They Came From Hollywood

‘Grosse Pointe Blank” director George Armitage figures it was fated that he’d end up making a movie with producers Donna Roth and Susan Arnold. As a young screenwriter in the late ‘60s, he made his first big splash writing “Gasss-ss” for American International Pictures, fabled producer Sam Arkoff’s beach-blanket B-movie factory.

Armitage still remembers that the most telling script notes he got were from Arkoff’s daughter and unofficial D-Girl--the then-13-year-old Donna. “Even then, she was trying to avoid formula stuff,” he recalls. “I had a scene on a college campus where a girl runs by in a tiny bathing suit. And Donna had written in the margin, ‘Haven’t we done the bikini picture already?’ ”

Roth and Arnold are both B-movie brats--Arnold’s father was director Jack Arnold, who made “The Creature From the Black Lagoon” and “The Incredible Shrinking Man.” But horror movies are not their forte. Since they teamed up as producers in the early ‘90s--they first met taking their kids to a Mommy and Me class--they have made a trio of quirky, critically lauded films (beginning with 1993’s “Benny and Joon” and 1995’s “Unstrung Heroes”) that find unexpected humor and romance in a world populated with eccentrics and troubled misfits.

Made for $15 million for Hollywood Pictures, “Grosse Pointe Blank” explores similar turf. Starring John Cusack and Minnie Driver, its hero is an angst-ridden professional assassin who returns home for his 10-year high school reunion, both to make up with the girl he stood up on prom night and to execute one last hit. It took in nearly $7 million in its opening weekend.

The film, which Times critic Kenneth Turan calls a “wild at heart anarchic comedy,” was penned by Cusack and three other writers, including two of the actor’s high school buddies, Steve Pink and D.V. DeVincentis, who both play bit parts in the film.

“We fell in love with the story as soon as we read it,” says Arnold, who began her career as a casting director. “The absurdity of seeing this twisted hit man talking over his troubles with his psychiatrist really got me. I just couldn’t stop laughing, especially reading the scene where his psychiatrist tells him, ‘OK, go back to your high school reunion, just try not to kill anybody for a few days.’ ”

(The hit man’s psychiatrist is played by Alan Arkin, who helped rewrite most of his scenes, adding chunks of Freudian jargon he’d learned playing Sigmund Freud in “The Seven-Percent Solution.”)

Though Cusack is clearly the focus of the film, Driver’s part has more substance than the flimsy girlfriend roles seen in most Hollywood films. “Credit that to Donna and Susan,” director Armitage says. “They really pushed us to flesh her out more, to give the character more complexity. Donna and Susan played a big role in virtually everything, from casting to editing, but they were never intrusive. They have a very collaborative way of working which made the movie feel like a familial experience.”

You would never mistake Roth or Arnold for the kind of hard-driving Donna Karan-suited women often caricatured in Hollywood novels. Although they are industry insiders--Roth is married to Disney Studios chairman Joe Roth, Arnold to Disney-based producer Tom Jacobson--they are also women in their 40s who put their careers on the back burner to start families.

They’re a new Hollywood hyphenate: soccer moms who double as movie producers. “Being mothers has had a lot to do with the kind of producers we are,” says Roth. “Being caretakers and nurturers has helped us work with writers and actors. Raising kids gives you a lot of experience learning how to be patient and work problems out.”

Warm and unpretentious, they turn a luncheon interview into a talk-show routine (“People have actually offered us a talk show!” Roth boasts), finishing each other’s sentences, giggling uproariously during a photo session and nervously asking if they’re making any sense during various stages of the interview.

“They’re so hilarious that I don’t know how they ever get any work done,” says Diane Keaton, who made her feature directing debut with “Unstrung Heroes.” “Just eating lunch with them can be an experience. They’re best friends and I mean best friends. When we were working, they even stayed in the same hotel suite together.”

Roth and Arnold take family vacations together and share an office together, which is adorned with photos of their kids. Arnold has two girls, ages 8 and 12, Roth has two children who are also 8 and 12, plus her 25-year-old son from a previous marriage. At lunch, they order the same dish--a swordfish salad. When the meal is over, they race off to the bathroom together.

For them, family comes first. “If we have a meeting and one of our kids is sick or has a school play, we cancel the meeting,” says Roth. “That whole ‘you can have it all’ idea for women is not as easy as it sounds. I think women often have to work twice as hard to have a career and a family, because if you care at all, you have to do an awful lot of juggling to make sure you’re really doing both well.”

To make time for family, the producers have limited their scope. “Grosse Pointe Blank,” which they produced with Caravan Pictures head Roger Birnbaum, is only their third film in five years. They have a first-look production deal at DreamWorks SKG, but have only a handful of projects in development.

“That’s our compromise,” says Arnold. “We don’t have 15 films in development. And maybe we don’t get the hot spec scripts that we’d get if we went to breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. But that’s our choice--you learn to leave work at the doorstep.”

When they went on location to film “Benny and Joon,” the children came along. “We were interviewing line producers who would do the movie,” Roth recalls. “And we told them we’d be bringing our kids and this one guy said, ‘I don’t know if that’s going to work.’ ”

Roth flashes a steely smile. “Well, obviously he didn’t get the job.”

In a business dominated by competitive, powerful men, it must be easy to underestimate two cheerful women whose lives aren’t ruled by career drive. Yet when asked if they are as ambitious as their husbands, Roth answers yes. “It’s just that our ambitions are different. I think with men, the scope is larger, but I don’t think the basic feeling is any different.”

Cusack says he quickly learned to respect the team’s tenacity. Picking various KROQ-style ‘80s hits for the soundtrack, Cusack discovered that Roth had a favorite song of her own that she wanted in the movie. “I told her I couldn’t stand it, that there was no way I wanted it in the movie,” he recalls with a laugh. “So, of course, the song’s in the movie. She beat me down like a dog.”

Watching her father making black-and-white horror films as a kid, Susan Arnold learned a valuable Hollywood lesson. Movie blood tasted great--it was made out of Hershey’s chocolate.

“My friends got excited about meeting the big movie stars,” she recalls. “I got excited about meeting Boris Karloff.”

Donna Roth has similar fond memories. At 13, her father hired her as a story analyst--her first summer on the job she read the entire Jules Verne catalog. “We were like Army brats, except in the movie business,” she says. “I remember selling Girl Scout cookies on the set, walking past big fake Styrofoam rocks, seeing fake smoke coming from dry ice. It was wonderful. When they broke for lunch, you’d see some guy wearing a monster suit, with his head off, eating a ham sandwich.”

Even though Roth and Arnold’s husbands are industry heavyweights, their fathers are their Hollywood mentors. To pay homage to them, the team plans to make a ‘90s-style horror movie--one project in development is a remake of “The Haunting,” a psychological thriller made by Robert Wise in 1963. Taking note of several gory shootouts in “Grosse Pointe Blank,” Arnold says, “If my father were alive, he’d be really proud--he’d love it that I finally made a movie with some blood in it.”

Roth brought her father to the premiere of “Grosse Pointe Blank.” In their offices, next to posters of the films they’ve made, hangs a French poster of “Creature From the Black Lagoon.”

“Our fathers weren’t A-list filmmakers, so we never felt like they were Hollywood big shots,” Arnold explains. “But we got a real love of movies from them. And they taught us how to be professionals. When I was very young, I learned when to talk on a film set and when not to.”

These experiences have given Roth and Arnold a knack for dealing with prickly creative issues. As one filmmaker friend puts it: “They know how to get what they want without you even knowing it. They’re manipulative, but in a constructive way.”

As Keaton puts it: “They’re not intimidated, it’s all second nature to them. I always felt comfortable with them because I felt that I was treated as an equal.”

Roth and Arnold’s artist-friendly impulses were put to the test by Armitage and Cusack, who took a guerrilla-filmmaking approach to “Grosse Pointe Blank,” constantly reworking the script and often improvising entire scenes during its 45-day shoot.

While the crew was at work lighting a new scene, someone was usually rewriting the script. “I should get some kind of award from the Writers Guild,” boasts Armitage, who gave co-writers DeVincentis and Pink their own trailer during filming. “The process of screenwriting shouldn’t stop just because you’re shooting the movie. If something didn’t work when we rehearsed it in the morning, we’d rewrite it before we started filming.”

If rewrites didn’t work, Armitage encouraged his cast to improvise. With most scenes, he would first shoot a tight, scripted rendition of a scene. Then he’d let the actors experiment with a longer, free-form version. Much of the improvisation occurs in the scenes between Cusack and a rival hit man, played by Dan Aykroyd. One of the film’s comic highlights is a coffee shop confrontation where they attempt to negotiate a truce and order an elaborate breakfast, all the while aiming huge guns at each other under the table.

“We shot 18,000 feet of film just of them in the breakfast booth, using multiple cameras from several different angles,” says Armitage. “But Donna and Susan never got uptight. They were very good about letting us explore a lot of alternatives. When we needed an extra day from the studio, they would find a way to get us the time without screwing up our schedule.”

Of course, it must have helped that Roth’s husband runs the studio that made the film. But Roth insists that she and Arnold were “treated as equals” at Disney. In fact, their relationship with Disney predates Joe Roth’s tenure as studio chief: “Unstrung Heroes” got the greenlight from his predecessor, Jeffrey Katzenberg. “Grosse Pointe” was originally bought by United Artists, which allowed Cusack to take the project to Caravan when UA was unable to make the film in a timely fashion.

“I would hope that we’ve proved ourselves enough as filmmakers so that the husband issue won’t be a problem,” says Arnold. “We’ve never gotten any special treatment.”

Roth and Arnold now have projects in development at several studios. The highest profile one is at United Artists, which is making “Avon Ladies of the Amazon,” a comedy-adventure that would reunite Keaton, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn, the stars of “The First Wives Club.” Arnold says that the script should be ready this summer, with shooting due to begin by year’s end.

If the film gets made, it would be the producer team’s first big-budget movie--and potentially their first big commercial success. Having survived so far making low-budget, low-risk, indie-style films for major studios, Roth and Arnold are clearly bothered by Hollywood’s obsession with opening-weekend box-office results.

“It’s scary to have 12-year-old kids come up and ask you how much money your movie made over the weekend,” Arnold says. “My father was a commercial filmmaker, but in my house you never heard him talk about movie budgets or how much his movies made. It would have been embarrassing.”

What matters most, they say, is when they receive letters, as they did after making “Benny and Joon,” from people saying that the film gave them a sense of hope about their lives. “That’s what made me feel the movie was a success,” says Arnold. “We had crew members on ‘Benny and Joon’ telling us that they’d had a cousin or an uncle who was mentally unbalanced. It really means something to be able to touch people.”

Roth nods her head in agreement, a big smile spreading across her face. “Of course, on ‘Grosse Pointe Blank,’ we had a lot of people come up to us, saying, ‘You wouldn’t believe this, but my uncle was a hit man too.’ ”