December 8, 1996: London
I am in England to interview line producers for Velvet Goldmine. The position is especially important on this film: In New York, I can look at a budget and promptly gauge its weaknesses and strengths; the British budgets might as well be written in Urdu.
We don’t have a lot of choices. Christmas is coming and no one wants to think about a difficult job that’s going to start right after the holidays. Also, people in England are not as familiar with me and my work and aren’t exactly turning cartwheels at the idea of doing a Vachon Production. (The only part of my reputation that has preceded me is that I am cheap.) The other problem is that England is a relatively small country with a limited number of people who can do this job.
I have two meetings scheduled. The first is with a guy named Nick, who’s young and hip and for whom I have high hopes. I meet him at the Groucho Club, buy him a beer, and look at him expectantly. But Nick keeps his eyes on his drink. “Um,” he says hesitantly, “I don’t think I’m right for this. I mean, I didn’t really get the script. And I don’t think I want to work in January.” I am stunned. I can’t believe he’s drinking a beer that I’ve paid for. I say, “Fine,” put a couple of pounds on the table, and leave.
One down, one to go. An hour later, I meet Guinevere, a thin, elegant woman in her early fifties who smokes constantly. Her résumé is impeccable, she says all the right things, and she’s available. But I have a knot in my stomach. Maybe it’s because she’s totally unfamiliar with the music of the early seventies. Maybe, it’s her habit of calling everyone, “Sweetie, Darling.” Todd comes to meet us and we chat. She is properly reverential to him, but still…
December 13, 1996: New York
Back in Manhattan, I call the executive producer, Scott, who says he has checked up on Guinevere and has heard great things. We could keep looking, but a bird in the hand…We take the plunge.
December 21, 1996: New York
Guinevere has gone to Vienna for Christmas and has our budget and board with her, promising to return with her version of the best way to spend our five million pounds. I breathe easier now that someone is in place and, convinced that I have, in fact, made the right decision, tie things up in New York.
January 3, 1997: London
I spend the morning apartment hunting and then go meet Guinevere for lunch. “Sweetie, Darling!” I am enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “Sweetie, I’ve done the budget, but Darling it may scare you a wee bit Sweetie.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?”
“Well Darling, it’s at seven million pounds right now.”
I stare at her kind of stupidly. “Uh…but we only have five million to make the movie.”
“Yes Sweetie I know but I thought it was better to make a budget for what I really thought it would cost rather then just a five-million-pound budget. This way we can figure out how to take it down. Do you see, Darling?”
I don’t, really. Maybe this is some English method of budgeting. “Well…how are we going to bring it down?”
“Sweetie, we’ll ask all the departments to give us budgets for what they think they absolutely need and then we’ll start carving away.”
Now, I would normally never ever let department heads tell me what they want their budget to be. But I think to myself: “Maybe producers do things differently in the U.K.” I scrutinize her seven-million-pound budget and my jaw drops: it has almost half a million in truck rentals alone. “Isn’t that a little high for a movie like this?” I ask.
“No, Darling, that’s what it costs here.”
That phrase becomes her mantra. Every time I query an enormous figure, she says either, “No, Darling, that’s what it costs here,” or “No, Sweetie, that’s what it costs here.”
All low-budget producers know certain “tricks” to keep costs in check—annoyingly inconvenient but money-saving maneuvers like returning trucks when you’re shooting in a studio and getting them back when you move to a location. Department heads hate that, because it means they have to unpack everything and then pack it up again, but it saves money. Other tricks include scheduling scenes with lots of extras in them for after lunch so that you don’t have to feed them. But Guinevere acts as if such techniques are unheard of in London. I am starting to panic. Maybe we can’t make this movie for the money.
January 9, 1997: London
The first week of prep slips by, leaving eleven. Each department head has dutifully given Guinevere a budget for what he or she absolutely needs. And of course, since no limits have been set, these budgets are astronomical, surpassing even what Guinevere has figured in her seven-million-pound first stab. “Well, Darling,” she says, “Todd will have to do a re-think, a total reconceive. We’ll have to do the Derek Jarman version of Velvet Goldmine.”
Now, Derek Jarman was a wonderful filmmaker but he made most of his movies for well under two million pounds and shot them on essentially one or two sets. We have five million—eight million U.S. dollars! How is it possible that we are so constricted?
January 16, 1996: London
We are ten weeks away, no production staff has been hired, and the costume and art departments are telling me that they can’t possibly cut their budgets. There is a general sense of chaos, a lack of leadership. I am already in danger of breaking the cardinal rule of producing: Never let the movie get away from you.
The second rule of producing is: Everyone is expendable. I learned this the hard way on several films—on Safe, I fired a spiraling-out-of-control art department midway through the shoot and spent a scary three hours huddled with my cell-phone in a corner of the set interviewing replacements.
So I fire Guinevere.
I begin, “Guinevere, I think this is not working out…”
“Oh, I see.” Her voice is steely. “You want me to go.” No more “Sweetie, Darlings” for me. It takes her three hours to pack up her computer, smoke a pack of cigarettes, and flounce out.