A rarely seen David Bowie romcom gets a new life

NEW YORK – Even the late English rock star David Bowie’s biggest fans might be unaware of his solitary foray into romantic comedy, and for good reason.

It was barely released in 1992 and had been all but impossible to see. Now, its director has restored, reclaimed and recut the film in question, The Linguini Incident, which made its Blu-ray debut on July 23.

Richard Shepard, 59, was only 25 when he directed the quirky, New York-set indie, which was his solo feature directorial debut. (He directed an earlier film, “Cool Blue,” alongside Mark Mullin.)

As was typical of the era, the low budget was gathered from multiple sources. “The whole movie was financed very weirdly,” Shepard said in a Zoom interview. “We had home-video money and foreign sales money and mysterious money – a lot of mysterious money.”

His first casting coup came early, when he landed American actress Rosanna Arquette, already a star with After Hours (1985) and Desperately Seeking Susan (1985) on her resume.

So, what made her take a chance on this young novice? “I loved the script,” Arquette said in a phone interview. “I just thought it was well-written and funny...and then, lo and behold, we had David Bowie, so that was really exciting.”

Shepard sent the script to Bowie on a lark, with the idea that he and fellow English rock legend Mick Jagger could play the film’s flamboyant restaurateurs.

“We naively just sent it to them, to play those small parts, with no money offered,” Shepard recalled. “We get this note back from Bowie saying, ‘I’m interested in your movie, but I don’t want to play that supporting role. I would like to play the lead.’”

Bowie wanted to play Monte, a British bartender at a hip, downtown restaurant who tries to talk one of his co-workers, the aspiring escape artist Lucy (Arquette), into a green-card marriage, but is instead sidetracked into helping her rob their employers.

Marlee Matlin, Eszter Balint, Buck Henry and Andre Gregory were among the cast; future Oscar nominee Thomas Newman would compose the score, and Robert Yeoman, Wes Anderson’s go-to cinematographer, was behind the camera. The film was shot over 30 days in 1990.

“He was just so great on the set,” Arquette said of Bowie. “Loved working with him, and loved his energy, and his ability to just be able to connect in the moment – which is the dream for an actor.”

The easy-breezy, collaborative nature of the shoot did not extend to its post-production. Shepard had only five weeks to turn in an edit, so his cut was more of a rough assembly.

“I had a list of things I wanted to change,” he explained but, because he was a powerless rookie film-maker, the movie was cut without his supervision.

“There’s weird jump cuts, takes going on too long,” he said. “It didn’t have any pace.”

That 98-minute version was unceremoniously dumped into US theatres in the spring of 1992. An even longer cut was released in Europe.

Reviews ran the gamut, from The New York Times’ Ms Janet Maslin, who called it a “cheerfully bizarre comedy”, to Variety magazine’s Mr Lawrence Cohn, who deemed it an “uninspired, poverty row production”.

But the reviews did not matter – no one showed up. It certainly did not help that the picture hit screens in Los Angeles as the city was under a curfew because of violent protests over the acquittal of police officers who were caught on tape beating police brutality victim Rodney King. The Linguini Incident faded into obscurity.

Shepard’s career took off. He directed, among others, Irish star Pierce Brosnan in The Matador (2005), English actor Jude Law in Dom Hemingway (2013) and American actress Allison Williams in The Perfection (2018).

But the bad aftertaste of that early effort lingered for the film-maker. “This is the only movie that my name is on that isn’t my cut of the film,” he said.

Until now. Three years ago, Sarah Jackson, one of the film’s producers, contacted Shepard and suggested they reacquire the rights to The Linguini Incident, recut it to match Shepard’s original vision and release it on disc and streaming for the first time.

That was easier said than done. The film’s original production companies and financiers had long since folded or gone bankrupt; they had sold the film’s rights to other companies that had also gone belly-up.

The film-makers were saved by a Variety search. A 2004 article revealed that Linguini was one of seven movies whose copyrights had been claimed by the Screen Actors Guild because of nonpayment of residuals to actors. After a protracted negotiation, Shepard and Jackson made a deal with the guild to buy back the rights.

But all that the guild owned was the copyright. When film-makers like Ridley Scott or Francis Ford Coppola assemble a director’s cut, they have the original elements – dailies, negatives, earlier assemblies, separate soundtracks – to work with. In this case, those materials were long gone, scattered to the winds in that flurry of closures and bankruptcies.

Shepard could not even find a 35 mm print, the bare necessity for the 4K scan he would need to begin working; he finally stumbled upon an art theatre in Zurich that had screened a print a few years earlier, which connected him with a British distributor that held the European rights to the film.

And to make new prints, if needed, that distributor had a 35 mm interpositive – a duplicate negative, “nearly pristine”, Shepard explained, “mostly because they never ran a lot of prints, so it wasn’t scratched or anything”.

Since that interpositive was for the longer, European version of the picture, the 4K scan gave Shepard more to work with. “In the recut,” Shepard said, “I was able to pace it up and get rid of all the weird jump cuts that didn’t seem to work. And then with the new technology of 4K, I was able to add zooms and reframe and give it an energy that helps tell this oddball story.” NYTIMES