AN INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL CERENZIE
by Susan Royal

Michael Cerenzie may be a hot, Hollywood producer, capable of raising 100 percent of a film's budget (as he did with Before the Devil Knows You're Dead), but his filmmaking sensibility is deeply rooted in the New York theater world, where he began as an actor, playwright, director and producer.

While studying acting with famed Sanford Meisner coach William Esper in New York, he was given the opportunity to intern at The Ensemble Studio Theatre. Within a year he had become the managing producing director, and found himself working with such talents as Arthur Miller, David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Eve Ensler and Horton Foote.

The Ensemble Studio Theatre, perhaps the leading developmental theatre in the country, is known for its support of the one-act play form. "Everyone brought their one acts to EST," says Cerenzie. "Up until Tennessee Williams died, he'd bring his one-acts there. Not just play people, but also novelists and screenwriters – people who had done an amazing body of work."

Cerenzie won an Obie Award for producing The Ensemble Studio Theatre's 1993 marathon of one-acts. This proved to be a defining moment in his career. "All of the sudden my ideas of playwriting and acting and directing kind of took a secondary position, because I realized that my skill sets were better suited for producing – supporting the creative talent, bringing people together and really trying to put a production out. And because I've done all those other jobs, it gave me an insight into how everyone's mentality worked a little differently. Writers are different from directors, as we know. And directors are different from actors, and everyone is motivated by different things."

Because of his success with one-acts at EST, he was asked to pull together a play festival in Los Angeles. "I was asked to come to L.A. by some people who had originally worked at EST and who had gotten backing from Showtime and Viacom/Paramount to do a very similar marathon of one-act plays. They wanted me to duplicate what we did in New York. I said, 'I'll only do it if you allow me to do it my way.' And they said. 'Fine,' but they didn't know what that meant. They were paying me $300 a week, so they didn't really care, I think, at the end of the day. So I came out to L.A. even though I'd sworn I never would."

Instead of relying on agencies as the sole source of the plays, Cerenzie decided to contact 130 MFA, BFA writing programs across the country and almost as many theater companies – big and small. These efforts brought in over 3,000 unproduced one-acts.

He hired forty actors and theatre people, most of whom were people he knew from New York who had transplanted to L.A. "Theater directors, production designers, lighting directors –
you name it. I put people in groups, and basically the first thing I did was rip off the front page of the play and give it a number so they wouldn't know if they were reading John Patrick Shanley's new play, or somebody from Arkansas who had just written their first play. I wanted no bias."

The one-acts went from group to group until they had been boiled down to a hundred plays, which were then staged as readings. Further eliminations and staged readings followed until only fifteen remained. The resultant play festival won 28 Drama-Logue Awards. "It was one of the most successful play festivals probably in history, because it was built out of the actual material. It wasn't about celebrity directors or about celebrity actors."

Cerenzie got a call after that from Chris Albrecht who was senior VP at HBO at the time. "I didn't know Chris, other than I knew that he was doing some really interesting things over there and Oz was one of them."

He met with Chris, a fellow New Yorker, and they hit it off. He told Cerenzie he'd like him to do something similar to what he had done for the play festival. He wanted him to use all his New York theater connections to find plays, novellas, and all kinds of material that could be adapted into short form and long form programs for HBO. He added that Cerenzie could also feel free to come in if he had an idea and pitch it to him. Cerenzie immediately pitched him an idea to do a New York-based, one-hour drama about the mob that had a police and judicial system corruption element to it. "He put me together with Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson to write the pilot, which was an unbelievable experience. My partner at the time, Dominic Casillo, and I co-wrote it mostly with Tom, who is amazing. It had a definitive edge, because it was Tom, right? So we went in and pitched it, and Chris thought it was great. But at the same time there was this guy called David Chase pitching this thing called The Sopranos. And needless to say, they passed on us and went with David."

Cerenzie, who had created and sold other ideas for television, told Albrecht he was thinking of going into the film business. Albrecht tried to deter him, saying, "Michael, stay in TV. You'll make money in film. But you'll make a fortune in television."

But Cerenzie had a belief which he calls, looking back on it now, partly naïve and partly idealistic. "Since I'd worked with all these great, high-level people in New York in my first year in theater — Horton Foote, John Shanley, Mamet – I was thinking I was just going to walk into Hollywood and be working with the likes of, you know, Spielberg and Scorsese and everybody else. My view was to kind of recreate what I had in theater."

Little did he know that taking up cigar smoking would play a role in his achieving this goal. It was his membership in the Grand Havana Room, an exclusive Beverly Hills cigar club frequented by the likes of Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis, that led to some pivotal advice that helped him achieve this.

The interior design of the Grand Havana Room was conducive to meeting people. "It was set up with a lot of couches in a very social way in which you would talk to people you didn't know."

The first night he was there someone sat down next to him who said he was a producer. When Cerenzie asked him what he had produced, he responded by saying he had a deal with Stallone. Cerenzie recalls, "I was very young at the time and I had produced about 150 stage plays. So I again asked him what he had actually produced and he was like, 'What's your problem?' and got up and walked away. A few minutes later, another gentleman comes and sits down next to me, because there wasn't a lot of room in the place. And we're talking, and he asks me what I do and I tell him I'm from New York, where I did theater and I came out here to produce film. When he says he's a producer I ask him what he'd produced and he tells me he's got a deal at Sony and a deal at Universal. And I say, 'Well what have you produced?' And he's like, What's you're effing problem? And he gets up and walks away. Then another guy sits down and asks me what I do, and I say, 'I'm a fuckin producer. What are you?' The guy asks me what I've produced and I say, 'What have you produced?' He names ten movies I know, because he turns out to be Arthur Sarkissian and he's in the middle of shooting Rush Hour at the time. We ended up going for dinner at Spago."

The advice Sarkissian gave him over dinner turned out to be pivotal to Cerenzie's career in film. "He gave me three pieces of really good advice. First, you've got to have great material. I told him that's where I came from, I'll get the product. Secondly, he said you need great relationships with talent and access to the agencies. I said I would have to work on that."

The third piece of advice he gave Cerenzie has perhaps most affected his producing path. "He told me he'd been around a long time and could see what was coming. He said, 'Eventually, five years from now, nobody without money is going to be producing films. It's becoming a money game. So get ahead of the curve.' And I took that advice to heart."

He had that in mind when he opened his first production company, Unity Productions. He knew he wanted the kind of autonomy in the film business that he had experienced in the theater world. He realized the only way he could achieve that was by raising his own money.

He also knew he didn't want to develop scripts the way he saw it being done in Hollywood. "What I didn't understand was why they would buy a screenplay and then the first thing they would do is fire the writer. Or the actor or director or money person would come on board and say they wanted the script rewritten by some $100,000 a week rewrite guy. There's something disjointed about the scripts that come out of that process. Quoting Sidney Lumet, 'We all have to be making the same movie.' I want to know that when I'm done making a film, I have at least 80% of what I thought I was going to have starting off. The only way you can really do that is if you have some control and you do that by having the money."

Deuces Wild, the first film he made, was a $10 million movie. "You don't usually start with a ten million dollar picture, you know? At MGM-UA. But I was very aggressive in putting it together. I brought sixty-five percent of the funding to the table, which at the time was German tax money. And I got a thirty-five percent minimum guarantee out of UA, to advance which I cash flowed at the bank, at Comerica. So in other words, I put the deal together and made the movie."

He also got Martin Scorsese, who was a friend of co-writer Paul Kimatian, to exec produce Deuces Wild. The film was based on a true story about growing up in Brooklyn in the '50s. "It got destroyed by the critics, but I'll always be proud of it. It's the first film I ever did in my life. I learned a lot, and you only learn from your mistakes, you know. I learned where not to give up control and when to be stronger."

It was another encounter Cerenzie had at the Grand Havana Room that led to his next picture. While prepping Deuces Wild he was still looking for an actor to play a five-day part. "We had no money left. I ran into Matt Dillon at the Grand Havana Room. I didn't know him, so I introduced myself and said, 'I'm making this movie, and I really would love you in this film. It's like an homage to the pictures you did when you were younger.'

Matt told him he didn't do cameos and was really focused on trying to get his own film made. The film, called City of Ghosts, would be his first directing effort. "So I asked him if I could read it, because, maybe I could produce it for him, and he started laughing. I said, 'What's so funny?' And he said, 'Well, Michael, no offense. I've been trying to make this movie for eight years. I've been to everybody in town. The best offer was from Eli Samaha, which I won't even get into. You're making your first picture, and congratulations by the way, because, that's amazing that you're off the ground like that. But, I've been working on getting this made for eight years.' He looked at me like I was insane."

Cerenzie pressed on, saying he could finance the film in 30 days, which he did. Matt Dillon appeared in Deuces Wild for next to nothing and then got to direct City of Ghosts, which led to a three-picture deal. City of Ghosts became Cerenzie's second picture.

Pulling off the deal for City of Ghosts, which also starred James Caan and Gerard Depardieu, got Cerenzie voted one of Variety's 50 Creatives To Watch. "The funny thing was I hadn't even started shooting my first picture yet. I thought that it was joke. I thought they were calling me because my subscription was overdue."

He had them send him information about the list and saw it included such people as Lars von Trier and Alan Ball. "And it's not fifty producers. It's like one producer. One production designer. One actor. One director. One DP. It was one of everything. I thought, 'You're trying to tell me, that in all of Hollywood, that I'm the producer?' We hadn't even started rolling on Deuces yet."

When the reporter from Variety met with Cerenzie for the interview he forgot to bring his business cards with him. "So now I think this is a joke. When he asked how I got into the business, I said, 'Well, I started selling crack, then I moved over to heroin.' He said, 'Michael, this is a real interview.' I actually called Variety and was told he was their special editions person. So finally I realized it was real."

But Cerenzie felt it was totally undeserved. "It made me look at Hollywood in a different way. I thought, 'Something's wrong here. I know fifty men and women who have more talent than me that deserve this award.' I've never really told that to anybody, but that was what was in the back of my mind. I said, 'You know what? What I'm going to do is instead of saying I don't feel I deserve this, I'm going to actually earn it.' Sam Mendes had this. Spike Lee had this. So I thought I'd better raise the bar in the kind of film I was going to make."

This was one of the reasons that Cerenzie chose to take a four-year hiatus from making films. "I wanted to create better product, and not just rush in."

The Variety article gave Cerenzie a lot of heat and more access to talent and agents (element number two of Arthur Sarkissian's advice) and brought him better product (element number one). The third element – creating the financing – was his additional motivation for taking a hiatus.

"I didn't make a movie for four years. I raised money and developed material. I developed, developed, and redeveloped. I wanted to come out with some really great product and I wanted to do it with my own money. I wanted to be dependent on the studios for distribution like anybody else, but at the same time, I wanted the independence and control you get when you have the ability to bring the money.

"When I saw the German tax funds going away and they were starting to do some reinsurance deals, I thought, 'That's not my style. I want to look for something that's going to endure the market.' I didn't go the hedge fund route. I spent my time, up until three years ago, traveling the country and traveling some parts of the world looking for private equity individuals. I also looked for different bank situations that could be combined as a debt/equity situation, but I was mostly just looking for single, high net worth people."

It wasn't easy. "You go through a lot of dead wood to get to where you want to go. And I spent a lot of money looking for money. Sometimes I'd find the guys that would throw a party for a million dollars at Cannes to impress some actress, but not put three million dollars into a movie.

"I learned to start being able to vet my sources better and better – to the point now that within thirty seconds I know if someone really is going to put money in. Whether or not they have the money isn't the question. You can make three phone calls and find out if a person really has the money. And if you can't find out, then leave it alone, you know? But I found a handful of people that, I would say, in their own way were visionaries. They had some gamble in them. They were willing to take a chance on the deal I was proposing and the kind of stuff I wanted to do. And I was lucky enough to find a handful of these people."

Now that he had a group of private investors, he decided to start with a small coming-of-age picture called My Sexiest Year, starring Harvey Keitel, Frankie Muniz and Amber Valletta. THINKFilm picked it up at the Hamptons Film Festival and will release it this year.

One of the projects that came out of the hiatus development period was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, by first-time screenwriter Kelly Masterson. "Originally we were going to do it as a much smaller picture, like an indie, Sundance-type picture. I thought we'd do it for a few million dollars because it's dark. I figured we could get some great actors. I always had Phil Hoffman in mind, but I had him in mind for Hank, for the role that Ethan ended up playing. His agent read it and they liked it. They wanted to know who else was in it, who was going to direct it, you know. So I began putting it together."

Once again the connections he made at the Grand Havana Room would come into play. The very first person he'd met there, a telecine operator named Brian Linse, had since become his good friend. "I was sitting around with my friend Brian and said, 'Look it, I'm doing this producing thing. If I can do this, anybody could do this. You should produce with me.' And so we decided to work on some projects together and one of them was Before the Devil Knows You're Dead."

One day, after a year and a half developing the film and having the first director not work out, the two were sitting around discussing possible directors. When Cerenzie asked Linse who his favorite filmmaker was, he replied, "Sidney Lumet. Who's your favorite filmmaker?" Cerenzie said, "Well, you know it's Sidney Lumet."

They looked at each other for a moment and, without saying a word, Cerenzie picked up the phone and called ICM. "I asked, 'Who's responsible for Sidney Lumet?' They tell me it's Jeff Berg, and I'm like, oh my God, this is going to be tough, because he's the chairman of the company. I say, 'Please tell him it's Michael Cerenzie calling. I have a film that I want to do with Sidney Lumet.' And he literally got on the phone in less than ten seconds, and that was the strangest thing that's ever happened to me because, even now, heads of agencies will say, 'I'll call back.'

"But he came right on the line and said, 'Yes, Michael.' I started to say he probably didn't remember me, but he said, 'No, I remember you. You did Matt's movie and you pulled that picture off.' He has quite a good memory.

"I guess it was a big deal, because the agency had tried and everybody had tried to get that picture made. I told him, 'I have this script for Sidney. It's a little on the dark side, but I think he would gravitate towards this,' and he tells me to be in his office in twenty minutes. That's Jeff, you know.

"I had sold my car to pay for a screenplay or something [the investors didn't pay for development] and so I walked from the Four Seasons over to ICM which at the time was on Wilshire. It took me the twenty minutes to get there and give him the script.

Berg asked him what it was about and where it took place. "When I told him Chicago, he said, 'Sidney doesn't leave New York.' So on the front of the script, I literally write: 'This takes place in New York City. Don't worry about the Chicago part of it.' And I think he sent it like that to Sidney."

A week later, while Cerenzie was in New York on business, he got a call from Lumet. Thinking it was a friend playing a joke on him, he hung up. "All of a sudden I get a call from Jeff Berg in L.A. asking me if I'd just hung up on Sidney Lumet. Then my phone rings on the other line. I go, 'Hold on, I think that's him.' And it's Sidney, who says, 'I guess we had a bad connection. You know these damn cell phones.' He was either messing with me or just giving me an out. I never actually talked to him about it, but I think he was giving me an out."

Sidney told him he'd read the script and thought there was something there. He asked him to come to his office. "So I go up to his office. Just a little hole in the wall, you know, no statues, nothing. It's maybe half the size of my office. And the first thing I think upon meeting him is, 'This can't be Sidney Lumet. He looks like he's sixty years old."

They started discussing the script. When they began to argue over whether it was a dramatic thriller or a melodrama, Cerenzie suddenly stopped and deferred to Lumet.

"I shut up and he looked at me and said, 'What's that? What was that you just did?' I say, 'Nothing,' because in my mind I'm thinking, this guy did 12 Angry Men before I was born. He did a lot of movies before I was born. This is the man who did Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon and Verdict and Network. You have to respect someone who's made forty-six pictures. If he wants to call it a melodrama, it's a fucking melodrama, right? And then he said to me, 'Don't ever do that again. If you're gonna produce me, produce me.' He's so comfortable with who he is and he's seen it all. He has this ability to disarm you."

By envisioning the film as a melodrama, Lumet heightened the stakes in the film. "In the original story, Hank and Andy weren't brothers, they were best friends. Andy wasn't a drug addict. He was gay, with a son who was mentally handicapped. But now Lumet has one brother having an affair with his brother's wife. He made it darker by making it a morality tale about family. The disintegration of the family unit gave it the quality of a Greek tragedy."

While shooting Devil, Lumet was "like a rabbi" on the set, says Cerenzie. "There are no star chairs. Just a bunch of folding chairs next to where he's set up and anybody might be flopped in them. He'll be listening and talking to anyone – from the DP to a PA. But he knows what he wants and you have to know what you're talking about."

Cerenzie was amazed by Lumet's energy. "Look, Sydney's going to be shooting films for another twenty years. His father lived to be 105 and his mother lived to 102. He's quicker and more on the ball than I am. On Devil he came in four days under. He delivered his first cut five days after wrapping. He made just one more edit from that to the picture you saw."

Part of why Lumet can edit so quickly, is that he has less footage to deal with, since he often does just one take. At the beginning of shooting, Philip Seymour Hoffman told Lumet he would need more than one take. Lumet humored him by doing six takes. After Hoffman saw that the first take was the best, he never asked again.

Lumet can often get it in one take because of his rehearsal process, which is grounded in his experience with live television in the '50s and theater. Unlike many film directors, Lumet rehearses his actors extensively before shooting, instead of just relying on table reads. Hoffman later told an audience in New York that Sidney Lumet has taken theater and film and created a new medium.

Cerenzie was upset that Lumet received lifetime achievement awards from organizations last year, instead of directing awards for Devil. "I was shocked that the DGA and the Academy didn't nominate him for Best Director. It was one of Sidney's best-reviewed films of the last thirty-five years. Eighty percent of the reviews called it a 'return to form.' Peter Travers wrote that 'Lumet at 84 can direct better, harder and faster than a man one third his age.' I got up at five a.m. to watch the nomination announcements. I thought we'd get three Oscar nominations. But Sidney warned me, 'We're gonna get wiped. I've been around so long, Michael, I just know."

Cerenzie had such a positive experience working with Lumet that he didn't want it to end. "Three weeks into shooting I knew I wanted to make a multi-picture deal with him." So he and Funky Budha Group's Paul Parmar set a deal to produce Lumet's next two films, with an option for a third.

Cerenzie and Lumet started looking for projects. "I must have sent him twenty scripts and he sent me ten. We were getting frustrated and finally Sidney said he'd just write one himself. He wrote Getting Out and it has all the great Lumet-isms I love. It's a sexual thriller along the lines of Double Indemnity. We've begun casting and plan to shoot this summer."

Last year Cerenzie joined forces with Christine Peters (How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days), who is producing Area 51 for Paramount and The Friday Night Knitting Club starring Julia Roberts for Universal. Together they formed CP Productions, which has a first-look deal with Paramount. They've since produced the action thriller Black Water Transit, directed by Tony Kaye (American History X) and starring Laurence Fishburne, Brittany Snow and Aisha Tyler. The film, adapted from Carsten Stroud's novel of the same name, is currently in post-production.

Casting has begun on another of their films, Chaos, directed by Daphna Kastner. The film follows the lives of five different New Yorkers who are affecting each other's lives, even though they don't know each other.

CP Productions is developing a wide slate of films adapted from novels, video games, graphic novels and comic books. Russell Mulcahy, director of Resident Evil: Extinction, will direct Zen in the Art of Slaying Vampires, adapted by New York best-selling author, Steven-Elliot Altman, who wrote the book – the first in a three-book series. The story follows a man who is turned into a vampire when he and his girlfriend are attacked in Manhattan. She dies, but he lives on to struggle to overcome his murderous impulses through Zen meditation. Cerenzie and Peters are also working on a video game version of the film.

Part of CP Productions' game plan is to turn video games into highly commercial, tent-pole product. Among such films they're developing is Joust, based on the popular Midway Games arcade game. Cerenzie describes the script for the film, written by Marc Gottlieb, as "Gladiator meets Mad Max." They plan to launch a Joust franchise, which will include a graphic novel based on the screenplay and written by Steven-Elliot Altman.

Whether making a mid-budget crime drama or a huge sci-fi event picture, Cerenzie plans to maintain his policy of keeping the vision of the film pure by sticking with the original creative team – a lesson he originally learned well in the New York theater world and has never forgotten.