‘Tomcats’: An Unlikely Bit of Studio History

Early last year, Joe Roth set off seismic tremors throughout the movie industry when he bolted his post as studio chief at Disney to form his own production company, called Revolution Studios. In the months that followed, the media traced every twist and turn in the Roth saga, as he forged a distribution deal with Sony Pictures Entertainment and production deals with three box-office mega-stars: Julia Roberts, Bruce Willis and Adam Sandler.

Revolution also mapped out aggressive plans to make high-profile projects, including Ridley Scott’s “Black Hawk Down” and “America’s Sweethearts,” directed by Roth and starring Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack.

So, with all Hollywood watching, what is the first movie out of the gate at Revolution? Would you believe a raunchy, R-rated comedy? The film is called “Tomcats,” a sex romp full of crude humor starring relative unknowns Jerry O’Connell, Shannon Elizabeth and Jake Busey.

If you’re wondering why Roth and his partners at Revolution, who include former Fox executive Tom Sherak, chose this film as their debut, and not a splashier movie like “America’s Sweethearts,” the folks at Revolution say it just makes sense to go with what you’ve got. “Tomcats,” with a modest $11-million budget, carries none of the risks of a big-budget film, they point out, and it doesn’t have to make a lot of money to show a profit.

And that may be the best spin Revolution can put on “Tomcats’ ” opening weekend; the film took in a lackluster $6.5 million, good for only No. 4 on the box office top 10.

Roth noted that the company will have six films coming out this year, so why not go with a movie that doesn’t take a lot of time to make? “We’ve been in business now for a year,” Roth said. “It takes a little time to develop higher-end projects. . . . This sends a signal out to the industry so they don’t have to contemplate what my next move is.”

The competition would also be rough during midsummer, when rival studios are scheduled to roll out such films appealing to young males as “Planet of the Apes,” “Rush Hour 2” and “American Pie 2.”

“I wanted to go early,” he said. “I felt comfortable. I felt spring break was a good time for this movie. Even though I can see critically mixed reviews, as [they] always are [for movies] like this, it’s silly to wait for summer to put this out.”

He was right on that score. The reviews have been mixed.

Though The Times noted in its review that the film contains “an abundance of gleeful tastelessness that actually is pretty funny,” the Associated Press found the plot rather boring and noted that while “Tomcats” tries to be funny and bawdy like “American Pie,” it falls short. “This cat has been fixed,” it cracked. The Washington Post, meanwhile, called it “repugnant” to women, “who are largely depicted as walking, talking (OK, scratch the talking part) sex organs and mammary glands.”

Indeed, one of the striking aspects about “Tomcats” is that although Sony is marketing the movie as though it pushes the envelope of raunchy humor, it actually pales in comparison with the antics of Jim Carrey in last year’s comedy “Me, Myself & Irene.” In that film, Carrey not only defecated on a lawn, but he also drank mother’s milk from the source and pumped bullets into an injured cow.

Nevertheless, Sony is certainly positioning the film as the must-see spring-break comedy principally aimed at males ages 18 to 24.

“I think we always had a feeling to make [“Tomcats”] sexy and fun and a bit outrageous,” said Jeff Blake, who heads marketing and distribution at Sony.

As for the aggressive advertising and publicity campaign for “Tomcats” targeting the college-age crowd, Blake added, “We really did go for it, no question about it. We really put it in spots that were appropriate to an R-rated audience.”

The outdoor advertising campaign depicts a sexy woman pictured from the waist down in shorts with the provocative line: “The last man standing gets the kitty.”

That line proved too objectionable in Boston, where the local transit authority banned it from buses and bus stations.

But twentysomethings certainly have been bombarded with commercials. Sony aggressively went after sports programming on Turner Sports and Fox Sports as well as late-night talk shows hosted by David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Craig Kilborn.

MTV, with its young demographic, was also earmarked, but because the film carries a restrictive R-rating, Sony ran ads only after 7 p.m. on the music cable network. The film also had a strong presence on such MTV programs as spring-break coverage, “Hot Zone” and “Rock ‘n’ Jock.”

Meanwhile, the stars of “Tomcats” also taped spots for E! Entertainment’s “Wild on E!,” and the studio made sure they had a presence on college-oriented Internet sites.

As for Wednesday evening’s premiere, Sony gave “Tomcats” a rousing send-off at the Hard Rock Cafe that featured leggy young women in “Tomcats” sports bras and short shorts spinning around on in-line skates. Attached to their chests were TV monitors displaying clips from the movie.

Other young women with Dentyne smiles cruised the party crowd handing out shots of liquor, while overhead on a massive television screen beamed interviews with cast members. On the ground, fans screamed as the actors walked up the red carpet, bombarded by questions from members of the media and thousands of camera flashes.

To understand how Roth’s first movie at Revolution came to be a small-budget raunch-fest, with sight gags such as best men at a wedding with dueling erections, requires a little history.

As they say in fairy tales, it all began once upon a time when a screenwriter named Gregory Poirier, who had earned a serious reputation penning the John Singleton race-themed film “Rosewood,” was sitting inside a steam room at Burke-Williams in Santa Monica. Staring into the fog, he overheard a group of bachelors talking about an odd wager they had made with five or six of their college buddies.

“They were all paying into this fund every year,” Poirier recalled. “The single guy who would hold out the longest would get all the money. They were sort of talking about it like a no-lose situation: ‘One gets the money and the rest of us get wives.’ ”

An idea was born.

After a little research, Poirier said, he discovered that such bets are common at campus fraternities.

“So, I let my imagination go,” he said.

Poirier made one promise to himself. Since he had long dreamed of directing a movie, he wanted this to be his directorial debut.

“I did the first draft on my own,” he said. “Then I went out and got a couple of producers I know and like--Alan Riche and Tony Ludwig--and asked them to come on board and help me a little bit. We worked up the script to what we felt was a pretty good pace. Then I went to William Morris and told my agent I wanted to go out with this thing not just as a script and director, I wanted to go all the way” through the production process.

O’Connell, who appeared in “Jerry Maquire” and “Mission to Mars,” read the script, Poirier said, and told him: “Dude, if you make this movie with anybody else, I’m going to sue you because this is me in the script.” Riche and Ludwig then said they had met Shannon Elizabeth. She had come to Hollywood’s attention when she bared her breasts in the blockbuster hit “American Pie.”

“From there, I got a line producer, Paul Kurta, and he did a budget--a breakdown,” Poirier said. “He told me, ‘This is how long it’s going to take to make it. This is how much it’s going to cost.’ So, I had a producer, a script, two stars and a shooting plan. Basically, what we had was a movie that needed a home.”

Enter Joe Roth.

He was sitting in an office complex called Lantana with an assistant one day and didn’t even have his company up and running yet when the script--which was sent all over town--landed on his desk. Unlike his old home of Disney or any other major studio, where projects have to go through layers of bureaucracy, Roth was the bureaucracy at Revolution.

“I said, ‘Wow, this would make a really funny movie,’ ” Roth said. “I called the guys up, and they said it would cost $11 million. I had some success [with youth comedies], and I felt that for the price, this was a terrific piece. I didn’t have a company at the time. Basically, I started funding it myself.”

Poirier realizes that timing was everything.

“We were very fortunate to get it to Joe at that time,” he said. “It was literally Joe in a room, and his assistant was there. There was no chain of command. Joe was the chain of command. He took the script home and read it, and the next morning he said, ‘Let’s go.’ ”

The shoot, which took place in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, had a 35-day schedule.

“I went back and asked for another five days,” Poirier said. “He said, ‘OK.’ That was it. He was great all the way along. The nice thing about Joe is he’s a filmmaker. He knows five days on a movie like this can make all the difference in the world.”

The most challenging part of the shoot, he said, was making sure the cast would make it for the 3 a.m. call time in Vegas.

“We had to start filming at 3 o’clock in the morning to 4 o’clock in the afternoon,” he recalled. “We had all these young, beautiful, exciting cast members, and they would go party, forgetting they had a 3 a.m. call. I came dragging myself down at 2:30 in the morning and they were all still up.”