‘DISTORTIONS’: FILM AGAINST ALL ODDS

Actress and aspiring film producer Jackelyn Giroux didn’t think things could get much worse last summer, as she neared the end of her long drive home from Vancouver, British Columbia.

She had come within a whisker of getting Canadian financing for her film “Distortions,” only to have the deal fall through because of a shift in Canadian tax laws. After two weeks up there, she was returning empty-handed, depressed and physically exhausted.

Then, things did get worse.

Somewhere near the Mulholland Drive turnoff of the San Diego Freeway, at 3:30 in the morning, Giroux was hit from behind by another driver, sending her new red Honda Prelude diving into the center divider. The car hit the concrete wall at an odd angle and its frame collapsed. Giroux was wearing her seat belt, but it didn’t help. The front end of the car had come back to her.

The uniqueness of this story is not that Giroux survived an accident that collapsed a lung, crushed an arm and shattered the left side of her face.

“While I was lying in the hospital, I said, ‘I’ve got to do that movie more than ever now,’ ” Giroux said Thursday after her return from the Cannes Film Festival, where she had gone to sell the completed version of “Distortions” to film buyers there. “And (in the hospital), I met this eye doctor who invites me to his (parents’) house and it’s the perfect house for my movie. I got it at a great price.”

For the 2 1/2 months that she lived in Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital, she continued scrambling, at every opportunity, for financing.

“I couldn’t afford to not be working,” Giroux said, laughing. “My co-producer Dan Kuhn would answer the phone (in the hospital) ‘Jackelyn Giroux Productions’ and hold it for me while I talked. I told them, ‘Don’t give me any drugs, I don’t want to sound funny.’ ”

Giroux, who interrupted her acting career with a two-year stint as a photojournalist covering the professional tennis tour, said she has never wanted anything more than to be a film producer. She had tried to get “Distortions” made with the studios, but when she found no interest there, decided to try to find her own financing.

People who finance their own films cut costs wherever they can, even if it means promising bit parts in the movie to the parents of an eye doctor, in exchange for use of their house near Sherman Oaks.

“His father was also a doctor and his mother was show-business struck,” she said. “I said, ‘I’ll put you all in this movie.’ I made them extras in the funeral scene.”

When Giroux learned that the doctor’s house had once belonged to Samuel Goldwyn, she decided to pitch the project to Sam Goldwyn Jr.

“You never know. I thought Sam might be struck by the idea of having the house in the movie and want to make it,” she said. “He liked the idea but he didn’t want to make the movie.”

As she recovered from her injuries--Giroux still has two eye operations ahead of her--she continued to look for financing for the under-$1-million film, a psychological mystery with a triple twist ending. Her major asset was the list of actors--Olivia Hussey, Piper Laurie and Giroux’s husband Steve Railsback--who were committed to it.

The breakthrough came when Giroux met an executive of King Features, a company that syndicates series and movies for television, and talked him into putting up money for the TV rights even before the movie was made. Film producers often pre-sell theatrical and video rights, but television is the last stop on the trail of a film’s commercial exploitation and it’s almost unheard of to get up-front money for those rights.

As Giroux would discover, getting the commitment and getting the actual money were two different things. When King Features’ legal department balked at giving her the letter of credit she needed to convert to a bank loan, she decided to camp out in the lawyer’s office.

“I sat in his office for an entire week,” she said. “I came in when the doors opened and left when they closed. I sent out for food. I would have slept there if they let me. The secretaries loved it. We talked movies and celebrities.

“The lawyer kept saying, ‘Go home, Jackie, we’ll fax it to you.’ I said, ‘No way, I want it in my hand.’ Finally, on Friday night before Halloween, they gave it to me.”

There were other problems. Giroux fought with agents over salary, including the agent representing her husband. (“I said I won’t work with ICM again. The agent said, ‘We handle your husband.’ I said, ‘Well, I won’t work with him again, either.’ ”)

The bank loan didn’t close until the fourth day of shooting. (“It was a lawyer thing. They like to argue over details and run their bills up. I finally said the magic words: ‘I am going to have to close the production and if I close the production I’m going to have to sue somebody.’ Then the loan closed.”)

“Distortions,” directed by Armand Mastroianni, was filmed in 18 days during late January and early February, at locations ranging from the eye doctor’s house in the Valley to the docks in Marina del Rey. It was shown for the first time April 30 in--appropriately--the Samuel Goldwyn Theater at the Motion Picture Academy headquarters in Beverly Hills.

The movie was shown several times in the market section of the Cannes Film Festival and Giroux said there were several offers from small distribution companies to pick up theatrical and video rights to various markets, including the United States and Canada. She said she was hoping to get into the black with the American rights and the harvest profits from foreign sales.

Giroux said that by the end of the festival, she would take the best offer on the table. At the last minute, Universal Pictures expressed interest, but wanted to see a shortened version of the 97-minute film. With the scent of studio money to drive her, Giroux has been in the editing room since returning from Cannes, whittling five minutes out of the opening scenes.

Ironically, it was the cutting room--specifically, the cutting-room floor--that convinced Giroux to give up acting and become a producer.

“I was working on a film where my role kept getting smaller and smaller in the editing,” she said. “I said to the director, ‘What are you doing to me?’ He said, ‘C’mon, Jackie, women don’t sell movies. Men and cars do.’ He was just being honest, but I don’t want to believe he’s right. I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can do something about that.’ ”