I Lost it at the Video Store: A Filmmakers' Oral History of a Vanished Era by Tom Roston

Author:Tom Roston [Roston, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Critical Press
Published: 2015-09-23T21:00:00+00:00

Allison Anders: We went to Larry with the pitch trying to sell him on it. I was in there with all of my male producers. And Larry had one female assistant. I had never done this before. His coverage was half-and-half on the script. It was an unusual script at the time. He says, “Well, I have to tell you, Allison, you set us up for one thing and that doesn’t happen.”

Larry Estes: The script didn’t have the elements that most people were looking for, so it was more like, “Please help me understand why this story is interesting to my home video audience.”

Allison Anders: I didn’t know what to say. I said, “I know, but that’s because women’s lives work like that. The male narrative is to set you up for something and you reach that goal and whatever happens, whether you win or lose, it determines what happens to him later. But with women, we set goals, but we have collected so much stuff along the way, and so much experience, that the outcome doesn’t really matter.” I’m talking out of my ass, by the way. And this girl is nodding her head and I’m like, “Stay with me, sister. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” That girl was my salvation. And Larry is just staring at me. I’m like, “I’m sorry, I’ve gone on a tangent.” And Larry says, “No, no. That’s fine. I don’t know anything about women.” So he says, “You go get me a budget.” He was like, “Yeah.” He did say, “Let me ask you about sex.” I said, “Uh-oh, okay.” He said, “I get these scripts with these sex scenes in them and there’s all this male bravado. And then they chicken out when the time comes and they don’t give me what I want.”

Larry Estes: I was referring to one movie. That was Sex, Lies, and Videotape. In the script, it was pretty clear. I even asked Soderbergh to make sure I was reading the same script, and they were like, “Oh, yeah.” When I got the last of the dailies, I thought, “Uhhh, I am in deep shit, here.” It’s all very carefully shot where you don’t see any naughty bits. Steve’s explanation was that it wasn’t necessary after all. My reaction was, “How nice for you.” I had some scary days going to the sales people. I was lucky it turned out to be a great movie. It became irrelevant. But going forward, I wanted to be more clear.

Allison Anders: I said, “Oh, I’ll give it to you.” He wanted to make sure there was some sexiness in there, especially for Ione Skye’s character. It was important for me to see that as well, because of where her character had gone. It was a healing sort of thing. So while it satisfied what Larry needed for the film, it also satisfied what I needed for the character.

Quentin Tarantino: I actually wrote a movie that Larry Estes financed. It’s called Past Midnight (1991), a Jagged Edge wannabe with Natasha Richardson and Rutger Hauer.

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