10/26/22
Newletter139
The Crack of Dawn
In the early 1980s as we were producing our first indie features we were all in a non-stop hustle mode. Just as a note, it’s really hard raising money for movies. You have to take hundreds of meetings to find just the right kind of gambler/sucker/move producer wannabe who will actually cough up some money. I had a group of psychiatrists who were interested in investing in my first film, Thou Shalt Not Kill…Except (1985), which is the marines versus the Manson family and is very bloody. The psychiatrist I was dealing with, who answered the door several times wearing nothing but a fur bathing suit, kept urging me to add more killings to the story. After the fifth meeting I had to say, “There are sufficient killings in the script, are you going to write a check or not?” Not.
But the oddest pitch meeting was with the late Ivan Bloch. Ivan was a rich, big-shot real estate developer here in Detroit who decided for his sheer amusement to produce Broadway plays. His first time out in 1980 he co-produced Tintypes, that was a critical and commercial success and nominated for all the Tony Awards, but didn’t win. Ivan produced 14 plays on Broadway, the biggest being Ma Rainy’s Black Bottom that was a big success and nominated for, but didn’t win, all the Tonys. So, Ivan was a big macher in Detroit, as they say in Yiddish – a big-shot; a mover; a shaker. I somehow wrangled a meeting with this guy, who was ridiculously geeked up all the time and really playing the part of the mover and shaker. I was pitching him the feature version of my short film, Cleveland Smith Bounty Hunter (1981), starring Bruce Campbell. Ivan liked the short movie, liked Bruce, seemed to like me, suddenly had a terrific idea. He intended to make his move into movies and he just so happened to be spending the weekend with Robert DeNiro’s agent, Jerry Something [whose name I could track down, but fuck it] at Ivan’s vacation home in Charlevoix, Michigan, a really nice town at the top of the lower peninsula on Lake Michigan, and hey, did I want to come along? I finally asked, “Why?” Ivan said, “You can pitch your story to Jerry.” There was no part for Robert DeNiro, but hell, I could write one. I said, “Sure.” Ivan told me to go home and pack for the weekend – and bring the script – and he’d be over in a couple of hors and pick me up.
Ivan and his talkative, attractive wife picked me up in a Mercedes. We drove nearly 300 miles north – all of us smoking – to Charlevoix, which is indeed beautiful. Ivan had a 2,000 sq. ft., three-bedroom house that opened out to the lake, which was also nice. In the morning, Ivan and I walked to the corner coffeeshop, and he ordered four large coffees. We came back and he poured the cups into the pot, then woke his wife up and pretended he’d made it. Then Robert DeNiro’s agent, Let’s say, Jerry Grossman, I don’t know, came over. We all sat on the deck drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes and yucking it up for hours. We switched to mimosas at some point. I did pitch my story, which everyone found amusing, then Jerry left and we crashed.
However, the next morning proved why I was actually invited for the weekend. It turned out that Ivan and his wife had somehow managed to end up with three Mercedes-Benzs at their summer home and needed another person to drive the third car back to Detroit, which I happily did.
As I mentioned, Ivan Bloch did manage to get into the movie business a couple of years later with The Stone Boy (1984) with Robert Duvall and Glenn Close, which my witty friend Rick remarked, “Who would have thought it was possible? A Tender Mercies rip-off.”
I read here in the Detroit Jewish News that Ivan died in 2001 at the age of 60. He was his own whirlwind phenomenon, particularly here in Detroit. I’m amused that I was used by him.
And that’s the rest of the story.