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The Life and Times of John Peirson Part I
The Life and Times of John Pierson
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| Future parents of She's Gotta Have It Baby: John and Janet Pierson at their 1983 wedding. |
My friendship with John began in the dead of winter several years ago when we attended a Knicks game together. It has continued through summer heat waves, when I have been co-ringmaster at two of the Cold Spring Film Workshops organized for independents by John and his wife and partner, Janet. I had the following conversation with John last August, shortly after reading a draft of Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes, which is scheduled to be published as this issue of MovieMaker goes to press.
Peter Broderick (MM): Let's go back to the beginning, John. Situate yourself in the '70s, before you got involved with representing films and filmmakers, so that we have a better understanding of your background.
John Pierson (JP): Well, this is a really great day for you to ask that question because I went to the Beacon Theater in New York last night and saw Elvis Costello. I was just tripping all through the concert, because that first Elvis Costello and the Attractions album, My Aim Is True, came out in 1977, which is when this all started for me. So I'm thinking, God, here's this guy 25 records later. He was this angry young man, and it was the New Wave and it was punk and here we are in the mid-'90s and look at all the things he's gone through ... I'm not putting myself in the category of Elvis except in terms of the passage of time -- but in 1977 I had just gotten out of film school at NYU. It was kind of the in-between era when all those later American independent filmmakers had not quite arrived on the scene yet, and the Marty Scorseses and Marty Brest's of the world were long gone. I answered an ad in the New York Times from a distribution company and the next thing I know I'm working there by day, and showing movies, both indie films and old Luis Buñuel films which never opened in New York, by night. It was a wild and woolly way of getting your feet wet, having a full immersion course in no time flat. Spinning off that I programmed the Bleecker Street Cinema, the famous rep house, for a year and a half at one point. I programmed the Film Forum, too. In the course of doing all this I had to learn how film publicity works. I had a wide, eclectic background in all the kinds of areas that you need to know. I had to learn it soup-to-nuts, the whole experience of dealing with off-Hollywood Films.
MM: So then, following this full immersion experience, when was it that you found yourself getting involved with a film and a filmmaker for the first time?
JP: Bill Sherwood on Parting Glances in the summer of 1985, but it very directly grew out of being around the action the previous two years as Jim Jarmusch shot his first half-hour short, which grew into the feature. Stranger than Paradise. Jim was just one of the guys we knew around town. He came to rep theaters just like everybody else did in '83 -'84. We knew he was making movies. And so being around all the developments and the evolution of that film ...Wim Wenders gave him leftover raw stock black-and-white short ends from The State of Things. That was a galvanizing moment because that film went from short to feature and then went to Cannes. Jim and Sara Driver, his girlfriend-slash-producer-slash-partner, had a screening of the full-length Stranger than Paradise in New York. I know it sounds completely like revisionism, but when the lights came up again at the end of 90 minutes it was sort of like the world had changed.
MM: What was it that seemed so earthshaking about that moment?
JP: What was basically so great about it was the empowering feeling. Hey, I'm not a filmmaker, so I'm projecting a little bit here, but it felt so great to have one of us, another guy on the streets of New York, make what aesthetically felt like a perfect film on its own terms. There's been much discussion since then of the budget determining the aesthetic -- but this is a case where having $100,000 and turning it into just really great art was just mouthwatering and eye-opening. The idea of using nonprofessional actors to play somewhat exaggerated but still highly believable versions of their real-life selves became a trademark; it was how a lot of people figured out they could cast their films. All those things felt very empowering. Stranger Than Paradise used nonprofessional elements, but it was just not sloppy. It was fully realized. Very organic, very unified.
MM: So a new era was being launched by that film. What other elements of it were influential in terms of the films to come after it?
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| Guinevere Turner and V.S. Brodie in Go Fish (1994). |
JP: Its world sales in Cannes, its performance in places like France and Japan, oddly enough, and its tremendously successful release in North America where it remains (and I'm sure Miramax hopes they change this on Dead Man, although the signs are not necessarily good so far) Jim Jarmusch's highest-grossing movie. Movies are a business. To have it not be just critically acclaimed and win the National Society of Film Critics' "Best Film of the Year," but to also have it perform so strongly in the marketplace just put the icing on the cake.
MM: Did it change your concept of how you wanted to be involved with independents?
JP: It changed me because this swirling inchoate mass of filmmaking aspirants around me got changed. They got galvanized. People like Spike Lee, and Bill Sherwood, and Lizzie Borden got focused on just how far they might be able to go in this indie filmmaking area. And as all of these people kind of orbited through my life, it changed me. I knew how the Stranger deal went down. My buddy and colleague Sam Kitt played an informal role in providing some of the final structure to that deal.
I also realized Sam had somehow begun to carve out some middle man type of position, and I didn't consciously say "That's for me," but that's exactly how things turned out. The talent pool was around. I knew my way around the industry. My peer group was these filmmakers, and I'd been to film school. But the peer group I was maybe more aligned with were the people who'd been coming up and taking key positions within the infrastructure. This of course was all-important in getting the American independent film movement up and running as more than occasional, one-shot scattered successes. I'm not trying to suggest that Stranger Than Paradise was the first and only one. Of course there's John Sayles, and there are people who even Jarmusch would cite -- Susan Seidelman's success with Smithereens influenced him. Wayne Wang's Chan Is Missing was another ultra low-budget film that obviously made an impact. There was Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), and you know I'm leaving out a couple of others. El Norte, in terms of the more socially conscious, higher budgeted but from-the-heart type of indie films.
MM: So what was your path from that fateful screening of Stranger to Parting Glances?
JP: One of the producers of Parting Glances, Arthur Silverman, was somebody that I had gone to school with. He had a motion picture exhibition company called "Road Movies." He called me in, thinking they would need assistance in selling Parting Glances because he would be away from New York at the key moment when the film was done. Because he would be many thousands of miles and many time zones away from where he needed to be as the point person, he asked me to take the reins. I said, "Why do you think I could do this?" And he gave this brilliant answer that a child might give: "Because you know these people." I thought about it for 30 seconds and realized he was right.
MM: When you started on Parting Glances did you still have a day job?
JP: I was working at Films Incorporated. We were very active in theatrical repertory exhibition which was having its late great flowering renaissance at that point, '84, '85. There were still a lot of screens all over the country. You had to find ways of packaging or promoting that were not unlike first-run movies. You'd have a restored print of Once Upon a Time in the West or a new print reissue of Jules and Jim and The 400 Blows and have Jean Pierre Leaud come into town to publicize that in New York. Or we'd assemble packages of Warner Brothers cartoons in beautiful 35 prints. We did a major Kurasawa retrospective. These were really fun things for me. More fun in a way than all the best new features. Because it's fun to be dealing with truly great films.
MM: Had the term "producer's rep" come into being at this point, or were you part of defining it?
JP: I think I was part of defining it, but it's an excellent question for further research. "Sales agent" certainly had meaning in the foreign market long before I came on the scene. The difference is that a sales agent cuts a deal and enforces the contractual terms but isn't necessarily a collaborator in the ongoing creative process. To me, repping implies an ongoing involvement in not only seeing that a film gets all those things you're looking for in an excellent deal, the advance of course being one key thing-and not just enforcing that deal like with a whip, but also collaborating on the effectiveness of the movie's release. It's not easy.
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| John Lurie, Eszter Balint and Richard Edson in Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise (1984). |
MM: Well let's talk about the producer's rep role. During the time that you did this, and now you're not doing this anymore in quite the same way--
JP: --I have a new answer to that. I've probably contradicted myself like 52 times in the last 52 weeks, but the new answer is this: if there is a film that I think is terrific, and the only way to be involved with that film is through repping it, then I'm not going to stand on principle or ceremony and say "Oh sorry, I don't do that anymore." Let's face it, there aren't enough great films out there that each of us really takes a fancy to. I would still rep a film that I got truly wildly excited about. Does that make sense?
MM: That makes sense. But since you began doing this, there have only been a handful of other people who have done it. Isn't that true?
JP: Well, in the mid-'80s, my competition, though I never saw it that way, was Jeff Dowd. You know Jeff got involved the same time that Parting Glances was happening for me. He was repping Desert Hearts, another one of those Gay Wave films that came out in the first quarter of '86. He earned the nickname "The Dude," I believe, for being involved with Joel and Ethan Coen on Blood Simple. So he was hot. And Jesse Beaton had helped Greg Nava and the producers of El Norte make their deal. I'm not sure that anybody made it their life's work.
MM: And where does Tom Sternberg fit in?
JP: Well, Tom -- okay, you caught me, man. I mean if Tom Sternberg wants to claim the crown of first real producer's rep, then he's completely entitled to it. Of course, his primary area of focus, and it makes sense given when he started out, was European films for sale to North American distributors, not so much the American independent stuff. But he has of course done that also. And he doesn't just wheel and deal and then turn his back or hide his head and walk away. He's in there. In terms of me saying I never felt competitive, I will say that there was a point when he was sitting in a screening of She's Gotta Have It, when it was in the San Francisco Film Festival. I was aware of what Tom did and I did kind of sneak a look at him, number one to catch his response, but number two because I remember that's one of the few times I was thinking, like Jeez, do I have to battle with this guy or are we in the same sort of collegial state here or what? Basically because Tom's purview has been with the French for so long, I almost feel like we're two different sides of the coin. I don't think he even liked She's Gotta Have It that much, so that's when I knew everything was fine.
MM: Okay, let's go back before we go forward. Give us a summary in terms of your experience with Parting Glances. How long were you involved with it and what was the result?
JP: Well it sold in the blink of an eye. My involvement started in the summer; the film was not finished in time for the key September festivals -- Telluride, Toronto, New York -- the Labor Day-to-end-of-September trilogy. At that point in '85 people weren't quite as calculating with their completion schedules, and what they were steering toward. The Independent Feature Film Market, which was a much smaller, gentler event during the mid '80s, followed on the heels of those three festivals. Parting Glances was ready for the IFFM, which was then a viable selling event. It was shown there, and very, very shortly thereafter sold on a quote-unquote preemptive basis to Cinecom. So preemptive, what does that mean? It means they made an offer, and they wanted us to give them an answer as quickly as possible without shopping the film around. Of course we stole a little time to shop it a bit and found out we didn't really have other interest. Then we went back, kind of bald-faced, and suggested that we would absolutely strongly consider their preemptive offer if they could make it a bit sweeter. They did and the deal closed. I believe that was the last week in October, 1985.
MM: Was that the experience that decided you that repping films was something you wanted to do full-time?
JP: (Laughs) I'm still not sure. I knew that I enjoyed the poker games that seemed to be required. I knew that I'd been involved in other kinds of negotiations in my life and had felt comfortable, so it probably pointed me down that road. But the real absolute opportunity/test came within five days. Spike Lee's NYU rough-cut screening of She's Gotta Have It fell in the same week that the Cinecom Parting Glances deal closed. When I saw She's Gotta Have It, I had that kind of rare experience when you see something that you just completely utterly love and adore and think is The Next Thing, and want to be involved with no matter how. I did not, by the way, have that kind of reaction to Parting Glances. I thought that the Steve Buscemi performance, which was his debut, was fantastic, but I was up and down on the movie as a whole. I liked it but I didn't have that over-the-top response that I did with Spike.
MM: So you saw She's Gotta Have It, and then what happened?
JP: Fortunately, there are witnesses. I walked down the street and said to my wife, Janet, parodying the line about Bruce Springsteen, "I've seen the future of cinema and its name is Spike Lee." I knew that I had a fee of $10,000 due me from the Parting Glances deal and I knew that money was a windfall that I wasn't expecting. This is October '85, mind you, so people were still into, like "You've got to get real estate in New York, man. Get real estate. It's just appreciating every minute of every day." I was immediately thinking I'm going to get that $10,000 and Spike needs money and this is a fantastic opportunity here. Knowing that that money was coming made me feel absolutely that it was the only right thing to do, the only smart thing to do. Who knew it would be so life-changing to put that money into She's Gotta Have It?
MM: So that was a fateful investment.
JP: That was. I never made a better move. Never been happier about it. Never had a greater, greater experience in my life.
MM: And then how did it work out between you and Spike in terms of you representing the film? What was the sequence there?
JP: I said I'd like to put in some money. I said I've just made this deal on Parting Glances and I think I'm now better qualified to represent your interests in the sale of your film. We had a discussion about the fact since I knew I'd have an equity interest from the investment. I also tried to bring along one of the Parting Glances producers with me. He set conditions on Spike, he wanted to be an executive producer for example, and wanted certain cuts made that he was adamant about. Both those things really bothered Spike and he actually spurned the money, which he desperately needed. I knew I was in with the equity investment and assumed I would be making something with that because I felt really good about the film, so I was extremely flexible in making a step deal in terms of a representation fee. I just wanted to make sure I was there for that film. I had it in my mind that my fee was within the 5% range, but the step deal on She's Gotta Have It had a fee that dipped down a point with each increasing hundred thousand dollars of revenue -- a reverse step deal.
MM: A disincentive for...
JP: Let's do a little something technical here for the MovieMaker readers. Let's say there's a certain percentage up to a hundred thousand and then another percentage beyond a hundred thousand. If you get a hundred and one thousand you don't drop down to the lower percentage for the whole amount. The first percentage would apply up to a hundred and then the amount between a hundred and two hundred would be at the next percentage, and the same thing from two to three, etc. It isn't literally a disincentive. Of course, his lawyer thought that's exactly what I had structured. I thought, oh yeah, so in the event that we had a four hundred thousand dollar deal, which is what we had on that film with Island, she must have thought I was in there begging them to make it a $399,999 deal. I mean, come on.
MM: Give us the quick story of She's Gotta Have It...the two or three key things that got it finished and sold.
JP: Oh man, the money was still like squeezing water out of a rock. I put some in, some other people who already had some money in at the time of the NYU screening put some more in. I helped Spike get a deferment from Irwin Young at DuArt. Spike himself got a full deferment for his sound mix at Sound One. He's remained extremely loyal to that place ever since, which is great, because other filmmakers are not, I repeat, are not going to be able to make that deal for themselves, then or now. Other steps along the way were really kind of painstaking. The film was shot on Super 16, so basically that's a case where you have to budget for the 35 blow-up because Super 16 is only screenable in a double system format. Super 16 had to go to blow-up or you weren't going to have anything to actually show. And the key events in terms of watching, boosting, making the film, began right around Spike's 29th birthday in the third week of March, 1986, when the programmers of the Director's Fortnight at Cannes saw the film and within 20 minutes invited it.
MM: So the audience reaction was pretty clear?
JP: The audience reaction was spectacularly great and you could tell it from the start. There's the point in the film about 10 minutes in that anybody who's seen it will know where the dog lineup occurs. That's when you really know if you've got people in your back pocket and that was an over-the-top reaction that night.
MM: The San Francisco Film Festival screening? What month was that?
JP: March 29th, 1986. The deal with Island was cut between then and Cannes. There was spirited competition from all distributors, except for Cinecom, which had seen the film first and passed on it, on the general theory that Nola Darling in the person of the actress Tracy Camila Johns was quote unquote "not-sexy." Some of the offers were low because the film was like a completely new thing. It's like nobody had thought about the black audience, certainly the non-action, middle class, college-educated black audience in quite some time. Nobody knew what the black audience was and nobody knew if they would go to something that wasn't generic or action-oriented.
MM: So what was the advance?
JP: Island bought the world for $400,000 plus completion costs.
MM: How much did it actually cost to get in the can?
JP: Spike's been one of the most upstanding citizens on this long-debated question of real budgets and understated budgets, and budgets that don't count everything that they should count. $175,000 was the figure he came up with, the figure that he stuck to. It's very accurate. It even includes legal expenses and my fee. That's an all-in figure.
MM: And do you know, in terms of actually getting it in the can...
JP: About $50,000. Actually I should say even less, because there wasn't that much cash around. With $28,000 in grants and other odds and ends and dribs and drabs, I would say probably $40,000 is a more accurate figure. I mean it was only a 12-day shoot, so maybe as little as $30,000 to literally get it in the can. And then funds were being raised every single week thereafter.
MM: Then after She's Gotta Have It, give me the sequence of the next few films you represented.
JP: Well, She's Gotta Have It's sister film from the Directors' Fortnight, from May '86, was Lizzie Borden's Working Girls, and I signed on for that. I was helping them in Cannes and then when She's Gotta Have It was all taken care of I signed on officially. I liked the film a lot, but I also got much additional prompting from my wife, Janet, who just went completely crazy about it. Sara Driver's film Sleepwalk was the opening night film in the International Semaine de la Critique, which is a weird section over there that I've never quite been able to make sense of, even though years later it worked out really well for Clerks. And there was another film that wound up being released in '87, produced by Lynn O'Donnell, directed by Steven Okazaki. Lynn went on to produce Crumb. Living on Tokyo Time also came to me the summer of '86, just prior to the opening of She's Gotta Have It.
MM: And then what was after that?
JP: I lose track. Better pull out the bio. I guess after that, like many people, I kind of hit a wall. There were four films that were all released in '87 which I became involved with over the next year, and Anna was the film picked up by Vestron in a spirited bidding war with Miramax. That film came out late in '87, so '87 was a really, really, active year for me with something seemingly opening every other month. And She's Gotta Have It of course had lots and lots of aftermath because it just played forever, and there was the home video release so it was a great, great year. Had a baby, the She's Gotta Have It baby, that year. So it was a rich and wonderful time. In 1988 I wound up in this prolonged relationship with Errol Morris on The Thin Blue Line, where for the first time I didn't have a fully active repping role. I was sort of this phasing in and phasing out kind of advisor who was then asked to police the release of the film by Miramax. So that was an odd kind of experience, kind of removed from me, although a truly, great, landmark film, I think.
MM: And then when did you go past the wall?
JP: Well, thank God. Now I've got a family, I've left my day job, I'm living film to film. On a certain level all the 1987 films, except for Sleepwalk, which was a favorite of Sara Driver and Jim Jarmusch, all had excellent deals, and life was sweet. Then 1988 was a trial and there was hardly any income getting into the bank, and I was really starting to sweat it. I had no idea what job I could have gone back to at that point anyway. Around the turn of the year I saw a film I completely flipped for because it was just so unusual. Sidewalk Stories, black-and-white, shot 35, beautiful, no dialogue. The writer/director, Charles Lane, also played the lead character, a Chaplinesque street person who adopts a little lost girl, played by his real-life daughter. I just completely fell in love with it. Island Pictures' Chris Blackwell seemed to like that film as much as I did, and made a pretty spectacular worldwide deal. So on a personal level that kept the wolves from the door for me.
MM: What was this spectacular deal?
JP: A $550,000 advance. The producers did themselves harm by having a pretty crummy synthesized score that had to be recomposed and rerecorded. In a silent film you have tremendous opportunity to help people really go with it if the music is really good, and it wasn't. The producers' take on that deal was slightly eroded by the rerecording of the music, but how often do you attract that kind of interest in a black-and-white silent movie?
MM: So what was next after Sidewalk Stories?
JP: Well, here we go. That summer, Michael Moore entered my life and left a phone message asking if I wanted to check out this movie, Roger and Me. I'd heard about it the previous year. It had played incomplete at the IFFM as a work in progress, a section of the market which had just begun to catch on then in '88, and in the book the chapter on Roger and Me is like 50 pages, so I hardly know how to summarize what went on except here's a film with a cash budget of $160,000 that Warner Bros. wound up acquiring for $3 million. Jeez, how did that happen? Sometimes I wonder myself.
MM: It's hard to do the story justice here. You have a very subtle way of delineating the various characters, companies and forces in your life at that time.
JP: I think I had some sense that maybe there was history in the making on that one, and I'm very fortunate to have kept, kind of at Michael Moore's prompting, some very good journals. There really wasn't an hour of any day when something didn't happen which affected the life-slash-value of that movie. I've never quite seen anything like it. I know records are meant to be broken, and I'm a big Baltimore Orioles fan and I savored the moment when Cal Ripkin, Jr. passed Lou Gherig's consecutive game streak, a record that nobody thought would be broken. But there's a series of fortuitous and serendipitous and calculated circumstances that came to bear to take Roger and Me from being like 'Gosh this is a really good documentary' into the stratosphere of a Time-Warner megadeal. (They might not have quite realized what a handful Michael Moore turned out to be, but, hey, none of us did.) And in the independent film context, of course, one cannot possibly overrate the impact of sex, lies and videotape that January at Sundance and then its coronation with the Palm d'Or four months later at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival. Nobody even thought it should've been in the main competition except Harvey Weinstien and a French distributor. So there were enormous accolades for this film from nowhere and of course sex lies and videotape is not a She's Gotta Have It kind of film or one of these $25,000 films we're familiar with now. It had a certain polish. But again, it just really caught the essence of the time. It made everybody think, gosh, this is like the next thing we need -- we need more Steven Soderberghs. And in that same Cannes Film Festival you have Sidewalk Stories, and you have Spike, who just totally nailed it on Do the Right Thing, his third feature. Do the Right Thing, in addition to being a fantastic, masterful piece of filmmaking, also illustrated the viability of thinking that these young independent filmmakers could sustain careers. Do the Right Thing is released that summer and once again it helps to not just be dealing with what you think is really good art but something that winds up being commercially successful.
MM: Right, the story as you accounted in
the book is such an incredible roller coaster. And I think that
it's probably a unique chapter in the history of American independent
film. MM
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