John Pavlus

God knows what's happening on the boat, but here on the grassy shore of suburban Diamond Lake, where director Pete Jones is shooting his new movie "Doubting Riley," things seem eerily calm. Jones and a small contingent of key crew members have motored two-hundred yards out on the water to film a complicated monologue scene, while the rest--if you ignore the walkie-talkies and overstuffed utility belts--could easily be mistaken for late-afternoon loungers at a family barbecue.

A makeshift tarp pagoda softens the low sunlight over a picnic table, where a few electricians banter over half-eaten hotdogs. Behind them, the makeup department sits in deck chairs trading fashion magazines, while a couple of grips toss a football at a comrade who's tightening the bolts on a twelve-foot-high lighting scaffold. "Please tell me there's a Cubs game tonight," someone says, and one of the grips dutifully whips out a pocket schedule to confirm. A PA lugs another bag of ice over to the cooler, as an assistant director rummages through it and joins the banterers. "What the fuck is `Faygo'?" he asks, holding up a foreign-looking soda can. "Straight up Detroit, man!" comes the reply. Laughs all around.

This is not the mien of a crew working with a gun to its collective head. Yet that's exactly what they are, for "Doubting Riley" is Sundance-bound or bust. Preproduction for the 23-day shoot began just last July, and from here--on this languid September evening, with another week of shooting still left to complete, not to mention post-production--the film festival's October 3 submission deadline looms less than a month away.

Pete Jones loaded and cocked this gun on purpose, and given his history, it's easy to understand why. Jones's first film, "Stolen Summer," was the initial offspring of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck's now-infamous "Project Greenlight" experiment--a somewhat Faustian arrangement which offers the winner of an online contest the chance to make his or her own million-dollar Miramax movie under the pitiless gaze of HBO's reality-TV cameras. While Jones recalls the experience warmly--"They were good to me. I'm not just saying that," he claims--the show portrayed him as an oblivious ingrate surrounded by a nigh-incompetent crew, and "Summer" croaked at the box office. Jones spent the next two years unable to sell a script.

The Chicago-born director knows there's only one way to make his comeback. "I've put all my eggs into the Sundance basket," he says. So how do you successfully produce a feature film in less time than most tenth-graders get to write their term papers?

Back in January, Jones and producer Pat Peach were taking meetings around LA, trying to sell an idea Jones had for a comedy about a gay man whose Irish Catholic brothers don't believe him when he comes out to them. The pitch garnered some interest and Jones banged out "Doubting Riley" in two weeks, basing the lead role, Bobby Riley--whom he would eventually decide to play--on himself.

"The thing about my writing is, unfortunately, I'm not good enough to not personalize it," Jones says. Given that his homosexual credentials include a wife and two kids, one wonders exactly where he got his inspiration. "I was raised traditionally Irish with strong Catholic values," he explains, "and I just thought it would be a funny concept if I personally had to come out. How would it affect my family? The story is a true sense of how I view a lot of my friends, Chicagoans, Midwesterners, would deal with homosexuality."

Jones looks thinner now than he did on TV, though his red hair and apple cheeks remain instantly recognizable. It's the second-to-last day of shooting at a tavern in Highwood, and the writer/director/star is preparing a climactic scene in which Bobby's brothers (played by Stony Westmoreland, ex-"Firefly" hunk Nathan Fillion, and local character actor Dev Kennedy) clumsily demonstrate their acceptance of his orientation by throwing a "gay" surprise party. The crew has festooned the outdoor patio with pink flamingoes, cock-shaped Christmas lights, and a giant glittered sign happily proclaiming "BOBBY'S GAY!" Two male go-go dancers practice their moves, prompting grimaces from Jones's own brothers, who are visiting the set tonight. The scene culminates in a passionate kiss between Bobby and his lover, Andy ("Mad TV"'s Michael McDonald). Bobby's brothers, having completed their filmic journey of tolerance, applaud; Jones', watching take after take of male lip-lock, can barely hold down their dinner. "I almost dry-heaved, and I didn't even see it," one mutters.

"I love how the straight brothers who are slightly homophobic deal with it," says Jones of his, er, characters. "This is not a broad comedy. It's got at least some issues to it, a dramatic undertone."

The Jones brothers aren't hanging around just to hear themselves gag, though--as the principal contributors to "Doubting Riley"'s $700,000 budget, they're de facto executive producers. (Blood, apparently, is thicker than repressed sexual panic.) Pat Peach says he and Jones originally planned to package the film with a well-known star for a sum in the low seven-figures, but, as is wont to occur in LA, things "fell through." After a few months spent dithering in development hell, he and Jones figured they'd have more luck producing it as a low-budget indie instead. Co-producer Judd Nissen suggested taking advantage of Chicago's low-interest production loan, and Jones quickly convinced his brothers and some of their friends from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to put up the collateral.

Turns out the filmmakers couldn't have found better money men: they literally put up and shut up, disbursing cash with a no-strings informality that in other circumstances would look downright reckless. Indeed, Jones's brother Packy seems to regard his contribution as more a gift than an investment. "I'd have given the money even if it was just him running around with a camcorder," he affirms. Film financiers usually speak in terms of "points" and "grosses," but when asked what his expectations are if "Doubting Riley" gets accepted to Sundance, Packy replies, "I dunno. A couple ski lift tickets, maybe."

Across the dim and crowded patio, under the flesh-toned glow of the penis lights, Nissen is collecting John Hancocks from a group of polo-shirted investors. "We should have had them sign this stuff long before any money ever came to us," he says, brandishing a sheaf of financial paperwork, still somewhat incredulous. "But they were just like, `Naw, here's the money, go do your thing.'"

By mid-July, three weeks from beginning principal photography, Jones had his money but still no Bobby. He and Peach had solicited a dozen actors, including Chris O'Donnell, Casey Affleck, and Tom Everett Scott, with no luck. "What it came down to was, working backwards from the Sundance deadline, I knew we had to start production," Jones says. "So I said to the guys: `We got no one. Do we just postpone shooting or do I take the role? And they said, `Well, it IS you...'"

Peach and Nissen ushered the director into crash-course acting lessons and tried to devise an efficient way of braiding the two jobs together on-set. Between the constant directorial decision-making and the added pressure of delivering a believable performance, the producers worried that Jones might have a meltdown, so they decided to buffer him: all concerns for Jones would filter through Nissen, who would be the only non-cast person on set allowed to speak to him. Mercifully, this rather J. Lo-esque arrangement proved unnecessary, but Jones still spreads some of his duties around.

"We're the primary guys giving him notes," Peach explains, watching the monitor as Jones lays a wet one on McDonald for what must be the twenty-third time tonight. "In general he doesn't want to see too much of himself on the playback."

"But sometimes we insist," Nissen interjects.

"Right, we want to make sure he signs off. We don't want him to be in the editing room and go, `You guys let me do that?!' We know he's going to do that anyway, though."

To oppose Jones's diffuseness as a director/actor and compress the chain of command, Peach and Nissen combined three usually distinct management tiers--producer, line producer, and unit production manager--into one. The two men jokingly describe themselves as "the yin and yang of producing," and it's an unnervingly apt metaphor, especially when they stand next to each other: Nissen tall, stout and dark, Peach short, taut and blond, both sporting identical moustache/soul-patch combos. Unlike many top-heavy, dissent-ridden producer teams--for instance, famously, "Stolen Summer"'s--these two act like a single authority harmoniously bifurcated for efficiency's sake, rotating around the set in a Trojan orbit.

"A lot of things get lost between layers of people," explains Nissen. "It's also because of money. There are only so many positions that are paid, and so we need to allocate those to the essential stuff." Behind us, a large bounce card tips and clatters into the street. Nissen arcs away to investigate and Peach finishes his thought without missing a beat: "Nothing is falling through the cracks so far, knock on wood."

"This is your two-minute warning, people!"

Bruce Terris, first assistant director on the set of "Doubting Riley," barks orders with just the right balance of enthusiasm and menace. Back in Diamond Lake, night has fallen and the shoot has moved inside to prepare a drunken bedroom scene between Bobby and his brothers. The afternoon's casual idyll has evaporated: about a dozen people are scuffling around in a space designed for two or three, and it's Terris' job to keep them all on schedule. With his wired expression and Agent Smith earpiece, he looks just like you think he would--because you've seen him before, on television.

Many of "Doubting Riley"'s key crewmembers also worked together on "Stolen Summer," becoming unwitting--and unwilling--pawns for "Project Greenlight"'s reality-TV theatrics. Cinematographer Pete Biagi, for instance, was "cast" as an arrogant artist willing to derail entire scenes to please his own fickle eye; Peach became a weaselly Judas, selling out his co-producer as a scapegoat for the shoot's exaggerated ills. And Jones, of course, was the emperor with no clothes. Every film production has its share of tension and impolitic moments, but "Stolen Summer" came off like a low-budget "Heaven's Gate." As Terris puts it: "They made it look like a fucking nightmare."

The head count in the master bedroom has now swelled to twenty, and everyone is talking in the taut-jawed tones all too familiar to "Greenlight" fans. "Stand way back there," says Sarah Foerster, the set still photographer. "Otherwise you may get an elbow in the eye." Everywhere in here is in somebody's way. A jerry-rigged filter frame teeters off the front end of a movie lamp; an electrician lunges through the thicket of moving bodies to secure it before it falls onto the head of a PA struggling to mount a sheet of diffusion on the window. A Polaroid pops the room white, prompting annoyed glances toward a sheepish-looking costume intern. "Flashing!" she shouts, too late.

Watching this chaos, it's easy to imagine the field day HBO had with Jones on his maiden voyage. What's less immediately apparent is how meaningless these pockets of stress really are in the context of an entire shoot. Terris's two minutes are up: Biagi has signed off on the lighting and Jones, barefoot in boxers, is ready to rehearse. He shifts confidently into director mode, ushering all "non-essential" personnel out of the bedroom--apparently the scene calls for Nathan Fillion to drop his pants.

Christine Hickey, who works the craft service table outside, gives up the straight dope. "I've done ten films, and when people are hungry, the masks come off," she says, munching on a Power Bar. "But it's actually been really organized. They've had their little bumps and blunders, but every show has that. There's never been an issue of having to get rid of people, or running out of money, or being totally up in the air about what's going to happen the next day."

According to Terris, what few woes "Doubting Riley" has endured can be attributed to its punishing schedule, which he likens to "trying to stuff ten pounds into a nine-pound bag." He says that the crew has been burning through six or seven pages per shooting day (the norm is somewhere around three). "I think the perfect number of days for a film like this would have been thirty," he says, hustling back to the set after the dinner break. Most of the crew is still chatting over their vegetable stir-fry; Terris wolfed his down in about ten minutes. "We missed two days but we made them up later on. We've actually been able to reshoot some scenes along the way that Jonesy wasn't happy with. Really, we're cooking."

Oh, and one more thing, he adds. "For the people who tried to make that documentary seem like we were a bunch of morons: fuck you."

It's September 25th, and Pete Jones is back in Los Angeles. "Doubting Riley" wrapped successfully (with one day of overtime) and the crew bid adieu with a private bash at Fado pub. Now Jones is stuck in an editing suite with one week to whip his footage into Sundance shape, and he and his trusted editor, Gregg Featherman, have no time to kid themselves. Fine cutting the film is impossible on this deadline; Jones plans to submit it as a work-in-progress.

"It's almost like triage," says Jones, speaking via cell phone in a rare break from the operating room. "We just pick out which scenes are on the deathbed and say, `These are what we need to work on over these next three days.' The other ones are going to need work, we know that. But for right now they're passable."

Jones says the worst part of the sixteen-hour marathon sessions, though, is watching his own performance. With no time for delicacy, Featherman's often-blunt evaluations occasionally blur the line between "Bobby Riley" the character and Pete Jones the flesh-and-blood person. "We had to make a decision to only refer to my performance as `Bobby'," the director says. "Hearing `you stink in this scene!' isn't really doing much for my ego. `Bobby stinks in this scene'--that's a little easier to take."

Self-deprecation aside, Jones says he's proud of his first outing--no pun intended--as a film star. "Let's put it this way: I don't think my performance sinks the movie. That was my biggest fear. Now I have to uncover the good things."

By now a videotape containing "Doubting Riley"'s rough cut is laying on a desk in Park City, Utah with hundreds of other contenders. Sundance acceptance letters typically arrive in late November. For his career's sake, Jones is hoping this holiday season starts off with Thanksgiving--and not Turkey Day.

(2003-10-08)

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