The Honeymoon Is Just Beginning for ‘True Love’ Director

When she was a 22-year-old film student at New York University, Nancy Savoca won a couple of student film awards that convinced the novice director she could make it in the big time. After walking the graduation line in 1982, Savoca sat down with her husband, Richard Guay, and banged out a screenplay for a film called “True Love.” Soon after, the young couple began innocently knocking on doors to get a Hollywood studio deal.

“We had done nothing. We knew nobody,” Savoca, now 30, said. “We were real cocky because we didn’t know any better.”

The story Savoca was trying to sell was a multicharacter drama about the doubtful wedding of a young Italian-American couple in the Bronx. After the ceremony, the bridegroom wants to celebrate his wedding night drinking with his buddies instead of honeymooning with his bride.

“The nice studios sent our script back unopened,” Savoca said. “That way we could use it again, because it costs, you know, like 10 bucks to get those things copied.”

After several years of pounding on closed doors and kicking around in the film business as everything from production coordinator to assistant auditor, Savoca got fed up. She rounded up some investors and made “True Love” herself for less than $1 million.

Using a cast of unknowns who worked for no money, “True Love” was completed earlier this year and won the Grand Prize in the dramatic competition at the 1989 United States Film Festival in Park City, Utah. The film got off to a rocky start in theaters because of what Savoca calls a wan marketing campaign by MGM/UA. But “True Love” is currently performing well in New York and opened solidly in Los Angeles theaters on Nov. 10.

Now, as these stories go, it is Hollywood who is knocking on Savoca’s door with directing offers. With her career launched, does the director finally feel rewarded?

“ Relieved is a better word,” Savoca said during a recent interview. In between trying to get “True Love” off the ground, Savoca had two children, both of whom her husband was busily trying to keep occupied during the interview.

“I think the hardest thing was to keep up the energy and be persistent,” said Guay, who co-produced the film. The couple has seen no money for their work, and may not if the film does not pay for itself in the box office. “We were completely naive--that helped. We weren’t intimidated by the process because we didn’t know what it was all about.”

“I’m glad the doors are finally open,” Savoca said. “At the same time, after six years of this process, we’re a lot more cautious. We’re older. Our priorities have changed from what they were when we came out of film school. If you want to make the movies you want to make, you have to be cautious, because they’re not so easily accepted.”

Initially, there were fears that Savoca’s script for “True Love” was too New York, that a marriage taking place in a small Bronx neighborhood was a slice of Americana that people had no interest in swallowing. The story was also busting out with a wedding invitation list of characters. Between the bride’s and the bridegroom’s friends and family, there were at least 25 fully developed roles in the film, which made reading the script a task in concentration.

“The story shoves so many people in the reader’s face that it’s hard to tell who they are,” Savoca said.

To flesh out the characters and give studios an idea of what the film would look like, Savoca and Guay in 1985 sunk $22,000 of their own money into a 9-minute trailer. With the reel in hand, the couple made the studio rounds again, and again they were rejected. But the trailer impressed a friend of theirs, film maker John Sayles, who led a small group of investors to get the project off the ground.

After the film won the award in Park City, studios began bidding for rights to distribute “True Love.” Most of them wanted to change what Savoca says is an honest ending to the film, an ending that basically leaves the troubled couple no better off then before their marriage. Savoca and Guay decided on MGM/UA to distribute because the studio offered complete creative control.

But when the film opened in Los Angeles, Savoca was openly unhappy with MGM/UA. She held up a copy of The Times comparing the advertisements for “True Love” with Avenue Picture’s “Drugstore Cowboy.”

“This is MGM, a (major) studio, versus Avenue, an independent, and their ad is four times as big as ours,” Savoca said (the ad was actually twice the size). “This is MGM saving money. It’s extremely frustrating. Because if we hadn’t done well, then I’d wash my hands. I’d say, it was a great learning experience and I’ll move on to my next movie and do better.”

Barry Lorie, who heads MGM/UA’s marketing division, was out of town and unavailable for comment.

Savoca wants the film be a domestic hit so she can pay her 40-member cast the deferred salaries they forfeited during the 50-day shoot. But she is pleased to see that, as a result of the film, some of her unknown, non-union actors are breaking out. Ron Eldard, who plays the bridegroom, has been signed by an agency. The bride, Annabella Sciorra, has completed work on two feature films, including “Cadillac Man” with Robin Williams, and will soon begin a third.

“I didn’t go into this movie to make money. Nobody did,” Savoca said. “You come in with the lowest expectations. You wish there could be guarantees, because nobody deserves to work that hard. For me, what I wanted for the movie was to get my foot in the door of this business because this is what I want to do with my life. I’ve accomplished that.”