So, in walked Calista Flockhart…
Now, when people hear her name, or used to hear her name, they’d think anorexia. Which was unfair, because while Calista was waifish back in the day, you wouldn’t think eating disorder. And, as to the little matter of talent, whatever it is, she had it.
Which lead to a tough call. My brother Chris, the producer and lead actor, wanted Calista. I was sticking with Lara P. from Chicago. I had a working relationship with her, knew what she was capable of, and damn it, I was the director! Chris wasn’t backing off, we were deadlocked. I remember three days of pure warfare, the two of us going back and forth. Chris pulled the chemistry card, that unfathomable connection. If he was to act this thing he had to have chemistry with the actress playing Jane. He had it with Calista and didn’t with Lara. I called BS and suggested it might just come down to him wanting to bed Calista. He, of course, objected to that rude notion. I laughed in his face. We were arguing loudly, in our Southern Italian manner, in and out of bars. This was going nowhere.
The solution was to take it out of our hands. Give it to an inner circle of producers, those who knew the project best. Audition tapes were distributed to five people. 48 hours later, the results were in: Calista would be Jane. The vote: 5 to 0. Shit…
If we look at any single reason why Jane Doe landed four boxes across at every Blockbuster and Hollywood Video store in the country, it’s found right here:
Life Lesson 1A: Cast well. When given a choice, always choose the actress who will become nationally famous within 10 months.
Had we known that inside a year Calista would become Ally McBeal, or that on June 28, 1998, just three years later, she’d be on the cover of Time Magazine, we might have done things a bit differently. Maybe we tell Unapix, makers of Jack Frost 2: Revenge Of The Mutant Killer Snowman, that we were passing on their offer, and slide that $150,000 check back at them. Maybe we keep domestic distribution, find the money for pick up photography, re-shoot some of the 20+ scenes that we didn’t have time to shoot the first time around, reshape the Fine Cut with all new design elements and a fully re-edited version according to our vision. Maybe maybe maybe…
Life Lesson 1111A: Ain’t no do-overs. Just…ain’t.
I used to open up all my Columbia College classes showing the video of my brother appearing on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood. When Jane Doe came out we were besieged. Ally McBeal as a junky?! Calista as you’ve never seen her before!
I remember walking into video stores. In New York for Christmas, there’s Jane Doe at a Blockbuster on 14th Street & Union Square. Shopping in Times Square? There’s Jane Doe at a Hollywood Video store on 44th Street. Friends called me from Seattle and Portland, seeing the movie for sale there. It was all over Chicago, in Wisconsin…even had reports of an appearance in Atlantic City. This for a movie without a theatrical release, with next to no reviews, that appeared at exactly ONE film festival (which it won).
Absolute… fucking… insanity. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
Unapix Entertainment went bankrupt in 2001. We never did get a full reporting on dollar figures. The public figure they disclosed for sales of Jane Doe was just over a million dollars. Knowing the crafty accounting standards of distributors in general, and how trustworthy our bankrupt partners in specific,especially where it came to profit sharing with us, one might assume more money flowed in from Jane Doe. We’ll never know, but have only ourselves to blame.
The beauty about taking a beatdown from Life is that you can make a conscious decision to never let that happen again. Won’t guarantee that it doesn’t, but take it from a craps dealer, the mathematical possibilities diminish. It’s better to have lived it, learned from it, and moved on.
Life Lesson 332: “Given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.”—William Faulkner
