agent received two phenomenal screenplays, and I wanted to do them both, but the director and producers for each project weren’t going to wait around for me to film one and then the other. The directors were rivals, and I knew that whoever’s I made my second choice would likely never ask me to work with him again. They were both extremely successful, and egomaniacal, and I was still in the early years of my career, and how I handled this would matter a lot. These things still matter a lot, but I’m no longer as vulnerable to the whims of the powerful because, to be frank, I have some of that power now too.
Isis already knew about my dilemma when I called her. It’s obvious to me now that my director friend had probably tipped her off, but at the time I was too awestruck and naive to figure that out. I’ve known her now for twenty-five years, and aside from her advice about signing on to do that humiliating flop, The Writing on the Wall, she’s more or less always been on the money. She’s old now and often sick, but I’ve done my share to keep her alive. When she told me a few years ago that she had breast cancer but no insurance, I gave her most of the money for her treatments. During that time, she wouldn’t meet with me in person, but she did take my calls. Her treatments have cost me almost a million dollars, but spread out over a couple of years, that’s not so much money. I’d probably have paid ten times as much if I’d had to. A number of the checks that I gave her for her treatments were written out to a Dr. Selzer, but about half of them I wrote out directly to her. It could be that she’s the biggest con artist out there—I have thought of this, but I really don’t think she is. We’ve known each other too long, and I’ve paid her too well for her to have any complaints in that respect.
Even so, if she was conning me, it doesn’t matter that much. Who knows what my career would have become if she hadn’t been advising me these past two and a half decades?
Based in part on the reading she did for me not long before we wrapped on Bourbon at Dusk, I decided to submit it to the Cannes Film Festival’s screening committee, nearly killing my relationship with Elise to make the mid-February deadline. It had been five years since I’d last been to the festival, and that year the film was one that I’d only acted in, not directed and co-written, not invested more than two years of my life in—finding the right producers, casting it, writing the screenplay with my friend Scott Jost, who unlike me is a screenwriter by profession, but mostly he edited what I’d written, though he would say that he wrote as much original material as I did.
Bourbon was a runner-up for the Palme d’Or, and so it earned a “Grand Prix,” which is fine, but the French-Israeli filmmakers who won the Palme for their “gritty, neo-realist drama about child prostitution in an age of urban anomie” were possibly the most ungracious bastards I’ve ever had the misfortune of spending an evening with. The director said to me point-blank two hours before the winner was named, “I liked your film, Mr. Ivins, but I do not think it is good enough. I do not think that mine is good enough either, so this is not meant as an insult.”
Well, let me put it this way—if it sounds like an insult, it most likely is an insult. In fairness to this guy, I think he was drunk, but five minutes later, his producer stoked the fire by saying, “I agree with Henri. Bourbon is a good film but not a great one. Our film is maybe very good but not great either.”
It could be that they were jealous of the fact I was with Elise, who they might not have known was my girlfriend before meeting us at the festival. These two balding gnomes couldn’t keep their eyes off of her, and when she was polite but not flirtatious with them, I suppose they decided to take out their sexual jealousy on me by insulting Bourbon. I could see these guys calling her when we were back in L.A., begging her to star in their next