Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life - Hardcover

Burns, Edward; Gold, Todd

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592408591 ISBN 13: 9781592408597

Publisher: Avery, 2015

Synopsis

An entertaining and inspirational memoir by one of the most prominent practitioners and evangelists of independent filmmaking, and the acclaimed writer, director, and actor (Saving Private Ryan, Friends with Kids, Entourage) whose first film—The Brothers McMullen—has become an indie classic.

At the age of twenty-five, Ed Burns directed and produced his first film on a tiny $25,000 budget. The Brothers McMullen went on to win the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 1995, and established the working-class Irish American filmmaker as a talent to watch. In the twenty years since, Burns has made ten more films (She’s the One, Sidewalks of New York, and The Fitzgerald Family Christmas), while also acting in big budget Hollywood movies (Saving Private Ryan), hit television shows (Entourage and Mob City), and pioneering a new distribution network for indie filmmakers online and with TV’s On Demand service (“why open a film in twenty art houses when you can open in twenty million homes?”).

Inspired by Burns’s uncompromising success both behind and in front of the camera, students and aspiring filmmakers are always asking Burns for advice. In Independent Ed, Burns shares the story of his two remarkable decades in a fickle business where heat and box office receipts are often all that matter. He recounts stories of the lengths he has gone to to secure financing for his films, starting with The Brothers McMullen (he told his father: “Shooting was the twelve best days of my life”). How he found stars on their way up—including Jennifer Aniston and Cameron Diaz—to work in his films, and how he’s adhered religiously to the dictum of writing what you know, working as if he was just starting out, and always “looking for the next twelve best days of my life.”

Chronicling the struggles and the long hours as well as the heady moments when months of planning and writing come to fruition, Independent Ed is a must-read for movie fans, film students, and everyone who loves a gripping tale about what it takes to forge your own path in work and life.

About this title

About the Author:

Edward Burns is a writer, director, and actor. In 2015, he will star in the TNT series Public Morals. He lives with his family in New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

INTRODUCTION

My first film was released in 1995. It was The Brothers McMullen, a comedy about family, relationships, sibling rivalry, and growing up after you’re already grown up. Shot for $25,000 in and around my parents’ Long Island home, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, scored at the box office, and got me labeled as one of Hollywood’s hottest young independent filmmakers. A few years later, I couldn’t get a movie made.

You should know that I did not set out to become an indie filmmaker or to make an independent film. I’ve never given any consideration to those labels and definitions. Besides, what is an indie film? Some people argue that it has to do with subject matter. Some people think it has to do with the size of your budget. Others believe it has to do with how you got your financing or who distributed your film. I’ve always defined it as a film that is independent of outside influence. And that’s all I wanted. The goal has been to make films—my own films—on my terms, the way I have envisioned them, without any interference. And that last part is tough to pull off. It has required belief, courage, and an unflinching streak of independence. The result has been a labor filled with far more love than frustration, and far more a sense of accomplishment than defeat. And that’s the story I have told in this book.

As of January 2015, it will have been twenty years since I took McMullen to Sundance. Since then, I have written and directed another ten films. Many of them have had seven-figure budgets (my biggest budget was No Looking Back’s $5.5 million); my last three have cost so little they have been labeled microbudgets. To dwell on the budgets, though, would be to focus on the wrong thing. Independent Ed is about my education as a filmmaker, a producer, and a writer. It’s the kind of book I would have wanted to read back when I was in film school or before then, back when I first got the idea of writing scripts and putting those stories on film. In those days, I didn’t even know if making a movie was possible. More important, I didn’t know it was impossible. I was dumb enough and young enough to believe in my dreams. I like to think I still am. Dumb enough, that is.

Which is the message I hope to convey here. In this book, you will read about how I have made movies, why I have made them, and what happened along the way. You will see that the business side of making films is as crucial as the creative process. But nothing can replace the commitment you have to make to your work. If you want to make a film, you simply have to find a way to make it. An important thing to remember: There are no rules when chasing your filmmaking dreams.

That’s the big takeaway. There is no right way or wrong way to make a movie. You’ve just got to figure out a way to get it done. And it won’t be easy. But that’s not why we do it, is it? We do it because we have no choice. It’s who we are. And most likely, you’ll find that those days on set will be the best days of your life.

Eddie Burns
Tribeca, New York City
2014

ONE

The middle of three children, I was raised in a neighborhood of Irish, Italian, and Jewish families in Valley Stream, Long Island. My dad, Edward J. Burns, was a sergeant with the NYPD. Later, he became the department’s media spokesman. My mom, Molly, worked for the FAA and has to get the credit for turning me on to Woody Allen.

Soon after we got our first VCR, sometime in the early eighties, she brought home a VHS copy of Take the Money and Run, which, needless to say, I loved. That was soon followed by Bananas and Sleeper. A few years later, it was Annie Hall and Manhattan.

But at this point, I had never given any thought to how movies got made or who wrote them, and I certainly had no dreams of becoming a writer myself. Not yet. But my father did.

When I was in sixth grade, I wrote a poem that won first prize in the Catholic Daughters of the Americas Long Island poetry contest. It impressed my dad, and from then on he always encouraged me to write and tried to turn me on to writers and novels he thought I might enjoy. One day he came home with two books, a collection of Eugene O’Neill plays and J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I never looked at the O’Neill plays, but I immediately fell in love with Salinger’s classic coming-of-age story. It was after taking the journey with Holden Caulfield that I first thought about the possibilities of telling stories of my own.

I was always a pretty good storyteller. You had to be in my house if you wanted to get airtime at the dinner table. I also never had any problem sitting down for a few hours to tackle a creative writing assignment at school. That was not true of my science fair projects, and I usually received good grades and encouragement from my English teachers over the years. My senior year of high school, I wrote a short story that my English teacher, Mrs. Maxwell, thought was terrific. But much to my dismay, she wanted to include it in the school’s literary magazine. I was at first absolutely against this. I thought the story was too sensitive, and I knew my friends would rag on me endlessly. I did not need that abuse going into my last summer before college. However, after sleeping on it, I said okay—but with one condition. I asked her not to put my name on it. I would get the satisfaction of seeing my work in print and I wouldn’t have to worry about my reputation.

Thankfully, Mrs. Maxwell ignored my request. She published the story with my byline, and while there was a fair bit of ball-breaking from my friends, some were impressed, and the girls . . . well, long story short, when I went away to college, I thought maybe I would become a writer. I was a pretty good student and a pretty good athlete. If I wasn’t playing ball, I was watching it on TV or reading about it in the sports pages. So I figured maybe I’d be a sportswriter.

I started my college career at SUNY Oneonta in Upstate New York while being wait-listed at SUNY Albany. After one semester at Oneonta, I was accepted to Albany, where I soon declared myself an English major. During my sophomore year, I started to entertain the idea of becoming a novelist. The picture I had in my head of a novelist’s life appealed to my nineteen-year-old’s sensibilities. I’d write during the day and go out at night. I was getting good feedback on a handful of short stories I had written and decided it was time to start my first novel. I got about fifteen pages into it and realized I was not going to be a novelist. The major issue being that I was enjoying too many nights out and not enough time in front of the typewriter and in the classroom.

I was put on academic probation, and it turned out to be a blessing. My advisor issued a blunt warning but also offered a stay-in-school-and-don’t-get-your-ass-kicked-by-your-father strategy.

“Look, if you don’t get your grades up, you’re going to get kicked out of school,” he said. “But as an English major, you can become a Film Studies minor, where you watch a bunch of old movies, write a paper, and you’re pretty much guaranteed an A. You’ll get a couple of A’s, get your GPA up, and we won’t have to kick you out of school. What do you say?”

The next semester, I took my first film appreciation class. It was called Four Directors, and it focused on Orson Welles, John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, and Billy Wilder. I was enamored from day one. These men were the heart of the lineup of post–World War II filmmakers, and I tried to watch every film they made.

On the first day, we watched Wilder’s Academy Award–winning classic The Apartment, which I immediately flipped for because it reminded me of the Woody Allen films I loved. It was a New York comedy, small and intimate, and it felt honest. After seeing it, I went up to the professor and asked, “All right, who is this guy Wilder? Tell me everything. Fill me in.”

A Jew from Austria, Wilder fled Hitler and Nazi Germany, where he had worked as a journalist in Paris and then Hollywood. In 1939, he cowrote Ninotchka, which earned his first Academy Award nomination and heralded the arrival of an unparalleled talent.

The real pleasure of learning about Wilder, though, was watching Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, The Seven Year Itch, and Some Like It Hot. His range was astounding, and he wrote and directed like Woody Allen—my reference point in any discussion of film at the time. Now I had another master to revere.

I spent that semester devouring film. I was constantly searching for new discoveries. I watched everything: Hollywood classics, French New Wave, Film Noir, Westerns, Italian Neorealism, and of course the great American films of the late sixties and early seventies.

One such film from that era was the Peter Bogdanovich coming-of-age movie The Last Picture Show starring Cybill Shepherd and Timothy Bottoms as high schoolers in West Texas, and watching it was a life-changing experience, as good art is. You’re one person before, then different after. Here was an honest look at friends and families in small-town America. Although Valley Stream, Long Island, is a long way from Texas, I felt like I knew those people. After seeing that film, I knew those were the kinds of stories I’ve always responded to and those would be the kinds of stories I would like to tell. But the dream of becoming a screenwriter still wasn’t born.

My eyes opened wider after seeing François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. I had never seen a film like this. Again, I found myself relating to the story and falling in love with the honest approach to the storytelling. That put me on a Truffaut kick. The Man Who Loved Women, Stolen Kisses, The Woman Next Door, and Day for Night all reminded me of what I loved about Woody, the delicate balance in tone between drama and comedy. After immersing myself in these films, something else happened. I was no longer thinking about writing novels or short stories. I was thinking about writing films. I was thinking about becoming a screenwriter.

So I called my dad and told him that I wanted to write movies. We talked it out. I told him about the movies and filmmakers that were turning me on and that I really felt like I had to make movies. A few days later, he sent me the book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting. That was my dad; if we wanted to do something, he supported the effort.

So I found myself with this book, and the next step was up to me. I had no idea then, but this Syd Field how-to is the bible for every aspiring screenwriter, and for good reason. It tells you exactly how to do it. It delivers on the promise of the title.

I had never even seen a screenplay before, but the format I saw in the book excited me; it seemed within my grasp. It was all dialogue. I loved writing dialogue. I would finish a chapter, process the information I’d read, and say to myself, “Okay, I can do this.”

FILM SCHOOL

That summer, I went to the video store every day and rented movies. I watched with a new attention to detail and determination to learn. Mean Streets, Martin Scorsese’s first full-length film, and Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, another breakout first feature, spoke to me. All had a similar sensibility. They were scrappy, intimate films. They were indies before anyone coined the term indies.

I returned to Albany for my junior year and signed up for every film class the school offered. Before the end of the semester, I wrote my first screenplay, a semiautobiographical story about my high school basketball team. I thought it could really get made into a movie. Maybe everyone thinks that about their scripts. Why else write them?

However, my belief in this script was so strong and passionate that I didn’t see any way I could hand my script off to some guy in Hollywood and let him massacre my masterpiece. (I have since reread said script, entitled Apple Pie, and it is no masterpiece.) He wouldn’t know me. Nor could he understand my experiences. This was a passion project. I was going to have to pull a Spike Lee and learn how to make movies myself. So I began looking into film schools.

At the time, my dad, who had gone back to school and gotten his master’s while still a cop, was an adjunct professor at NYU. He taught one class each semester in communications and mass media. I thought that provided me with an inside track to getting in, and I told him I wanted to transfer to NYU, like Marty and Spike, the following year and study filmmaking.

I expected him to say he’d make a few calls and see what he could do. He seemed to know everyone. Plus, he was a great dad. He was present and involved in our lives. If my brother, sister, or I had a dream, he was there to help us get closer to them. My mom was the same.

But as soon as I mentioned NYU, he said, “Look at your grades and look at my salary. And then let’s rethink NYU.”

After researching film programs at other city and state schools, I enrolled for my senior year at Hunter College on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Tuition was about $600 a semester. My first class was Film Directing 101, and on the first day, the professor, Everett Aison, stood in front of the class and asked which of us wanted to direct films. Everyone of course raised his or her hand.

Then he asked how many of us had any acting experience. This time no hands went up.

“How do you expect to work with actors if you have no idea what you are going to be asking of them?”

We were silent.

He had a good point.

“What we’re going to do this semester is divide into groups of four and you’ll create and perform a three- to four-minute play. One of you will be the director, one will be the writer, and the other two will act.” The first time, I was picked as one of the actors. A classmate wrote a short five-minute piece about a young Eurotrash couple living on the Upper East Side of New York. I played Jean Paul, and the woman opposite me was Gabrielle. We rehearsed once before class, and we were pretty terrible, which is understandable since I hadn’t acted since third grade. And just as I would be years later on day one of Saving Private Ryan, I was scared shitless. But when it was time to put the play up on its feet, something happened that will forever be a turning point to remember. About halfway through the play, I forgot I was in a classroom. I forgot about my nervousness. I forgot about everything except what I was supposed to be saying, thinking, and reacting to in that moment. In other words, I lost myself to the role and became that other person, and it was fun. I now had the acting bug.

Afterward, my classmates were generous with their praise. A few of them said I should think about doing more acting. And I did. I put myself in the first film I made, The Shadow, a five-minute black-and-white silent movie about a guy who leaves his Upper West Side apartment one night and is followed by a shadow that eventually kills him. Not much acting was required in that one, but I loved the process and knew I was headed in the right dire...

About this edition

• Publisher: Avery
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1592408591
• ISBN 13: 9781592408597
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272