The Wild Card

I

It’s midnight and the phone is ringing. The voice on the other end is wide-awake and familiar. It’s Jeremy Piven, scene-stealing star of HBO’s smash hit Entourage, and he wants to talk about Sacramento filmmaker Joe Carnahan, who just directed him in the brand-new, mayhem-drenched action/black comedy flick Smokin’ Aces.

In fact, he has some ideas on how to lead off my story on Carnahan. “The phone rings at a million o’clock,” he begins. “And it’s fucking Piven. That drunken bastard!”

 I like it.

Piven has reason to be in a good mood. A week earlier, he was nominated for a Golden Globe for his role as Entourage’s deliciously profane agent Ari Gold. He’s as hot as they come in Hollywood these days, and the fact that he’s just finished working on a film with Carnahan, a former promotions producer at a Sacramento news station, isn’t remotely out of the ordinary. Not when you consider that Piven’s co-stars in the new film include the likes of Ben Affleck, Alicia Keys, Andy Garcia, Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds.

What is remarkable is that five long years after the gritty cop drama Narc  established Carnahan as a hot Hollywood property, his name hasn’t appeared in celluloid once until now. But in a town with a famously short attention span, he seems to have every bit the buzz he did then. A quick look at his schedule and the megawatt talent that he’ll be working with, and one thing is clear: 2007 is his  year.

Carnahan’s story is one of nagging ambition, reckless abandon, relentless writing, Cinderella highs, development-hell lows, shaky financing, dangling carrots, broken alliances, perseverance and resiliency. Career predictions are as precarious as a tee shot into a fog bank, but Carnahan has run a formidable gauntlet through the Hollywood system and emerged battered, but nowhere near beaten. 

After making headlines as the guy who did not  make Mission: Impossible III  after bumping heads with Tom Cruise and His People, Carnahan is making movies once again and is a magnet for top-shelf stars and high-profile productions. 

In addition to completing Aces  last year, Carnahan co-wrote Pride and Glory, a cop scandal picture with Colin Farrell and Edward Norton, which will be released this year, and a pilot called The Double  for NBC. He is writing and directing a remake of Bunny Lake Is Missing  as a Reese Witherspoon vehicle that should be in production by mid-March.

Carnahan has also provided recent DVD commentaries for the new Dirty Harry  boxed set, as well as special editions of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner  and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas  from a passionate fan’s perspective. In fact, his most prized possession is now a framed thank-you letter from Scorsese that also says how much he admires Narc. 

He also has a November start date for White Jazz, the sequel to L.A. Confidential, starring George Clooney. He will direct from a script written by his younger brother Matthew Michael Carnahan, whom he nudged into screenwriting during a road trip initiated when 9/11 led to the cancellation of an early Narc  screening.

Matthew’s first two sold scripts went unproduced, but he is beginning to rival brother Joe as a go-to scenarist. He’s finished the thriller The Kingdom  starring Jamie Foxx and Jennifer Garner, which will be released in April; an adaptation of the BBC series State of Play  for Brad Pitt; and Lions for Lambs, a military thriller set in Afghanistan, with Robert Redford directing Joe’s former boss Cruise, along with Meryl Streep.

The Coen brothers had better watch out.

But it took a lot of fits and starts to get to this point. “Hollywood can be a lethal place,” says Joe, “and as quickly as you are a cause célèbre, you are a casualty. I had to dig myself out of the M:I-3  experience and it took some time. Now I’ve got two films back to back, and life is once again a beautiful thing.” 

Casa de Sacramento

So just before Christmas, we visited the resuscitated filmmaker’s clay-brown, Southwestern-style home just north of the American River, where Carnahan spends a couple of days out of the month. He refers to it as his “Mexican railroad station.”

Carnahan, who is 6’2” and a stocky 240 pounds, is barefoot in faded blue jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. He sports a goatee and is regrowing hair that’s been shaved for nearly a decade. (“I thought I should invite it back in for a bit, before it rots silver on me,” he says.) For a photo shoot, Carnahan changed into a white robe with the emblem for the faux Nomad Hotel in Lake Tahoe, where the bulk of Smokin’ Aces  takes place.

We pass through a stone arch into a cavernous living area of open beams and tiled flooring that could, in fact, readily double as a train depot. To the left are an L-shaped white sectional couch, fireplace and large reddish boulder. A Middle Earth pinball machine lurks behind a wall divider and Gus Van Sant’s photo album 108 Portraits  sits on a coffee table. But the pièce de résistance is the sloping 6-by-24-foot indoor swimming pool. “The place could’ve been crumbling at the foundations and the second I saw that pool, I would’ve screamed ‘ESCROW!’” says Carnahan.

There are several smaller rooms in the home. Carnahan’s sleeping chamber includes a bidet and a sunken tub. One bathroom has a sauna. And there are separate bedrooms for Carnahan’s 11-year-old daughter and 9-year-old son who recently relocated to L.A. with their mom, Joe’s ex, to spend more time with him. Their mom also has a home here; the kids spend time with both parents and like to venture to Fair Oaks Park with their dad to play soccer and toss a baseball.

A small weight and speed-bag room is at the far right end of the “depot.” “Hitting that bag,” says Carnahan, “puts me in a peculiar mental state where I can step outside myself and experience a focus that is rare for me. I’m sure I have all the de rigueur traits of someone with ADD, so it helps me find the center of something and stay there. I also think it really clears my head and puts me into a strong creative mood.”

Even though Carnahan doesn’t spend much time in Sacramento these days, it’s still home, and has been for nearly 20 years. He was born in Dover, Delaware, 37 years ago, but he spent his pre-teen years in Shepherd, Michigan, and his teen years near Sacramento in Fairfield, where his parents still live. He moved to Sacramento when he was 19.

“I was really piecemealing it,” Carnahan says about his early days here. He worked for Rancho Cordova–based Mee’s Moving & Storage, commuted to San Francisco State for film courses, and attended Sacramento State. “It was funny,” he says. “The best film courses I took were not by the film instructors but by Roger Vail, who used to teach Art 169 [at Sac State]. If I had one instructor who really went the extra mile in terms of giving his students a real vested interest in film, it was Professor Vail.”

Carnahan earned a B.A. with a double major in English and Film Studies and landed a job at Channel 31. There, at age 26, he used the equipment in his off hours to grind out the micro-budget crime feature Blood Guts Bullets & Octane  with local talent, crew and locations. The violent, darkly comic film involves a maniacal secret, two flaky used-car salesmen (Carnahan and local actor Dan Leis) and a mysterious 1963 Pontiac LeMans.

A 1997 screening at a New York film market (where filmmakers pay to have their films screened) and a rave review of the $7,300 film in the Village Voice  led to representation by the William Morris Agency. Next Wave, a company providing finishing funds to independent films, plowed $100,000 into Blood  after it was accepted for non-competitive screenings at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Suddenly, Carnahan had a calling card for Hollywood.

Carnahan recalls Blood  as a great experience because all parties were kids just doing it for fun. But he’s since lost contact with some key Blood  associates. And Short Fuze Films, under which Carnahan and co-star Leis planned to produce more movies, never crystallized.

“I think we had different ideas about how we wanted to do stuff and this never jelled in the way that made sense,” says Carnahan. “And so we kind of went our separate ways. You reach a creative impasse. It doesn’t matter if it’s guys in town or it’s fucking Tom Cruise. It’s like, when you are done with somebody, you are done. You’ve got to know when to walk away.” Leis had no comment for this story.

Blood  cinematographer John Alexander Jimenez says he made brief contact with Joe at a Sacramento Narc premiere. “The last thing I knew he shaved his head and changed his numbers and recreated himself,” says Jimenez. “That’s about it.”

And Leon Corcos, who has producer credits on both Blood  and Ticker  (a short film Carnahan directed for an acclaimed BMW-sponsored film series), doesn’t mince words, either. “I didn’t know the guy still lived in the area,” he says. “Tragic thing is, I used to consider him the younger brother I never had. I used to call up and pretend to be Santa Claus to his children. As far as I know he moved to L.A. three years ago and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. I guess la-la land does that to people. He used to always say, ‘Dude, if I ever become one of those L.A. pricks, promise me you’ll let me know.’ So I did. He stopped returning my calls.”

For his part, Carnahan sees the split very differently. “He knows exactly why that relationship is no longer intact,” says Carnahan. “I don’t like back-biting or bad-mouthing and I don’t keep friends or acquaintances around who engage in it either.”

That said, Carnahan clearly isn’t afraid to mix it up when it comes to defending his work. Blood  received mixed reviews in the media, and Carnahan fired back at several detractors, even calling up one critic and telling him: “Here is the bottom line. My life will be spent making movies. Your  life will be spent writing about mine.”

“He wants to go right at people,” says Carnahan’s brother Matthew. “He absolutely takes it personally. And I think that is Joe’s greatest strength and greatest weakness. It morphs into him going after critics individually, but it can also morph into him writing a script like Killing Pablo, which is still one of the very best scripts I’ve read.” Killing Pablo  is a script that Joe has been trying to make into a film for years but that has moved to the back burner for now.

On the outside, Matthew is as mild mannered as they come, whereas Joe has a passion and an intensity that he wears on his sleeve. Do people ever ask Matthew how he’s so nice when Joe is so over-the-top at times?

 “Yeah,” says Matthew. “But then they read what I wrote and they’re like ‘Jesus Christ, you’re even more disturbed than your brother. You’ve got this Ted Bundy vibe, too, because it’s like you’re sporting a Lacoste shirt, but I’m reading the script where someone is slowly being beheaded by a blunt object.’ So, there’s that.”

 That must be music to their mother’s ears.

 “Oh, my God,” says Matthew. “My mom. My poor mom. My poor Catholic mother. I don’t think she has any idea what to make of it. I think she is beside herself with the success we’ve had but, my God, I think she’d like nothing more than for us to write a movie that stars Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson. The year’s most touching romantic comedy. I really think she is waiting for our Disney turn—and, Mom, it’s never going to come.”

 After Blood, Disney was certainly not waiting in the wings for Joe. In fact, despite the minor buzz generated by his low-budget debut, he had trouble getting another film into production. He finally resurrected the idea of a dark, psychological cop thriller called Narc  that had been germinating since his college days, and he pounded on a script for nearly 10 months. 

The Big Break

 Narc  circulated as a script for three years before it got a break when actor Ray Liotta became attached as producer and star. It was completed in February 2001 and screened a year later at Sundance. Its retro 1970s grit earned positive word of mouth and a nomination for the Grand Jury Prize in drama, but no distributor. Private screenings on the Bel Air circuit, however, attended by such celebrities as Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty, created a buzz loud enough to attract Tom Cruise, who bought Narc  for release by Paramount. Carnahan had graduated from flavor of the month to legitimate industry contender.

 Offers started popping out of the tinsel. Carnahan was flown in to Harrison Ford’s Wyoming ranch to discuss a film project called A Walk Among the Tombstones, but the project and Carnahan were a mismatch. “I didn’t want a story where I thought the character’s only motivation for doing something was money,” says Joe. “He just didn’t see it my way. And so you just got to say, ‘OK, it was nice seeing you.’”

In 2002, the buzz from Narc  landed Carnahan what might at first seem like a step backward: a commercial. But this wasn’t exactly your typical commercial. He was hired by Ridley Scott Associates, run by the legendary director Ridley Scott (Blade Runner, Gladiator, Alien) to direct a short, nine-minute film for a prestigious BMW Web site film series. For it, he wrote and directed Ticker, featuring Clive Owen. The other directors that participated? John Woo (Broken Arrow, Face/Off), Tony Scott (Top Gun, Deja Vu), Guy Ritchie (Snatch), Ang Lee (The Ice Storm, Brokeback Mountain) and the late John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate, French Connection II). 

Scott, who co-owns the production company with his brother Tony, hired Carnahan to make more commercials. And Joe says he’s done about five commercials per year since for such clients as Nintendo and Net-Zero. “It’s a blast,” he says, “and the money you make is so sensationally over the top, I can’t recommend it strongly enough unless you get a bad agency that crawls up your ass over everything.”

Carnahan also had the opportunity to cap one meeting with Ridley Scott with a total film-geek moment.

“I ate dinner with him in France a couple of years ago,” Carnahan says. “We had both been drinking red wine and we are talking about Blade Runner  and I just asked point blank: ‘Is Deckard, Harrison Ford’s character, is he an android, is he a replicant, or is he human?’ Ridley said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘I think there is a shot that you used where he has the same reflection in his eyes as Daryl Hannah.’ And Ridley says he was a replicant. He didn’t have their strength because he thought he was human. The  guy who made it told me he is. What a fucking moment, man.” 

In the years after Narc, Carnahan’s association with Cruise was also evolving. Based on his newfound street cred, he landed one of the biggest gigs in Hollywood. Cruise’s production company hired him to write and direct Mission: Impossible III. “I told them,” says Carnahan, “if you guys want to do a really punk rock version of this genre, that’s what we will do. Tom was really into it, but it became like the law of diminishing returns.”

He co-wrote 35 pages that Cruise and the studio seemed to love. He then worked on and reworked the full script from March 2003 to July 2004, making trips to Africa to scout locations and conducting camera tests in Germany. But the project stalled before a single real frame was shot.

What the hell were Cruise and company thinking?

“Well, I’ll tell you what I was thinking,” says Joe. “The Mission: Impossible  I wanted to do wasn’t one superstar and four assistants. It was five people working together. That was the TV show. I said this the entire time. I really wanted to do something I thought would trump the Bourne  series.”

“I called Tom from Germany and actually rolled a video camera on myself when I called to quit,” Joe says. “I videotaped myself because I was so flipped out. I was going to entitle it Joe’s Career Is Fucking Over. I said ‘Listen, you know, it’s your face on the poster, it’s your name on the poster, Paramount is giving you the money. You got to do things the way you want them done. It’s not going to work for me.’ ”

Cruise’s response, according to Carnahan? “OK, buddy. I understand.” 

“The analogy I always make on that movie,” says Carnahan, “is that somebody is inviting you out to the street to have a gunfight and you just shoot the fucker in the saloon. You know what I mean? I do not think I was long for that process. I believe I did them before they did me.”

“I have no ill will toward Tom,” he says. “I have ill will toward people in that process who I won’t name who are close to him that God help them if I ever fucking catch them in an intersection and there’s a light change. They are going under the car or fucking over it. All this sounds like I am wound up about it and it’s like…. What I don’t like is, I don’t like unavenged. I don’t like having this idea that there are people involved in that process who I consider being shitty human beings. They know who they are. One in particular, she knows exactly who she is. Sabotage. Just sabotage.”

I asked Lew Harris, the editorial director of Disney-owned Movies.com, and former entertainment editor of People  magazine, about the impact of M:I-3  on Carnahan’s career.

 “It happens all the time,” he says about the parting of ways, “and I don’t think it’s hurt his reputation at all. At the time that it happened, the glitter was already off of Cruise. And when you look at what happened, [Carnahan] sort of has the reputation of being a maverick, so in a sense it maybe enhanced  his reputation.”

“Basically, there’s still a lot of spin to his name,” adds Harris. “Eventually you can blow it, but look at the cast he gets for Smokin’ Aces. He’s getting huge, huge names, and I’m hearing that people working with him liked working with him. The only thing that’s going to hurt him, really, is going to be a few bad movies or marrying Madonna and putting her in his movies. Guy Ritchie had this exact reputation, and then he got involved with her.”

The Comeback

After the M:I-3  implosion, Carnahan returned to writing. He revisited the original 30-page script for Smokin’ Aces  that he had written in 1993. “I sold those pages to [production company] Working Title right after Narc  because I desperately needed the money, and they were kind enough to stick with me while I frolicked in the field of the big movie star.”

Aces  reflects Carnahan’s fascination with Frank Sinatra and his proximity to the mob. “Was he a bag man for Lucky Luciano?” he asks. “Was he running money to Cuba? Did he and Giancana conspire to win JFK West Virginia? You know what I mean? All that shit. I always thought it’d be interesting if Frank decided one day to parlay his status as a massive all-powerful kind of entertainer to become a mob boss. That’s the genesis of the idea.”

Carnahan nurtured that seed into a story about how oily cabaret illusionist and wannabe mobster Buddy “Aces” Israel (Piven) works his way into the good graces of the mob and a criminal enterprise all his own. Word leaks that he may be cooperating with the Feds, so a mob boss offers $1 million to silence him. Israel hides out in the penthouse of a South Lake Tahoe casino, and seven assassins, three bounty hunters and a phalanx of FBI agents converge on him, with all eyes on a huge jackpot.

One huge influence on the film is the Coen brothers. “If you want to see the direct ancestor of Smokin’ Aces, it’s Raising Arizona,” says Carnahan, “and the Piven character is the baby. Everybody’s going for that goddamn baby.”

Joe says it was the muscular script that lured Ryan Reynolds, Andy Garcia, the rapper Common, Ben Affleck, Peter Berg, Alicia Keys and Jason Bateman to the party. Each character has an isolated dramatic moment amidst all the carnage. And Carnahan injects several mighty bizarre scenes that should spark lively conversations around the office water cooler.

The entire South Lake Tahoe shoot took three weeks of the total 40-week shoot with Caesar’s Palace (now the Montbleu Resort Casino & Spa) doubling as the Nomad Casino, which becomes a massive shooting gallery. A look-alike set was created in Los Angeles for most of the mayhem.

As for the Tahoe location: “It’s horribly underused and fantastically scenic,” says Carnahan. “I loved it there. I also like the paradox that despite its epic beauty, it’s considered the bottom of the barrel in terms of entertainers and entertainment venues.”

But whether the scenes were shot on location or in the studio was less important than the on-set vibe. “I try to create an environment, as much as I possibly can, where people want  to be there and do really great work,” says Carnahan. “One of the first things we do is get Polaroids of everybody on the crew and I put them on my wall. I know everybody’s fucking name on that set. Everybody’s.”

But one guy Joe doesn’t need a Polaroid for is Christopher Holley, who met Carnahan while managing security at the Sacramento club Avalon. Joe cast him as Israel’s bodyguard Beanie. They’ve since become good friends. For the Sacramento premiere of Smokin’ Aces  on January 14, Joe showed up with Piven to a fundraiser to help raise money for a foundation that Holley and his siblings started to both honor their father, a former teacher, and help disadvantaged kids with their studies. 

“It’s like a party,” Holley says of the Aces  set. “Joe plays music in between the scenes. He’s on the microphone cracking jokes. I’ve never met anybody who had such a diverse collection of music. I mean from playing the theme of Star Wars  to heavy metal rock to hip-hop to classical and showing appreciation for it all. He had his iPod hooked up to the PA systems. You almost felt at times you were in a club because the crew would be setting up for another scene and everyone would be dancing and feeling good.”

“I mean, people cried  at the wrap party, man,” Holley says. “Common got on the mic and did a rap with Smokin’ Aces  characters in it and Carnahan’s name in it. It was like graduating from high school.”

When it comes to cast appreciation, the star of the film backs Holley up. “On other sets, you have to create  the Carnahan energy,” says Piven. “Joe is the kind of guy who, no matter what you throw out there—from ridiculous pop culture references to Noam Chomsky—he gets  it. The guy is always the smartest guy in the room, the hardest worker, plays the hardest, and I am so completely thrilled that I even know the guy, much less got a chance to work with him.”

“Also,” he adds, “he is just really  funny. If he was a woman, I’d marry him. Maybe that’s why I’m still single.”