interview page 1 | e-mail Chris Neumer
CHRIS NEUMER: Did I mention to you earlier the kind of piece that I was doing on Kissing Jessica Stein?
BRAD ZIONS: No.
CHRIS NEUMER: OK. We are doing a comprehensive look at the story behind Kissing Jessica Stein. With this interview with you, basically the only person that we haven’t yet spoken to simply due to marriage problems is Eden. Of course by marriage problems I mean she got married and went on a honeymoon. Thus far we’ve spoken with Jennifer and Heather, Charlie, Larry Sher, yourself, Scott Cohen and Tovah. Eden will be the last person that we have to speak with about the project. As you can imagine this is an all encompassing article. That is the focus of the piece just to give you some kind of idea. In this particular article if there are any kind of stories that evolve, those are of greater interest to us than other types of responses.
BRAD ZIONS: What kind of stories?
CHRIS NEUMER: I take it by this that you haven’t received a copy of the magazine that I had sent you.
BRAD ZIONS: No, not yet.
CHRIS NEUMER: Curses.
BRAD ZIONS: There are many stories. This is kind of a one in a million type situation with this. The movie barely got made. When it finally did go into production, we still didn’t have enough money to finish the movie. Then we raised the last bit of money once we had a rough-cut. Then being able to sell the movie and to sell it to one of the best kind of indie distributors and get a worldwide release and all of what has ensued has been definitely pretty amazing.
CHRIS NEUMER: How did you first come onto the project? I know that you have little if any film background.
BRAD ZIONS: At that point I had very little background. I had worked at America On Line for many years so I had a lot of business and new media background. When I left AOL and left Los Angeles, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do but I started reading scripts and had read a bunch of really bad scripts which is kind of par for the course.
CHRIS NEUMER: Why did you quit AOL?
BRAD ZIONS: I quit AOL quite frankly because my options were fully vested and it was the peak of the boom and it was just a good time to leave.
CHRIS NEUMER: My goodness, you were one of the few people you hear about who actually got out when the getting was good.
BRAD ZIONS: Yeah, it was definitely good timing. I wouldn’t claim that I could have predicted where it has gone, but I definitely wanted to take a lot of it off the table just because I had to be somewhat conservative financially. Then of course I put half a million dollars into a movie. Everyone told me not to do it. I had some pretty high-powered contacts in the film business.
CHRIS NEUMER: Any names?
BRAD ZIONS: I had a friend who was a partner in Endeavor. I had a friend who now works for Fox and had been a producer and has produced several movies. So I had people who had been on the inside who knew the business quite well, far better than I did, and they just explained to me that the odds of an independent, low-budget feature making any money back are quite slim. So then you have to say to yourself you think that you will be able to beat the odds or you are doing it for other reasons or … In my mind I knew that I could lose all the money. There was a very good chance that I would have lost all the money.
CHRIS NEUMER: I am assuming with that kind of rationale that there were other mitigating factors in your involvement.
BRAD ZIONS: I really wanted to get my feet wet and get involved in the industry. I could have probably taken that same half million dollars and optioned a bunch of scripts and hired a reader and tried to set up a few projects at the studios. It could have been 3, 4, or 5 years before one of my movies went into production. Believe me there were doubts along the way, but I decided that I really believed in the script and in Jennifer and Heather in particular. Beyond just reading the script a few times, meeting with Jennifer and Heather many times, they did readings, staged readings that became more and more elaborate and I was able to watch their readings with an audience to get a sense that people really, really responded to the material. It just made me feel much more confident that the movie was going to work.
CHRIS NEUMER: How did you first hook up with Heather and Jennifer?
BRAD ZIONS: I was walking down the street in Union Square and ran into somebody I had gone to high school with. I had lost touch with her, probably hadn’t seen her for at least 10 years. I saw her sitting out having lunch with her mother and I said, "Hi". It turned out we both were living in Santa Monica at the time. She’s an actress and I told her I had been looking for projects. When I got back to LA she called me and said, "You’ve got to read this script. My friend Jennifer has got this script and they are just about to try to get it back in turn around.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, because at that time the project was at Interscope.
BRAD ZIONS: Exactly. To be quite honest when I got involved, I didn’t fully understand the implications of turnaround. It had not been explained to me very clearly USA Films ultimately had the rights at that time. If they didn’t agree to give us back the rights, we could not have made the movie, even though we had raised much of the money. Jennifer’s lawyer was pretty instrumental in finally getting USA to come to terms with us.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was there a lot of strife and heated interaction between yourself and the other producers and Interscope in trying to get the rights back?
BRAD ZIONS: Not as much between our group, LLC we had formed our little group and we had 4 managers, Heather, Jen, Eden and I. When we were getting the rights back it just got dragged out a lot longer than any of us had hoped. Essentially studios had to have standard deals if they are going to give you the rights back in turnaround and you would pay any hard costs associated with the project. There might be some credit involved which actually they didn’t ask for. They would ask for some sort of back end. I think it was negotiated what the hard costs were, but it turned out we had $50,000 costs that they had accrued that we had to pay up front to get our rights back. For a movie that had a budget of less than a million dollars, that was a lot of money.
CHRIS NEUMER: Continuing with your story about meeting your friend and she said had a friend Jennifer who had a script, so you took a look at the script.
BRAD ZIONS: I read the script. I really loved it. The Josh Meyers character particularly appealed to me. I really felt that I got that character because I had been the struggling writer in college kind of thing. I just loved the scene where he kind of tells it like it is, tells her off. I thought it was really funny, it was new and fresh, something I hadn’t really seen before. It was not a mainstream story line, but I thought it had potential broad appeal, that it could be the kind of movie that could break out.
CHRIS NEUMER: Do you feel that the movie did break out?
BRAD ZIONS: I wouldn’t say it did break out. I’d say it did extremely well. I think that Fox did a great job, but it didn’t break out. Breaking out would have been My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The movie played extremely well in most of the urban areas of the country and I think it will do well similarly in Europe and even Asia and Latin America. But in the heartland of America, people were not going to see Kissing Jessica Stein.
CHRIS NEUMER: Shocking!
BRAD ZIONS: I think it is a shame and we’re hoping they will discover it on video and DVD because it’s really not an edgy movie. It’s not a film festival movie. It’s a comedy.
CHRIS NEUMER: And a classically structured romantic comedy at that.
BRAD ZIONS: Yup, exactly.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you expect to have people in the heartland steering away from it. I figure if they’re buying Eminem records, they might as well take a look at a film like Kissing Jessica Stein.
BRAD ZIONS: At its largest I think its run was something like 400 screens. That’s a large indie release. They looked at the numbers and it just didn’t do as well out in the suburbs or out in the more rural areas. It did incredibly well in New York and really well in Toronto and San Francisco. The big cities is where it did all the business.
CHRIS NEUMER: Interesting. It’s one of those things that you sort of expect but nonetheless you hear it and still was a little bit surprising to you. I say this to you also having seen the movie numerous times and just thoroughly enjoying it myself. Were you an on-the-set producer?
BRAD ZIONS: I moved to New York during the shooting and I came to the set and spent some time there, but I was not there everyday. Eden was really the one who had a lot of the experience of the day-to-day hiring…
CHRIS NEUMER: So she was the problem solver on the set.
BRAD ZIONS: Exactly.
CHRIS NEUMER: What did your role consist of while the movie was being filmed. What did you do on the project?
BRAD ZIONS: At that point I was so green. I was observing. I would watch dailies and just try to get a sense of how we were doing.
CHRIS NEUMER: Did you offer criticism on the dailies like, "Maybe we could do this." or "Dear God you can’t say that". Anything along those lines?
BRAD ZIONS: Honestly, not really. I really had much more involvement in the post-production process when we were editing the movie.
CHRIS NEUMER: OK, let’s skip ahead to post then. So you’ve gotten down the principal shooting or principal photography. What did your role become then?
BRAD ZIONS: It was an interesting process because we were gunning to get a cut ready for Sundance and we actually … In the first part of the editing process I was back in LA and we editing in New York and I was just getting tapes. We all saw a real potential in the movie but we also weren’t sure if … Well, put it this way: we applied to Sundance with a rough-cut and did not get in.
CHRIS NEUMER: You had shot in September of 2000?
BRAD ZIONS: Right, so there was an October deadline.
CHRIS NEUMER: I was going to say that was very, very quick.
BRAD ZIONS: We also needed some money so we didn’t have… We were kind of running low on cash. We had cut a deal with a commercial editing house. They would supply all the equipment to do the editing. We got to a certain point and they were saying, "Enough! We can’t just keep editing this movie." In my mind it wasn’t done and in Jennifer’s mind it wasn’t done. This is probably where we had the biggest strife amongst all of us.
CHRIS NEUMER: By all of us do you mean the four?
BRAD ZIONS: Well the five.
CHRIS NEUMER: So we’re adding Charlie to the equation?
BRAD ZIONS: Yeah. Charlie I think felt that the movie… We had a conference call where Charlie said he thought the movie was within 5% of being done. I think everyone was under a lot of pressure and we were running out of cash. Jennifer and I believed that the movie could get a lot better. We both put up $10,000 each of our own money and decided to move the editing process out to Los Angeles.
CHRIS NEUMER: So this was with if you will forgive the term "the original ending" before all the reshoots in LA then?
BRAD ZIONS: Correct. Then we spent many, many more weeks editing the film and then did test screenings. Because of the test screenings we ended up all agreeing that we should do a couple of days of pickup shoots because there were reasons why the ending was problematic. We felt that we needed a couple more scenes, pre-breakup of the two girls. That was a really critical time. Everyone was under a lot of pressure. This was before we moved the editing process out to LA.
CHRIS NEUMER: What was the time line on this?
BRAD ZIONS: Around December I think. November or December. When we didn’t get into Sundance, we were trying to figure out what the next steps were. Money was an issue and I know that Charlie and Heather were not in a financial position to … Everyone was looking to move on and find other work and there was a lot of stress. Jen and I felt strongly that the movie could benefit a lot from more editing. That’s why we essentially put up more money to bring it out to LA and spent a couple more months editing the film. We did test screenings and reshoots. That took from January through the end of March. We had to lock the picture at some point and do the final post-production back in New York to be ready for the Los Angeles Film Festival which was in April.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was there ever the feeling that you guys might have been editing too much. I know that in writing there comes a point in time when you just say, "That’s it, I’m done. I’ve edited this 80 times and I think any more might hurt the final product."
BRAD ZIONS: I don’t know. Did anyone else feel that way? I’m curious if you asked that question.
CHRIS NEUMER: I hadn’t realized how many months of editing and how long the editing process was. I realize there were the reshoots and the test screenings but I didn’t realize there was such a constant tinkering of the product until I spoke to you.
BRAD ZIONS: We rearranged the order of scenes. Jennifer spent a lot of time on her own doing that. Then we would all reconvene with Heather, Eden and Charlie. I think that most of the decisions that we made really benefited the film.
CHRIS NEUMER: When you say that, you know that I have to ask what were some of those decisions that really benefited the film? Can you give me one example of before and after just with re-cutting or re-editing?
BRAD ZIONS: One example I’ll give you is that many people found Josh Meyers’ character to be really damn unlikable. There were a number of things throughout the film that we did in this editing process to address that. Probably the critical one was in the very beginning of the film where Josh Meyers instead of saying to Jessica Stein, "Your phone is ringing", he says, "Stein, you need to get laid" when she is going on her big rant about this piece.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is the one where he said she was going down on the guy in the piece.
BRAD ZIONS: Exactly. You remember that? He turns to her and says, "Stein, you need to get laid. You’re so uptight." But it came off as pretty harsh. We found a way around that that really worked. We had him cut that line entirely and still kept the scene. He just said, "Stein, Stein, your phone is ringing." Then he just turns and walks away. There are small moments throughout the film that have been added or changed.
CHRIS NEUMER: Are there any particular moments in the film that bring a smile to your face or just stand out as being either indicative of the project or just something that is pleasing to you?
BRAD ZIONS: There are a couple of scenes that I fought for that were somewhat controversial, the kind of scenes that you either love them or hate them. One is the lipstick scene in the taxi. I saw enough women or girls react to that scene to know that it was kind of hitting a nerve. Some people just find it hysterically funny and I just didn’t want to lose it.
CHRIS NEUMER: Were there people who wanted to lose that scene?
BRAD ZIONS: Yes. I think Charlie has said that he never got that scene. Charlie would have lost it. In his defense, you are always looking for any possible scenes that you might want to lose.
CHRIS NEUMER: Extraneous scenes?
BRAD ZIONS: Yeah. The expression is that sometimes you have to kill your babies and sometimes the scenes you love the most are the ones you have to lose. For instance I don’t know if you have seen on the DVD the boat scene?
CHRIS NEUMER: I loved the boat scene.
BRAD ZIONS: Everyone loves the boat scene. As a stand-alone little vignette it is really great and for our movie, the production values on it were fantastic. It just didn’t fit in.
CHRIS NEUMER: Was there ever the sense that you were trying to get down to a certain time limit or you had to bring it in under 100 minutes?
BRAD ZIONS: We were definitely conscious of the length of the film. We wouldn’t have let the film run an hour and 20 minutes.
CHRIS NEUMER: An hour and 20 minutes short or an hour and 20 minutes long?
BRAD ZIONS: I’m sorry, I mean 120 minutes. We would never let it run for 2 hours. We thought romantic comedies tend to be 90ish to 100 minutes and we wanted to be in that range.
CHRIS NEUMER: It seems like you had a very substantial hand in the post-production process.
BRAD ZIONS: I also helped raise a lot of the other money. We needed another $100,000 or so and there were fund raising activities going on at that same time. In the earlier stages I didn’t feel like I could go to …. I have a network of former AOL colleagues, other Internet executives who could make an investment like that but I didn’t feel like I could recommend investing in an indie film. Once we had a rough cut and I could show them that we really had a chance to get distribution and make a return on it, I then felt OK about getting money from friends and that’s what I ended up doing.
CHRIS NEUMER: What kind of return did you end up receiving on this?
BRAD ZIONS: So far all the investors have gotten all their money back plus a 25% return.
CHRIS NEUMER: Now I have no idea on an independent film. I’m sure that anytime you get your money back period, that’s good. Is a 25% return good, is that quite satisfactory to you as a principal investor?
BRAD ZIONS: It is. We could have lost it all so getting it back and making some money, all of us essentially having our names on this first film that was critically well received and got a lot of attention, I think it is going to do great things for everyone involved. Charlie is making Legally Blonde 2.
CHRIS NEUMER: I knew he said he got that new Reese Witherspoon movie. Is that Legally Blonde 2?
BRAD ZIONS: Yeah. Larry works all the time. Jennifer just got a series on FX. It’s helpful for everybody. Not as much for producers maybe, but for me I wanted to get into the business.
CHRIS NEUMER: This is a pretty damn fine film to be able to put under your belt with your first project.
BRAD ZIONS: Exactly.
CHRIS NEUMER: You were also part of the World Trade Center editing. I saw this film last year when it played at the Chicago Festival which was what, the second or third festival that it was at? So of course I saw the cut with all the World Trade Center shots in it. What was behind the decision to cut the buildings out?
BRAD ZIONS: It was not an easy decision. I think all of our individual views seemed to flip-flop. I think that ultimately we felt that it was a romantic comedy and if we left them in, it would date the film and it would take a lot of people out of the film for the moments that the Trade Center was there. Then it became the issue of why not just remove half of them or 3/4 of them. I think we realized that it was an all or nothing thing. Either we were going to leave them in there and people were going to know when this was shot or we put in other New York skyline and other New York scenes and take the World Trade Center out.
CHRIS NEUMER: There have been several films that have had this problem and I think yours is the most prominently mentioned at least in my eyes.
BRAD ZIONS: I think that Spider-Man is up there.
CHRIS NEUMER: That was the whole trailer thing.
BRAD ZIONS: Ours was definitely mentioned. It was really an incredible experience. We were at the Toronto Film Festival and we had screenings on Sept. 10th and 12th. The festival was cancelled on the 11th and they actually resumed the whole thing the next day. There was our movie and I think I was the only one of us who actually went to the screening and it was packed. One of the larger venues. When the Trade Center came up, there were people visibly reacting or audibly reacting. I think in retrospect if we had left them in, would it have made a huge difference in our box office? I don’t think so, but I think it was the right decision because it is just a constant reminder of a really traumatic event for people. This is not an ultra serious movie. This is a comedy.
CHRIS NEUMER: I like the not dating it version better personally.
BRAD ZIONS: I think that has a lot of merit as well.
CHRIS NEUMER: Is there anything else that you would care to have me know or that you would like to mention? Were there any particularly amusing moments where you sort of stepped back, looked down at yourself and thought, "My God. What the hell am I doing here?"
BRAD ZIONS: I’m sure Jen told you the story of shooting in the taxicab. Did she tell you the story?
CHRIS NEUMER: I’ve heard the story somewhere, but I’m not sure if it was from Jen. What was this taxicab story that you started to tell?
BRAD ZIONS: It was just the way that we got some of the scenes that were shot in the cab. Our DP was crouching in one part of the cab.
CHRIS NEUMER: Oh, that’s right and Charlie is driving the cab?
BRAD ZIONS: Charlie’s driving it and our sound person is in the trunk.
CHRIS NEUMER: The one that I’m surprised no one has mentioned except for Scott was where he was arrested, suspected of robbing a convenience store. I even brought it up to a couple of people and they were initially like, "What?"
BRAD ZIONS: That happened like the very first weekend of production.
CHRIS NEUMER: It amused the hell out of me. Scott Cohen arrested for robbing a convenience store.
