Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(34)
That spring, I pitched a few projects, but Columbia passed on all my ideas. Then I found a script titled The Farm of the Year about two brothers in Iowa. Their father dies, and the brothers inherit the family’s successful farm. But after running it for a few years, the farm fails, and the bank moves in to take it over. David Puttnam at Columbia liked the script, but another company, Cinecom Pictures, owned the rights and wanted to produce it. David, ever affable, told me, “Go, make it great.”
Cinecom pledged $5 million to make the movie and hired me to direct it. I started tweaking the script, scouting locations, and working on preproduction. Richard Gere signed on to star, along with Penelope Ann Miller, Brian Dennehy, Kevin Anderson from Steppenwolf, and a young Helen Hunt, who later went on to win an Oscar for Best Actress in her role in As Good as It Gets. I brought over several other actors from Steppenwolf to round out the cast: Terry Kinney, Bob Breuler, Francis Guinan, Laurie Metcalf, Randy Arney, and Malkovich. I also cast Moira to play Richard Gere’s girlfriend, and in a small roll I cast a then-unknown actress named Laura San Giacomo (who later became known for her role as Maya Gallo in the sitcom Just Shoot Me!).
We shot the film in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and I found my transition from theater directing to film directing a little more difficult than I’d anticipated. I was just thirty-two years old and often felt unsure of my decisions. Moira and I rented an apartment in Cedar Rapids, across the street from the production offices we’d set up, and I spent so much time in our apartment tweaking the script that the production manager walked across the street one afternoon and urged me to spend more time in the offices—the production folks were all convinced I was hiding out from them. We began shooting. The days were long, and I kept cutting and adding things to the script. Laura San Giacomo had just the one small part in the movie, a few scenes, but the day she arrived I decided to cut her character. It just wasn’t working in the script, and I didn’t want to shoot something that would end up on the cutting room floor. Just as I had experienced with Tom Irwin and True West, one of the hardest parts of being a director is making decisions for the sake of the project that may disappoint people. Fortunately, Laura responded sweetly and didn’t hold it against me.
Meanwhile, the production manager was set to receive a bonus from the studio if he brought the movie in under budget, so he continually sliced and diced where I wanted more. In one major scene, the brothers burn down their farm. I’d envisioned the Great Chicago Fire or Atlanta burning in Gone with the Wind, but we ended up with what looked like three candles on a birthday cake. Not enough money had been spent on the scene. So I scheduled a reshoot with lots of fire everywhere, spent a lot more money with multiple cameras rolling, and got what I wanted—so much so that we scorched the rented farmhouse and had to repair it afterward. I also decided to have the writer, Chris Gerolmo, rewrite the end of the movie. The script had originally ended with a big chase scene. An Iowa cop chases Richard Gere’s character, Frank Roberts, on dirt roads through the cornfields. We started shooting it with actor Daniel Roebuck in the role of the cop, but a big chase at the end wasn’t feeling right for the film that I’d been shooting for the past six weeks. I decided I wanted the movie to wind up with something more poetic, more heartbreaking, so I asked Chris to rewrite it and had to tell Daniel that his scene was out. He and I have remained friends, and he never fails to remind me that I fired him from my first movie. Chris came up with a beautiful scene between the two brothers as they are forced to go their separate ways and say goodbye. The producer, Fred Zollo, introduced me to the great composer John Barry, who wanted to write the score for the film. But by the time we started shooting, Barry had become sick and had to drop out. We needed to hire another composer, and fortunately we got Robert Folk. But with this aspect of the film, too, I would also second-guess which way to go. All the music I’d ever done for plays was hard-hitting rock and roll, but because Barry had wanted to write the score, I’d shifted my thinking to an orchestral score, so that’s what Folk wrote. It was beautiful, but I still wasn’t sure.
To add to the pressure, in the middle of all this confusion, I received a call from the producers who said the selection committee at the Cannes Film Festival wanted to see a cut of the movie.
Cannes! Holy crap! Cannes means red carpet and paparazzi, big movie stars chauffeured to the front door in limousines. Every filmmaker dreams of being in competition at Cannes. A great reception there can really help a movie out.
The pressure was on to get the film ready for the festival. I cranked up my editing pace. The studio execs then decided to fiddle with the title of the film, changing it from The Farm of the Year to Miles from Home. I kept editing, right up to the point when Richard Gere, a pregnant Moira, and I all hopped on the plane for Cannes. Richard and I carried canisters of the 35-millimeter print with us. Richard had been there before, but it was an exciting and totally new experience for me. All the craziness of Cannes was a real shock to the system. Miles from Home didn’t win any awards and received mixed reviews, but it was fun to be at the festival.
Once we got home, I went back into the editing room and kept making changes. The movie needed to be shorter, and I changed the music all around. I decided the scenes with Moira and Richard Gere were unnecessary, so I cut my very own wife out of the film. Ever the consummate professional, Moira told me not to worry.
Miles from Home opened at the World Playhouse in Chicago on September 12, 1988, the same month Steppenwolf opened the inaugural production of The Grapes of Wrath. Richard Gere came into town for the movie’s premiere and we held a party. Some critics liked the film, including the great Roger Ebert, but publicity was limited, and I think a total of only five theaters ever showed the film. It never found its audience and fell flat, earning a grand total of $188,964.