A Real ‘Prime Gig’ for a Veteran Stage Director

Question: Which allegory about greed, trust and American business directed by Gregory Mosher tells the story of con artists working a telemarketing scam? (a) “Glengarry Glen Ross” (b) “The Prime Gig” (c) Both of the above.

The correct answer is C. On Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Film Festival screens Mosher’s more recent foray into the world of phone hustlers. Written by William Wheeler, “The Prime Gig” stars Vince Vaughn, Ed Harris and Julia Ormond and marks Mosher’s debut as a film director.

Until recently, Mosher had been an all-theater/all-the-time kind of guy. Fresh out of Juilliard, Mosher staged the 1975 debut of David Mamet’s groundbreaking “American Buffalo” in Chicago, the first of more than 20 collaborations with the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. In 1984 he directed David Rabe’s “Hurlyburly” and earned a Tony Award nomination for staging “Glengarry Glen Ross.”

The following year, Lincoln Center hired Mosher to run its theater. During his seven-year tenure, he produced new works by Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Leonard Bernstein, Elaine May, Rabe, Stephen Sondheim, Wole Soyinka and Derek Walcott. He directed Madonna in Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” and earned a second Tony nomination for his revival of “Our Town.” He produced Mike Nichols’ staging of “Waiting for Godot.” He made Lincoln Center a magnet for such actors as Robin Williams, Steve Martin, William Hurt, Harvey Keitel, Eric Stoltz and Penelope Ann Miller. Finally, Mosher says, he burned out.

“Theater was enormous fun and really a thrill, but I had done it essentially nonstop for 17 years--I had two vacations in 17 years,” muses Mosher. “I’d come home at 1 in the morning and leave for work at 8. I wanted a break.”

After quitting his Lincoln Center post in 1992, Mosher finally had time to watch movies. He saw three or four a day, screening “The Graduate,” “Chinatown,” “A Place in the Sun” and other classics dozens of times. “I was just trying to un-construct movies, to get them from a seamless experience and work backward in my brain to the building blocks. At first it was really just so hard, but it was exactly the newness that was appealing. I thought it would be interesting to find out if I would be good at this,” recalls Mosher, speaking by phone from his home in New York.

In 1999, producer Cary Wood, aware of his “Glengarry” connection, invited Mosher to direct “The Prime Gig.” The tale revolves around Penny (Vaughn), a small-time phone hustler who gets sucked into a high-powered scam run by charismatic felon Kelly Grant (Harris) and his predatory girlfriend Caitlin (Ormond). Says Mosher, “Cary didn’t quite get what he bargained for when he hired me, because in a way he was looking for a little ‘Glengarry’ redux. But that sheer business aspect of the story, even using telephone sales as metaphor for the stock market and the craziness of the ‘80s and the ‘90s, was less interesting to me. What fascinated me about ‘Prime Gig’ was the whole Penny-Julia Ormond relationship, and how Vince’s unwillingness to let his guard down is precisely the thing that leads him into this morass.”

By the time Wood came calling, Mosher had taught himself enough about American film to know exactly whom he wanted as his cinematographer: John Alonzo. About Alonzo, who died in March, Mosher says, “To study American movies is to study John Alonzo, who made, 45, 50, 60 movies in his life, with geniuses, and whose movies look very different--’Chinatown’ looks very different from ‘Norma Rae.’ John still very much had that ‘70s eye, and Bill, I thought, had written a ‘70s story, which is to say a pre--I have to be very careful when I say this, because I like Quentin Tarantino--but it’s a pre-Tarantino story. It’s not a ‘Hey, let’s kill somebody and get a hot dog’ movie. ‘Prime Gig’ doesn’t exist in that anarchic world. It’s a world that’s totally screwed up, and yet, decency matters, love matters, trust matters, honor matters.

“And that’s an attitude that in the film world is at least a mid-century idea, a 1950s to 1975 idea. Vince Vaughn’s character is like Nicholson’s character in ‘Five Easy Pieces,’ or Montgomery Clift, or Newman, who played those characters, like in ‘Hud’--these guys are just screw-ups, major screw-ups, and yet theirs is a moral universe. You’re not at all in a world of no consequences. People’s actions are not easy to determine, which is where the whole con thing comes in. I mean, really, how many times have you wondered if the person is being nice to you because they can get something from you?”

Last year, Mosher flew out from Manhattan to shoot “The Prime Gig” in Los Angeles. The pale New Yorker was in for a shock. “You want to commit suicide under that light,” he rants. “It’s just all glare. When you get the light coming through that Godforsaken smog, it’s blindingly bright and yet profoundly unpleasant really. I never wear sunglasses in New York, and I just Krazy Glued them to my face out there.”

A Different Sort of Actor

Mosher may have been alienated by the climate, but he reveled in his cast’s just-do-it approach, which made their theater colleagues look, by comparison, like dawdling navel-gazers. Mosher explains, “It’s so weird, because in the theater, we spend six weeks talking about the play, breaking the play down and stuff; you get on a movie set and these guys just know what they’re doing. It was thrilling for me, beyond thrilling. One of the kids on the set, a former stage actor, pulled me aside and said, ‘Theater directors want to talk about it all the time. You figured out something they never get: Just let everybody work, and if the train starts to go off the tracks, pull ‘em back on. On a movie, we actors come in really knowing what we’ve got to do, and we do it, and we tend to not want to talk about it very much.’

“I don’t think I said more than 10 things to Vince during the whole shoot. Just little things, technical things. You know, he understood the character.”

Since the actors didn’t require much coaching, Mosher says he spent a lot of time on the set pestering his camera operators. “I drove the guys on the camera crew crazy,” he says, laughing. “We’d line up a shot and I’d say, ‘OK, your job is to be nice to me, so tell me, why is this shot of Vince getting out of his car and walking up to the door, why isn’t that out of, you know, “The Mod Squad”? We’ve got three minutes here while we’re waiting, frame it [as if it were] for TV,’ and they would show me the TV version of the shot, and I’d go ‘Wow, cool.’

“You know, [on your first movie] you’re surrounded by people who are better at their jobs than you are at yours. When you start saying, how can we make it better, how can we make it simpler, how can we make it more truthful, how can we set this shot up so we can juxtapose it against a shot that we’re not going to shoot for another day or two?’ Then they go, (a) Well, he’s not a complete dummy, and (b) If he’s curious I might as well tell him.”

Mosher is quick to cite other film directors who started in theater: George Cukor, Orson Welles, Elia Kazan, Mike Nichols. Actually, it’s a pretty short list, Mosher concedes. “The funny thing about America, as opposed to England, is here, you sort of had to choose which team you were going to play on, whether you were going to be a movie guy or a theater guy. Nichols is one of the few who goes back and forth. It’s like, ‘Which sport are you gonna play--hockey or basketball?’ was the question and once you answered it, you were committed and it’s hard to cross over, very hard.”

It’s also hard, apparently, to shed some of those old theater reflexes. “It’s never the same when you do it on stage. The pause is a little bit longer, the pain is a little bit deeper, the laugh is a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller. It’s an ongoing, living thing. And so it was funny in the editing room working on ‘Prime Gig.’ I’d think, ‘That’s funny, that’s exactly the way he read that line yesterday.’ So if you’re gonna change something, you have to clip a frame or juxtapose another image, or put a different piece of music underneath it, and there’s great fun in that. This movie game, it’s another ballgame.”

And one he’s eager to play more of. Mosher has three film projects in limbo, pending the outcome of the writer and actor union negotiations. In the meantime, he’s back to theater directing, steering Macaulay Culkin through rehearsals for Richard Nelson’s new play “Madame Melville,” opening May 3 in New York.

When it comes to the stage, Mosher modestly defers to the actors and to the writer’s word, which serves as, well, the last word. “In theater,” Mosher says, “it’s all about text with a capital T. In movies, it’s image with a capital I. The essence of the difference is, in film you let the picture tell the story, and that was something I was obsessed with. I kept saying to Bill, ‘What’s the visual way to tell the story? How do we make the movie work with the soundtrack off?’ In the best of all possible worlds, people could follow this movie with the soundtrack off. They’d know, ah, that’s a seduction, ah, that’s a confrontation, ah, that’s a moment of horror.”

* “The Prime Gig” screens Tuesday at 7:15 p.m. at Directors Guild of America headquarters, 7920 Sunset Blvd. Call (800) 965-4827 for tickets.