From Brentwood, 1999
By Jenny Peters
It looks like every other house in the neighborhood, with its well-kept, soft green lawn, trim white siding, and bay window. But inside this middle-class home nestled in the San Fernando Valley, just down the road from Universal, Disney, and Warner Bros., movies are being hatched.
For this comfortable house, once the actual home of actor Andy Garcia and his family (they have moved on to bigger digs), is now the headquarters of Garcia’s CineSon Productions. It’s a small set-up - for instance, today Garcia, along with his wife, Marivi, his assistant Rose, and Dante, an oversized (and very friendly) Labrador Retriever, make up the complete staff.
"As you see, this is not a big operation we have," Garcia, casually clad in striped T-shirt, jeans, and sneakers, smiles, as we settle into his living-room-turned-office. He doesn’t bother to sit behind the massive, paper-strewn desk; instead we sink into soft wicker sofas, with tea and cookies beckoning on the coffee table before us. A poster for his new film, Just The Ticket, leans against one wall; conga drums, piano and electronic equipment are scattered about. In the front room, where Rose and Dante are comfortably ensconced, the film itself sits, resting inside four large metal canisters, lining the floor below framed posters for Garcia’s past films, Jennifer 8 and The Godfather, Part III. "We were trying to make that movie for eight years," Garcia, who not only stars, but his company CineSon also produced, Just The Ticket, explains proudly. "And we ended up selling just foreign rights to it; we didn't have a domestic distributor. And we made the movie anyway, with very little money."
Produced for "well under ten million dollars", the romantic drama was picked up by MGM/UA and is scheduled for release in early 1999. Directed by Garcia’s close collaborator Richard Wenk, the film follows the "charming" story of a professional ticket scalper who plys his trade around New York City’s Madison Square Garden. He’s facing a personal crisis with both his career and his true love (played by Andie MacDowell); and therein lies the story that Garcia and Wenk have fought all these years to bring to the screen.
"It's about a relationship that's sort of at its end, because she just can't put up with that guy's way of life, as a ticket scalper. This guy doesn't even have a social security number. And he's trying to do one last thing for her so he can get out," Garcia elaborates. "It has a tremendous heart, and humor, and it's got a great ending. We're very proud of the film. And we obviously want the movie to be successful, and reach the widest audience. You want all that stuff. I'm not the type of person who goes through all this effort for a movie, and then doesn't care if anybody sees it. I want them to see it, and I want them to see it on the big screen."
The film marks a distinct turning point in Andy Garcia’s career. The 42-year-old Cuban-born actor immigrated to Miami as a young boy, attended college in Florida, and headed for California in the late Seventies, determined to build a career for himself as an actor. With a wife and a baby daughter to support, Garcia worked sporadically in television -- and more regularly as a waiter at the Beverly Hilton Hotel -- until 1985, when he snagged two career-building roles, first in The Mean Season, and, more memorably, in 8 Million Ways to Die.
It didn’t take long for Andy Garcia to become a household name, by creating standout performances in films like The Untouchables, Internal Affairs, Hero, When a Man Loves a Woman, and The Godfather, Part III, for which he was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. But in those years, as his marquee value was expanding and his family was growing (he now has three daughters), so was his need to take more control of his creative destiny.
He first did that by expanding his horizons into music, playing the conga drums, composing and producing legendary Cuban composer/musician Israel Lopez "Cachao" on a Grammy-award-winning album, Cachao Master Sessions Volume I and Grammy nominated Volume II. Garcia mixed music and film to make his directorial debut, with the acclaimed documentary Cachao . . . Como Su Ritmo No Hay Dos (Like His Rhythm There Is No Other), a concert film celebrating Cachao’s musical genius. And he produced, performed and wrote four songs for the soundtrack of the 1995 film Steal Big, Steal Little.
Focusing on music satisfied him for a while. But while making lasting contributions to Latino music was a gratifying outlet for some of his creative energies, it is bringing this new film project to fruition that has brought Garcia to another level of personal fulfillment.
"Becoming a producer enables you to empower yourself, to make the film that you want to make, especially if other people have said, ‘We don't want to make it.’ I have desires to make movies. I have movies I'm developing, and things that I'm interested in," Garcia says, running his hands through his shoulder-length black hair and stretching as he speaks.
"And they're really personal stories. That's why you end up producing or directing. Because if you don't try to make these stories, you can't expect anyone else to come up with that idea and offer it to you. So you assume certain aspirations and goals, in order to tell certain tales. So you become the producer out of necessity, maybe not out of real desires."
Perhaps Garcia has chosen to take on more responsibility because of the weak box-office results of his last few studio films. Desperate Measures, Hoodlum, and Night Falls on Manhattan have all failed to bring audiences in to theaters, a fact that the actor acknowledges with a shrug.
"What's that old quote? ‘It's a lot easier getting to the top than it is staying at the top.’ So it's difficult to constantly keep working on the kind of things you want to be working on. It's a commerce-driven business," he says. "There's the other old adage, ‘You're only as good as your last movie.’ So for directors, actors, producers, writers -- whoever encompasses the creative elements of a film -- you have a hit, everyone's happy, and you're the hottest thing in the world. But if the movie doesn't open, then those realities do come into play."
"Movies are very hard to make, to get it all to come together. So many people have their say in what the end product of films are. Sometimes the things that you get involved in don't necessarily become a reflection of what you did. I mean, they can change, but they can also become so different that after a while you go, ‘What is this? Who's responsible?’ Most of the time, certainly, the end result is really out of my control."
So in order to gain more of that control, Garcia has made some sacrifices. He hasn’t worked on anything but Just The Ticket in over a year, eschewing multi-million dollar acting offers in order to follow his vision. "It's better not to work than to work in something you don't want to be working in," Garcia smiles, acknowledging that for now, anyway, he can financially afford to devote himself to a labor of love. Plus, he’s figured out how to keep it all in the family, spreading the high responsibility, very-low-paying work around. "My wife is involved in all of this, too. She helps run the show," he says smiling.
The Garcia family seems to enjoy this small, scrappy way of working, for although Garcia says he is always reading scripts and considering the lucrative acting offers that regularly come across his desk from the major studios, he clearly seems to have wholeheartedly embraced his newfound role as an independent film producer.
"I have a lot of things that I want to act in, that nobody wants to make," he says with a grin. "The next movie I want to produce is The Lost City, which is a movie I want to direct, about Havana at the turn of the revolution. I’ve been working on that script with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the renowned Cuban writer, for the past five years or so. He wrote the screenplay for Vanishing Point years ago. That'll be my next one. I’ll act in it, too."
And when asked what he’ll do if it takes him three more years to get that movie made, Garcia responds like a true independent, like a man with a dream that is beginning to be fulfilled.
"I’ll be with it as long as it takes," he says. "Certainly, in this business you need a tremendous amount of inner fortitude to be in it for any kind of length of time, and I’ve already been doing this for twenty years. I’m just going to keep on working on the things that reach me, the things that I want to be associated with and identified with, both as an actor and a filmmaker."