Ya Gotta Fight for the Right to Make It Nice

If the on-screen drama of “The Spitfire Grill” is emotional, the story behind the story--the making of the $6-million film--is pure melodrama. A comedy of errors with plenty of tear-jerking moments, it is a Capra-esque tale, with an unlikely everyman as its hero.

Meet John Doe, in this case, Roger Courts, executive director of Gregory Productions, which produced the film. An articulate, soft-spoken grandfather and film buff, Courts, by Hollywood standards, seemed harmless enough--he had been running the Sacred Heart League, a Catholic charity in Walls, Miss., for 30 years.

But Courts had a dream: to make an uplifting film like “Tender Mercies,” sell it for a lot of money and use the profits to pay for a new school that the charity wanted to build for poor children in nearby DeSoto County.

“It’s like saying they’re going to raise money by playing blackjack,” says L.A. attorney Gregg Homer of Homer, Kirsch & Mitchell, who urged his client not to finance a film without a distribution deal in place. (Courts instead formed the for-profit production company, Gregory Productions, which borrowed the money to make the film from the charity.)

“What I underestimated was Roger Courts’ creative vision,” Homer adds. “Roger told me, ‘Distributors aren’t going to understand this film from the script. They’ve got to see it.’ ”

To find the right script, Courts contacted a California friend who produced TV specials, who contacted a friend who produced TV shows, who contacted a TV writer-producer pal, who pitched the story for . . . the movie. As soon as Courts heard it, he knew that Lee David Zlotoff’s story of an ex-con trying to rebuild her life in a small Maine town was the one he’d searched years for.

Peacham, Vt., has a winter population of about 250, but that figure increased by a third the day the 80-plus film crew descended in April 1995. Indie producer Forrest Murray (“Bob Roberts”) had been hired eight weeks before production to replace the first producer, who had never produced a feature film, and was expecting a relatively easy shoot. But while the snow (a crucial element in the story) was disappearing under freezing rains, an even bigger storm was quietly brewing.

The bed-and-breakfast that was to provide dressing rooms for the six lead actors fell through a week before production (sold by its landlord after being on the market for years). With no room in town to park star trailers, dressing rooms were created in a local church basement--using hospital curtains as partitions.

Meanwhile, the time set aside for rehearsals was being spent trimming the script instead--and still the screenplay was too long. The actors realized they wouldn’t be able to rehearse until they were in front of the camera and crew--an actor’s nightmare, especially with no special effects or big-budget explosions to help carry the film.

But an explosion did occur . . . on Day One.

Ellen Burstyn had built her entire character around a particular hat, which she wore through the screen tests and repeatedly emphasized in script discussions. But as she stepped in front of the camera that first morning, according to sources present on the set, director Zlotoff--accustomed to the run-and-gun pacing of TV production (he had been supervising producer on “Remington Steele” and creator of “MacGyver”)--requested that she “Lose the hat, babe.”

Sources say the Oscar-winning Burstyn was so upset that she fled to her not-so-private “dressing room” for the next two hours. (Burstyn denies this.)

The incident was the shot heard ‘round the set. The six lead performers--including Burstyn, Alison Elliott and Marcia Gay Harden--bonded together, determined not to sacrifice their performances for expediency. “The first 10 days of filming were spent trying to keep the actors from mutinying,” says one on-set observer. “There was an active insurrection on any given day.”

Camera blocking became a daily battle, a committee affair involving actors, director, cinematographer and the assistant director. Scenes were deleted each night, creating fears among the actors that the story’s arc might collapse. Murray and executive producer Warren Stitt stretched themselves thin playing peacemaker as talent agents threatened daily to pull their clients.

“It was the most difficult eight weeks of my life,” says Stitt, whose previous credits included producing Easter Seals telethons. “I was on the last plane out of Cambodia when Pol Pot fell--I’ve been in some hairy situations--but none of them were as taxing as this. And it didn’t have to be.”

By the end of the second week, the actors negotiated a truce.

“The battle that we all chose to fight was to have a quality film shot in a lesser amount of time and under duress,” says Harden, who plays Shelby, a put-upon housewife who learns to stand up for herself. “People didn’t whine. People argued; they said what they had to say. It was survival. We wanted to make a good film, and so we fought to do so.”

Trailers arrived the next day.

Courts, meanwhile, had decided to stay in Mississippi during most of the filming, focusing on the big picture: the budget, the schedule and most of all, the dailies. “I thought that a lot of this [trouble] had to be expected,” he explains. “But I was counting on this incredible bank of talent in both cast and production crew to overcome it . . . and I was not disappointed.”

When time ran out to shoot the film’s climactic river scene, Courts made the painful decision not to raise the extra $250,000 the director believed necessary to finish. The completion bond company ordered the production home (and to shoot the scene in California), but Courts held his ground: Stay and shoot over Memorial Day weekend.

Stunt coordinator Danny Aiello III helped jam three days of water scenes into one--in spite of half the scouted camera positions being washed away by rain. Finally the filmmakers returned to L.A., not knowing if the sequence, and therefore the film, would work. It did, thanks to editor Margie Goodspeed, and in spite of various crises along the way, including throwing out the originally commissioned score, raising an additional half-million dollars for a new one and hiring five-time Oscar nominee James Horner to give the film a full orchestral sound.

Cut to Park City, Utah, Jan. 20, 1996. Burstyn, Elliott and Harden are seated on a platform in the back of the Prospector Theater, smiling through nervousness, still raw from a painful shoot. Marketing whiz Jonathan Dana, who is handling the sale of the film, is also worried: How will the Sundance Festival crowds, fond as they are of chic-bleak nihilism, react to this heartfelt drama? Should Gregory Productions have accepted one of the pre-festival distribution offers? As the film ends, the audience erupts in wild applause, turning to the three women (now dissolved in tears) and giving them a five-minute standing ovation.

It is time to close a deal. But Courts and Dana don’t feel good about the offers on the table and decide to cut off negotiations with Trimark, their most ardent suitor. “When I don’t know what to do,” Courts says, “I don’t do anything.”

“Roger set the tone,” Dana says. “We didn’t know how it was going to come out right until the end. But he said, ‘We’re not negotiating out of fear.’ ”

The next day, Castle Rock--which had only acquired one other film in its six-year history (“A Midwinter’s Tale”)--offers $10 million for all rights to the film--four times more than had been paid for any acquisition in Sundance history. (The film opened Friday.)

“Spitfire” wins not only the 1996 Audience Award, but the Spirit of Sundance Award for Harden, (who later marries Thaddaeus Scheel, the crew member who drove her trailer). Burstyn, who had refused to do looping sessions with the director, caps off the evening by giving Zlotoff a big hug.

Courts, who has omitted his name from the film’s credits to avoid publicity, has now become a producer to be reckoned with (his next project is said to be announced imminently). And DeSoto County is getting a new school--with a cafeteria called the Spitfire Grill.