SCREENWRITER IN WONDERLAND : How I Sold My First Script to the Movies, Got Chills Watching the Dailies and Still Respected Myself in the Morning

RANDY TURROW DOESN’T FIT MY CONCEPT OF A MOVIE PRODUCER. HE’S 35 years old, a nonsmoker and a nondrinker and has been a committed vegetarian ever since, as he says, the “1971 earthquake convinced me that I wasn’t immortal.”

On the set, he wears a black cowboy hat, jeans and a billowy, long-sleeved white shirt that is reminiscent of some 18th-Century painter. But unlike some Angst -ridden artist, Turrow is so buoyant, upbeat and otherwise optimistic that from time to time I wonder if he fully understands the problem. “Randy isn’t easily discouraged,” says his girlfriend, Kay Netek. “The most disappointed I’ve ever seen him was once when his carrot juice wasn’t fresh.”

I met Turrow in 1986 after he called to say he had read an article of mine about an overly passionate poet who pursued a woman till he ended up in jail and she ended up half-crazy. Turrow said that it was a great premise for a feature film and that if I was willing to write the screenplay, he would raise the money to film it. Flattered that anyone thought I could write a screenplay, I threw myself into it every night and weekend over the next couple of months.

That, I discovered, was the easy part.

IT’S A WARM SUNDAY NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER IN THE PARKING LOT OF A restaurant in Venice. Randy Turrow is leaning against someone’s black Porsche, explaining to the film’s director and star, Bud Cort, that he has exactly five more hours to finish the shoot. The cameras will start rolling tomorrow at 8 p.m., and they will stop at 1 a.m. whether “Love and Venus” (the film made from my screenplay) is done or not.

“You knew what the situation was,” Turrow says with uncharacteristic irritation. “You said you could shoot it in 30 days. You’re four days over schedule and over budget. The bonding company wanted me to stop shooting yesterday. I had to beg for one more day.”

Everyone on the crew has a suggestion for finishing the film, but Turrow begs them to please be quiet. “We have to get these shots in,” he says, holding his head in his hands. “I’ve got to figure out how to do it.”

Late the following afternoon, the cast and crew meet in a narrow Venice alley beside a stagnant, moss-filled canal to rehearse the first scene of the evening. But immediately, Cort and cinematographer Dietrich Lohmann start to snap at each other.

“We didn’t discuss this,” says Lohmann, a German expatriate who, in response to Cort’s demands, has more than once threatened to walk off the set.

“Sure we did,” asserts Cort, who is no shrinking violet himself.

“No,” insists Lohmann.

“This is exactly what we planned.”

“I can’t stand this,” says Lohmann, swinging his head like a chained elephant. “I’m trying to help you. I’ve been helping you for weeks.”

“That’s your job,” says Cort. “That’s what you’re paid to do.”

“Don’t talk to me in that tone of voice,” says Lohmann.

At this point, Turrow breaks in with a call for rehearsal. Cort and Lohmann calm down, but it’s hardly an auspicious beginning to the most important and pressure-packed night of the entire shoot. Critical scenes are still missing. It won’t be dark enough to start shooting until 8 p.m., and over the next five hours (the city shooting permit for this location requires us to stop at 1 a.m.), they have to knock off a minimum of 27 camera setups--more than they’d do in a normal 12-hour shooting day.

At sundown, Turrow calls upon the 70-person cast and crew to form a circle and join hands for a prayer meeting-pep rally. He isn’t really an inspirational speaker, but he makes up for it by laying on flattery high and deep. He tells the actors and technicians that what they do here tonight will make cinematic history--”When this is on the screen 20 years from now, I’ll be thinking of you.”

Concluding with an amphibian allusion, he asks everyone to “win one for the guppies, and may the guppies turn into frogs and the frogs turn into princes, and that is what I want for everyone here--to be a prince or princess.”

“Gee,” says one grip, wiping away a mock tear. “That was beautiful.”

WITH TURROW, I CAN NEVER QUITE DECIDE whether he is blissfully innocent or uncannily shrewd. When he was a high school wrestler, he tells me, he once won a tournament simply by flattering away his opponent’s will to win: “Every time I saw him, I said, ‘I shouldn’t even be in the same room with you. I don’t have a prayer. You’re my God. I don’t even want to go out on the mat. Let me concede right now.’ ”

Despite his talent for persuasion, it never occurred to Turrow to go into the film business. In 1974 (the year the movie takes place), while he was still at Cal State Northridge, a friend’s father got him a job in the mail room at Creative Management Associates (now International Creative Management)--which for him was a real education. He’d be sent to deliver a package to Robert Redford, and he’d say, “What’s he look like?”

Still, Turrow caught on quickly. He had a persistent nature and didn’t shy away from taking risks. Over the next decade, he worked in every phase of filmmaking, from actor’s assistant to Bud Cort (on the TV pilot “Bates Motel”) to producer (the play “Last Lucid Moment”).

“I was the best assistant any actor every had,” says Turrow. “Bud gave me a new identity. He called me Bruno. I took care of his dressing room. I put up a picture of his favorite star. I put his coffee in the same place. I had his favorite plants. I hung up all his clothes in the same place when he would throw them down. I laid out newspapers for him perfectly. On the set, people would say, ‘Hey Bud, get over here!’ I’d say, ‘Excuse me. Mr. Cort is busy now.’ Pretty soon everyone was calling him Mr. Cort.”

Years later, when Turrow read “Love and Venus,” he thought of Cort. The actor had an uncanny gift for portraying sensitive souls in a callous world. Twenty years ago, he had become an instant cult hero after his tender, tormented portrayal of the suicide-prone rich kid who falls in love with an old woman in “Harold and Maude.” Now “Love and Venus” fairly screamed for Cort. The main character was a neurotic, highly creative poet. And Cort was a high-strung, highly creative actor. It was, says Turrow, a perfect match.

BUD CORT IS VERY FAST, VERY VERBAL AND NOT afraid to assert himself. I deeply admire his acting ability, but at times he makes me nervous. One week before the start of shooting, Turrow and I are sitting in Turrow’s Culver City office when Cort comes in, holding up his arm.

“I just cut a mole,” he explains. “It’s bleeding like hell.”

It’s the least of his problems. As a result of union squabbles, he has just lost his cinematographer and his first-assistant director. An accident on a previous film has left him wearing a back brace. And he still has to finish casting the film.

So far, he has Jim Brolin (“The Amityville Horror” and the TV series “Hotel”) to play the poet’s hippie pot-smoking buddy; Gena Rowlands (“A Woman Under the Influence” and “Gloria”) to play the female lead’s mother; Rhea Perlman (the sitcom “Cheers”) to play a feminist friend; Dr. Timothy Leary (the Harvard disciple of LSD) to play a judge; Martin Mull (“Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman” and “Fernwood Tonight”) to play an attorney; Woody Harrelson (“Cheers”) to play a Vietnam vet and Carol Kane (“Hester Street” and “Taxi”) to play an artist’s model.

“Bud brought in a bunch of his friends,” Turrow tells me. “He cashed in a lot of chips.”

What Cort wants now, he tells Turrow, is a certain handicapped actress for one of the female lead’s friends. “I really need her. It would make the story really perfect. It’s so important.”

“Here’s the thing,” says Turrow tactfully. “She lives in Washington. I would have to fly her down, pay for her plane tickets, put her up and pay her SAG. It would end up costing us $5,000.”

“Five thousand dollars?” says Cort. “Forget it! We can get someone from around here.” (Eventually, they find Bridget Flaherty, a local handicapped actress.)

Later that afternoon, the three of us meet in Cort’s office to discuss a longstanding problem. In a film about a nerdy but talented poet who loses his grip during the Nixon era, we are missing the inspirational core of the film--two erotic but funny poems that we had originally planned to buy from a local poet who, much to our chagrin, turned us down flat.

Cort is irate. If he had known Turrow didn’t have the rights to the poetry sewn up, he complains, he never would have agreed to do the film. In fact, he says, he absolutely must have those poems. The integrity of the whole film depends on it: You can’t write a story about a talented poet and then have him reading some awful schlock poems.

Turrow, calm and conciliatory as always, shows Cort something I have written as a substitute. I can tell from Cort’s expression that he’s not impressed. He reads the first line--”What I want is a gas stove with a blue flame that gets my copper bottom hot”--and scans the rest. “This is crap. This is pathetic. Second-grade stuff. A kid could do better.”

I’ve had it with Cort. Here it is, the last furious week before the start of shooting, and he’s running power plays. “You’re acting like a prima donna,” I say.

“Then get out,” he answers.

I storm out of his office and stand at the top of the stairs, looking across Madison Avenue at the huge MGM sign on the Filmcorp building. I feel like a fool for telling everyone that my screenplay is being made into a movie. And now I realize I’ve been living a pathetic delusion. The people across the street, they’re the real filmmakers. These clowns couldn’t make a feature film. They couldn’t make a dog-food commercial.

While I’m standing there, Turrow comes out. “Don’t let it upset you. That’s just Bud.” If he doesn’t want to do the film, says Turrow, we’ll get someone else.

Turrow is trying to cheer me up, but the fact is, we don’t want someone else. Cort is terrific in the part, but he’s starting to act as wild and obsessive as the character he’s playing.

Later that day, I’m at home brooding over the collapse of the project when the phone rings. “Paul, it’s Bud,” says Cort. His tone is mild, his manner contrite. He’s really sorry, he says, but he’s been taking some weird cold medicine and shouting at people all day. But it’s the movie, too. He wants to make the strongest possible film. He’s putting his career on the line for this one. And that’s the reason he was so insistent that the poetry had to be first rate.

I’m so relieved that I’m practically gushing. “The truth is,” I tell Cort, “I agree with you.”

A few days later, Cort takes a crack at writing a poem himself. His opening lines: “I want a tube-topped Venus who undulates my soul and my shorts.” I like his poem a lot better than mine, but, as I later learn, the words themselves are less important than the way Cort performs them.

Another afternoon, Cort and I--we share screenwriting credit on the film--sit in his office and write the second poem in 15 minutes. It is not any sublime cry from the heart. But during filming in a re-creation of a ‘70s-era coffeehouse, Cort’s wrenching delivery (“I kneel in church. I blaspheme your name”), gives me chills down my spine. I get chills again when I see the dailies. And when I finally see the first rough cut, I’m still getting chills.

IT’S THE THIRD DAY OF SHOOTING “LOVE AND VEnus,” and as I walk across Venice Beach to the water’s edge, I see a white Andalusian stallion near the camera truck. The animal is magnificent, but I’m more than a little miffed. “They’re turning this into a circus. Whose idea was that ?” Then suddenly, it hits me: “Oh, right--I wrote that scene myself.”

During one of the screenplay’s many rewrites, Turrow suggested that we might want to put a horse in the story. So I wrote a scene in which our obsessed poet sees a virile young man riding a horse along the beach and then imagines himself riding the horse. And now, to my astonishment, here are 70 people, backed up by half a dozen support trailers, a lunch wagon, generators, lights, umbrellas, director’s chairs, actors, extras, a stunt rider and a high-speed camera, all because late one night four years ago I wrote a few lines about a horse galloping through the surf.

I’d been writing magazine articles for 20 years. No one ever made that big a deal about them. But now that I have a screenplay in production, everyone wants to know how my film is going. On the other hand, the more time I spend on the movie set, the more clear it becomes that respect for screenwriters is hardly universal.

One day at Turrow’s office, I run into the haughtily beautiful female lead, Kim Adams, in the kitchen. Adams is a Guber-Peters Management model starring in her first feature film as the object of Cort’s unwanted attention. She has bee-stung lips, laser eyes and a frame both tall and devastatingly lean.

I introduce myself as the screenwriter (which apparently makes no impression) and remark that it must be difficult to memorize all the dialogue changes. (Cort and I have been furiously rewriting dialogue.)

“Not at all,” she says. “I find it quite easy.” And then she brushes past and is gone.

When I mention this episode to one of the acting coaches, she tells me not to feel bad that actresses don’t gush over me: “You’re lucky to be allowed on the set at all.”

“Is it true?” I ask Turrow during a lull in the shooting along the bicycle path in Hermosa Beach. Writers are nonentities? But when you’re a producer, women are forever coming up and asking you to sleep with them?

In response, Turrow calls out to the film’s still photographer, Rory Flynn, to ask if, “hypothetically,” she would consider having an affair with him. Rory, who is the daughter of Errol Flynn, is surprised by the question and diplomatically points out that she is happily married.

“I’m just talking hypothetically,” says Turrow.

“I’ve never even given it . . .”

“Hypothetically,” Turrow repeats.

“Well,” Flynn says with a laugh before drifting away, “I guess you are kind of cute.”

Turrow later confides that at least three times a day various women come up and in one way or another let him know that they are available. And this despite the fact that he is “totally monogamous” and his girlfriend (who is development coordinator on the film) is on the set with him every day.

“There’s something about the nature of filmmaking,” he says. “Sexual energy and creative energy come from the same spot. On location, you can’t stop it. Everybody sleeps with everybody else. When we were shooting in the jail, some of the male and female crew members were slipping off into empty cells. I feel like a camp counselor sometimes.”

IT’S TOUGH TO MAKE A MOVIE UNDER ANY CIRcumstances--there’s so much lust, greed, jealousy and ambition. But it is tougher still when you’re trying to make a movie on 25% of a normal studio budget. For Turrow, keeping the film on schedule is a constant battle. “Come on,” he tells Cort again and again, “we’ve got to move to the next shot.” But as soon as Turrow turns his back or takes a call on the cellular phone, Cort does it his way. If Turrow insists, Cort tells him to quit trying to direct.

Because Turrow usually gives in on creative issues, some people on the set, including Kay Netek, think he is letting Cort walk all over him. But Turrow, who doesn’t have a big ego about these kinds of things, says he long ago made a deliberate decision to let Cort have his head. “Bud is a perfectionist. You want to validate his vision. So what if some departments went a little over budget? That’s no sin on a $2-million film when it looks like a $6-million film.”

For his part, Cort is determined that the film look and sound right and that the actors have adequate time both to rehearse a scene and to do it over if it isn’t right. “I have to work with the actors,” says Cort. “For me to be told that I cannot rehearse actors--’Just get it! Do it!’--I can’t work that way.”

For Jim Brolin, it was a treat to work with Cort. “I felt I could do no wrong,” he says. “I had heard that Bud was erratic. Whoever he used to be, he isn’t that person anymore. He created an atmosphere for us all to be creative.”

Whatever else people might not like about Cort, they can’t fault him for not caring. He spent three months combing Venice, Hollywood and Pasadena to find the right building for one exterior shot. He was so intent on getting precisely the right look, says assistant director Tony Perez, that even minor variations turned into major issues: “ ‘If I can’t have this shot, I have no film. If these salt-and-pepper shakers are not painted blue, I have no film.’ ”

While Cort’s demands cause some crew members to walk around muttering to themselves, others are thrilled to work for someone with a vision for a change. “We were running around like maniacs,” remembers costume designer Dana Weems. “I gave him my sweat, my weekends, my nights and my wardrobe left over from the ‘70s. I liked Bud a lot. He wasn’t wishy-washy. He wanted what he wanted.”

“The day before the shoot,” says Cort, “I was told I couldn’t have the horse I wanted. They wanted to give me a cheap white horse. It put me in a panic. It had to be a magnificent stallion, a larger-than-life horse. Otherwise, it wouldn’t work. For certain things, you have to go for it.”

The tension, the long hours and the subject matter of the film itself sometimes leave Cort totally drained. “You have to have the answers, and if you don’t, you have to make them up.” At night, says Cort, he drags himself into bed and recites a little prayer: “I hope I’m cutting it. I hope I’m cutting it.”

Despite Cort’s inexperience as a director, he does have a leg up in one respect--he has acted in 40 feature films. He knows actors. He speaks their language. And he knows what to do when they get stuck, as Kim Adams does early on.

On this warm morning on a Canoga Park sound stage, the script calls for Cort, as the obsessed poet, to come into Adams’ office and announce that he is madly in love with her and her genitalia. This is supposed to make Adams so furious that Cort panics and runs out the door.

But Adams can’t get mad enough. Her indignation comes off too nice. They do the scene over and over as Cort tries everything to pull a performance out of her: “Look at my face! Do it the way I’m doing it! Say it the way I’m saying it!”

But nothing works. She’s exhausted. He’s exhausted.

They’re up to about the 20th take when Cort remembers that the day before, Adams cut her foot on a piece of glass and was given a tetanus shot. Now, with nothing else working and no end in sight, Cort whacks her smack in the sore spot.

“Ouch!” screams Adams.

“OK, you got it! Now do it!” urges Cort.

This time, when Adams shouts “Get out of here!” she’s really fierce--face contorted, eyes flashing, voice so sharp and piercing that it makes your teeth hurt.

Unfortunately, the ordeal with Adams takes so much out of Cort that when he does his lines, there’s no emotion there. In a West Hollywood screening room the following night, the dailies are a disaster.

“It was supposed to be a moment of great passion,” says Cort, “and it was all wrong. I looked half-dead.” Cort goes into such a frenzy that you can hear him through the screening room walls. “I wigged out,” he says. “I thought, ‘How could I have that much disrespect for myself and for my character that I could allow myself to give it all away?’ I went insane. I went completely berserk. I tried to tear the screen down.”

Even now, Turrow can’t talk about that night without laughing: “Bud threw his hat at the screen.”

FOR TURROW, IT IS A PERSONAL CREED TO ALWAYS stress the positive, so much so that sometimes in the years before the film got backing, he would call me just to thank me for having written “Love and Venus.” Consequently, I am not surprised when, just before the start of production, he calls up and simply says, “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I say. “What for?”

“Your words are going to be edited by an Academy Award winner.” As Turrow explains, he has just signed Peter Zinner to edit “Love and Venus,” a real coup for Turrow, as Zinner was an editor on “The Godfather,” “The Godfather Part II,” “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “The Deer Hunter,” for which he won the Academy Award.

“How did you get him?” I ask.

You have to be creative, explains Turrow. When you’re working with such a small budget, you can’t afford to pay people what they’re really worth. So you offer other things, such as screen credit. In Zinner’s case, the editor wanted to help daughter Katina get a credit. So Turrow made Zinner’s daughter editor and Zinner supervising editor.

Dietrich Lohmann, on the other hand, had made 110 movies in Europe (including 18 with the late Rainer Werner Fassbinder), but he had never shot a feature film in America. And for the chance to get his feet wet here, he was willing to work on a low-budget film.

Cort saw the project as an opportunity to combine his acting career with directing. In 1979, he had been in a near-fatal traffic accident--on his way to a Reseda roller-skating rink one night, he plowed into an unlit, abandoned car in the middle lane of the Hollywood Freeway. As he flew through his windshield, he ripped his lower lip and lost several teeth. He ended up dragging himself off the freeway with a broken arm and leg.

Recuperation took a long time, and afterward, he was offered mainly supporting parts, and even those were few and far between. So when Turrow showed him “Love and Venus,” he jumped at the chance not only to star but to direct as well.

All that was needed was the money to make the movie.

Although Turrow had worked on dozens of movies, TV shows, music videos, documentaries and commercials over the years, he had no track record as a feature film producer. And in any case, this film was a tough sell--it was a small film without major stars, major action or car crashes. It ended in tragedy and, worst of all, it was an original story. “People didn’t understand the script,” says Turrow. “You couldn’t just say, ‘It’s where ‘When Harry Met Sally’ meets ‘sex, lies and videotape.’ ”

Cort worked his Rolodex by getting the script to a long list of old friends and colleagues, including Michael Douglas, Debra Winger, Jeff Bridges, Bill Murray and Don Johnson. Turrow, in the meantime, talked to 200 potential investors, some of whom were hustlers, some dreamers and some serious, responsible business people who had offices, assets and the ability to finance the film. The problem was telling them apart.

In 1987, still having made no progress in selling this film, Turrow moved his production company into a little bungalow perched on the flat, tar-paper roof of an old two-story mortuary in Culver City. It was a cozy but tattered, down-at-the-heels kind of place more like an underfunded academic institute than a film-production office.

Because Turrow and his associate producer, Bill Martens, couldn’t afford apartments, they slept on the office floor. Rather than spend money to eat out, night after night they made do with microwaved spaghetti. On Sundays, Turrow and his girlfriend would get free vegetarian dinners at the nearby Krishna temple. The rest of the week, they’d crash parties at MGM/Lorimar and eat the hors d’oeuvres. “All the guards knew us,” Martens says. “We walked on the lot like we owned it.”

Turrow, who always looks for the silver lining, maintains that in spite of the hand-to-mouth existence, those days were a happy, golden age. “We used to go to sleep at night looking up at the MGM sign shining in the window. We had health, intelligence and friendship--we just didn’t have any money.”

FINALLY, IN FEBRUARY, 1988, TURROW HAD A stroke of luck when Diane Cairns, an International Creative Management agent who helped package such films as “Fatal Attraction” and “Dangerous Liaisons,” read the script.

“I was charmed and shocked,” says Cairns, a high-powered, low-key woman with a business degree from USC. “My first thought was that nobody in Hollywood would ever buy it. But it was funnier than anything I’d ever read, and it had a wonderful heart and a warm message.”

Despite her reservations, Cairns was willing to take a chance, and she called in Turrow and Cort to tell them she was thinking of an $8- to $12-million picture with people like Nick Nolte, Michelle Pfeiffer and Meg Ryan. She mentioned a producer’s fee of up to $400,000. “How does it sound to you?”

Turrow walked out of Cairns’ office floating on air. “I was thinking, ‘God, I won’t have to sleep on the floor anymore. I can get a car.’ ”

In the weeks that followed, Cairns sent the screenplay to 29 of the most respected and creative people in Hollywood, and, to her surprise, every one of them rejected it--sometimes sharply: The script was “offensive and bizarre”; “If I show this one to my boss, I’ll lose my job”; “Whatever did you see in this one?”

The best reaction was, “Go with God, Diane. Bless you and let me know what happens.”

“It was too daring for the studio system,” Cairns says. “Half the people thought it had too hard an edge. And the rest just didn’t get it.”

A year later, when Turrow finally did make an independent deal to finance the film, it was almost anti-climactic. A woman friend who had typed up some of his movie proposals introduced him to a matter-of-fact East Coast businessman with an extensive background in TV programming and distribution. He in turn took the project to Larry Estes, senior vice president in charge of feature-film acquisitions at RCA/Columbia Pictures Home Video.

Estes was impressed. He was a longtime Cort fan and thought the story would have a special appeal for film buffs. More to the point, perhaps, it was a low-risk venture. Because the film would cost so little to make (about $2 million), RCA/Columbia could still make back its budget on video sales alone even if it never got feature-film distribution.

JUST BEFORE THE START OF shooting on the final night, Cort makes a final plea to the crew members, asking them to join with him over the next five hours “to kick ass like we have never kicked ass before. We have 27 shots to get. If we don’t get them, I’ll be found floating in the river.”

Despite the tension and pressure, the shooting goes surprisingly well. To save time, cameras are set up in two different locations and Cort shuttles back and forth between them as needed (occasionally without his costume pants, which because of budget constraints he has to share with the stuntman). Amid all this, a Venice resident comes bursting out of his house to complain to Turrow about the sound of gunshots in one scene.

“I want your card,” he fumes. “My kids are trying to sleep. I want everyone to know the producer who spoiled it for everyone else.”

“We have permission,” explains Turrow. “We talked to the neighbors. We saw a city councilwoman. I’m trying to work with you.”

The man checks his watch. “It’s 10:45. I’ll give you to 11:15 p.m. If I hear one thing after that, I’ll play Jimi Hendrix so loud you won’t be able to think.”

“Will that help your kids sleep?” asks Turrow.

“They are not sleeping now,” snaps the man as he turns to leave, eyes flaring like landing lights.

Turrow has been threatened so many times during the making of the film that this little encounter runs like water off his back. As for the possibility of the canals being closed to movie companies, Turrow is more delighted than upset. “I said, ‘Great!’ ” he later explains. “Ours will be the last movie ever made on a Venice canal.”

The rest of the night’s shooting is a sprint against the clock. With 15 minutes left at 12:45 a.m., the cast and crew start the final scene. Cort is lying on a wooden barge in the canal as Adams holds his head in her lap. The camera is on a big hydraulic crane. As it slowly pulls up and back, you see the barge, a moss-covered canal and, in the distance, a backlit bridge shining in the night with an unearthly blue glow.

“Cut!” says the assistant director.

Everyone cheers (quietly). Champagne is uncorked, and hugs and congratulations are offered all around.

TWO WEEKS LATER, I SHOW UP at Turrow’s office for a screening of the first assemblage (a rough-and-dirty reel consisting mainly of the scenes strung together in the proper order). Turrow is puttering around on the rooftop patio of his office, scooping up dog droppings with a long-handled dustpan and releasing them over the side of the building into a trash bin two stories below.

He greets me warmly, but it’s clear that he’s under a lot of strain. His face is drawn. Strands of premature gray show in his coal black hair.

“The bonding company’s on my ass about the budget,” he says, sweeping up another load. A much bigger concern, we soon discover, is the film itself. The film, which has no music or sound effects (except for raw dialogue), is still 2 1/2 hours long. The story seems abrupt and disjointed. It drags in places, and when it ends (lamely), the small audience sits there in silence. Although Larry Estes is encouraging (“There’s a good film in there”), the bonding company representative gets right to the point: “I don’t know where all the money went. I sure don’t see it up on the screen.”

For my part, I’m reminded of an old industry axiom: A film is never as good as its dailies or as bad as its first cut. And in fact, it’s true. After three more passes through the editing room, and coupled with sound effects and period music by Swamp Dogg, the film is astonishingly better. The cutting is far cleaner and faster than before. Scenes that were adequate without music and sound effects now come across with gratifying impact and power. Best of all, people who come to the various screenings titter and roar in all the right places as well as applaud warmly at the end.

It’s a Hollywood tradition that writers despise what producers and directors do with their stories, but despite all the trauma, fights, technical foul-ups and compromises, the film is finally working. As for me, I’m delighted.

This time it is I who congratulate Turrow. “You really made it happen.” Turrow supported Cort’s vision (albeit sometimes with clenched teeth), and now the results are up there on the screen. Although Cort has added some scenes and changed others, not to mention having rewritten dialogue, he hasn’t tampered with the basic story (mostly he made it much better). Certain things look different. A few things are a bit more political than I would have liked. But Cort put it together in a way that makes aesthetic sense.

Turrow will shortly be taking prints to major distributors. If no one wants to release it, says Estes, RCA/Columbia might very well pay for prints and ads to do the job itself.

For Cort, the end of production is a huge relief. Ever since the start of the film, he’s been putting in 18-hour days, ignoring friends’ calls and draining his own bank accounts to finance additional footage--all to make the best possible film. “I can’t wait to show it to a real audience,” he says. “My heart is in my mouth.”

He’ll know how good it is, says Cort, when the film is seen by an audience like that at the old World theater on Hollywood Boulevard. “I once saw a creature-from-the-black-lagoon-type movie there. I didn’t get upset when the person next to me opened the paper bag and started swilling tequila. It didn’t bother me when the person to my right lit up a joint. I was mildly nonplussed when the couple in front of me started having oral sex. I got up and left when the person behind me took out an acetylene torch and began to build a model airplane.

“That was the World theater. If you can capture that audience’s attention, then you’ve got it made. That’s the kind of place where I want to see ‘Love and Venus.’ ”