by Ray Pride
Everybody in the movie business has a hometown story they're dying to make.
Michael Corrente, who made "Federal Hill" and "American Buffalo," happened to find his ready made. "I lost my dad in 1988, and I took a year off," the 39-year-old director, a polished, unpretentious raconteur, says. "I was just reading a lot. And there it was for a buck on a book rack. How bad could it be for a buck?"
The book was a paperback original by an unknown writer named Peter Farrelly. Farrelly, the co-writer and co-director (with younger brother Bobby) of "There's Something About Mary" has joked that Corrente likes the novel more than he does. "The book is more about my life than Peter's!" Corrente says with a grin. "Peter Farrelly wrote a book about a kid from Pawtucket, which is where I grew up. He gave me the book to make a movie out of, because he knew I knew these characters at least as well, if not better than he did. He grew up in Cumberland, his father's a doctor, they came from an upper middle class family. He went to a prep school; they would bring in some inner-city kids. He saw that, and thought, 'This would be an a interesting story to tell.' But I read the book and said, 'I know these guys!'"
At first glance, the story's more 1970s coming-of-age teensploitation, but there's the occasional hard edge to the very un-"Mary" seriocomedy that impresses. The charmingly lackadaisical Shawn Hatosy plays Tim Dunphy - dubbed "Dildo" by brusque, inarticulate widower dad Alec Baldwin - as one of the more noteworthy stoner-slacker-boner-charmers of recent years. While he's close to his goofy, disabled younger brother, he's closer to a clutch of pals who devise every more colorful ways to, well, get fucked up. One incident gets him tossed into a boarding school, where, wouldn't you know, he meets the rich filly Breck-girl moonbeam (played to clean-haired quintessence by Amy Smart). Sort-of complications ensue, along with a few raucous gags and bittersweet turns.
The script was a true collaboration with the three following one rule - make me laugh. "There are a lot of scenes in the movie that we all collaborated on, and I invented some." The film's highlight is a scene that caused some friction among the trio. "That's about the only scene in the movie that Peter and I disagreed with, truth be known. It just scared Peter. For me, I put this scene in the movie because this young boy has a flashback to the only warm, fuzzy moment that he remembers with his Mom, his Dad and his brothers and even that's a little twisted, y'know? Everything is just a little off. It's important to me, because you can't just say 'Mommy's crazy' at the end of the movie. You have to earn it somehow. I see this warm and fuzzy moment shot at forty frames a second to see Mom shooting bulbs off the Christmas tree with Daddy is enough to let you know things were a little crazy." Corrente was adamant, because it was true. "That scene actually happened to me a kid! - My mom spent her summers in Canada and shot trap and skeet all the time. She got my brother and I this little pop gun for Christmas and she put the little cork in and she looked over a half broken Christmas bulb and she shot it. Before you knew it, my Mom and Dad shot every bulb off the Christmas tree before either one of us got to touch the gun!"
He sees similarities to his gritty debut feature, "Federal Hill." "I think it's similar in that it's about blue collar people in a tough neighborhood with the inability to express how they feel. Then they figure out a way. We're not making any statement about Rhode Island or Pawtucket, it's any blue-collar town in the Northeast."
But Corrente's blue-collar movies have a blue-collar ethic: he raises his own finance. Not that he necessarily wants to. "Like almost every movie ever made, it was shopped to every studio and they all said, 'Myah-myah, yink-yink.' Y'know, I said forget about it, I just raised the seven [million-dollar budget]."
Something they didn't like about the movie? "I've heard every excuse [between] it's too funny or it's not funny enough. They say all kinds of things. A lot of these pictures are made because they think teen pictures are making money, so they put 115 pages of stuff together to give you a reason to put teenagers in movies and they forget to put in heart, soul and story. I would love to be in a position now, even after 'There's Something About Mary' grossed what it grossed, to go back to the studios with the screenplay and say this is the movie we're going to make. I'd be willing to bet you we'd still have trouble getting it made."
While Corrente stays away from marketing - "I'd only fuck it up if they let me in there" - he's ready to protect what he loves. "I made the film because I was obsessed with the book. There could have been a bazillion teenage movies and I still would have made it. I raise the money so I ultimately have final cut. Otherwise, I would go back to construction."
"Outside Providence" is now playing.
copyright 1999 New City Communications, Inc.