Greg Pritikin director of Dummy

I don’t know I never heard it.

That was the brilliant idea of someone’s over at Artisan or Lion’s Gate. That’s what happens in this business. People do things in your name and you have no idea how or why it happened. The problem is that right in the middle of Dummy’s theatrical run Artisan was taken over by Lion’s Gate. They pulled a bunch of their movies out of the theatre and it was just a bad deal for all the filmmakers involved with Artisan at the time. Dummy played for about a month then it was shut down.

I think it would have done really well if it had been allowed to go. Our opening weekend we were number four of the top ten indie films that were out and our box office average was the same as Once Upon a Time in Mexico, especially considering we were competing with Lost in Translation which had cleaned up everything. We think it did well considering it was terribly marketed and terribly promoted.

Yes we showed the film at South by Southwest and he really loved it. He plugs it on his site whenever he can.

It was just under a million. The industry expression is high six figures.

An unknown Hollywood is that because there are so many bad scripts out there if there is a script that is mediocre or better the actors will respond provided it is financed and has a shooting date. A lot of people just have a screenplay and just try to get it to movie stars. That doesn’t work. If you have a little bit of money and can make an offer they will read your script. It’s a secret so we shouldn’t tell too many people. Even famous actors want to do interesting work and there isn’t a lot of interesting work out there. The illusion is that if someone is famous they don’t need the work. They all need the work.

Well according to Jews he’s not a Jew because his mother is not Jewish.

That’s a hearty Hungarian nose. He wasn’t even raised Jewish and no one in his family even looks Jewish. He’s not the perfect Jew. He’s a fallen Jew.

I guess we escape our preconceived notions on what a Jew should look like. Steven Spielberg is a Jew but to me he looks like he would playing golf at a restricted club.

I was never thinking, “Lets get that Jew actor Brody.” I was thinking that Adrien Brody has this intense vulnerability and innocence that I haven’t seen in many other actors his age.

I saw him in probably all of his stuff. The first movie I saw him was a movie a friend of mine produced called Six Ways to Sunday. I remember being blown away by Adrien because he was so good that I didn’t think he was an actor. I just thought he was some funny character they decided to put in the movie. That’s a great achievement.

I thought it was important that the film look as real as possible and as unstylized as possible. I did not want the characters and script to be overshadowed by the heavy hand of the director’s style so I wanted things very natural and low key.

I’m not a ventriloquist.

No I moved out after high school. What is autobiographical is the universal theme of having a family that gets on your nerves and being in a family that doesn’t always listen to each other. I was lucky enough to not grow up in a family like that, not that bad anyway.

If the parents are too normal then how do you explain why the kids are so dysfunctional? Adrien’s character is very dysfunctional. He’s living at home and can’t communicate. It wouldn’t make sense if his parents were June and Ward Cleaver. Then it would become a different movie. It wouldn’t be a character driven comedy but a movie about a psycho.

Maybe that would work on some of the SuicideGirls. I get the feeling they might like it.

None of those specifics are autobiographical. I did have a girlfriend at the time that I almost married, goddamn girl! She sang in a Klezmer band and that’s where that came from. One of my closest friends is an amateur ventriloquist and is probably the worst at it. You could see his lips moving if he was wearing a paper bag on his head. His entire routine consists of the dummy insulting him and he’s not able to come up with a comeback fast enough. I would marvel at their relationship. It’s amazing that the minute you give someone a dummy the first thing they do is insult themselves. I thought that was an interesting concept. The first chance you have to talk to yourself you criticize yourself. I thought there was a story in there. How could someone become a better person through this process?

This probably the worst time for independent film. They say that every year and it’s true because it gets worse and worse. The reason it’s getting worse is because there are fewer theatre and the screens that are in those theatres are taken up by the same movies. So there are fewer movies needed. Nobody picks up anything. You go to a festival, see brilliant movies and nothing gets bought. They can’t figure out how to market them. When Adrien won the Oscar it really didn’t help things. We still didn’t get picked up until two months after he won.

Richard Kelly [writer/director of Donnie Darko] is a friend of mine and his film was a huge hit at Sundance. It had Drew Barrymore in it and is really interesting but for six months nobody picked it up. For six months they were going from door to door looking for someone to release it.

There is a warped view about movies being discovered at Sundance but no they usually rejected at Sundance. Very few things get picked up right off the bat. You are trying to sell them a bag of goods.

I didn’t have anything to do with the sale. It was the producer and his rep. I just sit back and ask if I got any money. Then I get lied to and screwed again. No I’m kidding, I’m not that bitter. I have no idea what the logistics of the deal. They usually don’t let the filmmaker in on that unless the filmmaker is also a producer.

We just did another film called Surviving Eden that we’re showing at South by Southwest. Illeana Douglas was supposed to be in it but she couldn’t. We keep talking about doing something else. I am actually in a short film she directed.

It’s so crazy and what they decide to show is crap.

This one happened ridiculously fast. I got a call from a friend of mine who is an actor. He said they just fired the director of the new movie he’s on and they hate the script. They had the money to make it though. It was weird. I met with the producers, we hit it off and I wrote the script in three days. We immediately started casting, ten days of preproduction then we shot it in 20 days. It’s got a great cast, Cheri Oteri, Jane Lynch, Sam Robards and Peter Dinklage. It’s also got one of my favorite character actors in it, Conchata Ferrell. She’s in everything from Network to Mr. Deeds.

It’s a terrible movie but she works at the pizza parlor in the town where Adam Sandler is from.

I think Surviving Eden is a very funny movie much better than Dummy.

I got an email from one of the video sales people. They wrote to tell me the movie is renting in Arkansas.

Yeah it’s every state and every town. It’s a good feeling.
by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck