An Artist Is Now a Director : Longo Hopes ‘Crypt’ Opens Film Career

“Going from the art world to Hollywood is like trying to transfer to a college that doesn’t accept your credits,” says Robert Longo, one of several young visual artists who established thriving careers in the ‘80s and have been trying to cross over into film ever since.

New York artists David Salle and Jeff Koons both have film projects they’ve been struggling to launch for a few years. Richard Prince--currently the subject of a retrospective at the Whitney Museum--did arty spots for MTV, and Julian Schnabel profiles movie stars for Interview Magazine.

Work by all these artists sells for upward of six figures, but that hasn’t cut much ice with the Hollywood money people thus far. Longo, who’s attempting to edge his way in the back door of a movie deal by directing an episode of “Tales From the Crypt” that airs tonight at 10:30 on HBO, thinks he knows why.

“That Mike Ovitz collects contemporary art hasn’t changed the fact that most film executives simply don’t make the connection between film and art,” the 38-year-old artist said during an interview at a Hollywood hotel. “The film world assumes all artists want to make ‘arty’ films and they don’t want to let artists in because film is a business based on making money and artists have other interests. Success in these two worlds is very different too. With movies you need millions of people to buy a $7 ticket, whereas an artist can be successful simply by having one wealthy and influential person support his work.”

In Los Angeles from Paris, where he’s lived for the last two years, Longo was one of the most highly visible and controversial of the generation of artists that came into prominence during the boom years of the ‘80s. Working in various forms and materials, he created monumental, unabashedly bombastic works exploring themes of power, destruction, science fiction and war.

Born in a middle-class neighborhood of Brooklyn, the youngest in a family of three children, Longo was raised on a steady diet of movies and rock ‘n’ roll and has always positioned his work within the context of mass media.

“For years I always had three TV monitors going at once when I worked in my studio, and with all my art there was a frustration with the fact that it didn’t move,” he says. “I did a series called ‘Men in the Cities’ that was meant to be seen sequentially like a Muybridge photo piece, and I made several montages inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s film ‘2001.’ Movies have been a huge influence on me and there’s always been something cinematic to the way I compose images.”

Longo began trying to transform the cinematic aspect of his sensibility into concrete reality in 1983 when he collaborated on a script titled “Steel Angel” with writer Richard Price. Originally titled “Empire,” the script was written for performance artist Eric Bogosian, but the project sputtered out, he says, when “Bogosian went off with Oliver Stone, and Richard Price was adopted by Martin Scorsese. But even if Eric and Richard had stayed with the project, ‘Steel Angel’ was basically too nasty for Hollywood and I wasn’t willing to spend the time in L.A. that would’ve been necessary to make the film happen. My agent and lawyer kept telling me I had to hang out here for a long time to crack the film world, but I’m an artist and I have a hard time functioning that way.”

What Longo did instead was give himself a crash course in filmmaking by directing rock videos. Beginning in 1986 with a tape for the New York band the Golden Palominos, he refined his skills with videos for such groups as New Order, Living Color, R.E.M. and Megadeth, but found himself bored by the form when he sensed himself “running out of tricks.” His waning interest in video also had to do with the fact that he had bigger fish to fry.

“One evening I met (Elektra Records president) Bob Krasnow at a party and at that point he was just launching Elektra Home Entertainment and wound up hiring me to do a short film,” Longo recalls. “It was originally budgeted at $40,000, but that was the crack in the door we drove a refrigerator through--it wound up costing just under $100,000. The film was loosely inspired by the Andy Warhol film ‘Chelsea Girls,’ and was called ‘Arena Brains,’ and it featured Sean Young, Eric Bogosian, Ray Liotta and Michael Stipe in a series of vignettes set in the New York art world. The first day of shooting I had to fake so much--I didn’t know what the hell I was doing--but we opened at the New York Film Festival in the fall of 1987 and were pretty well received.”

Longo spent the following year preparing for a major traveling retrospective of his artwork, first presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989. That same year he wrote and directed a large-scale theatrical piece called “Dream Jumbo,” which premiered at UCLA. Though Longo was deeply involved with the art world during this period, the Hollywood siren continued to call.

“Krasnow was really excited about the response to ‘Arena Brains’ and got it released on home video, and then he told me to find a feature film I wanted to do and he’d give me $1.5 million,” he recalls. “So my partner, Victoria Hamburg, and I wrote a script called ‘Johnny Mnemonic,’ based on a William Gibson short story, and Krasnow liked it. We were about a month away from pre-production in 1990 when Warner Bros. got bought by Time-Life and everything got put on hold. Krasnow cut me loose from our deal so I could get the film made somewhere else, but at that point I just thought ‘to hell with this--I give up.’ ”

But another fortuitous social encounter put Longo’s project back into play.

“A few years ago I met Joel Silver (one of the executive producers of “Tales From the Crypt”) at La Coupole in Paris and wound up giving him a tour of Paris at night and we became friends. When he heard about this script I had, he expressed an interest in executive producing it for me and, once that happened, all these doors started opening. Carolco wound up buying the rights to the script and hired William Gibson to do a rewrite. We’re now at the point where Carolco is waiting to see my episode of ‘Tales From the Crypt’ before giving ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ a green light--not enough pressure, huh? This is definitely an audition for me.”

Based on a script titled “This’ll Kill Ya” by A. L. Katz and Gilbert Adler, Longo’s “Tale” is a psychological horror story starring Dylan McDermott, Sonia Braga and Cleavon Little. Made for $400,000 during a five-day shoot at City Studios in Van Nuys, the show was an exercise for Longo in how to compromise. Compromise is central to the creative process in television, but it’s antithetical to how visual artists normally work.

“Early on I suggested shooting this whole thing with a snorkel camera, but they didn’t like that idea at all,” Longo says with a laugh. “I had a lot of control over it and got to design the sets, but there are still so many limits with television. I had myself psyched up to make ‘Apocalypse Now,’ but once I got to the set I had to scale my fantasy down because it’s hard to achieve monumentality in TV.”

Longo is dealing with a fairly conventional creative formula with “This’ll Kill Ya,” and he plays it straight and by the rules. But if it results in his getting the go-ahead for the offbeat “Johnny Mnemonic,” he has some surprises in store.

“The thing I love about ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ is that it includes all the issues I’m interested in, disguised as a Hollywood movie,” he says. “It features a woman bodyguard, so there’s a role reversal thing, and the lead male character screwed up big time somewhere along the line, so he’s dealing with regret, and one of the main characters is a dolphin.”

Asked which character he identifies with, Longo laughs and says, “The dolphin, of course.”

That makes sense. Though he likes being an outsider, he’s also determined to prove he can navigate the stormy waters of Hollywood.