A fork (and a bump) in 'The Road'
This Gloucester couple made a fortune in PR. Now, as film producers, they toil to bring Cormac McCarthey's bleak vision to the screen.
GLOUCESTER - Their house, a chateau-style bastion on 11 acres of spectacular oceanfront along Gloucester's Folly Cove, is grand enough to have a name: Seawinds. Steve and Paula Mae Schwartz, owners of one of the most successful public relations companies in New England, are key benefactors of such honorable institutions as Bowdoin College, the Gloucester Stage Company, and the American Alpine Club.
Life may be good - quite good - for this urbane couple. Yet they are only too aware that there are no guarantees.
That's why they see their recent foray into film production as a kind of public service, or at least a necessary eye-opener. The Schwartzes are co-producers of "The Road," the forthcoming adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grimly apocalyptic novel of the same name.
Just last week, they had an eye-opener of their own. After a test-screening, the film's principals made the unexpected decision to bump the opening of the highly anticipated movie off the fall schedule, taking it out of this year's Oscars derby. "We're racing as quickly as we can to the finish," Steve Schwartz said on the phone from a cab in Manhattan. "The [November] release date was overly aggressive. . . . It's all part of the adventure."
A new date for the film's release will be announced shortly, said a spokesperson for Dimension Films, the distributor. Holiday film schedules and Oscar deadlines are subjects that did not come up in meetings with Dimension's Bob Weinstein and director John Hillcoat, Schwartz said on Thursday. The lone goal for holding off opening, he said, is to fine-tune the film to the best of its potential.
The Oprah-endorsed, Pulitzer Prize-winning book imagines a catastrophic, dog-eat-dog landscape after an unexplained holocaust, with a father - played in the film by Viggo Mortensen - and his son struggling desperately to survive. It is, say the Schwartzes, no accident that the author conceived the story amid widespread terrorism, an energy crisis, extreme weather, and other threats.
Late bloomers in the film industry, the Schwartzes are feeling a sense of urgency. At the beginning of the project, they moved quickly on "The Road" to capitalize on the "high level of anxiety" currently dominating the national dialogue, Steve said at their home this summer.
Already in production is their second feature, "Tree of Life," directed by Terrence Malick and starring Brad Pitt and Sean Penn. And they've mailed off a big check toward the rights to a third story, by "Taxi Driver" screenwriter Paul Schrader.
The deep dive into film production is fulfilling a mutual lifelong passion for the couple, married 29 years, who spent their dating years going to arthouse screenings. Paula Mae, a Brooklyn native who went to Boston University, once taught a film course in Westchester County, N.Y., way back in the days of Super 8. Steve, who tried his hand at short-story writing while at Columbia University, has always been partial to Fassbinder and Woody Allen, but he's also a science fiction fanatic.
Together, they dabbled for a time in screenwriting, earning credit for an episode of the sitcom "Taxi." And their three adult sons - two from her previous marriage - are the kind of guys who can recite whole blocks of dialogue from screwball classics such as "Airplane" and "The Naked Gun."
Both of their older sons, Lee and Derek, work in psychiatric services, while the youngest, Roger, recently left a career in meteorology to hold down the Los Angeles office of Chockstone Pictures, the Schwartzes' fledgling production company.
"The Road," as Steve points out with a smile, was rejected by every major studio before they came on board. When Hillcoat ("The Proposition") first introduced the couple to Mortensen, he called them "the folks who enabled this movie to be made outside the studio system."
Mortensen, according to the Schwartzes and fellow producer Nick Wechsler ("Sex, Lies, and Videotape," "Requiem for a Dream"), was everyone's first choice for the role.
"Somebody said he's a method actor in a leading man's body," Steve said. "He starved himself in sympathy with the character." In rural Pennsylvania, the actor walked more than a mile through an abandoned, pitch-black highway tunnel. In Oregon, he plunged into 42-degree water.
"He couldn't move his arms," Schwartz recalled. "There are not many actors who would not use a stuntman."
Some of the most disturbing scenes of human misery - for those who've read the book, they're unforgettable - required the participation of the young actor Kodi Smit-McPhee, who plays the boy. Mortensen, said the producer, felt responsible.
"I hope he doesn't mind my saying - when the scene was over, he'd kiss the boy."
The film met its budget of $20 million, said Steve, sitting in a high-backed chair in the opulent great room of his home. Bearded and curly-haired with rimless eyeglasses, the wiry 60-year-old, an enthusiastic ocean kayaker and weekend rock-climber, dresses in shorts and running shoes. His wife, sitting on a facing sofa, wears camouflage pants cut off capri-style, with a tiny American flag pinned to her black knit pullover.
When they bought the old house as a summer getaway 10 years ago, there were literally bats in the belfry. But the exquisite linenfold paneling in the dining room has been featured in a design textbook, and the rolling grounds are an idyllic paradise to Steve, who walks with the purposeful stride of a seasoned hiker. Within a year, the couple had moved in year-round.
"It's exciting in winter," he said.
They handle the grueling commute down Route 128 to the Waltham offices of Schwartz Communications in part by staggering their drive times. He leaves early in the morning to beat the traffic, while she heads in hours later and stays into the early evening. It's one of the many ways the Schwartzes say they have managed to thrive while running a chaotic business together.
"We're choreographed," said Paula Mae. "We make appointments to see each other. We don't talk about personal things at work. And we have a clear division of labor. When we started, I told him, 'You catch, and I'll clean and fry.' "
They met at a New York ad agency in the late 1970s. Paula Mae had thought about a career in journalism, working for a time in the letters to the editor department at Newsweek.
"I made $65 a week," she recalled. "My parents were horrified."
After they married, Steve was hired as a speechwriter for Jack Welch at GE.
"That was an extremely important experience," he said. When he was offered an opportunity to join a pioneering desktop publishing company, he jumped. Welch told him it could make him rich overnight, and he was right.
"Paula Mae and I have always been comfortable in a high-risk, high-reward environment," Schwartz said.
When he cashed out of the software company in 1990, the Schwartzes hung out their PR shingle in Waltham. Specializing in the high-tech and healthcare industries, the company grew rapidly. With more than 200 employees, it now has offices in San Francisco, London, and Stockholm.
In the couple's early years on Madison Avenue, there were marketing campaigns for good old-fashioned consumer products, like Gerber baby food. Now, however, the causes are much greater.
Like their research-based clients, "The Road" carries a certain weight, said Paula Mae.
"It's not shampoo," she joked. As all great storytellers know, life and death are something of a recurring theme. 