Sex and the single film

When “Kinsey” vies for three major Golden Globe Awards on Sunday, it’s the light at the end of an eight-year tunnel -- long, even by Hollywood standards.

The project was rejected by 87 studios and film companies. Three months before they began shooting in July 2003, no financing was firmly in place.

A year-and-a-half later, the story of Alfred C. Kinsey, the biologist who shocked 1950s America by peeking under its bedcovers, has become a critical darling. Writer-director Bill Condon has drawn accolades along with its star, Liam Neeson, and supporting actors Laura Linney and Peter Saarsgard. The $11-million movie, which expanded into 588 theaters on Friday, has landed on 119 top-10 lists, including those of the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, the Wall Street Journal and Rolling Stone.

The “Kinsey” saga provides a window into the vagaries of a risk-averse business in which executive shifts and marketplace changes can make or break a project. It’s also a lesson on the importance of star power, passion and persistence -- as producer Gail Mutrux can attest.

“Even with an Academy Award-winning actor and writer, this one took forever,” she said. “No hard feelings on this end. I’ve never been interested in down-the-middle genre pictures, so they’re always a tougher sell.”

As Condon sees it, Mutrux is a throwback to a different age.

“She was the first one on the set and last to leave, like an old-time movie producer ... working for McDonald’s wages,” the director said during a telephone interview from New York. “It’s exciting to see a single ‘produced by’ card. In Hollywood today, the person who developed the project, the money people, they’re all ‘producers,’ so the title is less meaningful.”

Flash back to 1993. Mutrux was co-producing the movie “Quiz Show,” a movie about Charles Van Doren, who was caught cheating on the popular television show “Twenty-One.” While reading a chapter on Van Doren in author David Halberstam’s book “The Fifties,” she became engrossed in another one, on Kinsey, a controversial figure credited with paving the way for the women’s and gay liberation movements. In his groundbreaking “Sexual Behavior of the Human Male” (1948) and its 1953 female equivalent, he argues that there is no such thing as “normal” sexual activity -- only “common” or “rare.”

At the time, Mutrux, a former UCLA art history major, was on the production staff at Baltimore Pictures, started by director Barry Levinson and producer Mark Johnson. After turning out movies such as “Avalon” and “Toys,” they all parted ways two years later.

1995: Mutrux goes to Fox 2000, a division of 20th Century Fox, where she partners in a production company with Katie Jacobs. She brings up the possibility of a “Kinsey” project to executive Kevin McCormick, who has coincidentally just read a script on the subject, one in which Fox 2000 chief Laura Ziskin was interested. That manuscript could not be purchased, however, because of legal complications.

1996: Mutrux begins the research in earnest, soaking up oral histories and biographies at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana. She also produces “Donnie Brasco,” the tale of an FBI undercover agent who infiltrates the mob, starring Johnny Depp. After the 1997 release of the movie, she lines up Tom Fontana, executive producer on Baltimore Pictures’ NBC drama series “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which she developed and produced, to write the “Kinsey” script. A year later, Fontana withdraws before handing in a completed draft, Mutrux says, because his TV responsibilities are too consuming. Mutrux co-produces Neil LaBute’s black comedy “Nurse Betty,” which features a young Renee Zellweger -- a mix of drama and humor to which the Flushing, N.Y.-born producer is drawn. Finding a writer to do that on “Kinsey” is no easy task -- and the pressure mounts when she learns that producer Ed Pressman and HBO have “Kinsey” projects of their own.

Early 1999: Ziskin still wants to make the film with Mutrux, though Mutrux is no longer on the lot. Condon, who won a 1998 best adapted screenplay Oscar for his “Gods and Monsters,” wants to come aboard as writer and director.

“Both of us saw the movie in the same way: ‘Sex in the name of science,’ ” the producer recalled. “Kinsey’s research was a way of exploring his own sexuality. It wasn’t until later that I became aware of the bisexuality, the wife-swapping, the purported self-mutilation, which made things more dramatic and complicated. Kinsey was more than a workaholic who died because he pushed himself. He was a tragic hero.”

The theme has been a double-edged sword -- both the appeal of the movie and its drawback. Domestic film companies considered the topic of sexual repression too hot to handle, Mutrux found. Foreign firms considered it a particularly “American hang-up” to which their audiences wouldn’t relate. Dramas, moreover, are perceived as noncommercial -- harder to get off the ground these days.

“Shot in classic studio style, ‘Kinsey’ would have been distributed by a ‘major’ 10 years ago, when they each released four or five dramas a year,” said Condon. “Now a ‘Schindler’s List’ or a ‘Philadelphia’ would be channeled into specialty divisions like Fox Searchlight or [Universal’s] Focus Features, who make risky films -- but for less.”

Spring 1999: Fox 2000 pays $50,000 for the rights to Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy’s 1998 biography “Sex: The Measure of All Things: A Life of Alfred C. Kinsey” for use as source material. By the time Condon delivers the script a year later, Ziskin is at Sony Pictures with a production deal. The project is put in “turnaround,” making it available to anyone willing to pay back the costs. Without a Harrison Ford or a Tom Hanks, Mutrux explains, the new regime isn’t interested.

Summer 2000: Joining forces with LaBute in a production company, Pretty Pictures, Mutrux spends eight months trying to pre-sell rights to “Kinsey” to entities such as Summit Entertainment and BBC Films. Condon, meanwhile, writes an Oscar-nominated screenplay for the musical “Chicago,” which goes on to capture the best picture Oscar.

First quarter 2001: Mutrux submits the project to Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope -- and gets her first “yes.”

If the filmmakers are willing to slash the budget from $25 million to $10 million -- Coppola’s cap at United Artists -- they’ll pick it up. Condon bucks the notion at first, reluctant to change his vision.

“Scaling down, I knew, would be another type of hell,” he said. “We’d have to pay for 100 speaking parts with less than half the money. In the end, however, I told myself it was worth it. Coppola’s involvement made us ‘real’ enough that we could start to cast.”

Summer 2001: Coppola is looking for a new foreign partner who, with United Artists, will finance his films. Mutrux quietly approaches other companies, concerned that the uncertainty will cause Condon to bail out.

Spring 2002: Linney signs on, followed by Neeson -- working for much less than their asking price. Myriad Pictures, Coppola’s new foreign partner, takes the lead in the production, approaching Fox for the rights. Six months later, the studio asks each of its divisions to sign off, and Fox Searchlight chief Peter Rice indicates interest. He’ll distribute the film domestically -- supplanting UA -- if Myriad handles the international end.

“The involvement of Liam and Laura made all the difference,” said Mutrux, who produced LaBute’s “The Shape of Things” that year. “Nowadays, the studios want everything in place -- script, directors, actors -- before they agree to it. You virtually have to make the movie first. That’s what the Sundance Film Festival is about.”

Jan 2003: Condon comes to New York to hire a casting director and crew, but no contracts have yet been signed. Like Condon, names such as John Lithgow, Tim Hutton and Tim Curry worked approximately for scale. And Carter Burwell, veteran of the Coen brothers’ movies, did the score for “virtually nothing,” the filmmakers say. When a project isn’t studio-related, Condon says, years and years in development are commonplace because the money isn’t always there.

April 2003: Myriad’s financing falls through. The shoot can’t be postponed because Neeson and Linney have other commitments. “The same thing happened on ‘Gods and Monsters’ when Ian McKellen accepted an 18-month stint at London’s National Theatre,” Condon says. “We had someone standing there with a bullet and a loaded gun, saying, ‘This is it or it’s going away.’ Sometimes, you need that to get going.”

Coppola’s agent, Bart Walker, approaches Michael Kuhn, former head of PolyGram Films who becomes “Kinsey’s” guardian angel. Aided by German financing, he agrees to finance the movie through his brand-new Qwerty Films.

June 2003: Violating the first rule of show business, Mutrux and her producer-husband, Tony Ganz (“Clean and Sober”), put their own money in the production. She’d been paying for budgets and option renewals, keeping things afloat. Ganz lends the project $75,000 before Kuhn’s deal is signed, prior to the 37-day July shoot. Coppola and Zoetrope’s Bobby Rock are credited as executive producers because they helped secure the financing.

Second half of 2004: “Kinsey” opens at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals to very good reviews. A month after the Nov. 12 release, Linney is voted best supporting actress by the National Board of Review and Neeson best actor by the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn. The picture, Linney and Neeson are up for three Golden Globes and four Independent Spirit awards. Whether they will get an Oscar nomination will be answered Jan. 25. Still, with about $8 million in ticket sales thus far, it’s hard to know if the film will make money, Mutrux concedes.

“Barry Levinson told me, upfront, that the good ones take the longest,” she says. “I have another project, 10 years in the making, that I’m still waiting to get done.”

For Condon, it has been seven years between directing jobs. He had hoped that the success of “Gods and Monsters” would make this bout easier, but he’s not about to complain.

“To play this game, you have to be prepared for the bad, and level-headed about the good,” he says. “And, while we like to think we have some control over things, you have to learn to let go. If you don’t, you’ll end up like Orson Welles, telling anecdotes around the dinner table for 40 years, railing against the gods.”