Q&A: 'THE RESIDENT' Creator Amy Holden Jones Looks Back at the Ups and Downs of Her Long Career (Part 1 of 2)
From turning down Steven Spielberg, to editing Hal Ashby's worst film, to directing a slasher for Roger Corman, the filmmaker had seemingly done it all before she was even thirty...
If the world’s biggest director called you up and asked you to edit his deeply personal fantasy film for him, I’m willing to bet you’d say yes. Most people would, in fact. Not Amy Holden Jones, whose career in Hollywood spans half a century now. When Steven Spielberg tried to recruit her to cut what would become for a time the most successful film in history, she decided to turn him down and direct her first film instead — a bold move that is only one of several she has made at professional crossroads, moves that would transform her life as an artist over and over again, keep her relevant when others might have seen their names fade from IMDb’s digital memory, and ultimately lead her to creating the wildly successful TV series “THE RESIDENT”1.
The Fox series ended its six-season run, after 107 episodes, this past January. It seemed like a good time to chat with Amy about it, but, for a cinephile like me, I have to admit I was far more interested in discussing her transformation from documentary filmmaker to in-demand editor during the American New Wave of the seventies, to her directorial debut THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982), and the systemic sexism that forced her to pivot into a nearly full-time career as a screenwriter in the nineties. She was so honest with me about the ups and downs and some of Hollywood’s darkest qualities — sometimes brutally so — it quickly became obvious that our epic conversation required two parts. Consequently, Part 2 will post in two days.
There is so much to learn from Amy’s sometimes traumatic, often infuriating, always inspirational journey — especially if you’re curious about what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood before we used words such as diversity and inclusivity.
COLE HADDON: This is a rare treat for me in this interview series because you have a career that spans a few chapters in Hollywood history, but also one that has fantastically evolved over the same number of years – most often around some very key moments. More, you’ve done it as a woman in an industry that did not always want you. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this conversation with me.
AMY HOLDEN JONES: I’m a bit worried about talking too much about myself, but eager to help. The arc of my career has seen many changes in how women are treated. Considerable progress has been made. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if the same doors now open for others had opened for me.
CH: Honestly, I don’t know how it hasn’t left you and so many other women – and people of color – screaming mad.
Let’s start by jumping back in time to college. For you, of course. That means Wellesley. When you arrived there, was your ambition purely photography — which I know was your passion — or was cinema already on your mind?
AHJ: I went to Wellesley specifically so I could study photography with Minor White at MIT. Wellesley students can take half their classes at MIT and MIT had one of the best photography departments in the country. In high school, I’d spent most of my time in my dark room. I made films also — short documentaries — but my first love was still photography.
CH: What was it like studying under White?
AHJ: He was the patron saint of large format black and white photography, a contemporary of Edward Weston and the author of THE ZONE SYSTEM MANUAL. He roamed the halls with his long white hair, often barefoot, in a clean t-shirt and drawstring pants, as calm and awe-inspiring as a bodhisattva. Classes were held in a large room with no furniture and boards for mounting images on every wall. He’d give an assignment and, when we completed it, we’d put our images up and he’d circle the room critiquing each one. The assignments were unique. For example, he told us to photograph “joy”. He wanted images that were emotional equivalents, not a representation of people experiencing joy.
Gradually, I realized the still image wasn’t enough for me. I wanted a story, too. In the film department, I soon found myself with a beautiful 16mm Éclair ACL on my shoulder.
CH: Do you recall how you responded to this direction?
AHJ: I remember him looking at my image for this assignment and shaking his head. Apparently, I’d photographed happiness, not joy. One highlight of my time studying with him was when he put a photo of mine on the wall in his office. I still have a print of that picture.
The entire experience was fantastic, but gradually, I realized the still image wasn’t enough for me. I wanted a story, too. In the film department, I soon found myself with a beautiful 16mm Éclair ACL on my shoulder.
CH: At this age, did you feel any kind of — I guess you’d call it — spiritual connection to the motion picture camera? What I mean is, was it immediately evident you had found your way home in some way?
AHJ: I used both super 8 and 16mm cameras when I made films in high school, but they didn’t steal my heart away from my beloved 35mm Leica M2-r. Once I held the 16mm Éclair ACL, however, I fell hard. It was a marvelous camera and a thing of beauty in itself. In cinema verité, the feeling as you shoot is incomparable. Your eye takes in the scene through the lens, selecting what you want to see, and the choice of where you look reveals both your subject and you. It’s a far more intimate and powerful connection than you get in fictional films, and it happens on the fly, like performance art, because you never know what will happen next. Documentaries shot on tripods, driven by research and scripts, don’t have this quality — although I love them. MY OCTOPUS TEACHER is more similar to the films I saw at MIT.
CH: Can you tell me more about how MIT’s documentary film department began to, say, seduce you away from photography?
AHJ: I wasn’t seduced away. I continued taking stills and working in my own darkroom for many years. But cinema verité was an emerging art and what it revealed was brand new. It was driven by a new technology, portable sync sound cameras. Technological innovation always drives innovation in the arts. There was no reality TV at that time, so these documentaries were startlingly unique.
These were the sort of films I wanted to make, and they had nothing in common with feature films.
CH: How so (for those who are unfamiliar with this chapter of cinema history)?
AHJ: Ricky Leacock [a founder of cinema verité and head of the film department] became a friend, an inspiration, and a mentor. His films — including PRIMARY, HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY, and CRISIS — were a revelation to me. PRIMARY is a rivetingly intimate look at a primary between Hubert Humphrey and JFK. CRISIS was about the Cuban missile crisis, and they shot in the White House, right at the seat of power the entire time. The camera got behind the scenes to a degree that would never happen today. HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY was about the first woman who had quintuplets. I saw these films as camera-based. The raw truth emerged by looking, listening, without preconceptions. These were the sort of films I wanted to make, and they had nothing in common with feature films.
CH: What happened after graduation?
AHJ: I had several interesting jobs in Boston. I made a short documentary for WGBH, worked in the cutting room of an NIH-funded autobiographical documentary, and I was briefly in Rome and Paris on different documentary crews. But there was little money in any of it and the work was intermittent. I realized people like the Maysles Brothers and Frederick Wiseman were independently wealthy. I was not. Documentaries were shot on film in those days and were expensive to make.
Unsure what to do, I took a crazy leap and wrote to Martin Scorsese care of Warner Brothers Studio when I’d learned he was prepping a new film. One of the documentaries I’d made at MIT had won the biggest student film festival in the country, and Scorsese was a judge. I asked him if he remembered my film A WEEKEND HOME and if he had any advice. He called me immediately when he got my letter and asked me to meet him in New York. A WEEKEND HOME is a dark and complex portrait of my parents. Not only did Marty remember it frame by frame, he told me that after seeing it he’d made a documentary about his own parents, ITALIANAMERICAN. Then he hired me to be his assistant on TAXI DRIVER. Obviously, I was stunned and delighted. I knew nothing about the feature world, and the experience was a master class. Scorsese let me simply watch and learn. Only a handful of people saw dailies, but I was one. He always treated me as a fellow filmmaker. It was a gift beyond price.
CH: Wow. Just wow.
AHJ: My passion for documentaries had to be abandoned for monetary reasons. One door had closed, but I’d climbed in a window to a whole new world. To this day, the eight weeks I spent on the set of TAXI DRIVER remain a highlight of my life.
CH: This feels like such a pivotal moment in your life, a clear before-and-after, that could’ve resulted in an entirely different you had you not written that letter. Has it felt that weighty in your memory of it, that consequential to your life, and did the result of that kind of audacity, that daring, impact how you made other decisions later in your career?
To this day, the eight weeks I spent on the set of TAXI DRIVER remain a highlight of my life.
AHJ: It was a pivotal moment in every way. It was an incredible stroke of luck. Few directors would have even answered my letter, much less become a mentor to a clueless young woman right out of school. Luck matters a great deal, but you also need to have work to show, an example of what you can do. I had made A WEEKEND HOME. The letter I wrote was nothing without that film. But the film wouldn’t have done much either if Marty hadn’t been the kind of man he is.
CH: What happened after TAXI DRIVER?
AHJ: I continued working at Warner Brothers as Marty’s assistant while he edited [it]. I saw every rough cut of the film. I was even in the cutting room when Tom Rolf showed him the first version of the brilliant “You talking to me!” scene. One day Roger Corman called Marty looking for an editor. Everyone at that time, including Scorsese, broke into features by making exploitation films for [Corman’s] New World Pictures. Jonathan Demme, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Towne, Jack Nicholson, and so many more started with Roger Corman.
Scorsese told me this was the logical next step and sent me to meet the directors, Joe Dante and Allan Arkush. And that is how I ended up cutting HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD when I was just twenty-two. It was non-union, but due to some strange videotape agreement I never understood, it got me into the union as a group one editor. I skipped entirely the step of having to be an assistant editor for many years, which was then the rule.
AHJ (cont’d): The next job I got was cutting the documentary AMERICAN BOY for Scorsese while he was shooting NEW YORK, NEW YORK on the old MGM lot in Culver City. This led me to editing CORVETTE SUMMER, an MGM feature that was cut at Skywalker Ranch. Spielberg and Lucas saw my work there and I had several great offers afterwards including THE BLACK STALLION RETURNS for Lucas and the wonderful film DINER. Hal Ashby had just won the Oscar for COMING HOME and was one of the most important directors working at the time. He also sent me a script. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t trust my own instincts. I couldn’t possibly know more than Hal Ashby, could I? So, I took the job cutting what was then called THE HAMPSTER OF HAPPINESS. Later it was renamed SECOND-HAND HEARTS. Ever heard of it?
CH: I can’t say that I have.
AHJ: No one has because it was one of the worst pictures ever made. Hal directed it right before he made BEING THERE. It’s a good illustration of how even the best filmmakers can get on a train that is off the rails from day one and end up going right over a cliff. I wasted a year of my life working on that film. When it was finally over, I took a break and had my first child.
CH: By my estimation, we should be approaching the next big turning point in your career, the next fork in the road. Which is, of course, THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE. How did that ultimately happen?
AHJ: When my daughter Emma was three months old, Spielberg called and asked me to cut E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL. I loved the script and was beyond thrilled. I’ll never forget that job interview. He was brilliant.
When my daughter Emma was three months old, Spielberg called and asked me to cut E.T. … [but] I began reassessing my path in life.
CH: Christ, what an opportunity.
AHJ: Yes, it was incredible. At this point, I was twenty-seven years old and still by far the youngest group one editor in Hollywood. Spielberg’s go-to editor, Michael Kahn, was occupied cutting POLTERGEIST, which everyone thought was the far more important film. E.T. was expected to be a small family picture. Spielberg’s attention when he hired me was very much on POLTERGEIST. That production was complex and was way over schedule. E.T. kept being pushed back. Meanwhile, I began reassessing my path in life.
AHJ (cont’d): I went back to Roger Corman to ask his advice on how I could one day get a chance to direct. He explained that if I was going to work for him, I had to prove I could make the kind of films he wanted to make. All his films needed at least one of three elements: humor, sex, or violence, and preferably all three.
CH: His best films always did.
AHJ: Nearly every blockbuster to this day has one of these elements. Every Tarantino film has all three. At this time, I was not a writer, but I needed a script to shoot. Rita Mae Brown had written a horror film for Roger titled DON’T OPEN THE DOOR and it was gathering dust on his shelf. I read the first ten pages and saw they contained a dialogue scene, a suspense scene, and plenty of action. I rewrote those pages to make them cost-effective, then I directed them using non-union actors and delivered a ten-minute reel to Roger of a script he owned. I saw it as nothing more than an example of what I could do. But after he screened the result, to my shock, he asked me to direct the film. I’d never even read the rest of the script!
CH: See, this is what I find so interesting about you. You created these opportunities for yourself, and in this case, it resulted in an offer to direct a feature film.
AHJ: Yes, that is true. I’d never expected what I’d done to result in an immediate offer, and, thus, conflict with my job on E.T. But it was an unheard-of opportunity for a young woman at that time in Hollywood.
CH: Absolutely. So, walk me through what happened next. You’ve got your first directing offer on one hand and, on the other, Steven Spielberg — as well as, I would imagine, a future as an in-demand editor and financial security.
AHJ: Yes, if I did this crazy little horror film, I’d be walking away from a lucrative editorial career and a chance to work with a cinematic genius to make a film about a man with a drill murdering young women at a slumber party. Even more confounding is the fact that when I read the rest of the script, I found it was a mess — violent, humorless, and lacking structure, the exact opposite of the beautiful script for E.T. Roger had asked me how much I needed for a budget, and I’d pulled a figure from mid-air — $200,000. That was incredibly low even by his standards. To give up the chance to cut E.T. and direct this film instead was by any measure insane. However, I believed that if I cut E.T., it would make me a top-tier editor in my twenties, and I’d be roped into working as an editor for a very long time. A chance to direct might never come again. Women simply did not get to direct in those days.
To give up the chance to cut E.T. and direct this film instead was by any measure insane … [but] a chance to direct might never come again. Women simply did not get to direct in those days.
CH: It honestly sounds like an artist’s SOPHIE’S CHOICE. How did you make the final decision?
AHJ: I now had a baby daughter. I thought that one day she would love E.T. and I might never be able to show her this horror film — I was totally wrong about this, by the way — but I am a risk taker and a rule breaker by nature. I believe we are remembered for the rules we break. So, with a heavy heart, I asked Spielberg if he’d release me from his beautiful film so that I could direct my first feature. Graciously, he said yes, and overnight I was in pre-production. Instead of being the woman at the side of the guy who is the boss, the person receiving footage I had not created, I now had to be the one to make that footage and turn it into a movie of my own. As I prepped and cast the picture, I rewrote the script from cover to cover — injecting new characters, set-piece scenes, structure, scares — and crucially, I changed the tone of the film. I had to make it funny, to take the sting off the violence.
CH: So, the first script you ever even read was TAXI DRIVER. We’re talking five or six years later now. For context, had you attempted to write anything else besides the work you’d done on the first ten pages of the script you shot a reel for? Or had you at least been dabbling with the craft by this point?
AHJ: Yes, I had tried a little. I attempted to adapt a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It wasn’t a success. I believe several things helped me make the transition this time. Roger had all his directors take acting lessons with a famous teacher, Jeff Corey. Those acting lessons taught me what went into the kind of scene an actor wants to play. Also, I wasn’t staring at a blank page, I was rewriting. That is far easier than doing the first draft, even if you never look at the original script again. Finally, I was going to film this thing in a matter of days. That focused the mind considerably.
“There’s nothing wrong with safe.” Wrong. There’s a great deal wrong with safe. There are no great films, and there is no great television that are “safe”.
CH: I can imagine. So, what happened when you handed in the new draft of the script to Corman?
AHJ: He read it and said, “You can do this. You can write.”
CH: I just got misty, imagining what that validation must have been like for you, especially in an industry I would call pretty anti-woman at that point. How did you feel when he uttered those words?
AHJ: I was thrilled, but also at peace. If Roger said it, the script must be okay. I trusted him. The truly great thing about him is he can tell good from bad. That sounds like a simple thing. It is not. Many times, including quite recently, I’ve seen executives pick projects I know will not work over ones I believe would be a hit. Roger could spot talent. That’s obvious from all the great careers that began with him. Once he saw it, he used it, advanced it, and promoted it again and again. And he had another quality of a great producer — he had the courage to roll the dice. An executive who I knew just chose a derivative script over a better-written draft, recently told me, “There’s nothing wrong with safe.” Wrong. There’s a great deal wrong with safe. There are no great films, and there is no great television that are “safe”.
CH: I couldn’t agree more. This instinct has always terrified me in producers. So, what happened next?
AHJ: E.T. existed without me, cut by the talented hands of Carol Littleton whose reputation was made by the film. When I saw it, I loved it, but I had no regrets, even when it became a cultural touchstone and massive hit. It had come into the world without me. My being there would have made no difference. SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE was mine and it worked. Roger was thrilled with the film and wanted me to do another one for him. It was official, I was a director, and although I adore working in my own cutting rooms, I would never work as an editor for someone else again.
Part 2 of my conversation with Amy will show up in your inboxes on Thursday, June 8th (be sure to subscribe for free if you haven’t already). In the next installment, we discuss the systemic sexism in Hollywood that hobbled her directing aspirations, how she picked up the pieces through screenwriting, and, of course, her TV career and “THE RESIDENT”.
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“THE RESIDENT” was co-created by Amy Holden JOnes, Hayley Schore, and Roshan Sethi