This week the second Chicago International Documentary Festival will screen Mark Brian Smith’s fascinating Overnight, which chronicles the precipitous rise and fall of indie filmmaker Troy Duffy. A blue-collar kid from Boston and a giant in his own mind, Duffy hit the jackpot in March 1997 when Harvey Weinstein, the fabled cochairman of Miramax Films, bought Duffy’s script for a post-Tarantino shoot-’em-up called The Boondock Saints and proclaimed him “a unique, exciting new voice in American movies.” A year later Miramax pulled out of the deal, and though the project was eventually picked up by the smaller Franchise Pictures, it opened on a meager five screens and vanished a week later.
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Unlike Troy Duffy, who seems to interpret his sudden wealth and fame as proof that he’s been cheated all his life, Smith has always assessed his talent more modestly (and more accurately), and he’s been remarkably loyal to the man who pulled him out of the Quik Stop and onto the national stage. “Harvey’s a twisted father figure to Kevin,” notes producer John Shestack in Peter Biskind’s new book, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. Two months ago, when the book came out depicting Weinstein as a manipulative bastard consumed by ego and greed, Smith released a letter to the press defending his mentor as “the last, great movie mogul” and concluding, “In the dysfunctional family that is the movie biz, I couldn’t ask for a better father. And while I can’t put words in the man’s mouth, I suspect Harvey would sum up everything I’ve written above thusly…’Jersey Girl. In theaters everywhere, March 19.’”
fashioned movie-back-lot romp starring his signature duo, trade heavily in this and gradually wear out their welcomes. Jersey Girl has more laughs than anything Smith has ever done, but his real accomplishment is integrating his warped humor into a genuinely personal story.
The grating sense of commercial calculation in Jersey Girl consistently undercuts Smith’s fine writing, and in this light it’s hard to overlook the prolonged sales campaign that brings it to theaters this week–not on March 19, as Smith promised in the punch line of his letter. I can only guess that the date was moved back because The Passion of the Christ was crucifying every new movie in its path, and Smith now operates at a level of the business where topping the box office opening week is a prime strategic objective. A few weeks ago he floated another story preemptively blaming the movie’s failure to open at number one on Gigli, the Affleck-Lopez vehicle that became the most derided picture of 2003. “In all honesty, Gigli did kind of wing us and still kind of stings to this day,” he was quoted as saying on various movie Web sites. “When I put the movie together it was Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and Jennifer Lopez and we had a great shot at being the number one movie the weekend we open.”
