Paul Schrader, Swimming Upstream Again

For a while it looked like tonight’s American Cinematheque premiere screening of Paul Schrader’s “Light Sleeper,” the first event of a following three-night retrospective, might be one of those only-in-Hollywood moments.

A movie with an undone deal.

A dressed-up event for an awaited movie, but a movie with no place to go.

The producing studio in deep financial troubles, its distribution company listed among the missing.

For Schrader, though, the question naturally becomes, what else is new?

What is currently happening to the 46-year-old writer-director in many ways reveals something about the uncertain, changing, never-predictable state of business in Hollywood.

Originally, “Light Sleeper,” which stars Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Dana Delany and Mary Beth Hurt, was to have been released this month, following build-up screenings at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals and as the kickoff event at the Directors Guild building tonight along with this weekend’s mini-festival of Schrader films, also at the auditorium of the Directors Guild.

But the film’s distributor, Seven Arts, had become a victim of hard economic times while its parent, Carolco, struggled to keep its vital signs viable.

Would they have to pass the hat among the Hollywood heavyweights who had signaled they would attend the premiere? Would deals have to be made over champagne and brave gossip among the invited producers, agents and executives?

But in true Schrader-outsider-in-Hollywood style, he saved them from all that. This week he and his agency, ICM, he says, signed up with an American distributor, Fine Line. Like Woody Allen, who opened his latest movie overseas because of a faltering domestic distributor, Schrader is seeing “Light Sleeper” opening first in London this week. He hopes to get the movie up on American screens by late summer.

To Schrader, deja vu. It’s almost like 20 years ago when he turned from writing film criticism for the Los Angeles Free Press and took up screen writing.

“I live in an ad-hoc world,” he says.

For “Light Sleeper,” Schrader started out with only a script and his own money and turn-downs from 29 studios and distributors. He lined up the actors on his own, scheduling shooting when they were clear.

“Making films today,” Schrader says, “doesn’t get much easier. You pretty much write a script on spec, not knowing where you’ll get the money to make the movie. Then you pick your actors and you try to get them to work for you. You deal with promises and advances. Meanwhile you keep looking for ways to raise the money. It’s nothing more than a cottage industry.

“You take your wares from place to place, trying to form some kind of coalition of money.

“Sure, the telephone rings quite often with people making proposals for films they want to make. But I prefer to work this way. Right now all I have for my next film is a script I wrote and a couple of actors in mind. The challenge will be to get the movie made.”

There is a sense of renewal and excitement in Schrader’s conversation. It is not dark dialogue from a filmmaker whose themes have often been described as dark.

He takes to the upstream swim, talking of the exhilaration of making his own movies by being the sum of all of its parts.

“What’s new about making sacrifices and doing the unconventional?” he says. When Schrader turned to films in the ‘70s he was part of a “brat” generation--Francis Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese.

“Then,” he says, “the movie business was in a state of uncertainty. The studios took your pitches and took some gambles. They listened to your ideas. Now they all seem to have retreated into their market research departments. There is a multiplicity of executives and marketers now. They know what they want. They shy away from the non-programmable.”

The three-night retrospective at the directors building, starting Friday, reveals some of Schrader’s non-programmable progeny, films that he either wrote, directed or did double duty as writer-director. “The Yakuza” and “Mishima” will be shown Friday. On Saturday, the classic “Taxi Driver,” along with “The Comfort of Strangers” and “Blue Collar.” Sunday afernoon is a double feature of “Patty Hearst” and “Hardcore.” On Sunday night, “Raging Bull.”

Schrader would have liked to have seen “American Gigolo” and “Cat People” scheduled, but, hey, he’s mellow now.

For Schrader “Light Sleeper” is the “third installment” of three personal films. To him the same main character moves through it and earlier through “Taxi Driver” and “American Gigolo.”

“ ‘Light Sleeper’ is my mid-life film,” he says. “ ‘Taxi Driver’ was about a man in his 20s, ‘American Gigolo’ about a man in his 30s. The Willem Dafoe character faces changes in his life. He is in his 40s.

“He is anxious about his future.

“He feels the best is behind him.

“This is not the kind of film I could have written in my 20s. My anger has subsided. Resignation and acceptance have settled in, sort of. I can’t pretend any longer that I’m in my 20s or 30s.

“I don’t have the same feelings of anger, of loneliness, of isolation.

“All that changes.”