John Lee Hancock thought he was doing a great job of racing through a day of shooting earlier this year on "The Blind Side," the new film that stars Sandra Bullock as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a no-nonsense Memphis supermom who makes room in her life for Michael Oher, a homeless, 350-pound African American teenager who ended up becoming the Baltimore Ravens' first-round pick in this year's NFL draft.
But when the real Leigh Anne showed up to visit the set, she found her patience flagging after a few hours. "If I were in charge," she told Hancock, "we'd get things done a lot faster around here."
I can only imagine what the hyper-energetic Tuohy would do if she were ever forced to sit through a studio development meeting, but I'm guessing that after a little while she'd be tossing people out of windows. She certainly would have been wondering what took Hancock so long to get back behind the camera. After all, Hancock is a supremely talented writer-director who made an impressive directorial debut in 2002 with "The Rookie" after writing a pair of Clint Eastwood-directed films, including "A Perfect World." And as it turns out, "The Blind Side" is a surprise fall hit, making an estimated $34.5 million this weekend, and according to CinemaScore, earning a rare A-plus from moviegoers, a reliable signal that the movie will have a long and profitable life in the multiplexes.
So why hadn't Hancock made a movie since his second feature, "The Alamo," arrived way back in 2004?
If you ask most people in Hollywood, they'd tell you that Hancock was in movie jail. A costly flop that ended up getting awful reviews and becoming the media's poster film for misguided Hollywood excess, "The Alamo" was an especially painful experience for Hancock. Born and raised in Texas, he was a natural choice to salvage the film after its original director, Ron Howard, bowed out of the production over a variety of budget-related issues. But after a series of dire early screenings, Hancock was forced to make huge cuts in what was originally a nearly three-hour film, sacrificing a lot of depth and rich historical texture along the way.
When we sat down to talk about his new film recently, Hancock still couldn't suppress a cringe when the subject of "The Alamo" came up. When you have a flop in Hollywood, it hurts, even years later. Of course, if you're a superstar filmmaker, whether you're Steven Spielberg or Michael Mann or Michael Bay, you can have a flop -- even a couple of stinkers -- and still get back into the ring, bloodied but unbowed. Even though Mann had belly-flopped with a "Miami Vice" remake, he bounced right back, even getting the same studio -- Universal -- who'd bankrolled his dud to put up the dough for his next film, "Public Enemies," apparently having decided that if a movie star of Johnny Depp's status still wanted to work with Mann that the director must still have the right stuff.
But directors with less invincible reputations have suffered. Greg Mottola, for example, was considered a promising young filmmaker after making the well-reviewed 1996 film "The Daytrippers." But when he finally got another movie going, "Duplex," he ended up taking the fall for a host of nasty creative disputes and was fired off the picture (which ended up being a flop, directed by Danny DeVito). To get back behind the camera, Mottola went to work in TV, directing episodes of "Arrested Development" and other TV series. He re-emerged in 2007, thanks to support from Judd Apatow, when he directed Apatow's comedy hit "Superbad," which made him bankable again.
Of course, if you ask Hancock, he'll tell you that he has some powder burns from "The Alamo" experience. "I'd love the opportunity to do a director's cut of the film, because what people saw in the theaters, even though I'm proud of it, wasn't the fully realized version of the movie. I learned that you should never take on a project where the media has decided that they already have an opinion about it. We were dogged by the same negative press that was directed at the movie before I'd even signed on to write it. The movie had just become a target, even though most of that negativity was directed at [then Disney chief] Michael Eisner."
But Hancock insists that he never felt like he was languishing in a movie jail cell. "After 'The Alamo' I really wanted to get back to doing regular human being stuff, like being a dad, and the best way to do that was to stay home and write," he told me. "So if I was in movie jail, then you'd have to say that everyone let me design the cell. I got plenty of offers to direct, just ones that weren't right for me."
So how did Hancock finally get "The Blind Side" up and running? And why did the studio that originally acquired the book back out of making the movie? Keep reading: