JUST LOOKING, MY MOVIEMAKING TRIUMPH

My one and only produced movie, JUST LOOKING, has been all over HBO-C this month. It’s on again Sunday Jan 24 at 11:30 a.m. (EST).

It’s a semi-autobiographical comedy about Lenny Levine, a teenager growing up in the Bronx. He’s fascinated with sex, but it’s 1955, and Lenny is too young and too scared to actually do it. So he dedicates his summer vacation to the next best thing. Seeing two other people do it.

Easier said than done. Lenny gets caught in the act of spying, and his mother and stepfather ship him off to spend the summer with his aunt and uncle in Queens.

There he meets Hedy, played by the divine Gretchen Mol. She’s a nurse who in a former life modeled for bra ads. Lenny is smitten. His goal to witness an act of love becomes an obsession, and his summer vacation turns into an adventure that will change his life forever.

I wrote the script in 1990. It opened a lot of doors in Hollywood, but none of the blockbuster studios wanted to produce a sweet little movie. I put it in a drawer and went on with my life.

Cut to 1999 and Jean Doumanian, then Woody Allen’s producer, called. She read the script and wanted to meet me.

I blew her off. I was legitimately busy running a dotcom ad agency, and I had long gotten over the need to jump every time a producer called to say I love your script.

Guess what? Nothing drives a producer crazier than a disinterested writer. Her people pursued my people. Only I didn’t have people. I blew her off without any help from subordinates. That really drove her people crazy.

When Jean and I finally got together three weeks after the first call, it was a lovefest. And we stayed good friends all the way through. Very un-Hollywood. But of course, it was a New York production, so that might explain it.

Jason Alexander (whom I had worked with early in our TV careers) had just come off Seinfeld and was hired to direct. An adorable Ryan Merriman (who is now a hot 24-year-old) nailed the part of Lenny. And the incredible Patti LuPone played his mom.

Movie making isn’t supposed to be pleasant — especially for the writer. But I had a shitload of fun. And while you always want to change this, or rewrite that, I’m damn proud of the finished film.

I did a twelve city promotional tour with Jason, who is as down to earth as you’d expect from a guy who started out as Jay Greenspan from Livingston, NJ.

The single biggest problem — two weeks before the release we got an R rating. Here’s how I understand the MPAA’s rating logic. If you say fuck you, that’s profanity. PG-13. If you say fuck me, that’s sexual. R. Lenny said “I want to see two people fucking.” But Sony Classics, the studio distributing the film didn’t have the time, or the stomach, to fight the R.

The reviews were generally positive, but saddled with that rating it opened in theatres across the country and closed a week later. But you can still buy the DVD at amazon, rent it at Netflix, or if you check your local listings, catch it on HBO.

It’s the perfect movie, especially if you identify more with a teenager discovering sex than with a blue cat person fighting to save the alien world he has learned to call his home.

And for those of you who can’t sit still for the entire 97 minutes, check out the 2 minute trailer.

If you do get to see it, let me know what you think. Because you know what? I still care.

Marshall posted on January 22, 2010 9:43 AM