Miramax, a studio with one eye on art-house filmmakers and another on mainstream, commercial fare, thought that Christopher might be delivering a big summer hit. As Christopher finished editing the film, Miramax scheduled 54's release for July. Realizing that the cast was a teenager's dream team, the company's publicity department began pitching Phillippe as a cover candidate to youth-oriented magazines, even though the subject of the movie and its overt omni-sexuality made it unlikely to appeal as first-date material.
But when Miramax screened Christopher's two-hour cut for a test audience, the reaction was alarming. A person familiar with the response cards reports that the viewers found the characters irredeemable and the ending, in which Greg, Anita, and Shane find happiness, unacceptable. ("I don't think that's true," says Christopher, when asked to comment on Shane's lack of popularity.) And another person involved in the filmmaking process says the audience loathed the moment when Meyer and Phillippe kiss; the subsequent elimination of that scene has been seized upon as proof that Miramax had problems not with the movie but with the theme of homosexuality. That turnabout would be strange, given Miramax's history of films ranging from The Crying Game and Priest to the upcoming Velvet Goldmine, in which any number of men bed each other with alacrity; in fact, the studio proudly showed a clip of 54 at April's New York Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation awards dinner (at which Miramax was honored). Explains Christopher: "This was a very ambitious story line from the start. Our goal was to keep the audience sympathetic to the characters, [and] any material that was removed from the film was removed because it was too challenging for some members of the audience. However, I'm excited because some of the most groundbreaking material really played and still remains."
But Miramax took seriously the test audience's opinion of what didn't play, and fighting began between the studio and Christopher. While the director was vocal to friends and colleagues about the trouble at the time, complaining that Miramax was attempting to take his movie away from him, he has since retreated into the more politic stance of a first-time director who has bitten the hand that could possibly feed him again. "I'm not not commenting," Christopher says now, crafting the kind of hedge it takes most industry insiders years to perfect. "The process is...whatever. Can we keep this general? We were both trying to make the best movie possible, and I think we've done that."
The actors were less confident when they received calls in June summoning them back for reshoots. All were in the middle of other projects; none knew what the result of their additional work would be. Says Meyer: "I figured maybe they didn't get an angle or an insert shot."
But by the time Christopher reconvened the cast in New York for reshoots, only two months before the movie was due in theaters, it was clear more than an insert shot was missing. "It's the first time I went through something like this, and it was scary at the beginning," says Hayek. "I was confused. I didn't know whether it would work or not."
