When Bad Guys Happen to Good People

Last winter, a distributor at the Sundance Film Festival was overheard saying to a reporter, “That’s the cruelest film I’ve ever seen.” The movie he was referring to was Neil LaBute’s “In the Company of Men.” Obviously he had no intention of picking it up.

In some ways, this response--well, any response--was exactly what LaBute was after.

“Ho-hum is the biggest evil in art there can be,” the 36-year-old LaBute says, digging into eggs Benedict at a hotel restaurant in Park City, Utah, oblivious to directors Gregg Araki and John Waters giving interviews at tables nearby. “My biggest fears coming here were, ‘That was interesting,’ or, ‘That was different.’ ”

He doesn’t have to worry. “In the Company of Men” went on to win the Filmmaker’s Trophy and was easily the most controversial entry of the festival. The film, which opened Friday, is about two young mid-level executives, Chad and Howard, who decide to take out their rage at women by dating and then dumping the same woman, preferably a wallflower. The woman they choose, Christine, is hearing-impaired, and the game itself escalates to the point where only one of the three principals is left standing.

“The ending doesn’t really beg you to feel good,” LaBute says. “Somebody described it as the first feel-bad hit of the summer. I thought that was good.”

This quality did not exactly make the movie an easy sell--even to the people who liked it.

“I can’t find anyone who thought the movie wasn’t worth buying,” says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, which finally stepped up after the festival was over and invested “under a half a million” to upgrade the film. “You run into your competitors on the street and they say, ‘Gee, that was a great film. We were trying to buy it.’ But during the festival, I don’t think anyone knew what to think of the movie. Or maybe some people in the lower levels of acquisitions liked it, but when they brought it to the top, the main guys got afraid.”

This was not LaBute’s concern. He had no intention of editing out the deaf jokes or misogyny. But he does admit that he had an impulse to “explain” his characters’ actions, because he knew that viewers have a tendency to confuse the message with the messenger. In this case, people might assume that the attitudes of Chad, the instigator of the plan, are his own.

“People will just say, ‘This is you, this is your voice box,’ ” LaBute says. “That’s a danger, but how else do you get it out there? Either you run the risk or you start saying, ‘Well, what about a scene where Chad helps someone across the street?’ In fact, I had a scene at the end of the movie that in a sense explained away Chad, what happened in his past. You hear him matter-of-factly describe an incident you think is just horrific. And we’re getting ready to shoot, and I said, ‘Why am I doing this?’ It just seemed wrong. If you send people home and say, ‘The world is OK, go to sleep, we’re safe,’ very quickly they’ll forget about what you had to say.”

LaBute is also quick to point out that Chad’s hostility isn’t limited to women. He cites a scene that many feel does not belong in the movie. In it Chad humiliates a black subordinate by ridiculing his speech--the man pronounces “ask” as “ax”--and bullying him into exposing himself to prove he has what it takes to be an executive.

“Even when we were getting ready to shoot, I hadn’t thought of casting a black actor,” LaBute says. “He wanted to be an extra, but I thought, ‘You know, I’m going to go all the way here.’ I wasn’t going to show [his genitals]. It was very much that kind of subversive thing that people do. They think, ‘I’m not a bigot,’ but they’ll hear someone say ‘ax’ and they’ll giggle to themselves. We thought, ‘Let’s get that very disquieting, “Oh, I’ve done that.” ’ “

One of the ironies behind all of this ugliness is that the author of it looks like--and is--a grad student type. Not only that, he’s a Mormon, having been raised in Washington state and having attended the University of Kansas and Brigham Young University, where he briefly worked on a doctorate. He’s also received a master of fine arts degree in dramatic writing from New York University, studied at London’s Royal Court Theatre on a literary fellowship, and participated in the Sundance Institute’s Playwright’s Lab (while in college he used to chauffeur institute personnel around Park City).

In short, LaBute is not just a raw voice screaming for attention. Until he was overwhelmed by the demands of his new life as a movie director, he taught theater and English at Saint Francis College in Fort Wayne, Ind., where he and his family still live. He and his wife, Lisa, who’s a therapist, have two kids. In fact, LaBute’s efforts are a family affair: His wife reads all his scripts and vets the characters for psychological accuracy. In the case of “In the Company of Men,” he says, “she was very pleased.”

To get that pleasantness on-screen, LaBute initially considered some elaborate cross-financing schemes with executive producers Mark Hart and Toby Graff. Then it so happened that the two producers got in a car accident. They received a cash settlement, and LaBute persuaded them to plow it back into the movie. The shoot itself lasted 11 days and reportedly cost $25,000. He saved money by employing simple master shots and framing the movie narrowly on the three main characters. He screened rough cuts in a church basement.

“It’s a marriage of economy and artistry when you make a movie like this,” LaBute says. “You just try to buffalo everybody into believing every economic choice was artistic.”

Of course, production values were the least of the film’s problems.

“One of the things we found is that people seem to need to take some time to like it,” says Bernard. “They like it a lot better a week after they see it. It sort of stays with them. And that happened to us too. We kept talking about it and we realized, ‘You know what? I’m just talking about this movie that I didn’t know what to do with.’ ”

More often than not the people doing the talking were women. For many, watching the movie was akin to being a fly on the wall in a men’s locker room. Sony Classics put an all-female marketing team on the case and started screening it for female-only audiences (a male publicist was slugged after one such screening). A mailing list of women making $80,000 or more was made up.

They also found another audience in twentysomethings who don’t yet have office experience but assume “Company” reflects office sexual politics. Even men, especially on Wall Street, have been solicited, although their reactions have been “quite strained,” according to Bernard.

As for LaBute, he now has a project out to actor Jason Patric and Propaganda Films, which he describes as a six-character piece (three men and three women) that’s “hopefully somewhere in that ‘Husbands and Wives,’ ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ ‘Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice’ country. Kind of levels the playing field between men and women.”

Asked if the script was approved by his wife, LaBute laughs and says, “It sure was. It’s made the cut.” That’s a scary thought.