THE NUTMAN CHRONICLES - PART 2: TAKING CARE OF THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

Thanks for joining us once more at Fear Zone as we continue with The Nutman Chronicles, featuring the award winning author of the zombie novel Wet Work , Phil Nutman. In Part One we delved into Phil's dark journalistic beginnings and peeked behind the curtains of JACK KETCHUM'S THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, which Phil co-wrote with Dan Ferrands. Draw your chair close and join us as we travel deeper behind the scenes of THE GIRL NEXT DOOR and Phil discusses big snakes and phallic trees and tells us exactly what he thinks of the film's ending. And remember: you read it on Fear Zone first - but you didn't hear it from us, capice?

"The first authentically shocking American film I've seen since HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER over 20 years ago. If you are easily disturbed, you should not watch this movie. If, on the other hand, you are prepared for a long look into hell, suburban style, THE GIRL NEXT DOOR will not disappoint. This is the dark-side-of-the-moon version of STAND BY ME."

--Stephen King

How do you feel about the way the movie ends?

I'm on the fence. It's rushed. It doesn't give the cathartic delivery that the book delivers, which we included in the screenplay. Dan and I spent a week mapping out those final three or four pages in the script and -- **SPOILER ALERT** anybody who hasn't read the book or seen the movie - we wrote the ending of the movie exactly as it is in the book. Ruth is one of the great villainesses. She's up there with Cruella De Vil and the Wicked Witch of The West as far as I'm concerned. Dallas wrote such an incredible character and we need that cathartic payoff and the way that David kills Ruth in the book is how we wanted the movie to end. She has that great monologue where she goes off and starts swearing every primal word under the sun about what a fucking bitch Meg is and how she brought this all on herself.

So, we didn't find out about this [changed ending] until we were on the set doing the scene where Meg comes up to David at the swimming pool and he buys her a hamburger because she hasn't eaten in three days - which is another little sweet grace moment as they sit there and he squeezes her hand under the table which always brings tears to my eyes. Well, while we're filming that, Dan, who'd just gotten into town from L.A., is sitting there bonding with Greg [the director] and they're watching the monitor, and Greg says "oh yeah, we changed the ending." Dan comes running up to me and goes "Do you know about this?" I'm like 'What?!' At that point Dallas had been off to the side and Blanche Baker, who plays Ruth, was talking to him and said "Dan and Phil wrote an incredible script based on your terrific novel. Unfortunately, we didn't film all of it." Dallas then comes up to me and says, "They changed the ending." We were a bit stunned to say the least. Maybe you'd like to talk to [producers] Andrew Van den Houten or Bill Miller or Greg Wilson about this because, quite frankly, we've never really had a full sit down. They had their vision and we had ours. That's all I'll say.

I have my own theories about why they made the changes they did, but I'm not going to second guess and I'm not going to expand on anything. I respect Andrew and Bill and Greg highly. I cannot stress that strongly enough. I feel the ending kind of works the more I see the film which hopefully isn't much more because I had a real hard time with it. I just can't keep from weeping which is what I do when I read the book. I think at one point, Bill said something to the effect that they felt it was a stronger ending. Opinions are like elbows: everyone has at least a couple. I'm looking forward to Andrew, Bill and Greg's commentary track on the DVD.

But the movie is the movie; the book is the book. The book will always be the novel. That's one thing you can never take away from a writer, and it's an incredible book. This is a movie that we're deeply proud of- and I speak for Dallas and for Dan - because we think it has something very special about it and a lot of that really reflects on Greg as a director; it reflects on Bill as a cinematographer and it reflects on Andrew having the balls big enough to actually say we're making this controversial movie. As far as I'm concerned, it's really up to the audience. There are people who feel that the ending works; there are other people who feel cheated, that don't feel the ending delivers what they want - they really want a cathartic release. The bottom line is this movie exists. This is a movie I never, ever, ever, ever in a million years expected would get made, and if it got made I never expected it to get an "R" rating, either. This movie was passed without cuts. I now have tremendous respect for the MPAA because they called up Andrew and said "we're passing this with an 'R' rating with no cuts because we came to the conclusion this is a serious movie about a serious subject and it's been handled with a great deal of sensitivity. If a parent took their teenager to see it, we feel it would promote a discussion about child abuse, about parental responsibility" - words to that effect. You can't ask for a better response than that in regard to an uncompromising movie about child abuse, torture, rape and mutilation - primarily committed by children.

I think it was within a few votes even of it being an NC-17 or something like that?

I believe the lady from the MPAA told Andrew they debated for two days and were split down the middle. I thought we wouldn't even get NC-17. I thought they'd take one look at this movie and say we're not even going to consider this movie because we're just going to reject it out of hand because of the tone. You can't cut this movie. You would have to cut this movie if it was shot badly and was exploitive in the way the material was handled, if it was filmed in a lurid fashion, but just with the subject matter and what happens in the story, if you did cut it, you'd end up with a 40-minute featurette.

Yeah, because you'd pretty much lose the core of what the movie's about in the first place.

Exactly. I thought we would honestly get rejected on the grounds of just the total tone of the movie and the subject matter. This is exactly what Dan and I agreed upon nearly eight years ago because that's what we've always wanted and I think this movie is going to have legs as they say in the industry. I think it's going to provoke debate. I hope so. I don't want to use the words "it has a message" because that sounds like we're preaching and we're not. We're telling a story and that's what made Dan fall in love with the book when he read it. Credit where credit is due, I honestly could not have written this script without Dan. Dan pretty much dragged me kicking and screaming into doing this. I did not want to go back to that fucking basement.

Yeah, it's horrible, man. I watched it again after talking to Blythe and just knowing the actor behind that just makes that scene that much more horrific to watch.

Blythe, I think, is one of the most talented young actresses of her generation - she gives such commitment to the role of Meg. She makes her a real person. And God, what she must have put herself through to convey that authenticity. I can't imagine what a young actress would go through mentally to pull that role off. I would work with her again in a heartbeat. I know that Dan and Dallas would, and I'm sure all the other guys would say the same. As far as I'm concerned, Blythe Aufarth deserves an Oscar. And Daniel Manche, who plays young David, Daniel was incredible, too. Everybody was. We were very fortunate. It's a credit to Andrew and Bill as producers. They worked with a great casting director whose name - I'm sorry, I'm embarrassed - is escaping me right now. I think Blanche Baker did a good job as Ruth. Dallas and I had the opportunity and pleasure of hanging out with William Atherton, and we would like to work with him again. He absolutely nailed the guilt, the recrimination and the tragedy and sadness and ultimately the sense of hope of adult David. Grant Show from "Melrose Place" is terrific, too; he does a nice little grace note essaying David's dad. Catharine Mary Stewart, whom I've loved for the past 20 years because of NIGHT OF THE COMET and THE LAST STARFIGHTER, I think is absolutely spot on as David's mom. And all the kids who play the young kids in the neighborhood and especially the little actress, Madelyn Taylor, who plays Susan--again, an incredibly difficult role for a young actress to play.

"When I look at this movie, Rick, I am literally blown away. It's very schizophrenic. I'm so close to it, yet at the same time I'm very distant from it and I can look at it and go, "wow. What a movie." We were blessed to have an incredible cast. We had a very talented director, and I just can't say more about Bill and Andrew for having the cajones to actually pull the trigger and make this thing happen.

Her maturity level is just incredible.

We were also fortunate that the parents of all the young actors in this movie were very intelligent. They all did due diligence; not only did they read the script, they went and read the novel. They also made a point of researching the Sylvia Likens case.

What are your favorite scenes in the movie?

My three favorite scenes are these: I absolute love Meg and David meeting for the first time, which in the book is on "the rock," but in the movie is on a sand bank. That's a beautiful moment. I also love what I call, "The Fall from Grace from Eden" scene when Denise says "it's summer. How come we haven't played The Game?" And then we do the lovely dissolve, that graceful moving camera shot that was pure Greg and Bill's [design; we come panning around the tree and they're out in the woods playing The Game. What we don't fully see - when I worked on the location that Saturday morning I just cracked up because what she [Denise, Eddie's kid sister, played by Spenser Leigh] sits behind is a huge phallic tree. The biggest tree in the woods. It was like this great, big erection, and it's got this huge vaginal gash in it. It had been struck by lightning. And Greg positioned Denise with the blindfold right in front of the open vagina. I mention this on the audio commentary on the DVD - I was the only writer on set that Saturday - and my comments had audio producer Gary Hertz and the mixing guys cracking up, but it was true. Then we had the snake wrangler there, and he has a little asp-like snake and then he had this big boa constrictor-looking snake and they couldn't decide which one to use, so Greg, bless him, turns to me and goes "well one of the writers is here, why don't you pick, Phil?" So I'm responsible for the big damn snake, which is totally out of place in a woods in New Jersey.

Greg actually had, I think, about 37 shots for the sequence. He mapped out everything for me. But because we had problems with the bloody snake, we lost an awful lot of time. This is proof you should always roll the camera on rehearsal because the first time when Eddie pulls the snake out of the bucket the thing was rock hard and rigid and went up poor Spenser's leg, right up her skirt. I'm nearly pissing myself with laughter to the left of the camera going "I can't believe this." It did it again on the second rehearsal. Then as soon as we came to do a take, the snake got tired and bored, and lazy, and in fact part of the reason we lost time that day is because we had to keep putting the snake back into its basket to go to sleep.

I love that scene, but for me the key scene of this movie which says everything about what this movie is about is the scene where David [SPOILER ALERT] tries to talk to his parents while they're asleep. They're in their Ricky and Lucy beds. Dad's snoring into his pillow and Mom's murmuring into her sleep, and David just breaks down. When he cries in the hallway because he can't wake his parents up, [END SPOILER] that to me speaks volumes about the powerlessness of children.

And that I think is something that's definitely going to be conveyed very well through the movie that I hope is going to have one of the biggest impacts on the audience that watches this. I think if anybody takes anything away, they need to know that things like this are going on screaming to be heard, but they've been kinda screaming inside themselves, so to speak, and not everybody that should be listening is listening.

I've had this discussion with a number of friends who are teachers and one teacher in particular told me that she teaches young kids and knows there are kids in her classes that have seen or maybe even done things they don't dare speak about. She can see it eating them up inside and there's nothing she can do about it. So if one good thing comes out of this movie, I really do hope that it will provoke debate amongst parents and teachers and children, young adults and teenagers, about how you need to be responsible, how you need to speak up responsibly.

Stuff like that, I hold stuff like that pretty dear to me. Not to go into too much detail, but not so much the physical rather than the mental part which I know I was subjected to quite a bit of when I was younger. That stuff has such a lasting impact. To do whatever we can so that kids don't have to go through that is so important.

So what can you tell me about how the script looked when you sold it to Moderncine producers, Andrew and Bill?

First draft ran 133 pages. We then cut it down to 125, I think. And then Dan cut it down to, I believe, 115. That was the version they bought. The wraparound sequences with Bill Atherton ended up being shortened from what we had originally written, which disappointed me because there's a line I added, and Dan and I spent one night arguing for three hours - I'm not kidding you - over that fucking line.

Which one was that, was that near the end?

"No, the beginning. In the book, adult David references he's about to get married again. We have Laura, his fianc?e, come and pull a cigarette out of his mouth - my homage to Bogart and Bacall in TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT - and she says, "you're busted. You're not supposed to be smoking." Then she asks "how was your day?" He quotes Jean- Paul Sartre and says, "Hell is other people" which is on the bottom of page one and completely sums up the entire subtext of the movie for me. But Dan went off on me. He didn't believe David would say that, and I'm going, "it's a literary reference and this is absolutely right. You asked me to write the wraparound sequences." Because we were trying to figure out how do you take that internal dialogue that opens the book, you know, the great opening line, "you think you know about pain?" How do you turn that into something visual? Well, I came up with the idea with the bum which was actually inspired by something I'd forgotten about. It just occurred to me last week before we did Dragon*Con because I knew we were going to do this panel about the making of the film and I remembered an incident back in 1982/83 in the west end of London where I had gone to see a couple of horror movies one afternoon. I walked out of the cinema and this wino is walking around screaming for help because somebody just smashed the shit out of him. His hand was shattered to shit. He had blood pouring out of his head, and everybody is like a school of fish. They're running away from him. And idiot boy here goes up and goes, "sit down, sit down. Let me help you." This is back before the days of cell phones, so I go to call an ambulance from the nearest phone box. Then I went and stayed with this guy. I tried to calm him down and waited until the ambulance turned up. Everybody looked at me as though I were a piece of dog shit. I'm hanging out with this stinking bum who's covered in blood and his left hand was, literally, it looked like somebody had smashed it to shit with a ball peen hammer and this guy is just mumbling, "thank-you, thank-you, thank-you." I had completely forgotten about this until last week. That is where the wraparound sequence comes from.

The point is, this movie comes from the heart, the soul, the balls from all of us. From me, Dan, Dallas, Greg, Bill, Andrew, Bill Atherton.

Dallas and I were doing a panel with Bill about the film at Dragon*Con over the Labor Day weekend after we screened the movie. The two of them had met at Dallas's favorite bar in New York before Bill shot the wraparound sequences, and Dallas called me up and said, "you know, I think Atherton's going to do a good job. I feel really good about this." Anyway, Bill astounded us. He talked for nearly half an hour on the panel. We just sat there with our jaws dragging. He was quoting lines of dialogue from scenes he's not even in, verbatim, straight out of the book and the script a year after he made the fucking movie! It doesn't get much better than that.

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Stayed tuned for Part Three, when Phil's discusses the spiritual aspects of his work and personal life. Don't worry--you'll probably be surprised by what he has to say if you're not too occupied with gathering your spear and knife and heading out the door.