'Fallen' director can get up

By Scott Foundas
Film Editor

"I'll do my best to overcome my essential prejudice."
Those are the first words out of Gregory Hoblitt's mouth as he enters a room in a Beverly Hills hotel, where he has spent the whole day busily promoting his new film, "Fallen," starring Denzel Washington. After all, what else would you expect to hear from a UCLA graduate about to sit down to an interview with a reporter from his alma mater's archrival?
That initial tension is soon cast aside, however, and replaced by a relaxed charm that indicates Hoblitt is very happy to be, for the moment, resting comfortably near the top of the list of Hollywood's up-and-coming A-list directors. Bursting onto the scene two years ago with "Primal Fear," Hoblitt immediately proved himself to be in tight control of all of studio filmmaking's disparate elements, managing to turn out tense, clever and surprisingly witty entertainment while putting a fresh spin on that most hackneyed of Hollywood formulae -- the legal thriller.
Now, with his second feature, "Fallen," Hoblitt has made a large advance on the promise of his debut -- a film more serious in tone than "Primal Fear," but with a similar kinetic energy and very deft balancing of supernatural elements with a noirish detective story.
"Fallen" may be, quite simply, the most authentically frightening and intelligent horror film to emerge from Hollywood since "The Exorcist," but it is something Hoblitt has been working toward for a long time. The film is purely cinematic, and Hoblitt demonstrates a strong sense of style and understanding of screen language. What most people don't realize, however, is that "Primal Fear" and "Fallen" are, for Hoblitt, merely the latest in a long line of distinguished accomplishments, which begins in the television world of the early 1980s.
As director and associate producer, executive producer and co-creator, Hoblitt was in one way or another responsible for the pilot episode of the L.A. Law, the telefilm "Roe v. Wade" and the inception and development of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue. He has collected numerous Emmy and Peabody Awards for his television work, yet, even for him, the transition to feature filmmaking wasn't so smooth.
In fact, Hoblitt is lucky to have done it at all, given the rarity with which such crossovers are made these days. Things weren't always that way, though. It is, of course, the golden age of television itself that we have to thank for some of cinema's most proficient and talented craftspeople. So, as Hoblitt and I began our conversation, I asked the director why he felt it seemed so difficult for those in the television world to get a foothold in the movie business nowadays. A grave look came over his face before he replied.
"I'm glad you asked that question," Hoblitt said. "Let me tell you a story: I was within 10 days of directing a movie around 1988 called `Sea of Love.' I was fired 10 days before it started shooting for a variety of other painful reasons, not the least of which was that I actually thought people would behave well in the world of making a movie as they had always behaved well in the world I was used to, which was Hill Street Blues and L. A. Law. Not the case. Prior to going back east to make that, I got a call from someone who said that Sidney Pollack wanted to talk to me.
"So, I went to see Sidney Pollack. The reason he was really there was to give me a little advice about how to work with Al Pacino and to give me a little bit of advice about the person who was producing the movie, who had been Al's manager -- a guy named Martin Bregman. And, outside of Sidney's office was a plaque on the wall for an Emmy nomination for Ben Casey, and I walked in and said, `You did Ben Casey? What's that doing there?' He said he'd done 90 hours of television before his first feature. I said, `I had no idea,' and he said, `You really learn how to do it.'
"The landscape is strewn with people who have tried to move from television into features who haven't made it, but there's a fair number who have. People that I've been associated with, who worked for me -- Betty Thomas, Mimi Leder, Randa Haines, Brad Silverman. All these people started on Hill Street or L. A. Law. Mimi was my script supervisor for five years, and then I gave her an episode to direct. So, yes, a lot of people have not made it, but there are people who are making it."
Regardless, I told Hoblitt that it still seemed as though the business of making theatrical motion pictures was largely an elitist, private club -- reluctant, scared even, to open its doors to the competitive world of television-based talent.
"I think people are afraid. I think somehow or another, they think there's some great mystery to making a movie. The fact of the matter is that, for me, there's four things that go into making a film, and it doesn't matter whether it's film, television or soap opera. You've got to have a script that works, you've got to have actors that illuminate the story that that script is telling, you need sets or locations in which to place your story and you need a camera, which is sort of symbolic for the crew and everything that goes around it, to stitch it all together. That doesn't change, and there's no mystery to it, but there is a perceived difference to it that is -- at its heart -- unfair, and denies terrific actors, wonderful writers and wonderful directors a chance to make movies. It might also keep directors, actors and writers from wading in and doing some great television.
"I think that the big studios, with all this money on the line and the kind of fear that's engendered by movie stars as they are perceived to be today, has people going, `We don't want to take a chance putting a movie in the hands of anybody less than an experienced, war-hardened director.'"
So now, with "Primal Fear" and "Fallen" behind him, does Hoblitt feel a sense of vindication? Are those films, in fact, a way of ceremoniously saying, "So there!" to those who, early on, doubted his abilities?
"I'm not unaware of the possibility of that thought going through my head in a flash, but I could have moved out a long time ago. The `Sea of Love' situation was pretty unfortunate and pretty demoralizing, but I was offered, right after that, a lot of things.... They knew the circumstances and that it was more about the circumstances than it was me. But I will confess that I was so unprepared for what I was confronted with that I didn't handle it very well, so I got hurt, but I hurt myself. I could have done a lot of movies, and I chose not to because I didn't want to get burned again and because there was nothing that had me saying, `This is a better piece of material than `Roe v. Wade' or L. A. Law or NYPD Blue or `Class of `61,' which is a pilot I did for Spielberg that I'm really proud of. I was getting put in front of me to do and seeking to do stuff that was better than 90 percent of the movies being made, and I wasn't going to get the other 10 percent. `Primal Fear' was the first one that I said, `Bingo. I could never do this on television,' and I could never do `Fallen' on television.
"The one I want to do is something called `Frequency,' which is a really interesting movie about a father and son who are talking to each other through a 28-year time warp, the father having died 28 years before and the son talking to him the day before he died. But that's something I couldn't do on television."
Ultimately, to look at Hoblitt's body of work is to see the evolution of a career steeped in blistering contemporary variations on the morality play, from the cops of Hill Street to the vain attorney who finds his entire vision of the world shattered by the end of "Primal Fear," then finally to the headstrong detective who must, against all odds, place his faith in the unknown in "Fallen." These themes of characters put to the ultimate test, forced to confront their inner selves and their deepest moral fears, are the ones that seem to appeal most to Hoblitt.
"On one level, certainly. My feeling has always been that all of us are capable of being as good as Mother Teresa and as bad as Charlie Manson. We all have it in us -- it's just where you come out, by virtue of genetic confluence, by virtue of how you're raised, language, religion and whatever else. You're going to fall somewhere in that vast spectrum, and I'm always interested in why people are what they are. In these two movies, what was interesting to me in both cases was presenting two men who are so good at what they do, so sure-footed and confident, that there's a certain air of cockiness about them. Denzel's character has apprehended and convicted eight people who've been executed. He finds out that he doesn't know what he thinks he knows and that the world is bigger and more complicated than he will ever be able to fully grasp.
"Richard Gere's role as Martin Vail in `Primal Fear' is a guy who's blinded by his need to win, his vanity, to the collision course that he's on -- and that it's bigger than him. So, you never get out in front of yourself, because you're liable to get broadsided, and that's interesting to me."