SIX

NO LOOKING BACK

With She’s the One in postproduction, I started to give thought to what I would write next.

I was happy with the tone of both The Brothers McMullen and She’s the One, but the films were very similar, and like so many young artists, I didn’t want to be pigeonholed. I felt that I had a broader range in me.

There were three films that made up what I called my Texas trilogy. The Last Picture Show, Tender Mercies, and Hud were three of my favorite films and still are. All three films are quiet dramas with understated performances. The filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, Bruce Beresford, and Martin Ritt embraced minimalist storytelling and restraint with their camera work. They were telling honest stories about regular folks in the real world, which was something I was always attracted to as a viewer. And they were not looking for laughs. That’s what I wanted to do next. I wanted to hold a mirror up to the world I knew and reflect it back as honestly as I could.

As such, I began to write Long Time, Nothing New, the story of people my age in a small town, looking for a way out.

I wanted to keep it real. I wanted to look at the dreamers who couldn’t articulate their dreams. They just knew there was more to life than what they were living. They had a burning desire to get out of their hometown but had no idea where to go or what to do. This wasn’t going to be a movie about the ordinary working-class person who dreams of being a painter, a novelist, or a rock star and, halfway through the movie, pulls that old typewriter out of the closet, sits down, and writes the masterpiece. The people in my new story were stuck in a rut. Same shit, different day, or Long Time, Nothing New.

A big part of what I loved about my Texas trilogy was how important it was to each filmmaker to give the audience a sense of place, from the sleepy little town in The Last Picture Show to the roadside motel and gas station in Tender Mercies. These places weren’t Anytown, USA. They felt specific and unique, though unlike any I encountered growing up on Long Island. Yet the characters and their desires, fears, and dreams were universal. Specific and universal. That was the key and that’s what I was after.

Having grown up on the South Shore of Long Island, I spent my summers at the beach, primarily Long Beach. As vibrant and full of life as Long Beach was during the summer, it was equally quiet, still, and melancholy during the winter. Anyone who has been to a beach community during the off-season knows what I’m talking about. Long before I wrote one word of my new script, I knew that was going to be the setting for this screenplay.

At the time, I lived in a two-bedroom apartment on Horatio Street in Manhattan. It was a doorman building and cockroach-free. I had turned the second bedroom into an office, the writing room I had always imagined. One night, I went out and bought Springsteen’s Tracks, a four-album set of unreleased songs, B-sides, and demos. For Springsteen fans like me, this was an event—sixty-six songs from different parts of Bruce’s career, all finished and remastered and accompanied by liner notes that explained where they fit into his body of work.

I sat up late into the night, listening, reading, and absorbing the music into the library of Bruce in my head. For obvious reasons the song “Iceman” got under my skin—more specifically the opening lines.

“Sleepy town ain’t got the guts to budge/Baby, this emptiness has already been judged/I wanna go out tonight, I wanna find out what I got.”

The song was an outtake from Darkness on the Edge of Town and I played it over and over. One line stuck in my head: “Sleepy town ain’t got the guts to budge.” By the twentieth time I listened, I was hearing it differently.

“Small-town girl ain’t got the guts to budge.”

That small-town girl became a character in Long Time, Nothing New. Her name was Claudia, and she was a waitress in the small town where she had always lived. “Small-town girl ain’t got the guts to budge.” The song let me feel the yearning and desperation inside that small-town girl whose eyes were cast a thousand miles from where she was.

In the early drafts of the script, I was going for more an ensemble story like Picture Show—some characters who had a way out, others who tried to find one, and others who knew they were anchored in that small town forever. But through various drafts, Long Time, Nothing New turned into a story about Claudia and the choice she had to make between two guys. One was an ex-boyfriend who returns to town intending to rekindle their relationship and take her the hell out of there. The other was his former best friend and now Claudia’s fiancé, a regular Joe who will never leave town.

I felt like I was writing the hell out of the script because I knew these people. Not only were they modeled after friends, but I also threw a lot of myself in there, all the conflicts and emotions of my younger years, before that fateful day with my advisor at SUNY Albany.

By this time, Searchlight was testing a cut of She’s the One, and audience reaction came back through the roof. Everyone was thrilled. Studio executives wanted to blow it out with a strong platform (or limited) release starting the same weekend McMullen had hit theaters a year earlier. Why mess with a formula that had grossed more than $10 million? Only this time, they expected to do double or triple that number.

Everything in the world was going my way. And that’s when the walls came tumbling down.

YOUNG AND NOT KNOWING ANY BETTER

Buoyed by the good news of the tests and the success of McMullen, my agents decided to negotiate a Woody Allen–type deal for me with the studio. It was a “put” deal, which basically stipulated that Fox Searchlight would green-light any script I wanted to make, sight unseen, as long as the budget was under $15 million, starting with Long Time, Nothing New. I would make a movie for them every year or two.

In retrospect, it was a bold position to take for a kid whose first “real” movie was still a few months from being released. And as we sat at the agency’s conference table, my gut told me as much. The folks at Fox have been good to me; why do we need to play hardball? However, my team assured me it was the right time to ask. Of the five movies Fox Searchlight released in their first year of business, McMullen was the big hit, and that, my agents said, gave me leverage.

There was a tense phone call with Tom Rothman (“What happened? Didn’t we do good by you?” he asked), and an even more uncomfortable lunch with Fox Entertainment chairman and CEO Bill Mechanic, who met me at a corner table in the studio commissary.

Mechanic said, “Why would you ask for this? We thought you were part of this family.”

I was devastated.

“Look, it’s my team,” I said. “I’m just listening to them, following their lead.” What did I know? I’m not in the business two years at this point.

Despite a release date that had seemingly been set in stone only months earlier, Searchlight moved She’s the One behind Emma and Tin Cup and reduced their support. The film was released on 459 screens on August 23, 1996, grossing $4,550 per theater for a weekend gross of $2.1 million. The next weekend, the screen count went up to 464, but the screen average fell off only 6 percent. Normally, with these kinds of numbers, this is when the studio takes the film wider, meaning they up the number of screens the film plays on. However, that wasn’t the case. She’s the One still went on to gross $9.5 million and was Searchlight’s biggest hit that year, but the message was clear: I had blown it. Then the studio passed on Long Time, Nothing New.

My agents told me not to worry and promised they would find another buyer. They shopped the script without any bites. To make the deal more attractive, we slashed the proposed budget from $15 million to $12 million to $8 million and then to $6 million.

As my agents shopped for a deal, they suggested I branch out as an actor. Their argument was, if I wanted to continue making my own films, I should act in larger studio movies and thereby become more famous. If I were more famous, it would help get my films financed. It seemed to make sense except for the fact that I never considered myself an actor. I enjoyed acting in my own films, but I knew what went into those performances. I wrote toward what I thought were my strengths as an actor and I later massaged those performances in the editing room. In other words, I knew my limitations. Because of this, I had passed on a number of acting jobs that came my way after McMullen hit theaters. But with three films under my belt, I felt maybe now I was ready. I told my agents, “Let’s go find something.”

One of the first scripts they sent me was Saving Private Ryan. The D-Day epic followed a group of soldiers as they searched for the last surviving brother of four soldiers who marched into the deadly maw of battle on Omaha Beach. The script came with a note: This is Steven Spielberg’s next project. My agent said I should look at the part of Sarge since I was too old, at age thirty, to play any of the privates. After reading the script, I knew playing Sarge required some heavy lifting and I knew I was not quite ready for that, or even capable of it, back then. But I thought I could take on another part, that of PFC Reiben, the wiseass from Brooklyn. He was a sarcastic pain in the ass.

“That I can do!” I told my agent. “Can you put me up for Reiben instead of Sarge?”

“Let me see what they say,” he replied.

In the meantime, my agents found two companies willing to split the price tag for Long Time, Nothing New. Gramercy Pictures offered to put up $3 million, and an overseas fund called Silver Streak signed for the other half.

I was ecstatic. I quit thinking about whether Private Ryan was going to happen and concentrated on the good news. I was going to make my third movie.

SHUTTING THE MOVIE DOWN

Casting Long Time, Nothing New was a reality check. Instead of the long line of up-and-coming actresses vying for the lead in She’s the One, I was greeted with a string of turndowns, starting with Patricia Arquette and Elisabeth Shue. Marisa Tomei was briefly interested, but she wanted Claudia changed from a waitress to a nurse, which would’ve required a complete rewrite since half the movie took place in a diner. Finally, my new manager, Rick Yorn, suggested his latest signee, Lauren Holly, who came in and nailed her audition. I had my lead.

Finding the right guy to play Lauren’s fiancé was even harder. After seeing numerous actors, someone at PolyGram—the parent company of Gramercy—mentioned they were putting out a new Bon Jovi album and suggested casting him as Claudia’s boyfriend.

Jon had held his own alongside Whoopi Goldberg, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Kathleen Turner in Moonlight and Valentino, and I knew Jon’s New York acting coach, Harold Guskin. I called him up.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“This guy is fully committed to acting. This isn’t just a hobby,” Harold said. “He’s the real deal. You should absolutely sit down with him.”

We met for lunch in SoHo, and within ten minutes I was sold. He grew up in a working-class neighborhood in New Jersey, similar to my Long Island hometown, and he was a great guy. It was like we already knew each other. He knew he had the part before he left the room.

But the good vibes disappeared quickly. One afternoon, less than a week into preproduction, I was working with Lauren and Jon in an East Village rehearsal space, when we were interrupted with an urgent phone call. Excusing myself, I went into another room, where my agents told me to brace myself for bad news: The movie’s coinvestor, Silver Streak, did not have the money that they said they did.

“They don’t have any money.”

“Are you kidding me?” I said. “What does this mean?”

“You’re probably going to have to shut down.”

Stunned, I walked back into the room and said, “Why don’t we cut rehearsal short today.”

What do I do when the shit hits the fan? I call the old man. My dad met me at a bar downtown, where I told him I did not want to let the movie die. I had gone through too much to get it this far. Too much was at stake. Besides, how would this look if I couldn’t get this film off the ground? We decided that was not an option. As my father had on McMullen, I decided I would put my own money into the film.

I took nearly every dollar I had made in the business up to that point and put it into the film. Though it was enough to keep us in preproduction, I knew I had to figure out another major move if I wanted to actually make the movie. Fortunately, Tom Rothman was there when we needed him again. Bart Walker, my agent, had somehow convinced the Fox studio executive to buy the international rights for around $2.5 million—enough to save the movie.

Once on the set, all the preproduction drama was forgotten. We shot for thirty-five days in Rockaway Beach, the perfect setting for my sleepy seaside town. With $5.5 million, we had enough dough that I was able to make everything look exactly the way I envisioned. I fell in love with production design and details. My DP, Frank Prinzi, and I drew from Edward Hopper paintings and one of the movies that inspired the screenplay, Tender Mercies. There are a few shots and sequences where you can see the influence. Creative work sometimes starts with imitation but finishes with inspiration.

At night, I raced back to the city to watch dailies and marveled at the look we captured. The movie was gorgeous. Only one problem cropped up during production, but it was a big one. Gramercy’s executives wanted the title changed. Anything but Long Time, Nothing New, they said. They feared critics would write, “Long time in our seat. Nothing new from Ed Burns.”

They threw a thousand titles at me until they came up with one they liked: No Looking Back. Did I like it? No. But the folks at the studio seemed to like the movie and were promising us a meaningful release. Their argument was a strong one: We want this movie to work as much as you do and we’ll have a better chance at success if we change the title. As a result, I said I was okay with the title.

In retrospect, I wouldn’t advise rolling over like that. Years later, long after the movie came out, I was in a video store in the West Village and came across No Looking Back. I knew the people at Gramercy who had insisted on retitling the picture hadn’t thought about the movie since it left theaters. But I had. I still thought about it. I was thinking about it there in the video store: No Looking Back, a Film by Edward Burns. Yes, it was my film—but not my title.