The Last Shot
Writer/director Jeff Nathanson, and actors Alec Baldwin,
Matthew
Broderick and Toni Collette
The genesis of The Last Shot is the kind of truth is stranger than fiction scenario that seems outlandish enough to come from the mind of a Hollywood screenwriter. Two independent filmmakers are approached by a producer with deep pockets and a desire to greenlight a movie right away. So they provide him with a script set around the Grand Canyon, and he tells them it needs to be shot in Providence, Rhode Island. They are baffled but agree, and the production begins. Then their benefactor mysteriously pulls the plug, telling them to get out of town quick.
Three years later, the filmmakers see their names in The Los Angeles Times and discover what really happened: the producer was actually an FBI agent, and they were being used as part of an elaborate sting to snare East Coast mob figures through their ties with Teamsters who provide transportation on movie sets.
"I was amazed that the FBI thought they could actually nail mobsters by posing as film makers," says Jeff Nathanson, the writer and director of The Last Shot. "I was convinced after reading the article that this was a really bad idea, and I thought it was funny."
Out of that tale, Nathanson constructed a fractured Hollywood fable about Steven Schats (Matthew Broderick), a movie theater manager who has been carrying around a screenplay called Arizona for ten years, even going so far as attending the funerals of faded industry figures to peddle the script. When Joe Devine (Alec Baldwin) appears with a checkbook and a plan to shoot the film in Providence, Steven takes it as a sign of divine intervention.
"I lived the Matthew Broderick role myself as a struggling writer in Los Angeles for many years," says Nathanson, "and I can tell you, that if someone had come to me and said 'We're going to make your movie,' I would have been so blinded by excitement, of finally having my dream come true, that there would have been very few questions asked."
Instead of creating a high-minded tragedy (ala Sunset Boulevard) or bitter black comedy (like The Player), Nathanson opted for a kind of warm-hearted spoof, and peppered the film with characters looking for their big break, their shot at the kind of validation only Hollywood can provide.
"People just come here and they're just awash in all of their fantasies," says Alec Baldwin in Los Angeles, "and people have these dreams about this business, these sort of crazy larger than life dreams of what Hollywood success means. It's such a weird amalgam of things that go on in this town and this is a business that when you hit it big, you hit on all cylinders. You become someone who's important culturally, you become someone who's wealthy, you become someone who's famous, and you become someone who's doing something that's perceived to be important to the community."
Baldwin's Agent Devine is someone who has as much to prove as Steven Schatz, and gets as wrapped up in the glamour of making movies as his unwitting partner.
"My character doesn't know it's pretend," explains Matthew Broderick, "but even Alec starts to believe in the movie, everyone around it starts to get caught up in the movie. There isn't really any movie, but we all just want it so badly. It's a touching story, actually, you want them to get the movie made."
The film's tagline says it's "inspired by the true story of the greatest motion picture never made," but The Last Shot might also be called the funniest Hollywood satire to never make it to theaters. Touchstone Pictures (a division of Disney) opted not to release the film in most U.S. markets, including Detroit. So despite being filmed in early 2003, and slated for a fall 2004 release, the movie didn't reach audiences until May 2005, when it appeared on DVD with little fanfare. (One of the extras is a meeting between the real filmmakers, Gary Levy and Dan Lewk, and their "producer," former FBI Agent Garland Schweickhardt, ten years after their ill-fated collaboration.)
Like videotape before it, DVD has become a way for movies to get a second life, and The Last Shot deserves a look for its sly, insider humor and an audacious performance from Australian chameleon Toni Collette as Hollywood bitch goddess Emily French. A faded star now known for a string of softcore sex films, Emily is eager to regain some credibility as an actress ("she was nominated" say several awestruck characters, as Collette should have been for this performance) and joins the ragtag group for her providential close-up.
"For an out and out comedy, this is a very complex, richly layered story," says Collette, "so I was able to play so many different things within this one kind of nightmare actress. It really wasn't based on anybody specific, I think there's just such a general notion that is familiar to us in modern society because films and celebrity are just such a phenomenal nightmare. It was just fun to make fun of the industry that I work within."
© 2005, Serena Donadoni. All rights reserved.