The Indie Jones
Independent filmmakers, even the talented ones, face astronomical odds against commercial success. Like most artists, all but a few fall by the wayside.
Stuart Gordon hit it big his first time out.
He made an ingenious horror film, “Re-Animator,” for $800,000--not enough to float a “Titanic” lifeboat--and won the Critics Prize at the International Cannes Film Festival in 1985. His labor of love, now regarded as a cult classic, went on to gross almost $30 million worldwide.
After two more low-budget pictures (including “From Beyond” in 1986, another cult classic that grossed about $30 million) Gordon co-wrote the story for Disney’s 1989 family hit, “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” which landed him a first-look deal with that studio.
On Thursday, his 15th picture--”The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit,” written by Ray Bradbury and starring Joe Mantegna and Edward James Olmos--opened the Newport Beach International Film Festival at the Edwards Newport Cinemas in Fashion Island.
“It’s great to be part of a festival showcasing new, young filmmakers,” said Gordon, 50, who first directed Bradbury’s script as a play in 1973.
That production starred Mantegna and Dennis Franz at the Organic Theater, which Gordon founded in Chicago with his wife, Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, an actor who has appeared in many of his films.
At the Organic, moreover, he directed 37 new plays, among them two he co-wrote: “Warp,” which he also directed on Broadway in 1973 and “Bleacher Bums,” which he directed off-Broadway in 1979 and which won a 1980 Emmy Award on public television.
Gordon also directed David Mamet’s first professional production, “Sexual Perversity in Chicago,” at the Organic in 1974, introducing the playwright to Mantegna, who would later become one of Mamet’s best and most reliable actors.
The 3-year-old Newport festival is just a toddler not remotely in the same league as Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, where the Disney-backed “Ice Cream Suit” recently had its world premiere. But Gordon hopes the Newport screening will help persuade Disney to release the picture as a theatrical feature.
“We originally produced it to go direct to video,” Gordon said recently from his home in Van Nuys. “But it came out so well, they’re considering a theatrical release. I’ll know pretty soon.”
Filmed for $5.5 million in East L.A., “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” tells the comical, heartfelt story of five down-and-out Latinos who pool their cash to buy a stylish white suit that dazzles them. They take turns wearing it and discover that the suit seems to have magical powers: Whoever puts it on gets what he wishes for.
Bradbury, who has written 30 plays and published about 600 short stories and 20 novels, says “The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit” first appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in 1958 as a 5,000-word short story.
The story has had many incarnations since. Bradbury adapted it for television, starring a young Peter Falk in the early 1960s, then expanded it into a full-length play, which premiered in 1968 at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles. He also turned it into a musical that premiered at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1965, with a score by Jose Feliciano.
“I was on the movie set three days a week for a month,” Bradbury said from his home in Cheviot Hills. “It was the most fun I’ve ever had. We were a real family--Stuart, the actors, all of us. And they used my entire script, unheard of. It’s the same as the play’s. They didn’t change a word.”
Gordon, for his part, calls the prolific author “an inspiration,” noting that they’ve stayed in touch for 25 years and became “friends for life” ever since Bradbury got up on stage at the Organic and “stripped down to his skivvies” to put on the ice-cream suit at the opening night party.
“The movie is such vintage Bradbury that it’s pure poetry,” Gordon added. “It always kills me that writers are not welcome on movie sets. Having him on the set was like doing Shakespeare and having Shakespeare there.”