Back in control

Errol Morris hits the Sundance jackpot

This isn't exactly a disinterested piece. My significant-other-of-a-girlfriend edited the final versions of the film. Still, congratulations to Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris, whose Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control was huge and boffo at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival. Janet Maslin bubbled over in the New York Times, calling the documentary "strange and wonderful" and Morris "a brilliantly idiosyncratic filmmaker." Sony Classics purchased theatrical rights for a lovely six-figure price, and Roger Ebert gave a speech at the Sundance premiere about how much he liked the film, following the audience's standing ovation.

It's the film that Morris, the highly regarded documentarian of The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History of Time, seemed unable to finish. For four tedious years he struggled with the melding into one feature of four peculiar documentary stories: of a topiary gardener, a mole-rat expert, a lion tamer, and an MIT robotics scientist. This was his oft-repeated joke about the backfiring of the film's unwieldy title: "Well, it's not fast, it's not cheap, but it's certainly out of control!"

As late as September, he was ready to let the air out of the movie and ship a video-only version straight to public TV. But during the fall, with tweakings after private and semi-public previews, Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control started to work. "Each screening, it got better," Morris explains at his Central Square office. "Finally, before Sundance, at Williams College everyone seemed to get it. They were entertained and moved."

What had changed? In earlier versions, he intercut his stories like crazy, almost Natural Born Killers style. In recent cuts, he says, "There are longer sections with the characters, letting each talk, until it sinks in."

Morris generously credits his editor, Karen Schmeer, and his music composer, Caleb Sampson, for "playing really big roles in pulling the movie together. Karen always insisted on the visuals having some kind of coherence, not just be things to cut together. Caleb's music has cemented the disparate elements."

A Sundance invitation motivated Morris to gamble big money on making a 35mm version for the Park City (Utah) showing. Even without a distributor. "However, as Sundance approached, Michael Barker of Sony Classics indicated he really wished to buy the picture, sight unseen. He wanted Sony to distribute `an Errol Morris film.'

"When I arrived at Sundance and went for breakfast, all sorts of people at another table were negotiating my deal: lawyers, my agency, people from Sony. The contract was finished before the screening at the Egyptian. We were going to sign in the lobby, but I thought that Sony's Tom Bernard and I might as well go into the men's room. I signed it on top of the towel dispenser."

How much better than Morris's miserable time at Park City in 1979, before it was called Sundance. He came, an unknown, with Gates of Heaven. The now-classic pet-cemetery appreciation was his first film, and the event was the fledgling USA Film Festival.

"I went to show Gates of Heaven at the same theater, the Egyptian. It was a very cold winter night, and there was a snowstorm. There were about four people in the audience, including myself. I didn't introduce the film, and there was no Q&A. Nobody knew I made the film.

"I was staying in some condo and there was no ride arranged. So afterward I was in the street hitchhiking, and this car with the other three people picked me up. They had come all the way from Provo to see Gates of Heaven. They were disappointed, hated it. I sympathized with them and said, 'I hated it, too. What a waste of time!' "

SHERMAN'S MARCH, Brookline filmmaker Ross McElwee's 1986 cross-America search for love, ended with his getting involved with a charming Harvard divinity student. Did they marry? McElwee's 1993 documentary sequel, Time Indefinite, showed that he did even better, tying the knot with Marilyn Levine, a graceful brunette with a silent-screen actress's aura.

Levine has made her own film, Life, Death, & Baseball (February 7 and 9 at the Harvard Film Archive), a touching, skillful, subtly emotional memoir in which she sets her worrywart personality against the winning disposition of her sister, Adrienne. But rosiness wasn't enough for Adrienne, and neither was love for major-league baseball. She died at age 16 of cancer.

Decades later the death still is felt in the Levine family. Marilyn examines the hurt in poignant interviews with her very nice parents. But the film's deepest moments come when she travels with her camera to talk with former Yankee hurler Rollie Sheldon (he also pitched for the Kansas City Athletics and finally the Red Sox). Adrienne had been president of his fan club.

For Sheldon, the glory days are gone. Standing tall among used cars in a Kansas City lot, the big leaguer's still straight, dignified, imposing, but sad, too -- as much of an American icon as melancholy Henry Fonda.