Yeah, he’s kind of a wack job, but I can also see things from his perspective. He’s got people telling him to step up and be a director, but that is, in fact, what he thinks he’s doing: He’s trying to make a directorial decision about the cast. It’s a pretty nutty decision, but it’s a decision nevertheless, and the studio isn’t letting him do it.
What he clearly fails to understand is that in the studio system, the director has a fairly narrow path, a fairly limited set of decisions he or she is permitted to make, and the challenge is to navigate this highly restricted channel and still come out with a watchable movie on the other end. That is not the only way to make a movie, obviously; if you give a thousand directors a million dollars each and tell them to film Script X, you’ll get a thousand different versions of it.
They hired Gulager to bring something different to the table, and when he does, they’re telling him they don’t want it. He’s treating his collaborators as enemies because, from his perspective, they are his enemies: They’re siding with the studio on casting and everything else. If his communication skills didn’t suck so hard, he might be able to articulate this, to explain where he’s coming from: “You wanted me to direct. Let me direct. If you fight me every step of the way, neither of us is going to wind up happy.” He just can’t make clear where he’s coming from, and everybody is going batshit crazy around him.
Personally, as insane as his approach has been up to this point, I suspect the studio would wind up with a happier crew and a better film if they just let Gulager do what he wants. It wouldn’t be a twenty-million-dollar-grossing horror throwaway like they’re looking for, but it would sure be better than the castrated thing they’re trying to force him to create.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Given what they’re trying to do, I think it was a colossal mistake to hire Gulager in the first place. It was evident from his submitted shorts that he can’t work with a crew; he was lighting and shooting and editing everything totally by himself. Yes, the actual films were more interesting than the others, but it’s screamingly obvious just to look at them that they weren’t made with a conventional director-crew arrangement. That in and of itself should have been a huge bright warning flare, over and above the man’s inability to communicate in the pitch session.
But they looked at the material, they looked at the man, and they brought him on board; and now they’re rejecting the very qualities that interested them, and trying to turn Gulager into something he isn’t.
No wonder Hollywood has a reputation as a soul-sucking, anti-artistic machine. They deliberately grind out every last corpuscle of individuality and rebellion in order to force people to conform to their managerial method. Just because that’s a gigantic cliche doesn’t mean it’s any less painful to see it being exemplified by the current production.
Part of me really wants to see the Damfleck step up in a production meeting: “Why are we fighting this guy? We hired him because he made the most interesting films, and now we’re standing in his way at every step. Dimension is obligated to spend a million bucks. Let’s just give Gulager the million and let him make the movie he wants to make. Sure, it’ll probably be a disaster. But it’ll be his disaster.”
Of course, that’s the way the last two Greenlights went, and those didn’t turn out so hot, so… never mind.
I’m just saying, it seems like nothing more than a big stupid tragedy of their own deliberate making. I’m starting to dread tuning in every week, and that’s not fun at all.