McCanlies, Texas
Pop. 1
By Louis Black, Fri., Sept. 19, 2003
Secondhand Lions has been a famous script almost since it was written. During most of the past decade it has been regarded as one of the best unproduced scripts circulating through the film industry (it was optioned four times). Hollywood viewed from the outside is any number of famous actors and actresses, a few brand-name directors, and even fewer widely known script writers. Within the industry it's different, with some of the best known and most highly regarded writers boasting few onscreen credits. There are writers who have great reputations, who have been brought in to polish the scripts of major releases, who have written admired and even imitated screenplays, yet who have seen very little of their work or their name reach the screen. Some have never had a film solely based on their work produced.
Tim McCanlies has a reputation that his filmography belies. Most of the major projects he has been associated with were green-lit at one time or another, though many subsequently were felled by the industry's complicated feudalism that might not boast the explicit castes of the Middle Ages, but where the relationships are just as arcane, while determining and decision-making are even more obscure and primitive. His adaptation of Ted Hughes' The Iron Giant reached the screen to critical acclaim; as a writer/director he scored points with critics and colleagues with Dancer, Texas Pop. 81; and he's acknowledged as the uncredited innovator of the WB's Smallville. (He had suggested and developed a series on the early life of Bruce "Batman" Wayne.) But most of the high regard that the industry holds him in is based on scripts with which most of us are sadly unfamiliar.
That has changed with Secondhand Lions, thanks mostly to New Line, the studio that has McCanlies directing, Jack Green shooting, and a terrific cast acting. Several weeks ago, I saw it at a screening, and when people have asked whether they will like the movie, I've tried not to answer. The film is so in sync with my narrative sensibilities and emotional prejudices that any brief appraisal is too difficult. Suffice it to say when I read the script I came downstairs sobbing and had to assure my son this was a good thing.
Tim and Suzanne, his wife, live on a ranch outside of Austin with 50 head of cattle, but as much as I like them personally the world that ignites me is the cinematic vision inside Tim's head. I'm happy to say this is a great film, for not only its devotion to but respect of narrative, for its humanity, for its characters, for the way Robert Duvall and Michael Caine walk across the landscape, for the way Haley Joel Osment learns important life lessons as we watch. Dreaming can be a form of revolution, but dreams driven by love and imagination are the common prayer of ordinary life. What follows is an abridged version of a discussion I had with Tim McCanlies recently. An expanded version will appear on our Web site.
Grad Student With a Gun
I was born in Great Falls, Montana, although I'm fifth-generation Texan. My father was military, so we traveled around until he retired in 1968 to Bryan when I was a sophomore. The first day in high school, there was an announcement about the drama society. I asked the guy next to me -- wearing an FFA jacket -- "Is the drama society good here?" He said, "Man, you don't want anything to do with that drama society. Nothing there but queers and faggots." I immediately joined.
I survived high school by doing a lot of theatre. I was already making Super-8 films. I was a UT RTF major. Nobody was doing anything interesting, because nobody had done anything. Already working 30 hours a week, I said, "Screw this! I'll go get a real job." On turning 21, I joined the Dallas Police Department and registered at SMU as a film grad student. I was a grad student with a gun.
I'd volunteer for the worst parts of towns because I didn't want to give old ladies tickets, but to put the bad guys in jail. I was seeing a part of the world that I hadn't seen. I never shot anyone, but there were plenty of times when I pulled a gun, and I was shot at a number of times. Interestingly, I learned a lot about writing because I had to write police reports all the damn time -- narratives about what happened.
Send Me Off to Dreamland
At the end of the day you make your own movie. So I made "Nicole et Claude," a short, while at SMU. It won awards and actually sold to Z Channel -- the L.A. version of HBO. As soon as I graduated, I threw all of my shit in an $800 van and moved to L.A. Didn't know anybody there, just went right to Hollywood, because I figured Hollywood & Vine would be the epicenter of everything. I was so naive. I had money to live on for a year, which I thought was enough time to break in.
I fell in with this crowd at Sherwood Experimental College, an avant-garde film school, where people like John Milius taught how to write screenplays.
There followed a few years of writing scripts for hire -- thousand-dollar screenplays -- girls in a summer camp caught between zombies and a forest fire, for ex-porn kings now trying to do movies. Around 1984, a script of mine somehow got to CAA [Creative Artists Agency]. They said, "We'd love to sign you." I've been working ever since as a writer. Never a downtime, really.
Scripts got optioned, I did rewrites, but almost nothing got produced. I would write a script, it would almost get made, and my price kept going up because the movies I was writing were getting green-lit, even though they weren't getting made. I worked on a lot of big action films like Shoot to Kill. Finally, I wrote Secondhand Lions in 1992, which became the cornerstone of my reputation for 10 years.
Dancer, Oklahoma
In the mid-Eighties, during a two-year deal at Disney, they wanted me to write a sequel to Ernest Goes to Camp. I told them that the Ernest movies were morally reprehensible. They sent me home for a month because I was being so difficult. I wrote Dancer during that month of house arrest.
When I moved out to L.A., the conventional wisdom was that one became a director by first getting work as a writer. After two or three successes, then maybe you'd get a shot to direct your own script. That's what I was doing: I was being very patient and playing the game. Then here comes Rodriguez and Linklater, saying, "Screw this! We're just going make our own damn movie!" Boom: They just did a short cut. I'm, "What the hell? You mean I went the wrong path? Screw this!" I decided to go the John Sayles route -- make Dancer by shooting Super-16 mm, spending a couple of hundred grand of my own money.
I announced it in Austin. It's funny -- I was no longer just a schmuck with a script looking for money. Now I was a director with a movie that was to get made! People came out of the woodwork with money. We ended up with enough money to shoot on 35 mm for four weeks out in West Texas.
After production had already started, the script got passed to Sony President John Calley, who read it on an airplane to Japan and said, "I love it. Buy it." He was told, "Well, they're already shooting it." Calley responded, "Buy it anyway."
The way we found out was when Sony started calling us, wanting our paperwork. Our first thought was, "Who the hell are you, and why are you calling us?" I had been on Iron Giant right up until Dancer. "Finally," I thought, "I'm out of the studio system; I'm an independent filmmaker now." Then Sony buys Dancer. I was an indie filmmaker for an entire week.
Dancer got great reviews, but it didn't have any big stars, so they didn't know what to do with it. They decided to open it in L.A. and New York and see what happened. I said, "It's not a New York and L.A. movie, by definition." During a very successful wide release in Texas, Calley said, "You know, when we open it in Oklahoma we should call it Dancer, Oklahoma." Since it only cost two million, they told me they were going to make more off of it than they were from Godzilla, because they spent so little on it. Since it opened in certain cities like New York and L.A., Dancer got the typical TriStar output deal [ancillary sales of rights in such areas as video/DVD, foreign distribution and TV/cable].
Musical Giant? Talking About MMMMYYY Giant!
I got a call one day from Warner's Feature Animation: "Brad Bird just told us how to do Iron Giant, but they're giving us two months to make this deal, and we want to hire you as writer now!" I said, "Well, can I meet with Brad?" They said, "No, he won't meet while we're making the deal."
"What is his pitch?"
"Well, we have somebody writing up what we remember."
"Excuse me?"
I did an outline based on Brad's pitch as they remembered it. Finally, after they made the deal, Brad and I got to meet. "Well, I wanted to write it," Brad opened. "My ideas are completely different than what you wrote."
"Whatever you want to do, I'm here to service you." I told him that I had my own movie to make [Dancer]. "I'm here to help you make yours. Plus, I worked five movies for Warner, and they all got green-lit because I know how these guys think. I will get your movie green-lit." And I did.
We had three days to work out the outline, because we had 20 storyboard guys set to do storyboards. We had to have a script in two months because we had 200 artists ready to roll then. This was on a Monday. On Thursday, we were going to fly to London to meet Pete Townshend, the executive producer. Of course, we were writing a musical with Pete's songs. My second surprise in the meeting with Brad was that "We're not doing a musical."
"Excuse me? We were hired to do a musical with Pete Townshend, our executive fucking producer having written the songs already. This is the album, and that's what we were hired to do."
"Well, it's not going to be a musical. I'm going to go to Townshend and tell him we're not going to do his fucking songs!" declared Brad.
A week later we fly to London and tell Townshend that it's not going to be a musical. Pete's fine: "Well, whatever, I got paid."
After that meeting I always thought of Brad as the Tazmanian Devil -- short and a blur. We started out not getting along, but within a day or two we were best buddies. Iron Giant came out great, but when we showed it to the executives, they said, "Oh, yeah, it's good ..." But they didn't get it. I wish that they had known how to release it. After they saw the reviews they were a little shamefaced.
Of Experience and Innocence: "Secondhand Lions"
Late 2001, my manager said, "Don't get too excited. New Line has just started a family film division." I said, "Well, this is the best family film out there. It's considered one of the best screenplays around." They loved it.
We got Haley Joel Osment attached fairly early on. His dad loved the script, and before I knew it, he said yes. New Line asked me, "Who do you want to go to?" I said, "Duvall." So we went to him on a Friday, and on Monday he said, "yeah." It was the easiest thing in the world. The other role took a little while, but Michael Caine read the script, loved it, and said, "Great, I'm in." The accent was a concern, but I put him with Joe Stevens -- who did a great job working with him.
These guys had not worked so hard in a long time, because they were in every scene. Every scene, every day, nine weeks, no days off; we had weather issues, but ... they have so much experience. I was telling Michael something, and he goes, "Yeah, John Huston said something like that to me once." I'd fall out of my chair. I had to put aside who they were, or I would have intimidated myself. I had to treat them like actors who were all working together. On the other hand, I'm not the kind of director who would say, "Okay, now what I want you to do is this." I just talked to them before the movie started about their character, the backstory, and things like that. Then I just gave them the character, because they're that experienced.
Especially the way that Bobby works: He doesn't want you to talk to him; he wants to do what he does. Then you finesse it. Which is the perfect way to work with Bobby, because what he's going to give you, 99 times out of a hundred, is better than anything you'd ever imagined. So, it'd be stupid to go in and try to shape it before you see what he's going to give you. But that's the way that a lot of directors work.
We would bring Bobby and Michael in just for blocking. They would walk through the scene and do great. I would go, "Okay, I don't have anything else. We'll see you in 10 minutes when we shoot the scene." They would come back, nail it in a couple of takes. Then I'd go, "Okay, we're going to come in for close-ups." That's why I had a DP who's fast like Jack Green. They came in, they bang bang bang bang, then they go back. They were so happy.
There was one time on our last day where I deliberately pissed Bobby off because he couldn't get there. He knew I was doing it! It's the speech where he grabs the kid. He said, "We're going to be here all night. I'm not getting it, I'm not getting it." I said, "Bobby, what I've got is pretty good. I can probably edit together some kind of performance out of this." I could not have said anything to piss him off worse. He went, "Augghhhh!" I said, "Roll camera!" He came out, nailed the scene, then he ran up and hugged me. He knew.
And life goes on. 
Secondhand Lions opens in Austin on Friday, Sept. 19. For a review and showtimes, see Film listings.
