BIO - This interview is with Tim McCanlies, screenwriter and director. Among his film credits are writing and directing Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 and writing the screenplays for The Iron Giant, North Shore and Dennis the Menace Strikes Again. He currently lives on a ranch outside of Austin, Texas.

PH:     Tim, tell me about your start in the entertainment business. 

TM:     I'm sort of unusual in that I'm a writer, by trade, and then only recently a director, so I've sort of made it twice I guess.  I went to film school in Texas, at UT and then Texas A&M and then SMU graduate school, in that order.  I spent two years at UT and thought I knew more than the profs teaching there at the time. I should say it's certainly changed a lot since them, as they now have several real pros, teaching now: Steve Harrigan, Jim Magnuson, they are both great guys.

So, after UT I went to A&M majored in drama and then went to SMU, in Dallas.  Actually I was working on the police department in Dallas.  At 21 I had been working part-time all through college anyway, as I had to work my way through school.  So I was loading trucks here in Austin at 5 a.m. and I thought, well I should do something more interesting.  So, I joined the police department in Dallas… and while there I enrolled in the graduate film program at SMU.  So, I was film student with a gun, a deadly combination. Once I finished graduate school, in film and creative writing, I went to L.A.

PH:      How did that lead to your working with some of the major studios?  

TM:     I starved for a number of years trying to break in.  I wrote a lot of scripts and finally a couple captured the attention of CAA. This is back in the early 80's and I've been working ever since as a writer.

           When I went out to L.A. I didn't know anybody in the whole state.  I loaded up everything I owned in a $500 van and just came west. I was kind of heading for Hollywood and Vine, thinking that would be the center of everything.  I actually found out it was this disreputable neighborhood.

           But I knew nothing, nothing, I mean I knew nothing about the business, knew nobody in the business.  Had no idea how to break in.  Nothing.  Just showed up.  I had some money from selling a house I owned, enough to make it for about a year, which I thought was all the time I would ever need and more.  I was that naïve.  And gosh, I spent 3-4 years of writing scripts, meeting people, getting them read.  You know, sneaking onto studio lots and putting scripts on director's desks…Like George Roy Hill, Sydney Pollack, you know, I was just really shameless.

            Finally a script I wrote got optioned by a first time producer who knew a bigger producer and finally got optioned by a company called Interscope that was just starting out at the time.  CAA read it and called me in.  CAA was, at the time, sort of the young upstart agency and they called me in.  At the time I was working as a computer programmer.  I had been working has a computer operator, which is actually a great writer's job because all you are doing is baby-sitting a computer; sitting in a room for long hours with nothing to do.  It's a wonderful job for a writer, but they found out I was bored and I was fixing programs, so they promoted me to computer programmer over my objections. 

So I was actually in Montreal, Canada installing a network that I and a couple of other guys wrote, when the call came from CAA and I got on the next plane.  I mean I literally dropped the project in the middle, got on the plane, the next day I was meeting with three of the top agents at CAA.

I was in this meeting, I had no idea what they wanted to see me about, then I realized about 30 minutes into this meeting that this big sales pitch they were giving about CAA meant that they wanted to sign me as a client… and I would have killed to be a client…

So I stopped them right there and said, "If this is where this is going, if you'd like me to be your client, I would love to." They really thought they were going to have to talk me into it.  And I was like "Geez, who do I have to kill"?

           So since then, I've spent most of my career as a writer for hire. Back then, there was a lot more development, there were a lot more chances for, I think, young writers to break in.  And at that time, writing was the accepted route to directing if someone wanted to write and direct; this was long before Linklater and Rodriguez and all that.  I mean, at the time, the accepted procedure for breaking into Hollywood as a writer/director is go out there and get a couple scripts made as a writer, make it as a writer first, then move into directing.  So, that's what I did.  I had a 2-year deal with Disney pretty much first crack out of the box.  Sort of a long 2 years.  Long story. 

And we spent a lot of time in development.  Disney was sort of the Russian Front of Development at that time.  It was a tough place to be.  There were really talented writers there, and soon we all felt like prisoners. You signed the contract and the first thing they want you to do is write an Ernest Goes to Camp sequel.  All the writers under contract were pushed into that, those movies were making a lot of money for Disney then.  And there were a lot of talented guys, you know, like Chris Carter, who created The X-Files,  who became really unhappy and left.

            But, I really made a lot of good friends.

PH:      What projects did you work on while you were at Disney? 

TM:     Well, I wrote North Shore that Jeffrey Katzenberg didn't get, so the producer Randall Kleiser took it to Universal and it got made in '87.  I wrote 2-3 other things at Disney that didn't get made.  And, of course that is the pain and the frustration of being a screenwriter.  That your best work, for reasons that have nothing to do with how good the script is, just sits on a shelf, never produced, worthless. 

That's pretty standard for screenwriters in Hollywood: often times, it's your best work that sits on a shelf, but those scripts do get around and form your reputation. I've gotten most of my jobs off of scripts that have never been made into movies. 

Recently I've gotten tired of that and have been more careful about not letting anyone own my best scripts.  So, Dancer one that I wrote, actually in the worst part of this Disney deal, the dark days of my Disney deal when I just finished up something that they said they were going to make and didn't. I had a meeting with my executive at Disney who said I'm going to pitch you three ideas and you'll pick one.  I'm sure you're going to love these ideas.  And he said, first one is a sequel to Ernest Goes to Camp.  Well, I had just screened Ernest Goes to Camp and I told them it was "morally reprehensible" so that was out.  To me, Ernest Goes to Camp , the whole point of the joke was that this guy endures pain and suffering. The pain scenes go on and on and on, his hand gets caught in something, you know.  The gags would be picking up little knee-high kids and throwing them thirty feet out of frame.  It just not a movie I wanted to write.  But at the time Disney was sort of floundering around, making movies like The Rescue which is about 13-year-olds with automatic weapons breaking their fathers out of a North Korean prisons. 

So, the three choices were an Ernest Goes to Camp sequel, a talking dog movie or an invisible kid goes to high school.  And those were the pitches.  And I said, well, I don't want to do any of those.  And he said, tough, pick one.  You're under contract. 

          So I pouted and threw a fit there right in the commissary and was told to go home.  He kind of put me in the time out box for 30 days.  He said, we'll schedule another meeting in a month, I want you to go home and think…and you know, get a better attitude and all that.  So during that 30 days, I wrote Dancer.  Threw it on their desk and said, this is the kind of movie you should be making instead of The Rescue and of course, they didn't quite get it.  And fortunately since I'd kind of written it on my own dime, I owned it and that was again, 10-14 years ago… 

          The whole time since, I would never let anybody buy it. Imagine was interested in one point.  Blah, Blah, Blah.  I said this is the one I'm going to direct.  My career has always been a hairs' breath away from a big movie getting made.  Like one movie I wrote at Disney, a big ICM agent called up the studio said I have 3 actors I'll put in your movie and I think they're all 3 comers. I'll put all three of them in your movie.  (It was about 3 Texas brothers, sort of like Beverly Hills Cop; brother was a county sheriff, another a homicide detective in Dallas and the third was an Army M.P. in Monte Carlo.  It was a really fun script).  So this agent said, "I have the three Texas brothers in your film:  Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner and Richard Gere."  And the studio execs didn't really know or get who Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner were, this was mid-80's…  

This was just before No Way Out, the movie that put Kevin Costner on the map. and before Lethal Weapon.  So, it was just before those 2 broke.  So 6 months later I'm watching Lethal Weapon, I'm going Ahhgghh!.  Anyway, the point is, there's been a lot of near misses.  I almost had a movie with Richard Gere, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson it.  That would have been a big movie, and done a lot for my career.  That's the breaks.

PH:      That's amazing. But it's the nature of the beast in this business too. 

TM:     That's sort of been my career as a writer all along.  Near misses with scripts that have been on people's shelves.  Their favorite scripts. 

I have one that was green-lit at Columbia three times, under 3 different regimes.  And almost got made at Universal.  Now there are millions of dollars against it so it's probably too expensive to get made.  So, I went through a phase, about 4-5 years ago… where I was "action writer guy".  I was writing character movies that were fitting these guys into action movies.  But, really I was a character guy.  I would be brought onto movies like Little Giants, to work on a "character draft", that they would then use to attach actors to.  You know what I mean.  People would say, "no actors want to do this.  It's got terrible characters".  I'd come in, I'd write a role an actor would want to do and then they'd change the script.  That's how they got the actor attached.        

PH:     Tell me a bit more about how this led to writing the "Dancer, Texas, Pop. 81" and "The Iron Giant" scripts.

           Well, about 4-5 years ago, I sort of went through a phase, wondering "Why am I writing these action movies I don't care about?"  I felt burnt out on the genre.  Which is sort of happening now, overall, with a lot of people. 

I thought about the kind of movies that I saw as a kid that really made an impression on me, like To Kill a Mockingbird.  They're really about something and in some ways they are family films.  I guess To Kill A Mockingbird is a family film, but it's not a movie for kids.  But, it was about big things and it was really a movie that you wanted to show kids.   

And so I decided that's the kind of movies I wanted to write.  So, I wrote a movie called Secondhand Lion and was a similar type of "big theme" movie…  I made a lot of money on that script over the last 5 years, because it's always been under option for a lot of money and it came close to getting made a number of times… 

          I'm hopefully going to make it now.  I've got a lot of interest from various financiers. For once, I was smart in that I never sold it anyone, I only optioned it; interestingly, I probably made more money that way than if I sold it because it's always been optioned, year after year.  And now that I'm a director, when the option came up, I said, well, I'm not going to option it to anybody any more.  I'm going to do it myself.  So, I will do it myself. 

          It's a story about this young kid whose really had a tough time with his mom and is dumped off to spend the summer with these 2 crazy uncles of his.  Mid-way through the movie these uncles buy this cast-off zoo lion that's sick, because they want to hunt it.  But it's too sick to even get out of its cage and the kid decides he's going to nurse it back to health.  It's a metaphor.  What can I say? Hey, it's really a terrific script.  And after that script, I suddenly became the "family film message picture" kind of guy.  Which is sort of interesting.  But I'm hanging onto it, like I always sat on Dancer, I never even optioned that script to anybody.    

They broke in through the system, you know, from the bottom up, as a writer like myself, they just made their movies and kind of by-passed all the bs.  That would be my advice now to anyone now: just make your darn movie.  So I decided to do that. In fact, I was speaking at a lot of writing seminars, telling people the way I broke in was as a writer, and that I felt I was therefore stuck, pigeonholed, as a writer.  Don't do that.  Just make your own darn movie.  Finally, I took my own advice.  I decided I'd just make Dancer on super-sixteen for $100,000 of my own money.  So, I set out to do that.   

I called some friends of mine here in town and we were making a movie.  Well then Chase Foster came along and said well look, I can raise $500-600,000. So we said, okay, we'll do that.  So suddenly we were a $500-600,000 movie.  Then Chase ran into a couple of other producers who knew a guy…

PH:     Who knew a guy, who knew a guy… 

TM:     Yep… who ultimately… well, eventually there was literally a 10 producer trail to this one guy.  The guy at the end of the line was a guy named Michael Burns, who was my guardian angel on Dancer who had done a lot of entertainment lending for people like Shearson-Lehman, Prudential, you know, put together film packages and financing. 

           So Michael thought he could raise the money… but we had all these other producers, and it became an interesting situation: my producer, Chase Foster, my first real producer (he got a "Produced by" credit), had like a couple friends or roommates who were trying to help him get it made at an early phase.  Well they fell away once these other 2 producers came along, but then at the end of the day they came on board and said, "you promised us we'd be producers!", so they are associate producers even though they didn't really accomplish much for us. 

There is a guy who introduced Chase to these 2 other guys, he's a co-producer.  These 2 other guys, also "producers", the way they got to Michael Burns was that one of their girlfriends sat next to Michael Burns' girlfriend in a film class, so one of the girlfriends is an associate producer.  The other girlfriend is an Executive Producer with Michael Burns.  She's Leanna Creel…interestingly, she and Michael are the ones who have actually produced movies before.  So, but anyway, it was like a series of 8-10 people to get to Michael who had the money.  Really all I needed was Michael.

.

PH:      You had told me on the phone earlier that "Dancer..." cost 2.2 mil. Where did the rest of the money come from? 

TM:     We'll we had about 2 million.  Well, we started with less, but we kept kind of getting Michael up.  He didn't want to spend that much… at first, we were talking about 1.5, finally we were at 2.2.  We brought in a UPM and so we kept kind of boosting him up.  Finally we were to the point of shooting in Bakersfield for about 1.5 or so.  

Yeah right.  Basically, our choices were: shooting in Bakersfield for 1.5, Or spending 2.2 to shoot in Texas, in wonderful locations that would give us so much more. The problem was, that the way Michael financed the feature, he put in about ½ million of his own money and then got the bank to do the rest.  He said, the problem is that I haven't got the other $200,000 it would take for me to get $2.2 from the bank.  So,  I wrote a check for $100,000 and Chase wrote one for $100,000 and so we got our locations. 

           Well, it cost me the $100,000 I was going to spend anyway, except instead of owning the whole movie, I now own a piece of it.  So anyway, the first weekend after production started, I was out in the production trailers, we've been shooting for a week and it's going great, we get a call from like the bookkeeping department at Sony Pictures.  They say, okay we need your forms so and so, your this and your that.  We're saying Who are You?  They said, "we just bought you, don't you know?"  So I started calling Michael and I'm going…  "Did you sell us?"   

So what happened was: John Calley,  head of Sony Pictures, evidently read the script of Dancer on an airplane and said, "we should make this movie".  His people said, "They already are".  He said, "Okay.  Buy it."  So suddenly they just bought it from Michael.  For them it was a can't lose proposition because a movie put into the TriStar pipeline that cost them $2.whatever million, they make $5-6 million just off of video…and so Michael got his money back like within a week.  

The down side of a small film like Dancer being at a major studio was that we were sort of beneath their radar. They thought the movie had no stars, didn't know who to market it to, and didn't really want to spend any money trying to find out. 

So they said, look, just by doing kind of a smallish opening, New York, Los Angeles, then right to video, you guys will make so much more money than if we spent $15 million to make 15 million… you know. 

It costs so much money to open a movie.  Of course the whole time my first time producers, a couple of them were sort of like, well, it's over, blah, blah blah.  But I hung in there and was pushing Michael Burns and Chase Foster, my other producer to really keep on them and I got a bigger opening for Dancer.  So after I made the movie, I fought for another year to get the good distribution and the PR and all that kind of stuff.  So, I got the film into South by Southwest which really helped because I got a terrific review out of Variety, but then I pushed Sony to get more than an LA/New York review.  I mean, they are typical big studio kind of non-thinking: they say "We'll open in New York and L.A. and see what happens."  My response to that was, "This is not a New York and L.A. movie.  By it's very nature its not."

PH:      Tell me about shooting your feature in a small town. 

TM:     First of all, if I knew then what I know now…there are so many things I would do differently. We had no money, so rehearsals were out of the question.  We shot a four week schedule, which is very short by Hollywood standards. Also, we couldn't afford to bring in a lot of actors from L.A. and pay their food and hotel… and so for the smaller roles I had to use locals: at times a blessing, at times a curse. 

There were times when I really was pulling my hair out. But there were some real characters.  Ending up give some great performances ˆ especially the old ladies.  Those are real widow ladies from Davis, and they give the film a real authentic feel… but it would just take a lot of time trying to explain to them what we're doing and why we are doing it and, you know, what a scene is. Not to look in the camera… sometimes they really didn't understand what was going on. 

           Well, you come down and you gave them the lines and you gave them a script, you'd think they'd understand what's going on here and that we'd roll camera and they'd say, now, wait a minute.  I'm confused.  What …and I'd say, now when he says his line, you say your line. 

PH:     What would you change if you could start the Production again?    

TM:    Well somehow we ended up shooting the bus stop, which is where the boys say good-bye on like day 2. And the guys just were not ready for that.  Even though we had rehearsed with the four of them for a week.   

            And my DP wasn't ready for it either as it turns out… so I had a good excuse to go back and reshoot that scene at the end of the schedule, where it really works so much better emotionally for the guys. In the future, I would look at doing really emotional scenes, like good-bye scenes, toward the end of the picture.   

            And I would probably have to fight for it, and say, "I don't care if it's inconvenient".  The UPM's tend to run the whole show.  I mean the first call I ever get as a writer when a movie is going into production that I am working on is "Okay, we've got these 5 night scenes, lets move them all into day.  Let's make them all day scenes.  They hurt my schedule."   Well, my attitude is well… tough.  I made those night scenes for a reason, yes you're going to have to go into splits, deal with it.  So…

PH:      You had some of today's really hot talent in this flick. Can you tell me a bit more? 

TM:    Nowadays they are making a lot of teen movies, but up until Dancer came along, all the teen movies were sort of horror movies and these kids all want to be Sean Penn.  I mean they really are serious actors.  They are all extremely bright kids, and really serious about acting.  They really want to "stretch" and don't want "just want a job".

PH:     Well, for the four leads, you had Breckin Myer, who's starred in "54" and "Road Trip" and had a nice part in "The Insider" ˆ then there was Ethan Embry, who's done everything from "Vegas Vacation" to "Can't Hardly Wait",  and Peter Facinelli, also in "Can't Hardly Wait" and also, "The Big Kahuna" ˆ and Musketeer #4 was Eddie Mills, who was in "Heartland" and "Splendor Falls."  Tim, where did your kids go when they wanted to kick back? Fort Davis isn't exactly New York City. 

TM:     They were usually either playing cards together or they would all pile in the car and take off and make a run to Alpine.  But, what's interesting is all the young actors in L.A. seem to know each other. And so all of them had heard about the script.

PH:     Were they in LA when they heard about it? 

TM:     Yeah.  But we didn't have much money.  I knew I'd have to get the 4 guys out of LA.  I looked like crazy in Austin, but nobody was right.  I knew most of  the Austin talent .  I brought in some Austin actors I know, but because we're on location in Fort Davis,  everybody we brought in we had to pay their room and board and per diem and all that… and that gets very expensive on a 2.2 million dollar budget. 

Because we had 40 speaking roles.  I just kind of drew a line in the sand and said the rest I'm just going to have to find here locally to do this part… parts around 10 lines and under.  So that's what I did.  People commented that Dancer has a lot of local color.  Part of it is I couldn't afford trained actors.

PH:      Tell me about the release of the film. 

TM:     So it wasn't really until South by Southwest and the Variety review that I was able to a bigger release in Texas.  And, you know, it did real well.  Without spending any money.  It played for 7 months in the several theatres. It's still doing great on home video. It also played on a lot of airlines.  And it's going to open all through Europe. Then there's the pay cable and Network sales. So, it's really made quite a profit.  But it's still, from my perspective, it's a…as a film maker, I wanted to make a splash theatrically, because that's what matters as far as your career goes.

PH:     Well, why don't we look at, and don't go too far into detail on this, but talk about the profitability of Dancer Texas.   Although it wasn't "Good Will Hunting" in the theaters, from what you were telling me, when it came to video, it did pretty well.   

TM:    They say over 90 percent of pictures in Hollywood don't make money and it's only the breakaway hits that do, but I don't know if that's true so much anymore.  I mean, Dancer made money because there were no big stars taking gross points, they didn't spend any money releasing it, it's sort of done well despite the fact that they haven't spent any money releasing it.  Especially in video, because of the good reviews.  So, they've made their money back. 

Unfortunately, it's still how much a movie makes in the theatres that's the indicator of it's "success" as perceived by Hollywood.  So a movie like Armageddon made maybe $150 million, but what you've got a budget over 100 million, Bruce Willis taking probably 20 gross points off the top, the studio probably spent another 100 million in prints and advertising putting it in theatres, you know what I mean, by the time the studio takes home its share of revenues, they're not making any money in the theatres either.

PH:      Did the personal financial success of Dancer, Texas put you in a good position to work on other projects? 

TM:      Oh, I'm gotten residuals, but no profit participation yet.  I got a very small salary because I'm in the WGA so I had to get at least scale.  A funny thing: when you pay scale to actors, you pay them "scale+10", which means scale plus 10%, because they have to pay their agents 10%.    I just realized that I just paid myself scale, not "scale+10".  So, I lost money…because I paid my agent 10, my lawyer gets 5, you know…

PH:     That's something people don't realize.  That until you go through all this stuff, and it could be a year, two, three years later before people start to realize money on this. 

TM:      Luckily, I've always been pretty successful at screenwriting.  I mean, financially, so and then I took a year off to go off and do Dancer for a nice bit of money.  So right after that year I spent, after I got Dancer posted and into theatres and all that. You're really working that whole time as a director.  I was really kind of the head PR guy and all of that.  I had first time producers who really didn't know that they were supposed to keep in touch with the studio in that way.  Anyway, I took a writing assignment.  I'm kind of in an enviable position, not necessary having to take any job that comes along and I kind of wanted to be, you know I'm sent a lot of scripts when Dancer opened as a director, but I didn't want to be a director for hire.  I've been a writer for hire, but I didn't want to be, at least I get to live at home, in Texas.  I didn't want to be a director for hire and have to live in a hotel out in L.A. or something for a year.

PH:      Tim, turning another direction - do you accept scripts from people? 

TM:     No, I really don't - for several reasons.  I sort of even had to develop a defense against that.  Even before Dancer I had a lot of people, you know, would-be writers would send me scripts wanting me to read them and they would say, you know, would you read my script thinking that I would help them.  But you know, they didn't really want help or criticism.  They just want me to sell it for them.  You know, cut to the chase, that's really what they wanted.  And I don't have time to do that.  I have scripts of my own I need to sell.  

When I first moved to Austin I let it be known that I would read scripts, and I got deluged with 100's of just terrible, terrible scripts.  Awful stuff - some from very bright people. None of which were even close.  I mean, just even the idea, I would want to ask the writer, you know, what were you thinking?  Do you know what I mean?  

But then, when I directed Dancer Hollywood sent me hundreds of scripts which I dutifully read.  Didn't like any of those either.  So, part of it is a realization that the sort of things I want to do and my talents as a director were sort of a narrow focus.  I'm certainly not going to do True Lies, I'm not going to do any kind of big action pictures.  If I have any strengths, obviously my strength as a writer, I managed to luck out once as a director, not screw up too badly.  Get some good actors who made me look good on film. 

            I'd like to try that again.  I think my ability as a director is sort of narrow and the kind of stories I want to tell are sort of narrow and the chances are that some new writer could capture lightning in a bottle and it would be a great script and the kind of thing I would want to do are sort of remote.  Certainly not worth my time reading hundreds of scripts.  I mean literally I got deluged by so much e-mail and such.  People finding out my address in various ways, or my e-mail address, or just whatever way people could get a hold of me… 

Many people have approached me to read scripts and literally would be a fully time job just to read scripts.  But then I wouldn't do any writing.  And my pat response to that is I'm a writer not an agent or a producer.  It's producers and agents who read writer's scripts.  And they have staffs to weed out the bad stuff.  I don't.  I mean any agency will tell you they pour through hundreds… thousands of scripts before they find one with promise.  That has a good idea at it's core.  Something that's a commercial idea.  If it's a got something an star who gets a movie made would want to do.  Hollywood commercial films tends to be about a big star role, say a Mel Gibson…they tend not to be ensemble movies. 

            But, I don't necessarily want to direct those movies either.  So, maybe I'll spend years trying to get one of my scripts made.  But I do read a lot of scripts, I can't avoid reading, friends of mine or whatever like that, and usually they are well written, often by real pros; but they're just not something I want to do.  I don't want to spend 2 years of my life telling that story.  You know what I mean?  You either spark to or you don't. 

            I'd just as soon make small movies. And I enjoy my privacy.  I enjoy living at my ranch and piddling and such…being in production is a really tough job.  And I don't necessarily want to do that full time.  So, I don't mind making a movie every 2-3 years and if it means something, that really means something and touches people I'd rather do that than make a movie that makes $200 million like Armageddon.

PH:       Tim, as always it's been a delight talking to you. Good luck with all your projects.