EW
YORK - When Tom Gilroy, Jim McKay, and Michael Stipe attended Boston
College in the early 1980s, they worked at the campus radio station, liked
each other's avant tastes, and hung out together, watching movies, taking
photographs, playing in a psychedelic punk band.
Now all three are bustling figures in the up-and-down world of New York
independent filmmaking. Each has carved out a separate path along the way.
Stipe, of course, is front man for the rock group REM. Gilroy also acts on
TV and writes plays for his own theater company. But 20 years after
meeting they still collaborate to an amazing degree.
''We're in each other's projects all the time,'' says Gilroy, now 40,
sitting at an outdoor cafe in his Brooklyn neighborhood.
One such project, ''Spring Forward,'' plays this weekend, belatedly and
briskly, at the Brattle Theatre. Gilroy wrote and directed it. McKay and
Stipe were among the producers. (In turn, Gilroy and Stipe were
coproducers of McKay's latest film, ''Our Song,'' just out in New York but
not yet in Boston.)
Gilroy describes how the interaction works: ''I tend to write every
day, four hours a day. Sometimes, I don't know what it is. Then I hit a
point where I see how certain pieces are related to each other, how they
coalesce into a story, so I take those pieces out and put them in a pile.
I have several of these piles in my office'' - a large room on the third
floor of his house. ''There's the love story between the Chinese guy and
the construction worker, the story with the vampires talking about
existentialism.'' (He says this with a bit of a smile; it's hard to tell
whether he's kidding or whether these proto-stories really exist.)
''The `Spring Forward' pile was the largest pile,'' he goes on. ''The
guys'' - meaning McKay and Stipe - ''read it, thought it was ready, and
gave me a kick in the [butt] to finish it.''
''Spring Forward'' is one of those films that you could say they don't
make anymore, except that they never really did. It's about two men
(played by Ned Beatty and Liev Schreiber) talking - not about sports or
cars, but about things that circle around (but never quite explicitly
touch) the meaning of life. That's rare enough but, rarer still, the men
are blue collar - groundskeepers for the parks department in Ridgefield,
Conn.
Gilroy spent his teenage years in Ridgefield, but before then he was
raised in Queens and Long Island. His parents were high school dropouts,
lower middle class from families of cops and steamfitters. Then his father
went to night school, on to Harvard, and finally soared to the position of
vice president for two major corporations. When Gilroy turned 14, the
family moved to what he calls ''the WASPish gentry'' of Connecticut.
''For a writer, it's a pretty good background,'' Gilroy says. ''It
gives you two unbelievably different lifestyles in one lifetime. It gives
you perspective.''
Certainly it gives this film an authentic feel - a complete lack of
either the condescension or the sentimentalism that plagues many movies
about the working class.
The film was inspired more directly by a period five years ago, when
Gilroy and his father spent a lot of time together, holed up in a Boston
motel and hospital waiting room while his mother lay in a coma. (She
eventually died.) ''My father told me stories about his early life that
I'd never heard when I was a kid,'' Gilroy remembers.
The other ingredient came from an in-joke routine that Gilroy and McKay
developed at BC, in which two old guys with thick Boston accents would
talk about New Age ideas.
That germ of a notion, combined with the tales from his father and
memories of his own dual existence, eventually grew into ''Spring
Forward.''
Gilroy shot the film over the course of four seasons three years ago,
then edited it for eight months, showed it at the Toronto Film Festival,
reedited, and then brought it to Sundance last year. There it won high
praise and a small distribution deal with IFC Films (a branch of
Independent Film Channel).
Nobody thought it would be a box-office smash. Gilroy says he's
satisfied it has won an intense following and has financially broken even.
Still, he says, ''If I were starting this film now, I'd find it a lot
harder to get made.''
The independent-film scene has changed dramatically just in the past
few years. The start of the indie craze can be dated to 1988, when Steven
Soderbergh's ''sex, lies and videotape'' won the best-film prize at
Sundance and then Cannes. Suddenly, every major Hollywood studio was on
the lookout for indies; many started their own indie-like divisions.
Charles Fleming, an LA-based author who has written several books and
articles about Hollywood's workings, recalls, ''For a while, it appeared
that, unless you were stupid, you couldn't lose money on a low- budget
film.''
So the studios picked up just about every ''independent'' film that
came along. After a while, there was a glut of these movies, and, cheap as
they were, some lost money. The bloom was off. The hammer came down.
''The studios,'' Fleming says, ''started treating these movies not like
independent films but like studio films that happened to have low
budgets.''
Gavin Smith, editor of Film Comment magazine, agrees. ''They started
putting pressure on these films to be more commercial, to have star
actors.'' These films also came under the same pressures as the big films
to make huge money in the opening weekend.
With the bigger films, this has led to enormous advertising budgets,
often as large as half the size of the production budget. But with a film
that costs only a few million to produce, it makes no sense to spend tens
of millions on marketing. And so the chances grew slight - slighter even
than before - that the an indie film would stick around a theater long
enough to attract its natural audience, much less expand beyond its
niche.
''Spring Forward'' has played in a handful of cities. And its
Brattle run is scheduled for one weekend only.
Still, Gilroy & Co. keep at it. Besides acting in small roles for
''Law & Order'' and ''Sex and the City'' (shows he rarely watches),
Gilroy writes plays for the Machine Full theatrical company (which he
heads with Michael Imperioli, who's gained fame as Christopher in ''The
Sopranos,'' and Lili Taylor, a perennial indie-film actress). He's
directing a production of ''Hamlet'' for the New Jersey Shakespeare
Festival, with Taylor as Ophelia. And he's working on two screenplays -
one that he calls ''very different from `Spring Forward,' less
commercial,'' and the other ''a Marx Brothers, Vonnegutian comedy.''
Gilroy was an English major at BC, and so has always been influenced
more by novels and short stories than by films. ''Most novels don't have
neat resolutions, the way Hollywood movies do,'' he says. ''I make money
as a script doctor for studios. I know where these people want to go. But
when I do my own stuff, I deliberately subvert what people's expectations
would be for a movie.''
In ''Spring Forward,'' there's a scene where Schreiber's character
meets a woman (played by Peri Gilpin, known for playing Dr. Crane's radio
producer on ''Frazier''). It's clear the two will go out, but that's the
last we see of her; the subplot vanishes.
''Some people have said they wanted Peri to come back,'' Gilroy says.
''I ask them, `Why do you want that?' Their expectation is based on a
million Julia Roberts films they see. If I bring her back, then that scene
becomes `the scene where he meets his girlfriend.' But the scene is about
a lot more than that. That scene - this film - is about coincidences,
about understanding your dreams, about not forcing your life to go in one
direction. You might go one way, you make this turn, suddenly everything
changes. That's what happens in literature. That's what happens in life.''
