An interview with Jim Hemphill about his BAD REPUTATION
August 10th, 2007 by Scott Marks
An interview with Jim Hemphill about his Bad Reputation
How many of you can boast that you had a movie character named after you receive oral sex in a car?
See what kind of an onscreen tribute a teacher is afforded when he befriends a star student? Director Jim Hemphill and I met in my History of Cinema class at Chicago’s Columbia College and for the next four years he became my exclusive projectionist. This kid could focus a film so sharp you could slice London Broil with it.
From the outset there was something different about Jim. He has a boyish look about him that caused several classmates to dub him “Doogie Howser.” In spite of a well scrubbed, inexhaustibly gentile demeanor, once could instantly detect a sense of slumming cinematic enlightenment oozing from the boy.
First off, unlike many of his contemporaries Jim actually watched and enjoyed films made prior to 1990. He held Spielberg in contempt and elevated Scorsese to His rightfully lofty position.Jim is fearless in the face of bad cinema and I could always count on him to accompany me to films that no one in their right minds would dare see. In class it was all Hitchcock and Welles, while at the multiplex contemptuous slop like The Jerky Boys
While an LA Times interview cites Brian DePalma’s Carrie as a prime inspiration, all I could think of while watching Bad Reputation was Roger Corman’s New World pictures.
My tastes are kind of all over the place,” Jim said before stopping a moment. “With this movie I guess I proved Truffaut’s dictum that a first film is a mad rush in which the filmmaker tries to cram everything that he likes.” Forget about Francois, what about Corman? “Comparing my film to the output at New World Pictures is the most gratifying compliment you could ever give me,” Jim replied in a rare moment of humility. “The whole time I was shooting Bad Reputation I was aspiring to follow in the footsteps of (Jonathan) Demme, Stephanie Rothman, George Armitage, and other Corman auteurs.”
After a sigh, Jim adds, “Of course, by the time the shoot was done I
was just happy to have the camera in focus and aimed at the actors.”
Trying to slip in a curve ball I asked, “Abel Ferrara’s gag man Nick St. John or Scorsese’s scribe Paul Schrader. Who would win in a street fight?”
Gathering his composure Jim hit it out of the park by answering, “Catholics can kick Calvinists’ asses any day, so Nick St. John.”
Although weaned on a wide variety of prestigious world cinema, Hemphill is no film snob. Look beside the Ulmer’s and Anotnioni’s on his DVD shelf and you find equally adored copies of such monumental turds as Bring it On, Knute Rockne: All American, Private School and Ryan’s Daughter
Why did Jim decide on a grade ‘B’ horror film as his maiden genre? “It kind of chose me,” he laughed. “I had written other scripts and tried to get them going over the years, but nothing ever happened. Then I got hooked up with this guy who ran a low-budget horror and softcore company (among his illustrious titles was Babes 2: Lost in Beaver Creek), and got the opportunity to do a teen slasher film. We ended up falling out and I did the movie independently, but the ball was set in motion.”
Jim came to the film through a “kind of a convergence of reading about the whole cultural phenomenon of the “school slut” in America, and racking my brain to try to come up with something that was both a commercial slasher film AND intelligent AND in the tradition of those New World Pictures we talked about earlier.”
The film began on a miniscule $10,000 budget that burgeoned to $50,000 which Jim “squeezed out of my father a few thousand at a time. The movie was originally set to be produced by a Bowfinger-esque production outfit in L.A., but when that fell apart I convinced my Dad to come on as an investor so I could shoot the movie I had already cast and scheduled.”
How does a young filmmaker, forced to scrape the money together in order to complete his project, feel after watching millions being poured into mindless multiplex filler? “I have no tolerance for contemptible crap like Hot Rod,” Jim says between gritted teeth. “After busting my ass to make a feature for less than the price of Lorne Michaels’ toilet paper. I—and a lot of other struggling directors I know—could make fifty decent movies for what the studios spend on junk like that.”
My hours at the lectern were well spent. In closing, I had to ask Jim the one piece of everlasting wisdom he took from my class?
He was quick to respond: “That It’s okay to like The Rules of the Game, and it’s okay to like Evil Dead 2”
And what, pray tell, was the greatest piece of misinformation I disseminated to my students?
This time the response came equipped with a mean-spirited chortle: “That John Woo and Jackie Chan are Japanese filmmakers.”
What do I know from anything other than film?
The cast & crew will be on hand for a follow-up Q&A. Tickets are available at www.americancinematheque.com
DVD Release Date: August 7, 2007
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