They’ve bet the house on a second chance

For Randall Miller and Jody Savin, Monday night, day five of the Sundance Film Festival, could change their lives.

That’s when their indie film, “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School,” will screen for industry agents and executives on the prowl for that undiscovered gem with the potential to turn into an overnight sensation. Think “Napoleon Dynamite” or “Garden State.”

“Either you do it or you don’t do it,” Miller said. “We really want to be filmmakers. If this doesn’t work out, we’ll go away and maybe in 10 years regroup and come back again.”

But there is an irony in the couple’s odyssey to get their film to Park City, Utah. Unlike the hordes of twentysomething filmmakers at Sundance burning with a desire to break into the industry, this fortysomething husband and wife have already been industry insiders, working on episodes of “thirtysomething” and “Northern Exposure” and urban comedies such as “Houseguest.” Then, as abruptly as success came knocking, Hollywood quit calling.

Today, the couple are starting all over again and attempting to return to their filmmaker roots. They’ve plundered all the equity in their home to finance their labor of love. Their small independent movie with a mouthful of a name is based on -- and uses snippets from -- a student film they worked on more than a decade ago.

It remains to be seen whether “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School” will be picked up by a distributor. But one studio acquisitions executive said the movie is already generating advance buzz because of the high-profile celebrities, such as Oscar winner Marisa Tomei, who signed on shortly after picking up the script about a widower whose life is upended when he agrees to fulfill a dying man’s wish to meet up with his long-lost love at a ballroom dance class.

If “Ballroom” is a hit, Miller and Savin say, they’ve got a second project in the wings, this one about a dysfunctional family.

But if “Ballroom” fails, the couple may have little choice about their next move: They will likely pull up stakes and leave Hollywood for more stable careers and a more affordable place to live.

Miller and his wife settled down recently at a Burbank restaurant across from Warner Bros., not far from the lab where they were doing the last-minute sound mixing for their film.

Looking back, the couple said, their modest success in TV and film proved itself to be a double-edged sword. Although far from rich, they enjoyed a comfortable living and purchased an old, Craftsman-style California bungalow in Pasadena. They have two kids, ages 2 and 4. But in recent years, they said, they found themselves pigeonholed by their comedy work and overlooked for more serious fare. Reality TV also took its toll.

And, as they got older -- Miller is 41, Savin won’t say -- a new generation of “young Turks” running the networks and studios seemed to push them to the sidelines.

“I never was a producer of a show,” Miller said. “I was just going job to job ... They only hired me, generally, to direct TV, but I haven’t been able to get TV directing jobs, let alone TV movies, for three years.” What about residuals? “With residuals, you imagine these huge checks, but I never had a really successful movie where you get a lot of money. I made $15,000 last year. That was my whole income. There was no way I could live on that.”

Some serious soul searching was in order. While they appreciated their TV careers, Miller and Savin realized that it had kept them from making serious films, a dream they had harbored for more than 15 years, dating back to their days as students -- he was a directing fellow, she a writing fellow -- at the prestigious American Film Institute.

With the boom in Southern California home prices, the couple raised enough money through a second mortgage to get their project off the ground and then contacted would-be investors to deliver their pitch.

In a testament to how actors often look for meaty scripts even if it won’t necessarily bring them big paychecks, the script attracted a veteran cast that includes Tomei (“My Cousin Vinny”) and fellow Oscar winner Mary Steenburgen (“Melvin and Howard”), Robert Carlyle (“Trainspotting”), John Goodman, Sean Astin (“The Lord of the Rings” trilogy) and Donnie Wahlberg, Adam Arkin, Camryn Manheim, Sonia Braga, David Paymer, Ernie Hudson and Miguel Sandoval. There is also a cameo by Danny DeVito.

Tomei said she signed up for the role of the damaged Meredith Morrison, one of the Hotchkiss students, without reading the entire screenplay. “I never really do that,” Tomei said. “Later, when I talked to Robert Carlyle, I said, ‘You know what is so weird -- I didn’t read the whole thing until we started work.’ And he said, ‘Neither did I.’ I think it was some energy thing. We were all drawn to this.... There are a lot of layers and an unexpected darkness to it.”

The film includes a series of flashback sequences featuring a cast of children that Miller shot as part of a 35-minute thesis film at AFI in the early 1990s. The student short, also titled “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School,” is set in 1962 and is about a 12-year-old boy who attends a cotillion and experiences his first kiss, discovering that “girls aren’t so bad.”

“The short film was based on this experience I had as a kid going to cotillion in Pasadena,” Miller recalled.

After leaving AFI, Miller worked for years in episodic television and comedy films. His feature work included urban comedies such as “Houseguest” and “The 6th Man.” Savin produced those films and, with her husband, wrote features titled “The Best Woman” and “Parent Wars” for Universal, “The Raise” for Disney/Caravan, “Pirate Tom” for 20th Century Fox and “Pete!” for Disney.

“We sold a number of [our own] scripts but no one ever allowed them to be made -- development hell,” Miller noted. “A few years ago, we were pretty low in our career because we were sort of known by our resume, that we’d done these broad comedies and we couldn’t seem to get out of that....”

“We had written some really different stuff and gotten some responses, but we weren’t getting anywhere,” Savin said. “We really wanted to make something of our own.”

Dreaming of making a film and actually making it depends, of course, on money.

“Really what started the ball rolling, we financially took money out of our house and put it into the movie,” Miller said.

“Randy said, ‘It’s the old cliche, if you don’t believe in yourself, nobody is going to believe in you,’ ” Savin added.

Through a friend, Morris Ruskin, a co-producer on the David Mamet-scripted film “Glengarry Glen Ross” and someone who has expertise in foreign film sales, the couple were able to meet with would-be investors, show them their script and make their successful pitch for additional production money.

Meanwhile, the script was getting noticed. Carol Bodie and Chris Andrews, agents at International Creative Management, read it and responded enthusiastically. Andrews represents Carlyle, who read it and signed on a day later. Soon, other agents and managers were also taking time to read the script and shop it around.

“We honestly didn’t imagine that with the small, personal movie we were making that we’d end up with all of the other stars that we ended up with,” Miller said. “We were going to ask friends to be in the movie as a favor,” Savin noted.

Steenburgen said she was one of the last to join the cast. She received the script while attending the centennial celebration of her hometown of North Little Rock, Ark.

“I loved the theme of it,” Steenburgen said of the screenplay. “I thought the writing had this kind of sweet strangeness to all of it. Plus, I love to dance.”

Longing for a chance to dance

Steenburgen said that throughout her career she has never had much opportunity to show off her skills as a dancer. In “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing & Charm School,” she does a respectable Lindy Hop with Wahlberg, along with a variety of other dance steps -- all performed with only four or five days of rehearsal.

Wahlberg’s preening and temperamental dance student is one of the highlights of the film. He credited Miller and Savin for making a film where each character stands out on his or her own, even within the arc of the story.

“They are putting their lives into this movie,” Wahlberg added. “This was a charming script and my character was a great character.” When he saw the strong cast he would be working with, Wahlberg said he told himself: “This is going to require my best effort.”

Embarking on a new career has proven stressful, but Miller and Savin are already preparing their pitch for their next film. It’s a drama with dark comic undertones called “The Nobel Son,” which takes place at Caltech in Pasadena.

Say what you will about all those young, hot filmmakers who have come out of Sundance, but Miller and Savin hope to be living proof that Hollywood offers a second chance, even after 40.

“I feel already like a veteran,” Savin groans.

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On the Web

To see scenes from “Marilyn Hotchkiss Ballroom Dancing and Charm School,” visit calendarlive.com/Hotchkiss.