ONWARD AND UPWARD WITH THE ARTS A TOUCH OF BAD

Why is the director Neil LaBute so interested in jerks? 6 BY

NCE upon a time in the early play “Lepers,” is a sexual merry-go-round nineties, in the irony-free zone among friends. Together, the two films O of Off Off Broadway, the are a kind of “Rake’s Progress,” and La- writer and director Neil LaBute sat on- Bute’s model for them is Restoration stage doing triple duty as an actor in his comedy, which, as he explained to me barroom play, “Filthy Talk for Troubled when we met in Hollywood this spring, Times: Scenes of Intolerance.” One of “gets down to the dirt of the way we live the barflies was in the middle of a riff with each other and treat each other.” He about AIDS and about her fear of infec- pays homage to his source in “Your Friends tion—“I say, put them all in a fucking and Neighbors” when, during a rehearsal pot and boil them . . . just as a precau- of Wycherley’s “The Country Wife,” the tion”—when a member of the audience drama professor and sleazy sexual preda- sitting right up front shouted, “Kill the tor, Jerry (), sitting in the audi- playwright!” LaBute, who is thirty-eight torium in periwig and frock coat, explains and whose wiry black hair and pug to his cuckolded best friend, Barry (Aaron nose give him the look of a large, ami- Eckhart), why he bedded his wife: able hedgehog, says his first thought was “to get to the exit, to lead the crowd JERRY:...I just feel...Fuck,I don’t know how to put this, I just feel... out to safety”; another part of him was BARRY: “Bad”? thrilled, because “people were listening JERRY: “Bad.” Exactly! Bad. enough to go out of their way to make a BARRY: I mean, my wife . . . JERRY: I’m sorry. response.” The angry patron stayed for BARRY: The same hotel room even. the rest of the play, which is a testament JERRY: I am sorry. to LaBute’s good writing and to his BARRY:Yeah... canny view of theatre and film as “a con- JERRY: But I ...I mean, I still feel... BARRY:...“Bad.” tact sport,” which “should be the most of JERRY: Right. “Bad.” whatever it is—the most joy, the most terror.” The moral and emotional noncha- LaBute, whose first play-turned-film, lance of LaBute’s characters echoes the “” (1997), made amorality and privilege of the Resto- his name and also earned him the sobri- ration fops, who, LaBute has said, are quet “the angriest white male,” courts “well-to-do people with time on their provocation not for the sake of shock but hands who go around hurting each to make an audience think against its other, doing things that are pretty un- own received opinions. His production pleasant, just because the opportunity company is mischievously called Con- presents itself.” The original court enter- temptible Entertainment; his work is tainments emphasized the notion of ap- cruel, dark, and often very funny. “In the pearance versus authenticity. “Behind that Company of Men” is about two corpo- great sense of costume—the wigs and rate eager beavers—the venomous Chad makeup—there was a sense that all was and his sidekick, Howard—who conspire well, even while bugs were crawling in to find a vulnerable woman, woo her, and the wigs and the physical self was falling then hurt her. “It’s a simple story,” La- apart,” LaBute said. “There was still the Bute wrote in the introduction to the sense that it was better to look good than published screenplay. “Boys meet girl, to feel good.” LaBute’s contemporary boys crush girl, boys giggle.” “Your Friends fops have no authentic self to hide: they and Neighbors” (1998), adapted from his are all façade. He links this to the nineties

LaBute, center, with actors from “Bash” and “”: Ron Eldard, ,

PHILIP BURKE , Renée Zellweger, Morgan Freeman, and . obsession with style and with the insis- “Neil always wants you to personalize his count a road trip to New York City with tence on appearance as reality. “There’s a work,” says the actor , who a few Mormon college friends for a party huge sense in the nineties of ‘I can be- starred in both “In the Company of at the Plaza. During the day’s long trajec- come anything I want as long as I present Men” and “Your Friends and Neighbors,” tory of good times, the guys find them- it tenaciously enough.’ Clinton would be and has a part in the forthcoming “Nurse selves attacking a homosexual in a Cen- a fair example.” Betty,” LaBute’s first mainstream Holly- tral Park latrine: LaBute, who calls himself “a part-time wood movie and the only one of his films Tim leans into him one more time, takes moralist,” is a practicing Mormon; he that he has not written. “He wants you a little run at it, smashing his foot against converted to the faith in the early eight- to say, ‘I’m that person’ or ‘I have the bridge of this man’s nose and I see it ies, before he married Lisa Gore, a psy- done that.’ ” give way. Just pick up and move to the other chotherapist who is deeply involved with side of his face. Wow. And then it’s silence. For the same reasons, in his stage Not a sound. And for the first time, we look the Church of the Latter-Day Saints. work LaBute favors the black box—the over at Dave....What’s he thinking? And The Mormon obsession with moral im- unadorned proscenium—and the con- right then, as if to answer us through reve- provement and with “pretending nothing fines of the monologue. His versatility lation . . . he grabs up the nearest trash can, big wire mesh thing, raises it above his bad happens,” as he says, accounts in in this form is shown to brilliant and head as he whispers, “Fag.” I’ll never forget large part for LaBute’s relish of transgres- unsettling effect in a trio of short pieces that . . . “fag.” That’s all. And brings that can sion. The absence of surface detail in his collectively called “Bash,” which opened down right on the spine of the guy, who just sort of shudders a bit, expelling air. films—“In the Company of Men” takes last week at the Douglas Fairbanks Thea- place in a nameless city and at a nameless tre, starring Calista Flockhart, Ron El- Clearly, LaBute does not follow the corporation where nameless executive dard, and Paul Rudd. Here, in one of Mormon line about the showing of tasks are performed—allows the viewer the pieces—a tandem monologue enti- good. On the contrary, his work is built to focus on the psychological aspects of tled “A Gaggle of Saints: A Remem- on the belief that great good can come the piece: the casual cruelties we commit, brance of Hatred and Longing”—a from showing the bad. the ways in which we displace our anger. soon-to-be-married college couple re- VISITED LaBute on the set of “Nurse I Betty,” which he describes as “a feel- good hit that includes scalping, love, a cross-country car chase, shoot-outs, comedy”—in other words, an entertain- ment, and perhaps a holiday from his usual despair. LaBute, dressed in a blue- and-black plaid shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a slicker with a packet of raisins tucked into the cuff, spent much of the first morning skulking around a crowded Pasadena bungalow, inspecting every cranny of a room where one of the film’s heavies, played by Chris Rock, goes looking for Betty, the title character (Renée Zellweger). The film is essen- tially a chase movie, in which Betty, a waitress, sees her ne’er-do-well husband murdered for the cache of drugs he has hidden in her car; traumatized and de- luded, she sets off for Los Angeles to marry her “fiancé,” the doctor on her fa- vorite soap opera. On the set, LaBute engages his cast as he does the world— with an almost Presidential bonhomie, at once solicitous and standoffish. He speaks with the low-key collegial com- posure of someone who knows who he is—the boss. “Love that Tide!” he called to the set decorator, who was po- sitioning the soap-powder box so that the camera would catch it in the corner of the frame. “Love that box of Tide!” The scene called for the actress Kath- leen Wilhoite to hold a baby as she an- swered the front door; on this bright morning, the professional toddler, a hefty lump called Robert, was bawling himself red in the face. LaBute swooped up the child and cra- dled him in his thick arms, as adept at han- dling kids as adults. (He has an eleven- year-old daughter, Lily, and a seven-year- old son, Spencer.) “You’ll have the baby in your arms. That’ll give you an acting “O.K., so who gets to tell him he’s a war criminal?” challenge,” he said to Wilhoite. “It’ll steal • • the scene,” she said. LaBute shot her a grin as he walked weger, Morgan Freeman), first happy of you,” LaBute said to Rock. Rock away. “They often do,” he said. ending, first film without his own narra- started over toward his screen father, On the bungalow’s front lawn, amid a tive voice. Morgan Freeman, who was sucking on a scrum of technicians and prop hands, Even so, the Hollywood machine toothpick and looking like a Marlboro LaBute, an almost constant nosher, hasn’t completely expunged LaBute’s man, in cowboy boots and pressed jeans. munched a few raisins. “My mom is very instinct for mischief, which became ap- By the time LaBute got the shot he was happy, because I’m doing more than she parent a few hours later, when he was talking about, it was midday and a tent hoped for,” he told me. “But she’d rather I slumped in front of a monitor with two had been erected to protect the monitors was doing comedies. I told her, ‘I just did, producers at his back worrying about the from the glare of the sun. LaBute and so wait till I do a drama.’ ” lack of coverage for an interracial sex his director of photography, Jean Yves Chris Rock ambled over, dressed like scene. On the small screen, Rock was Escoffier, watched the screens as Free- a Bible salesman, in a loose-fitting black kneeling on a bed behind a white girl, man and Rock, for about the tenth time, suit. “He’s great with scenery,” Rock said. pumping her for information while sauntered toward a parked LeSabre and “He’s the best hair director that ever rogering her doggy style, as Jerry memo- pried its trunk open. “I shoulda been a lived.” LaBute gave him an owlish look, rably does to Terri in “Your Friends and film director when I was a kid,” LaBute greeted him as “Mr. Rock,” and said they Neighbors.” “This is why I wanted to do said, happy with the take. “Time would were nearly ready to shoot. “I don’t smile the script, ” LaBute joked. In fact, he said, have gone by much quicker. Waiting for in this movie. I brood,” Rock said as he he shot the scene without coverage on Christmas? Go make a movie.” walked away. “Cheating America of the purpose, so it could not be edited, in the bullshit that is Chris Rock.” hope of finessing his case against the in- ABUTE, who has an encyclopedic It is typical of LaBute that he would bred conservatism of the studio. “We L knowledge of pop culture and can find a way to exploit Rock’s edgy, darker talked about the sex,” he explained. as easily imitate Don Knotts (“My body essence rather than his show-biz surface, “Frontal would have been too intimate— is a weapon”) as discourse on Werner even in a commercial film. “Nurse Betty,” he’s getting information from the girl. It Herzog’s “Stroszek,” is a curious amal- written by John C. Richards and James seemed less personal from behind. They gam of theatrical influences. “What the Flamberg, is the first of a two-picture have the same amount of clothes on—in fuck’s her name? I mean, tits like that deal that LaBute cut with Propaganda fact, more than they had on in ‘Your must have a name, correct?” has the ver- Films (the company that joint-produced Friends and Neighbors.’ I think it comes nacular wallop of a line; the four-million-dollar “Your Friends and down to the race thing. I really do.” actually, it is the self-incriminating tele- Neighbors” last year). After he’d signed After about ten minutes of calm dis- phone talk of Cary in “Your Friends and the contract, he had second thoughts cussion with the producers, LaBute ac- Neighbors.” LaBute writes with the same and wanted to bolt; now he seemed to cepted the postcoital option. “Just them linguistic cunning as Mamet and charac- be contentedly and firmly at the helm. in bed,” he said. “Her sitting smoking. terizes his admiration for the playwright “There are a lot of firsts for me here,” he He’s lying next to her, and they’re talk- as “beyond fan—stalker perhaps. Psycho- said as the other children in the scene ing.” He shoved his fingers into a bag of logical stalker.” He even managed to mount were being rounded up and given their Cheetos. “Let’s do it!” he shouted to his an expurgated version of Mamet’s “Sex- orders. “First crane. First squib shot. First assistant. “Light the bed. Let’s look right ual Perversity in Chicago” during his un- in all the things that you may not have down on them. And off we’ll go. She’ll dergraduate days, at Brigham Young Uni- dealt with—like anyone pulling a gun, let blow a little smoke in his face.” versity: “My posters were so rococo that alone using it.” To that list of firsts could The next day, the production caravan the passerby couldn’t read what they said.” be added: first big production (thirty moved to a low-rent side street of down- Where Mamet hears violence and million dollars), first seven-figure pay- town Los Angeles. “This is your ‘I found evasion under conversational speech, day, first star-studded cast (Rock, Zell- the coke’ scene. Your daddy will be proud LaBute hears a kind of moral and emo- contemporary Ameri- can writers have not articulated with quite such single-minded au- thority: a sense of sin. “The ‘should’s and ‘have to’s of Mor- monism make Neil struggle with the sinful life,” Metten says. “The Latter-Day Saints stan- dards are so high. The humanness of Neil sends him in the other direction. He gets even in his writing.” LaBute’s plays, which perco- late with corrosive skep- ticism, are, in fact, by-products of the righteous life. “The in- teresting thing about sin is that we’ve gotten a bit away from it,” LaBute says. “There’s a right and a wrong that goes beyond the daily prac- • • tice of living, and I think we have gotten tional entropy—what he calls “the chill working in a bank. She wants no part of away from that idea, yet it sort of hangs factor”—under his characters’ jabbering. him or his apology; she leaves the bad over all of us.” His stories show a sense “I tend to hear a false sense of warmth in feeling with him. “Listen,” he says to her, of goodness being leached out of the lives the way we lead people in sentences,” then starts to shout when she doesn’t ac- of his characters and, more hilariously, LaBute says. “ ‘You know,’ ‘I mean,’ ‘Lis- knowledge him. “Listen! Listen!! Listen!!! out of their vocabulary. In “Your Friends ten.’ People are constantly trying to em- Listen!!!!” “It’s so selfish,” LaBute says of and Neighbors,” the subject comes up bellish what they say with this false sense Howard’s desire to have his impulse to- over a meal: of camaraderie—‘I’m with you,’ ‘I’m with ward goodness acknowledged. “I think a BARRY: Do you think you’re good? you on this.’ A phrase that suddenly lot of the characters I write, and certainly CARY: What, a good fuck? started coming up more and more and a lot of the male characters, are selfish. BARRY: No, “good.” I’m asking you, do you that I incorporated in ‘Your Friends and They just indulge themselves in taking think you’re good? CARY: “Good,” what do you mean, “good”? Neighbors’ was ‘Is it me?’ These men care of their needs.” What kinda question is that? were constantly asking, without any sense This sense of entitlement is the pre- BARRY: I’m asking . . . I’m saying are you, of wanting to know the answer, ‘Who’s senting symptom of most of LaBute’s you know, like, a “good person”? doing this?’ ” characters, and is part of what makes his CARY: Hey, I’m eating lunch... In “Filthy Talk for Troubled Times” work so distinctly contemporary. In addi- Later, when the thorny issue of sal- LaBute developed this idea by orches- tion to Mamet, he admires Wallace vation comes up—the question of wheth- trating a counterpoint of monologues in Shawn, whom he calls “the great chroni- er they’ll ultimately have to “pay” for which people talk about wanting to con- cler of the ease with which we slowly their behavior, in Barry’s weasel words— nect while the form of the play insures tumble.” “The difference between a per- Cary says, “I mean, if there ends up that they aren’t listening to each other. fectly decent person and a monster is just being a God or something like that “Women. Fucking broads! . . . You can’t a few thoughts,” Shawn writes in the ap- whole eternity thing out there, like, fucking trust them,” one drinker says to pendix to his play “Aunt Dan and Lemon,” then, yeah, probably so. I dunno. We’ll another. “Well...personally, I could which LaBute cites as an influence on his see. But until then, we’re on my time, never trust anything that bleeds for a own modest proposals. Charles Metten, O.K.? The interim is mine.” LaBute’s week and doesn’t die.” The complete ab- who taught directing at Brigham Young, characters are so lost to themselves, so sence of empathy expressed by this vi- calls LaBute “a young Ibsen,” which is separated from their souls, that they cious joke also finds a powerful metaphor perhaps pitching it a bit high. But La- can’t feel anything; they hurt people in at the end of “In the Company of Men,” Bute is an original voice, and the best order to feel something. The murder- when the contrite Howard (Matt Mal- new playwright to emerge in the past ous mothers and fathers, the violent loy) goes in search of the female victim, decade. He brings to his observations college boys, the conniving friends Christine (Stacy Edwards), and finds her about human nature something that other and rampant seducers in his work continually dramatize sin as the inabil- His father’s temper gave LaBute a sense whom he hears from infrequently, has ity to imagine the suffering of others. of casual brutality and of “how much never seen one of his plays or films. damage could be done with language.” Charles Metten recalls sitting in his of- S a boy, LaBute often went to church He goes on, “I can remember working fice at Brigham Young with LaBute, A and participated in Bible study, with my father on a car. He’d gone in- who was planning to write a play about even though his parents didn’t. He grew side. The only thing that really sets me fathers and sons for Metten to direct. “I up with intimations of a faithless world— off is inanimate objects, because there’s asked, ‘Will it be another “All My Sons”?’ what he calls “a vague foreboding that no reasoning with them. I let out a tirade He said, ‘No, it’s gonna be better.’ Then, something was not quite right.” He ex- that would have made someone proud. I for the first time in our friendship, he plains, “I’m sure a lot of my love of didn’t realize he’d come back into the started to talk about his father. Tears stories—of watching film or theatre, garage. He looked at me, and I got the welled up. He got very, very emotional. imagining myself in some other con- sense of ‘So this is part of the legacy I’ve In fact, he left and went to the rest room.” text—came from the unsettling environ- left behind.’ ” Though LaBute was the president of ment at home.” When LaBute’s produc- When LaBute gets angry, according his high-school class, he refused to at- ing partner, , called him at to Eckhart, “he crawls inside himself.” tend Friday-night football games, be- the Seattle Film Festival, after the initial Pevner says, “If you’re good to him, he’s cause they coincided with the weekly success of “In the Company of Men,” in extremely good to you. If you’re bad to changing of the feature at the local cin- 1997, Pevner remembers getting La- him, forget it. What’s worse than the ema. His yearbook is filled with pictures Bute’s soft-spoken mother, Marian, on wrath of God? You won’t get anything. of him: in “You’re a Good Man, Charlie the phone. “I said, ‘It’s taken so long. You will get nothing.” LaBute doesn’t Brown” (he played Snoopy), “Arsenic and It must feel so good. He did it, he really like to be touched; he resists intimacy. Old Lace,” and “Don’t Drink the Water.” did it!’ She goes, ‘I know. He cap- “He doesn’t want people to know too At Brigham Young, which he attended tured his father perfectly.’ I said, ‘Well, I much,” the actress Hilary Russell says. on a scholarship, LaBute continued to actually meant he did it. He pulled it “He’s the only friend of mine that I feel act, but he preferred the detachment off.’ And she goes, ‘I know what you very close to but I don’t know absolutely of writing. He began providing mono- meant.’ ” everything about. There’s a lot of dark logues and scenes for friends going into “There’s a great deal of my father in a stuff, and he’s trying to figure it all out.” the Irene Ryan Acting Competition, one lot of the characters that people find LaBute’s cordiality and his mystery are of whom got to the finals. “I had a quick somewhat unseemly,” LaBute says. confounding. It is as if, like his plays, the ability to write short, kind of pungent Richard LaBute, who was ten years older warmth of his surface disguises colder sketches and monologues,” he says. “I than his wife, had wanted to be an airline depths. “He’s very hard to read,” says had the hardest time writing anything of pilot but ended up a truck driver; he spe- Pevner, who has worked with LaBute for length, because I hated the idea of stop- cialized in long-distance hauling during a decade and still doesn’t know the exact ping. I loved to sit down and finish Neil’s childhood, which was spent mostly address of his home, in a northern sub- something. I was always writing short in Liberty Lake, Washington, outside urb of Chicago. “He likes ambiguity. He pieces. It was the opposite of writer’s Spokane. “As a kid, you get a sense of be- will end up doing something he doesn’t block.” LaBute earned a B.A. in 1985; he trayal you can’t put specifics to—a sense want to do, simply not to have a con- married Gore, whom he had met at of women down the line is what one can frontation. He articulates through his Brigham Young, and they moved to make a leap to,” LaBute says of his hand- writing, and that’s it.” New York, hoping that he could parlay some father’s long absences. (Richard and LaBute’s mother, a fervid Anglophile, his sketch-writing skills into a berth on Marian were divorced about five years encouraged her son’s love of drama and “Late Night with David Letterman” or ago, after thirty-five years of marriage.) film, but his father did not; from the age “Saturday Night Live.” “My mother never talked about it. When of ten, Neil waged a perpetual losing In his first, frustrating taste of the I was old enough to talk about it, I really battle against his father about his being New York scene, LaBute’s confidence wasn’t interested to find out the truth.” what he calls “an indentured servant” on was severely tested. A friend gave him He continues, “There must be something a farm that his father operated as a side- the home telephone number of Lorne there that I don’t necessarily want the an- line. To LaBute’s knowledge, his father, Michaels, “S.N.L.” ’s executive producer, swer to, because it helps fuel the writing.” and LaBute cold-called him. “ ‘How Neil, the second child (his brother did you get my number?’ ” LaBute re- Richard, Jr., is a linguist and digital-pro- members Michaels saying. “ ‘Please don’t cessing executive in Minneapolis), was a call me here again. Send it in to the bookish, sensitive, goofy-looking kid. show.’ That was the extent of my sketch- Aaron Eckhart describes Neil’s father as writing career. From then on, I started “a hard-ass” who was “always chipping to say, ‘Well, then, I’ll just make it hap- at him.” The family pattern, LaBute says, pen for myself as much as I can.’ ” was to “spackle over problems” and “keep everything hidden—any kind of strife ABUTE’S early plays were the subject that would make my father angry. I can L of scandal and concern at Brigham remember when he came home, a great Young, where he worked toward a Ph.D. sense of anticipation, because of not in the early nineties. “The faculty revered knowing what mood he’d come back in.” Neil, but they were also afraid of him,”

TNY 7/5/99 PAGE 47 LIVE SPOT 10867 PLS INSPECT!! recalls Eckhart, who first performed La- ductions he generated, mostly in univer- the set the first day, when LaBute got Bute’s work as an undergraduate. “This sity settings, his plays were not getting his wife’s phone call. “She said, ‘You can’t material was absolutely subversive. They done. He was, he says, “torn by the make it. How can you make this film?’ thought it was going to tear down the hunger to get the work out there and I knew something was wrong just by theatre department.” The Mormon at- have people see it.” his eyes.” mosphere “forced Neil to be more cre- “He wanted to be the greatest living LaBute’s exploration of self-aggran- ative, because of the restrictions, the no- playwright in America,” Metten says of dizement is also, by inference, about self- nos,” Metten says. “Neil was in constant his student, whom he characterizes as “a sacrifice: it reflects in theatrical terms his battle.” For instance, in order to prevent pain in the butt because he was a ge- own internal battle to be at once great the staging of “Lepers,” which LaBute nius.” He adds, “When he would do his and good. “There’s the Church telling had rehearsed for three months, the ad- work, he knew it was darn good and that you, ‘You can’t make these films or you’ll ministration locked up the theatre and he would be ostracized from the regular go to Hell,’ ” Eckhart says of LaBute. even the lightboard; LaBute, who was community.” LaBute’s plays brought him “And there are other ramifications. Neil’s able to get into the theatre only to give a into conflict not just with the commu- wife holds a position in the Church. You final exam, cut short the exam and did nity but with forces closer to home. At got the whole social thing. It’s very acute. his play. “There was a glee in him,” says Brigham Young, his wife was conspicu- I think everything in his life, on a certain Tim Slover, who taught playwriting and ously absent from his productions. “I level, is telling him in some way to for- in whose postgraduate course LaBute came right out and asked ‘Doesn’t it hurt sake his true love—his work.” wrote “In the Company of Men.” “He your feelings?’ ” Hilary Russell says. “He’s Before he got the financing for “In knew he was doing important work. But like, ‘You know, it did at first.’ He just the Company of Men,” Eckhart re- the glee was over the fact that this im- kind of hardens himself. She must know members LaBute’s saying, “I don’t know portant moral work had surface features his work, and she’s just avoiding it— if I can make a film. Who’s going to that appalled people.” she’s going against every single Mor- trust me?” He was an unknown director, In the larger world, LaBute’s uncom- mon standard in not supporting her hus- with an unknown script, unknown per- promising scripts—which he typed all in band.” Although Lisa Gore is listed as formers, and an unhappy ending. His lower case, so as not to impede the flow a creative consultant on “In the Com- father-in-law, an importer of indus- of his thought, and with no stage direc- pany of Men,” there seems to have been trial silks, declined to invest, but two of tions—were hard to sell. “There was a serious disagreement on “Your Friends LaBute’s former students stumped up long period of writing plays and putting and Neighbors” up to the first day of their insurance payouts from a car acci- them away,” says LaBute, who supported filming. “There was a major issue of dent. The actors got themselves to Fort himself by teaching, and by working in a Lisa’s being afraid he’d be excommuni- Wayne, Indiana, where, in the mid- series of psychiatric hospitals and correc- cated—I mean, in the Mormon church nineties, LaBute was teaching at St. Fran- tional institutions, where he was able to you’re not supposed to even think im- cis College; his next-door neighbor write late at night. Except for the pro- pure thoughts,” says Russell, who was on put them up. “We had a wonderful D.P. and sound guy, but, as far as everyone else, they were all volunteers from Fort Wayne—I mean, postal workers, college students, housewives,” Stacy Edwards, who played the woman, says. “Neil was doing everything that normally would take at least six people to take care of.” LaBute shot “In the Company of Men” in eleven days, on twenty-five thou- sand dollars. Later, Sony added a quarter-million dol- lars in postproduction money to the film, and it grossed over five million dollars. “We knew through the entire shoot we really only had two takes per scene,” Edwards says. “So you had to get it right.” Eckhart recalls, “Stacy and I were sitting at that res- taurant. It was six o’clock at “I see myself going into some form of public service, like banking.” night. We didn’t close the restaurant down, because he had no money. Those cus- tomers are real, and they’re kicking us out. So Neil comes up to me and says, ‘Aaron, we’ve done it once, and it isn’t right.’ It was on my closeup and the last shot of the day. He says, ‘Aaron, we’ve got one hundred feet of film left. We’re getting kicked out of the restaurant.’ He goes, ‘Don’t feel any pressure, but you have to get this one.’ How many times did I hear that?” There was no video play- back, there were no dailies, and there was almost no movie when the lab gave LaBute three days to pay his bill or lose the film. But the end of the struggle came with a standing ovation at the Sun- dance Festival, where “In the Company of Men” won the 1997 Filmmakers Trophy. “In the middle of the screening, I turned to Matt Malloy and “It’s eBay fever—we’ll have to pull the plug!” said, ‘This thing is hot,’ ” Eck- hart says. “I knew Neil felt • • that way. When we came out, it was right there on his face—‘All right! In the film, Nurse Betty is spell- commerce who’d rejected his early work This is going somewhere. I’m vindicated. bound; and it struck me over the next that he could succeed in this part of the Everything that I knew about myself has hour that perhaps the purpose of this ex- business, too. In the past, he had ac- just happened.’ He didn’t say it. I saw it.” ercise for LaBute was to live, however cess to nobody; now he was on the Rolo- briefly, in the exhilarating spell of the dex of everyone in town. He was an art- LAST saw LaBute in Projection Hollywood system that had captivated ist with money chores to be done, and I Room 7 of a squat building off San- him as an adolescent on those Friday sometimes it was wise to give the piper a ta Monica Boulevard, where he was nights. LaBute had accomplished the dance. There were historical precedents: hunkered down in the far-right-hand hardest thing: he had found both a style Scorsese’s “Cape Fear,” Hitchcock’s “Dial corner of the first row of a screening and an audience for his point of view. M for Murder,” Huston’s “Annie.” Then room, watching seven hours of dailies. Now, for the moment at least, he was again perhaps this dance was not for the For this marathon, the members of his giving up the personal for the imper- piper at all but for the Mormon breth- team were spread out behind him over sonal, the subversive for something that ren, and maybe even for his wife, who five rows: they came and went, snoozed conformed more or less to the com- wanted him to delight the world rather and talked as clapper board after clapper mercial formulas that his other movies than disenchant it. board announced a new take of shots 87 shunned. “Nurse Betty,” a will-she-or- When LaBute and I talked again, a A through D. I sat directly behind won’t-she saga, plays against LaBute’s couple of weeks ago, he was making plans LaBute, hoping he might talk to me great strength, which is to force the au- to come East for rehearsals of “Bash.” during the process. He didn’t. Instead, dience to take a position rather than to He declared himself pleased with “Nurse he worked away at a large bag of Doritos abdicate thought for the sake of fun. I Betty” and with the new bag of tricks and a Pepsi as he watched a well-shot tried to see it through his eyes. Pevner he’d mastered. “It’s sort of freeing,” he sequence that included a white Mercedes had told me, “I think he wanted to ac- said. I asked him if the film was LaBu- tearing up the ramp of a hospital emer- quire power—you know, psychologi- tian, and, with typical LaButian ambiva- gency entrance and ramming an ambu- cal power, emotional power, financial lence, he answered, “Yes—and no.” He lance; an exchange of gunfire; flying power. To overcome his obstacles. I think did see some thematic connections with bodies; breaking glass; and Nurse Betty, he’s truly a romantic figure.” his plays and his tougher work. “There is in her hospital disguise, pressed into real In a way, a full-blown Hollywood a series of mediocre-to-bad men and medical service by some gun-waving movie could be seen as LaBute’s victory a woman scrambling to save themselves,” gangbangers who mistake her for the lap—a little moment of vindictive tri- he said. With LaBute, one way or genuine article. umph, to show the panjandrums of another, salvation remains the issue. ♦ TNY 7/5/99 PAGE 50