I held Cheryl tight on the dance floor, my head slightly buzzed and my lip slightly singed. I looked over her shoulder and saw Mom, Dad, and Clint with huge smiles on their faces. I saw the members of the cast and crew clinking glasses. As an actor, I had known what it was like to wrap a project, breathing a sigh of relief after weeks of spikes and plummets in confidence. No matter how rocky the ride, the job was done. As a director, it felt different. Every day, from dawn to dusk, I had been compelled to make what seemed like thousands of decisions. Thousands more awaited in postproduction. The sheer breadth of my responsibilities was daunting and occasionally terrifying. But now I also knew the satisfaction of being at the center of things, charged with rallying the troops, winning their trust, and solving our collective problems. When the solutions revealed themselves, in one little eureka moment after another, I felt a high I had never before known.
I whispered to Cheryl, “I love directing even more than I thought I would.”
This remains one of the top-three moments of my life connected to a film. The only other two that compare are when I screened Apollo 13 for the NASA people in Houston and received their enthusiastic blessing, and when I won Best Director and Best Picture at the Academy Awards for A Beautiful Mind.
LIKE CLINT SAYS, no filmmaker ever sets out to make a B picture. In my mind, when we began shooting Grand Theft Auto, I thought we were making a movie that might rival the recent work of Robert Altman and Hal Ashby. I knew that we stood no chance with the Motion Picture Academy during awards season. But the Golden Globes had a comedy category and our script was funny. If I brought my A game and really executed, hell, why not us?
This cockeyed optimism vanished, along with my wrap-night euphoria, when we put together our first cut of the movie. Joe did a great job, and Allan and Dad were pleased with how well the comedy played. But once I watched it through, it hit me: This ain’t no Golden Globes–worthy movie. This is a Roger Corman movie.
On the sidewalk outside the editing facility, on McCadden Place in the heart of old Hollywood, I confided my disappointment to Dad. He did not share my dejected feelings. He told me that the film was exactly what it was supposed to be. He advised me to buck up and work with him, Joe, Allan, and John Davison on making Grand Theft Auto the best fucking Roger Corman movie it could possibly be. Which was something I needed to hear.
Roger liked our cut, but he wanted to hold a test screening for it. He booked a place in L.A. that was better known for testing commercials and TV shows than feature-length films. We brought a black-and-white work print of our color film, with no music or sound effects added in yet, to the testing center. It was a place unlike any I had ever seen before, with each seat in the house equipped with a dial that the viewer could turn to the right when she experienced a moment she liked and to the left when she saw something she didn’t like.
Then the test audience marched in: a parade of blue-haired old ladies, some of whom were probably born in the 1890s. What the hell?
I turned to Roger and said, “This isn’t the audience for Grand Theft Auto! They can’t evaluate it!” Roger merely shrugged. John Davison pulled me aside to explain: the testing center agreed to screen Roger’s films for free as long they could piggyback the screenings on tests for TV commercials. The day we were there, the center was screening ads for . . . Geritol, the dietary supplement marketed to elderly people. I was mortified—about my film’s future and about offending these women with our movie’s off-color humor.
But damned if Roger didn’t know exactly what he was doing. We were seated directly behind a few of the old ladies in the screening room. We saw and heard them guffaw at the movie’s more raw gags, such as the moment where Marion Ross’s character backhands Jim Ritz’s policeman in the groin. I looked at Dad to my left and Cheryl to my right and stage-whispered, “It’s working!”
As soon as the movie was over and the house lights went on, one of these old ladies—who I distinctly saw laughing her head off—turned to her friend with a stern face and said, “Well, that was disgusting!”
The testing center provided us with printout graphs of the audience’s reactions. They looked like sine waves: peaks for the fun parts, dips for the dull parts. Roger announced that we needed to cut every dip from the picture.