoney. The short story was called ‘Killings’. It went to all the festivals. It went to Athens Film Festival, the British Short Film Festival, won some awards, and David Kelley saw it. So, I became a protégé of David’s, and I worked exclusively for him. And then I worked with Aaron Sorkin, so I just work with the best writers... ever!”
A wickedly direct path to industry success if you can swing it, though Dennie allows that this is her “Cliff’s Notes story”; after all, there were difficulties to follow. “I finished my Chanticleer film, but, then, I didn’t have enough money to do the sound mix, and I was out of money. So, I ran it all around town, and Steven Spielberg saw a rough cut of it. He turned me on to George Lucas, and I got my mix at Skywalker. It’s just incredible.” And that’s supposed to be the rough patch? Most rookie filmmakers would pimp out their children to struggle like this, but Dennie laughs and swears it wasn’t a complete cakewalk. “When you tell stories like this, it sounds like an overnight deal. The reality was… terribly tragic. ‘Oh, my god! What am I doing?’ Doors slamming in your face so fast. Coming from the east coast to the west coast – this is before Sam Mendes made theater legitimate in the eyes of Hollywood – you come with all these lovely theater reviews in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and you think, ‘I have these fantastic reviews of my productions’. And you can’t believe how quickly you get booted out the door. It’s like… slam, slam, slam.”
But in Dennie’s estimation, the theater training is priceless. “I think if you have a theater background, you’re very well-suited to make the jump into film. You learn very early on to collaborate. The writer’s right there. You know, ‘What do you think?’” It is, therefore, unsurprising that Dennie’s stage background proved immensely valuable on WHAT A GIRL WANTS. “I think any time an actor knows that the director comes from the theater, there’s this instant sigh of relief. It’s, like, ‘we’re going to speak the same language. I’m in good hands here.’” That sense of trust and mutual respect established in her actors a sense of freedom that paid off in some inspired improvisation. “Some of my favorite moments in this film were improvised. Dame Eileen Atkins, a great writer herself, comes in with a line like, ‘No hugs, dear. We’re British. We only show affection to dogs and horses.’ She wrote that! It’s, like, ‘Eileen, I’m keeping it!’”
Dennie is generous with plaudits for all of her actors, including Bynes. She praises the teenager, a veteran of television herself from age seven, for being a “solid pro”, and expresses pride over having captured Amanda at such a fleeting moment in a young woman’s life. “When I first met Amanda she was just fifteen, and we were kind of concerned – we have the same agent – and I just kept thinking, ‘I love her, but she’s maybe just a little too young for this role.’ And then I met her the second time. And, you know, there’s a period in a girl’s life where they just suddenly *explode* into womanhood. So, the second time I saw her she was beginning to get curves, but she still lit up the room, and still had all that sparkle, and she was still innocent. And I just thought, ‘Oh, man, we’ve got to role film *now*.’ Let’s get her now. And I’m so glad we captured her in that moment because it’s short-lived in a girl’s life. And we *just* got her. She was there: first screen kiss, first big love. All that. It was all very real for her.”
But mention Colin Firth, and Dennie, like most women nowadays, *really* gets excited. “I always wanted Colin. I wanted to get Colin before the movie was even greenlit. I came over to woo him because I felt he could bring something for the adults. Since BRIDGET JONES, he makes all girls kinda weak in the knees.” As for why it is that this proper, straight-laced Brit melts hearts the world over, Dennie enthuses, “I gotta tell you, when I first went to England to beg him to be in the movie, we didn’t even have a script. I just pitched him the story. And there was something about the pitch, I think, that spoke to him. And with Colin… you get this unbridled principle integrity from Colin; it’s just there in the man.”
Still, for a director on their second feature, it could all be a tad daunting. “I gotta tell you, I had to pinch myself, seriously. There were days I would wake up, and I’d go, ‘I can’t believe I’m in England making a big Warner Bros. picture. I have these killer actors, (director of photography) Andrew Dunn, who just shot GOSFORD PARK, is shooting this movie for me. I’m in St. James’s Palace. I see Charles go by everyday. I’m going to wake up and this is all going to be a dream.’ I never took it for granted.”
After her film opens to what should be significant business over this sports cluttered weekend, it’ll surely be impossible for Warner Bros. to take Dennie Gordon for granted, which is a good thing for them since they’ve got her under contract for two more pictures. But no matter how many more cutesy girl films she churns out for the studio (Dennie would rather tackle more adult subjects, though that may get sticky if WHAT A GIRL WANTS really catches on) she’s already won the heart of the only fan that really matters thanks to that *other* movie. “My teenage son thinks I’m, like, Stanley Kubrick.”
Faithfully submitted,
Mr. Beaks
Thanks, Beaks, as always, and I can’t wait for the other piece tomorrow. Those of you who want to rail at Beaks for going soft might wanna wait until he weighs in tomorrow night on something about 180 degrees away from this. Hehehehehe... should be fun.
"Moriarty" out.
