The Unkindest Cut: How A Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7000 Movie And Put It All On His
Credit CardJoe Queenan
Picador, paperback, 320 pages
ISBN 0 7868 6090 1
Review by Gerald Houghton (1996)
For maverick (read: psychotic) ex-LAPD cop Turk Bishop it was never open and shut. Psychiatrist Peter Thorpe was dead, and the evidence – not to mention fast food wrappers – says Amber Duggan, one of the doctor’s grossly overweight patients. But Bishop has doubts, especially when he meets Thorpe’s identical twin brother.
Malicious, mean-minded film critic Joe Queenan never really believed Robert Rodriguez made his festival busting El Mariachi for $7,000. So it was with a mix of gainsaying and naive optimism that he threw credit and his kids’ college fund to the wind to make Twelve Steps To Death for only $6,998. $50,000 later, Queenan was a poorer, wiser man.
Twelve Steps To Death – Turk Bishop’s pursuit of a murderer in rural Wisconsin – is a funny script. A very funny, ‛unbelievably offensive and politically incorrect’ script. Its parodies of Tarantino (‛KLB-70, the Sounds of the 1870s’) and Lynch (‛I guess it means there is trouble in the world till the squirrels come’) are smart highlights in 93 smart pages. Its hero is suitably wounded (wife and kids died in a hit-and-run car accident caused by ‛a schizoid anorexic recovering alcoholic with Attention Deficit Disorder who did not remember committing the crime’), and its denouement appropriately ridiculous. Through the 12 Step recovery program like a chainsaw through cardboard. John Waters Lite.
Vaguely confident, ‛heartless, cynical dick’ Queenan pitches full steam ahead, casting neighbours on the understanding that a/ at least they are cheap, and b/ can’t run away. Even if they can’t act. His eminently sensible English wife wants none of it.
He lucked on a cameraman and woman to work the sound gear, and discovered early that reluctantly casting himself as the lead wasn’t such a bad move. But even the most phenomenal good fortune is as nothing when this financial juggernaut gets to rolling. Nine days shooting doesn’t come cheap when you have to hire a 16mm camera, buy film stock and cater for ‛stars’. And it doesn’t even get really expensive – Automated Dialogue Recording, prints and video transfers – until later. Claiming in the end it cost all of $35 (if you’re going to lie, he tells us, lie BIG) impresses no one.
The Unkindest Cut is fantastically entertaining. Queenan (author of the diverting If You’re Talking To Me Your Career Must Be In Trouble, and presenter of Radio 4’s essential Postcard from Gotham) writes up a storm. No emotional nor financial toll is too big for sarcasm, be it whopping editing suite bills or the precarious state of his marriage: ‛I wanted people to talk about me in the same breath as DW Griffith, not Melanie Griffith.’ The laugh out loud quotient is enormous.
And the moral? That in the film business everything costs at least twice what you think. That for every Clerks there are a thousand and one cheap-shot movies that never see a projector let alone the inside of a multiplex. ‘Making a low-budget movie in the small town where you live,’ writes a chastened Queenan, ‘is basically a very expensive way to impress your neighbours’. And Robert Rodriguez? He was ‘either an outright liar or completely full of shit’.