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When Rudy Durand was denied final cut on his first film--a
pinball saga
starring Brooke Shields--he didn't get mad: he
sued.
Directors have been known to have run-ins with
producers. Some have
even filed lawsuits over real or imagined
breaches of contract. But not
many directors--correction,
first-time directors--have taken their
battles over creative controls
of a film all the way to the Supreme
Court.
Clearly, Rudy Durand
is not your average director.
Back in 1979, Warner Bros. released
TILT, a pinball saga written and
directed by Durand and starring the
then fourteen-year-old* Brooke
Shields. It bombed.
For
most directors, that would have been the end of the story, but not
for
Durand. An important principle was at stake: the
independent
producer who had financed his film, shopping-center mogul
Melvin Simon,
had promised him full creative control of the movie, and
Durand says he
was denied final cut.
What was a disenfranchised
director to do? First Durand tried to
negotiate the release of
his re-edit of TILT. When that failed, he sued
his producer and
some of the biggest names in the entertainment
industry: Warner
Bros., NBC, Viacom International, and the law firm of
Loeb and
Loeb. With virtually no legal training or experience in
dealing
with the movie industry, he argued his case in more than 150
court
appearances. And last year, twelve years after the
original
release of TILT, Durand finally agreed to an apparently
substantial
out-of-court settlement.
So what was this film he
fought so valiantly for? Was it another
Citizen Kane, or even a
Gone With The Wind? No, Durand acknowledges, it
was not.
But that is beside the point: "The argument was never that
I'm
the best director that ever lived, or that it was the best script
or
best film ever made." No, he says the point is "that's not my
movie out
there." And that, he figured, was plenty to fight
about.
To describe Rudy Durand as tenacious is a bit like saying
Attila the Hun
was pushy. Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, the
celebrated Texan litigator,
has known Durand, 56, since their
University of Houston days. Durand is
"as tough as a junkyard
dog," haynes says, and possesses some of the
other makings of a prize
lawyer as well: "He has a gift for detail and
a memory that's
hard to match. He's quick on his mental feet."
Durand is also
an incorrigible name-dropper. A wary listener might
suspect him
of padding the rolls of his friends and associates, but on
further
investigation, it turns out he really does dine with Tom
Berenger,
watch football on TV with Alan Ladd, Jr., and play golf with
ICM's Guy
McElwaine. "Rudy is a true gentleman--as good-hearted as
anybody
I know," says Ladd. McElwaine describes him as "a
well-educated
street guy. He's very gifted, and wears his heart
on his sleeve. I've
never seen him be duplicitous; if anything,
sometimes he's too frank.
When he gets on a cause, as you can see from
his lawsuit, he sticks to
it."
Indeed. But even before
Durand fell into that legal morass, he had his
work cut out for him
with TILT. His background was in sports
promoting. (Whom
did he represent? "Only the biggest names," he says.
"Bart
Starr, Sonny Jurgenson...") he was also a music producer
(the
title song from his first county album, Sam Neely's Loving You
Just
Crossed My Mind, hit the charts in 1972). When he came up
with the idea
for TILT, he had one film credit to his name: he
was executive producer
of Cactus In Snow, starring Richard
Thomas.
Several writers failed to deliver a screenplay he liked, so
Durand
rewrote TILT himself. After two disastrous attempts to get
the film off
the ground, he simply wanted his script produced.
All that changed when
he met Orson Welles in 1976. "I paid a guy
a hundred bucks to get the
script to him," says Durand.
Apparently Welles like TILT enough to call
Durand and arrange a
meeting, during which he inspired Durand to direct
it.
"Welles
went on the Carson show and started talking about the script,"
says
Durand. He said, 'it's the only script I've read in a long
time
where every character has a redeeming quality,' and the phone
started
ringing." That's when McElwaine met the fledgling
filmmaker: "I was
head of production at Warner Bros., and I tried
to buy it," says
McElwaine. I forgot how much money I offered
him, but it was quite a
bit at the time, and I said he could produce
it. I loved the script,
but I wanted to go with a more seasoned
director."
Durand was offered as much as $900,000 for the
screenplay, but he held
fast to his Welles-inspired dream of directing
it until he met up with
real estate developer Mel Simon, who dabbled in
the movie business (he
subsequently gave us all three Porky's
movies). Simon agreed to give
Durand what he wanted: the
directing job and full creative control of
TILT.
The project was
supervised by Milton Goldstein, the CEO of one of
Simon's
companies. Simon was "a businessman in a strange field,"
he
stated in a December 1990 affidavit. Consequently, he said, he
was not
aware of the implications when things began to go
awry.
Durand filmed for about five months, wrapping in the spring
of 1978.
Besides Shields, TILT starred Charles Durning and featured
newcomers
Lorenzo Lamas and Fred Ward. Durand claims to have
"discovered" Ward:
"He was leaning on a parking meter." Says
Ward wryly, "There were a lot
of parking meters in those days. I
could have been leaning on any one
of them."
During filming,
according to Simon's affidavit, a legal irregularity
occurred.
Loeb and Loeb had represented Durand during his contract
negotiations
with Simon, but some months later, a decision was made for
the firm to
represent Simon and his companies as well--despite the
potential for
conflict of interest. (Loeb and Loeb declined to comment
for this
article.)
Meanwhile, before a theatrical distributor had been
secured, TV rights
to TILT and cable rights to TILT and sixteen other
Simon films were sold
to NBC and Viacom, respectively. Goldstein
"handled the negotiations,"
according to Simon's statement, and the
developer only realized later
that the presale of the ancillary rights
would make it more difficult to
find a distributor. Warner Bros.
ultimately agreed to give the film a
limited release, with Simon
promising to reimburse the studio for any
losses. (Goldstein
didn't respond to requests for comment on this
article.)
The
first cut of TILT was completed without a hitch, but then, Durand
says,
he and his editor suddenly found themselves locked out of the
editing
room. Durand says Goldstein informed him that Warner Bros.
had
specific editing requirements--if he didn't cut it their way, no
deal.
"[Simon's people] were saying that Warner Bros. wanted the cuts,
but
Warner Bros. said they never made any demands," says Durand.
According
to Andy Fogelson, vice president of marketing at Warner Bros.
at the
time, "It's entirely conceivable, at least in the abstract, that
while
[Warner Bros] may have had no legal right to make the request,
they made
it anyway." He says it's possible that Simon's people
"used what was
certainly not a legally binding request--[what] may have
only been
offered by Warner Bros. as a suggestion--to do what they
perhaps wanted
to do in the first place, which was to cut the
movie."
So, against his better judgment, Durand made the changes
required of
him, and it was this cut that made it--however briefly--to
the screen.
After the disastrous opening, Durand went to Simon and
demanded that he
be allowed to recut the film. Simon (who's still
friends with Durand
despite having been sued by him) agreed; however,
Warner Bros. had no
interest in rereleasing the film. And with
the ancillary rights to the
"bad" version of TILT already owned by
Viacom and NBC, it was virtually
impossible for Durand to find a new
distributor.
At this point, most people would have cut their losses
and chalked the
whole thing up to experience. But not Durand; he
decided to sue.
Haynes makes him sound like vigilante Perrier:
"If you aggravate the
good old boys and tilt with their windmills,
they'll cut off your
water. But he's effervescent--he bubbles up
and fights back."
Durand proved to be a formidable plaintiff.
He filed suit in federal
court in 1981 and, he says, spent the next
five years discussing "form
over substance": "We began to argue
over 'Did you file this complaint,
did you touch first base, did you
cross your Ts'--never getting to the
issue of TILT." He
eventually wound up in the Ninth Circuit Court of
Appeals, arguing that
the defendants' conduct had violated the Lanham
Act, which deals with
unfair competition and trade practices. The jude
ruled that
Durand didn't have a case under the Lanham Act but said he
might have a
case for breach of contract or fraud. Soon after, the case
went
to the U.S. Supreme Court where Durand appealed an earlier ruling
that
he lacked jurisdiction to sue in federal court; the Supreme
Court
upheld that decision and bounced him back to state
court.
So Durand started the entire process over again, but this
time, the case
was destined for a jury trial. Haynes and Mitchell
"Doberman" Stein, of
Stein & Perlman, were helping him prepare for
trial when a settlement
was reached. "I had the evidence, and
[the defendants] could never get
around it," says Durand. "I
would be allowed to explain to the jury in
my own street language what
happened to me, and they didn't want to take
that chance."
In
the settlement, Durand received "quite a lot of money," according
to
Stein, and all the rights to TILT, which he's edited again (this
time in
stereo). McElwaine, who's seen both the Warner version
and the latest
edit, says the difference between the two is that "the
old one wasn't
bad" while "this one's good." When asked about
Durand's long battle on
behalf of the film, Shields replied in a faxed
statement, "The character
was fourteen, and so was I. I played a
lot of pinball and became quite
good at it... I'm happy for Rudy
Durand, and he deserves to have his
film seen. He worked very
hard to achieve this."
But don't look for the new and improved TILT
at your local theater--at
best Durand hopes to find an overseas market,
and at the moment he's
talking to various distributors about releasing
it on video in the
United States. He has also sold TILT's
soundtrack, which he produced,
to J.R.S. Records.
Durand says he
isn't bitter about the years he spent defending the
movie. "They
hit me with everything they had, and it didn't work," he
says.
And besides, "Racehorse always says that it's very healthy to
be
paranoid--he still believes that Humpty Dumpty was
pushed."
Nor has the TILT saga deterred him from pursuing a career
as a
filmmaker. His company, Koala Productions, is currently
developing a
script called Younger, which has "no fucking, no sucking,
no blood, and
no killing," he says. There are no four-letter
words, and it works.
This picture is about people being nice to each
other the way TILT
was." ("With the right casting," says Ladd,
"it can be a very clever
film.")
McElwaine is Durand's agent on
the project, and lawyer Terry Christensen
(who represented Peter Guber
and Jon Peters in their Sony Pictures deal)
is offering his legal
services in exchanged for a piece of the action.
"I found it to be a
very good script," says Christensen. "Rudy's got an
energy and a
creativity that you don't see every day--it reminded me a
lot of Jon
Peters. It took a lot of courage to do what he did."
Of
course, Durand is planning to direct the new film. Is he prepared
to
fight for this one the way he did for TILT? You bet.
"Napalm didn't
scare me," says the Korean War veteran. "You think
those guys are going
to scare my
ass?" |