WHAT HAPPENED WAS...                                   (click here for THE WIFE)

How far back should I go...? Well, in 1990 my Hollywood career was not making me very happy so I decided to try another approach to acting and movie making. (It was not actually a rational decision - my body made it for me. My face started twitching all the time and I lost the hearing in my left ear. I couldn't act or play music. I was having dizzy spells and severe heart palpitations. The doctors couldn't figure out what was going on. I believe my body was trying to communicate something.) I passed on a chance to direct a feature film (for cable) I had written and instead, decided to go to the Sundance Writer's Workshop (Jan. 1991) which had chosen my script BoneDaddy. The Writer's Workshop went well and I was invited back to work on BoneDaddy during the Director's Workshop (June 1991).

The Director's Workshop was the happiest professional experience I had had to date. Acting, writing, directing, and editing all day long for a solid month recharged me (by now my physical symptoms were subsiding). Part of the reason I went to the workshop was to see if I was able to direct myself in a film (something I'd never done). Additionally, this work was done with the guidance of the Sundance advisors: some of the most well-known and well-respected talents in directing, shooting, writing, and editing in Hollywood.

Leaving Sundance that summer I was determined and confidant that with the right script I could make my own movies.

I bought a video editing system in hopeful preparation for making a movie.  I spent the remainder of the summer re-editing my footage from the Sundance workshop.   In the fall of 1991 I began to write.

THE WIFE                                 (click here for WHAT HAPPENED WAS...)

In June of 1993, while editing WHAT HAPPENED WAS... I got the idea for a story.   So I went to dinner with Scott Macaulay and Robin O'Hara, my producers, and gave them a one line pitch: Two people come over for dinner and won't leave - the title would be WIFEY. They laughed - so I began writing the next day.

I wanted to write about something that I didn't understand - something that I had no answers about: marriage.  At one festival we showed the film someone in the audience complained that the movie left all the questions unanswered.  I didn't find out any answers making the movie - that wasn't the point.  I just wanted to take the first step and ask the questions.

At first the story had one couple arriving at a friend's house for dinner and eventually being unable to leave and go back to their own lives.  But that idea quickly fell away.  Now instead of having both visitors refusing to leave I found that one of them wanted to stay and one of them wanted to leave - and the other couple (whose house it was) were equally divided, one wanting the visitors to leave, the other wanting them to stay.  I didn't want to make the plot any more complex than that.

 I also had the idea originally that the visiting couple would seem at first to be the troubled couple but eventually the home couple (who at first seemed very together) would be the one who had the real problems.  But that idea also fell away quickly - it seemed so predictable and pat.  And that wasn't my experience of how marriages work.  I remember once hearing that marriage is like baseball - it's a long season.  I found in writing about my feeling about being married that there are great things about it and terrible things about it - that one day it's wonderful and the next day you wonder what in the world possessed to get involved with your spouse.  And I don't think that ever changes - at least it hasn't for me.  I suppose there was some part of me that wanted to solve the mystery of being married but thankfully I didn't end trying to do that.

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