John McNaughton’s odyssey has taken him from Lower Wacker Drive to the cover of Entertainment Weekly–from his shocking cult classic “Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer” to the sexy thriller “Wild Things,” which opens Friday.
Relaxing over lunch in a trendy beachfront hotel in Santa Monica, McNaughton–a native South Sider, and proud of it–couldn’t hold back a chuckle when asked about the clandestine marketing campaign that launched “Henry” back in the ’80s.
“We went out into the city with a bucket of paste and put up these posters by the Michigan Avenue Bridge, outside certain nightclubs and around the Trib and Sun-Times,” he recalled. “Many of them stayed up for quite a few years. They said, `I killed my mama.’
“No one can turn away from matricide.”
By contrast, last month, the very photogenic cast of his new movie–Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Kevin Bacon and Matt Dillon–were on the cover of EW.
“My whole life has been like that,” said the 48-year-old filmmaker. “If you look back 20 years, you’d never figure out how I got to be sitting here at this moment.”
That’s because McNaughton’s career path has been anything but smooth.
Even though his $120,000 art-house slasher (with a chilling scene filmed on Lower Wacker) eventually found an audience, it took more than three years and the support of several influential critics to convince a distributor to take a chance on it. Despite the delay, “Henry” caught the eye of several producers, and McNaughton seemingly was on his way.
His alien horror flick “The Borrower” came out in 1991, as did “Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll,” his rendition of Eric Bogosian’s edgy one-man off-Broadway show. In 1993, he tried to navigate the Hollywood mainstream with “Mad Dog and Glory,” but it failed at the box office.
By this time, McNaughton had developed a reputation of being difficult to work with, and he turned to directing for television, including several fine episodes of “Homicide: Life on the Street” and Showtime’s “Girls in Prison.” His 1996 return to the big screen, “Normal Life,” which starred Ashley Judd and Luke Perry as suburban bank robbers, was released in only two theaters before heading to video stores.
“I thought the movie was really good and it had something to say, but it wasn’t entertaining, per se,” McNaughton conceded. “It got to the point where I thought, `If people want to see stories this raw and ugly, they can just walk out the door.’ I don’t make pictures for friends of mine to watch in their basements. I want audiences to see them.”
To this end, McNaughton joined the roster of directors at the William Morris Agency, and acknowledged, “I had better behave a little better and grow up a little. When I changed agencies, I decided I was going to be a much more responsible client and not just scream at them all the time if they were morons, which had been my previous practice.”
“Wild Things,” dubbed “Body Heat 90210” because of its Florida setting, neo-noir storyline and hot young stars, should find a ready young audience. Dillon plays a high school guidance teacher accused of rape by two overripe students, who may or may not be telling the truth, and Bacon is menacing as a suspicious cop.
“My agents were sending me scripts, and, for once, I decided to read some of them,” he said. “Usually, with thrillers, I can read the first five pages, skip to the last two and figure out what happened in between. I couldn’t do that with `Wild Things’ . . . the intermediate 70 pages were a completely mystery to me.”
McNaughton, who maintains a Bucktown residence but rarely sees it, has not given up hope on a stalled film about Bill Veeck.
“I was 10 when the Sox won the pennant, and he was like Jesus Christ,” he said. “Mayor Daley set off the air-raid sirens. We took that seriously, because, this was 1959, and there was always talk of a nuclear attack. People were terrified.”
NO CLIP JOB
Satirist, screenwriter and playwright Larry Gelbart also hails from Chicago, although he left the West Side 55 years ago, when his parents pulled up stakes and left for L.A. He recalls his early roots in the new book, “Laughing Matters” (Random House), which chronicles his contributions to such landmark works as TV’s “MASH” and “Caesar’s Hour”; the films “Tootsie” and “Oh, God!”; and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” and “Mastergate” on Broadway,
In the opening chapter to “Laughing Matters,” Gelbart introduces readers to his immigrant parents–Harry and Frieda–who were wed as teenagers in Chicago. Sitting in the guest house of his comfortable Beverly Hills home, Gelbart expands on some of those childhood memories.
“My father worked in a barbershop called Charlie Woolf’s,” he recalled. “Everybody went in there, from Barney Ross, who was the West Side’s Jewish Joe Lewis, to petty thieves, bookies and businessmen.”
Although he would go on to win three Tonys, three Emmys and two Oscar nominations for his manipulation of the common tongue, Gelbart spoke only Yiddish until he was 4.
“I thought I was speaking English,” he joked. “I don’t think we had any books in our house, except maybe the Haggadah for Passover and the Racing Form.”
After moving the family to California, Harry eventually found his way to Drucker’s barbershop, in Beverly Hills.
“Everybody went there . . . the real cream of Hollywood,” Gelbart said. “My dad quickly established his own star. He was a fabulous haircutter and–again, with the jokes, the patter and the tapdancing–he was a one-man show.
“Before long, he was cutting everybody’s hair, including Danny Thomas.”
Harry somehow convinced the popular comedian to sample one of his teenage son’s jokes. It was used on Thomas’ radio show, and Gelbart became part of the writing team.
