Entertaining is stressful enough. But what do you do when your guests are two Academy Award winners? "You apply and reapply your antiperspirant, you change shirts several times," says Don Roos, who met Affleck and Paltrow for the first time by hosting them at his L.A. home while they were considering signing on to Bounce. "My boyfriend and I ran out to the market and got a fruit plate. Naturally they don't eat anything.... They arrived together. They didn't have their Oscars with them, but I detected an Oscar glow around both of them." Within minutes, Roos stopped sweating. Affleck lobbed questions about The Opposite of Sex; Paltrow quizzed Roos on how he intended to shoot certain scenes. "They stayed for, like, three hours," Roos says. "I was finally like, 'You know, I'm going to start vacuuming, 'cause I need to get on with my day, guys.'"
After the fringe indie success of The Opposite of Sex, Roos' second directorial effort didn't turn out to be mainstream by accident. Bounce, he admits, was something of a calculated career move. "I had just written The Opposite of Sex and thought: Oh my God, this couldn't be gayer," says the 45-year-old, who got his start writing spec scripts like Boys on the Side and Love Field, but had his biggest success with Single White Female. "I felt like I had taken all my clothes off and walked down Main Street. I was like, 'I have to write something commercial, something straight, something that will not ghettoize me.'"
Once it was completed, he sold the Bounce script to producer Steve Golin, then at Propaganda Films, for $1.25 million. By the time Propaganda's feature-film unit dissolved, Universal had control of the project. But Roos' agent, Steve Rabineau, managed to sneak the script to Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein, who instantly envisioned Paltrow, a veteran of six Miramax films, as Abby. Weinstein then summoned Roos, who was in London for the premiere of The Opposite of Sex, back to New York on the Concorde. "I stole everything I could," Roos remembers. "Leatherette pouches, pens, earphones. I would have ripped up the carpeting if I could have." Within a month, Miramax had bought Bounce from Universal.
But according to Bounce's director and stars, the studio's instincts wouldn't always be so dead-on. Initially, Bounce was scheduled to arrive in theaters July 7, just one week after The Perfect Storm and The Patriot. "I'm too dumb to know what that meant," says Roos. "I told Ben and Gwyneth, 'And the good news is it'll be out in the summer!' And they went white. They were like, 'Are you serious?' I said, 'Yes, it's gonna be a big fat summer movie!' They said, 'Finish your meal. We'll take care of this.'" In addition to airing his beef with the powers that be, Affleck posted a March 12 rant against the release date on his website, which read in part, "It appears that the burgeoning enthusiasm for the 'commercial' prospects for Bounce have grabbed the hearts and minds of the folks at Miramax, grabbed the better part of valor by the throat and throttled him within an inch of his life."
You Might Also Like
- Video Review Bounce | Karen Valby
- Movie Review Bounce (Nov 17, 2000)
- Pop Culture News Love is a Battlefield
- Movie News Hollywood's onscreen parents are younger than ever (Nov 17, 2000) | Clarissa Cruz
- Movie News ''How the Grinch Stole Christmas'' tops the box office (Nov 17, 2000) | Lori Reese
- Movie News Ben Affleck and Gwyneth Paltrow deny relationship rumors (Nov 17, 2000) | Dave Karger
