BY tim townsend '91
Tom McCarthy '88 had never been
to the Sundance Film Festival before. So, as he walked through
the snowy streets of Park City, Utah, early one morning last
January, toward the first screening of the first film he had
written and directed, he asked his producer Mary Jane Skalski
about festival etiquette.
"Tom asked me if Sundance audiences
ever boo the movie they're watching," Skalski
said. "I told him if they hate a movie they don't
boo, they just walk out."
After three years of writing, rewriting,
rehearsing, composing, dubbing, and editing, McCarthy had
finished his movie, The Station Agent, just days
before; the reels of film had been flown into Utah from New
York by his brother the previous evening.
Ten days later, The Station Agent
had collected three Sundance prizes--the Dramatic Audience
Award, the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award for McCarthy, and
a Special Jury Performance Award for actress Patricia Clarkson.
And McCarthy, a professional actor (Meet the Parents,
Noises Off) who tested his craft in the improvisation
troupe My Mother's Fleabag at Boston College and trained
at the Yale School of Drama, had an agreement with Miramax
for his film's distribution.
"We used to say, ‘Tom, what
are you doing in the School of Management?'" remembers
Maile Flanagan '87, a co-Fleabagger. "Then he
switched to philosophy, and Nancy Walls [another Fleabagger
and future regular on Saturday Night Live] would
say, ‘Oh, Tom, you're slowly spiraling downward.'"
McCarthy knew he wanted to act for a living by the time he
graduated from Boston College. He and fellow Fleabaggers rented
a house on Cape Cod that summer and performed improv comedy
in bars and basement theaters. Toward the season's end,
lounging one day on the beach, the group discussed their future.
They wanted to stay together, and they wanted to leave Boston.
New York, it was decided, was too expensive. There was already
too much improv in Chicago. Someone suggested Minneapolis--good
arts scene, plenty of jobs. Minneapolis it was.
A few nights after McCarthy told his
parents he was going to move to Minneapolis to be an actor,
Carol and Gene McCarthy came up to the Cape from their home
in New Jersey to see their son's troupe. "It was
in some awful bar," remembers Flanagan. "And I
can tell you one thing, Tom's dad was not happy. We
could feel the white-hot fire of a thousand suns directed
at us on stage." Tom McCarthy was the artistic kid in
the McCarthy clan of four boys and a girl. Two brothers also
graduated from Boston College, Jay '84 and Bill '92,
and went on to careers with Morgan Stanley and EMC Corporation,
respectively. "I bought Tom his first suit his senior
year"--for job interviews--says Gene McCarthy,
"and I think he wore it exactly once. I'm not
sure where that suit is. Maybe he sold it to help fund the
movie," the father says now, with a laugh.
In Minneapolis, after a year or so of
living together in
a house and performing in theaters and comedy clubs, the troupe,
rechristened Every Mother's Nightmare, split up. McCarthy
moved to Chicago to try his hand at more serious theater.
He had little experience--he hadn't even acted
in BC's theater department productions--but says,
"I was tired of just doing comedy." The year he
was in Chicago, he was cast in three plays, and in the third,
McCarthy won the lead role. He felt inadequate, however, around
his fellow actors. "I knew less than anyone,"
he says. So, in 1992, at the age of 24, McCarthy enrolled
in the three-year master's program at the Yale School
of Drama, where he took classes in writing and directing as
well as acting.
"It was clear to all of us that
he had a really great directorial imagination," says
Yale classmate and current dean of Yale Drama School James
Bundy. "If you spent any time with Tom at all you knew
that he was curious about life and completely his own thinker.
He was unafraid of trying something different."
While at Yale, McCarthy cowrote (with
Trevor Anthony) a well-reviewed burlesque play called The
Napoleonade, about the French general and a field marshal
who betrays him. McCarthy didn't act in The Napoleonade,
but instead directed it, and found he enjoyed being in charge
of a production.
Based on the success of the play, McCarthy,
still a Yale student, received a Fox Fellowship to write another
script. The result was The Killing Act, a play about
P.T. Barnum that McCarthy directed off-Broadway. The Killing
Act featured the actor Peter Dinklage as Tom Thumb, in
a performance McCarthy describes as "Iago on crack."
The two became friends, and as McCarthy watched people on
the streets or in bars interact with Dinklage (who is 4'5",
a dwarf), he began thinking about how he might work with the
actor again.
In the meantime, McCarthy's acting
career was taking off. Between 1995 and 2002, he won roles
in made-for-television movies and series, feature films, and
Broadway productions. He had a recurring role on the Fox series
Boston Public; played Dr. Bob Banks in Meet the
Parents, with Robert DeNiro and Ben Stiller; and trod
the boards on Broadway in the revival of Michael Frayn's
farce Noises Off, which was nominated for a Tony
Award in 2002.
"He's a very skilled actor,"
says Glenn Jordan, who directed McCarthy and Candace Bergen
in Mary and Tim, a 1996 television movie adaptation
of Colleen McCullough's novel, Tim. "We
saw quite a few actors for the part, and Candy Bergen and
I thought Tom was by far the best. There's a sweetness
and openness in his personality that comes through in his
acting."
McCarthy is boyishly handsome--with
his short brown hair, glasses, button-down shirt, and jeans,
he would look in place at a tailgate party. He's smart,
funny, and self-deprecating. Back in New Haven one recent
afternoon for a screening of The Station Agent, he
chomped on a cheeseburger, while cheerfully recounting the
"surreal" past year of his life. He seems taken
aback by the accolades his movie has so far received, despite
the years he put in to ensure that result. At the same time,
he's acquired some of his business's aura, fielding
cell phone calls over lunch (with apologies); at the screening
later, whispers of "there he is" can be heard
from Yale Film Society undergraduates when McCarthy steps
into the room.
McCarthy says his thoughts began turning
increasingly to filmmaking in the late 1990s, even as his
acting career was gaining momentum. "I was doing a lot
of acting, but
I wanted to work on the kinds of movies I like to see, and
I wasn't finding them," he says. About four years
ago, while driving out to see a brother's new lake house
in western New Jersey, he spotted an abandoned train depot
in the rural community of Newfoundland. Feeling there might
be something to this little white clapboard building--but
not sure what--he pulled over, took some photos, and
left a note for the owner.
"The guy was a little odd,"
says McCarthy. He was a "railfan," one of the
subset of Americans enthralled with the history and culture
of the U.S. rail system. "He invited me to a railfan
meeting, and after that I spent three months researching railfans."
Characters and themes of connection and disconnection took
shape as McCarthy used the long periods when actors wait around
on movie sets to write his script.
The San Francisco Chronicle
describes The Station Agent as "a character
study about a dwarf who inherits a run-down train station
and forms a friendship with two other misfits." The
New York Times says the film depicts "an eccentric
ad hoc family that grows out of the low-key, charismatic powers
of a train-obsessed loner of a dwarf."
"Everyone at Sundance was calling
it ‘the dwarf movie,' as in, ‘You have to
go see the dwarf movie,'" says Arianna Bocco,
a senior vice president of acquisitions for Miramax Films.
The Station Agent is about Dinklage's character,
Finbar McBride--a man who watches trains and makes his
living repairing models of them in a cluttered shop beneath
his apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey. When a fellow railfan
dies, Fin inherits the abandoned depot in Newfoundland.
Fin is a diffident, lonely man, settled
into living out his life with trains. But when he moves into
the depot, he is confronted with a garrulous Cuban hot dog
vendor named Joe (played by Bobby Cannavale), who cheerfully
sets up his van for business outside Fin's depot each
morning. Despite his deft brush-offs, Fin can't discourage
Joe into leaving him alone. Olivia, a sad, distracted artist
who has recently lost her child, completes McCarthy's
trio, and is portrayed by Patricia Clarkson. The story, a
quotidian unfolding of mostly small events, shows how these
three people repel and need one another. And that's
about it.
"Try to describe this film to someone--a
friendship between a dwarf, a hot dog vendor, and a bereaved
mother--no one would see it," says Los Angeles
Times critic Kenneth Turan, in an interview. "But
these characters are beautifully drawn. They never feel overdone,
and McCarthy isn't pandering to the audience."
Following the film's opening in New York City and Los
Angeles at the beginning of October, Anthony Lane in the New
Yorker called The Station Agent "a fine
movie." In the New York Times, Elvis Mitchell
pronounced it "thoughtful and often hilarious . . .
the kind of appetizing movie you want to share with others."
There are murmurings of Oscar nominations for Cannavale, Clarkson,
and Dinklage, and the film's first week's box
office receipts represented the highest per-screen average
of any movie showing in the country, according to the trade
publication Daily Variety. The weekend of October
17 saw the film open in 20 major markets. By November 9 The
Station Agent had taken in roughly $1,560,000 in gross
sales, from 94 theaters.
Filming of The Station Agent
began in the summer of 2002. In preparing to make his first
movie, McCarthy sought out the expertise of one of his directing
heroes, Sidney Lumet. The father-in-law of Bobby Cannavale,
Lumet talked about the script with McCarthy and gave him advice
about running a movie set. McCarthy says he watched Lumet's
The Verdict over and over before the filming of his
own movie began, in order to emulate the feel of the 1982
classic with Paul Newman and Charlotte Rampling.
McCarthy had been forming his characters
in his mind for some time, but he wrote the script for
Dinklage, Cannavale, and Clarkson. The actors began rehearsing
even as he and producer Mary Jane Skalski searched for financing.
"Between the protagonist being a dwarf and my inexperience
as a director, no one would touch the script," says
McCarthy. His break came from SenArt Films, a two-year-old
production company started by a former security industry executive.
McCarthy had $500,000 to work with, enough for 20 days of
filming. Actor friends from New York and elsewhere, including
Fleabag alumni, converged on the New Jersey set to volunteer
their help.
"I was barely holding it together,"
says McCarthy now. "Working with the actors is where
I felt the most comfortable, but I was learning the technical
stuff on the fly. You're the captain of this ship and
you don't know how 80 percent of the ship works."
The key members of his crew came from associations McCarthy
had made on other productions as an actor. He met the cinematographer
Oliver Bokelberg, for instance, in the late 1990s while acting
in The Citizen in Costa Rica. McCarthy shot his movie
with Super 16 film to save money. He later had the final cut
enlarged to standard 35 millimeter for showing in theaters.
After the lights went up at the first
screening of The Station Agent at Sundance, recalls
Skalski, "people got to their feet and cheered."
Emanuel Levy, a film critic and scholar of independent filmmaking,
was on the Sundance grand jury (with the director David O.
Russell and the actors Forest Whitaker, Tilda Swinton, and
Steve Buscemi), and he was present at the screening. "This
is a 1,200-seat theater," he says. "And it's
early in the morning, and it gets a standing ovation? I'm
thinking, ‘This movie is playing very, very well.'"
Arianna Bocco, the acquisitions executive
from Miramax, was also there. She got on the phone right away,
trying to get in touch with the film's producers to
let them know Miramax was interested in buying the distribution
rights. Word got around Park City, and by the evening screening
"every studio was there," says McCarthy. Again,
a standing ovation followed the film. "If it wasn't
the best night of my life, it was certainly one of the great
ones," he says.
The next morning, business took over.
Producers talked to agents who got together with buyers who
phoned reps who powwowed with lawyers. All the while, the
movie continued to impress audiences. "The next thing
I hear, Harvey is coming in on the Miramax jet to screen the
movie privately," says McCarthy, referring to the cochairman
of Miramax, Harvey Weinstein.
Weinstein screened the movie in Salt
Lake City, met with McCarthy and his producers, and approved
an offer. After
an all-night legal meeting, The Station Agent became
a Miramax film for the reported price of $1.5 million. McCarthy
went back to the condo he was sharing with Dinklage and Cannavale
and woke them up. It was 5:30 a.m. "We had some scotch
and just laughed a lot," he says. "This was a
little movie made by a bunch of friends. What had happened
over the last few days was just surreal--you really just
had to laugh."
Since then, McCarthy's life has
been a swirl of film festivals, special screenings, and media
interviews. At a festival in San Sebastian, Spain, recently,
the filmmakers and actors were chased down the road by autograph
seekers after the movie was screened for 1,800 people. "It
was like Beatlemania," says Dinklage.
For all that has happened, McCarthy seems,
in his way, undistracted. He's concentrating on his
acting at the moment, and will appear with Alec Baldwin, Matthew
Broderick, and Calista Flockhart in The Last Shot,
a film comedy due out in 2004. He has a girlfriend, though
they haven't seen much of each other lately, which he
isn't very happy about, and a place in the Village in
New York.
McCarthy says he's not ready to
talk in detail about his next writing/directing effort. He
will say only that it's "something about academia."
Tim Townsend '91 is a writer based in New Haven, Connecticut.
Photos (from top):
Tom McCarthy at the Angelika Film Center, New York
City. By William Moree
Robert De Niro, Tom McCarthy, and Owen Wilson in Meet
the Parents (2000). By Phillip V. Caruso/Universal Studios
The Newfoundland train station. By Tom McCarthy
Peter Dinklage as Finbar McBride in The Station
Agent. Courtesy of Miramax Films
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