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Truth decay: Hope Davis, Campbell Scott and Denis Leary in <i>The Secret Lives of Dentists</i>.

Truth decay: Hope Davis, Campbell Scott and Denis Leary in The Secret Lives of Dentists.

Alan Rudolph on living “film to mouth.”

by Sam Adams

In April, when Alan Rudolph was in town to pick up an award from the Philadelphia Film Festival, The Secret Lives of Dentists had already begun earning Rudolph some of his warmest reviews in recent years. But neither the festival’s recognition nor the critical acclaim seemed to put Rudolph in a particularly chipper mood. Discussing Dentists’ suburban New York shoot, his first in the area, Rudolph ventures, "I’d like to shoot there some more, if I ever work again."

Now, Rudolph may not be in line to helm the next Harry Potter, but he's hardly obscure: The director of such movies as Choose Me, Welcome to L.A. and Afterglow, Rudolph has long been well-respected, if inconsistently praised. But his filmography is as littered with bombs as with successes, and he's coming off what seems to be a particularly disappointing string of films: Breakfast of Champions, which took a critical pounding and received only the most minimal of releases; Trixie, which critics again assaulted (Rudolph posits they were still mad about Breakfast, madder still they didn't get to review it); and Investigating Sex, an adaptation of Dadaist dialogue on the subject of sex that has essentially been held hostage by its financiers, who usually produce German game shows, because Rudolph has declined to turn it into "a fuck movie." Quips Rudolph, "I keep scanning the newspaper for their obituaries."

Get him off the subject of his career, though, and the onetime Altman protégé can turn effusive, not least on the subject of Campbell Scott, who worked with Rudolph onf 1994's Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and is half of Dentists' titular couple (the other being an adulterous Hope Davis). Though Rudolph normally writes his own scripts, Craig Lucas' adaptation of Jane Smiley's novella The Age of Grief was pitched to him by Scott, who was about to start filming Roger Dodger in Manhattan and was eager to repeat the experience (not least because this was fall 2001 and the city needed the money). "I said, 'I'll do it,'" Rudolph recalls. "He said, 'Wait, let me send [the script] to you.' I said, 'I don't have to read it. I'll do it.'"

Such impulsive behavior won't seem out of place to anyone familiar with Rudolph's films, where tones shift wildly and without warning. (Dentists' kitchen-sink tale of a marriage on the rocks makes room for a garishly clad Denis Leary as the devil on Scott's shoulder.) Rudolph's love of actors is well established, and in this case it carried the day. "I consider him in the absolute front ranks of American actors," Rudolph says of Scott. "He's a real brother."

Though Rudolph has often bucked at being labeled an independent, he's accepted his place outside the Hollywood mainstream. "Hollywood has one formula, and it has since the beginning: You get to the moment of truth, and you tell a lie," he says. Instead, he lives "film to mouth," beleaguered but unbowed. "Somebody said, 'What's your movie about?'" Rudolph recalls. "I said, 'They eat, they throw up, they get better.'"

The Secret Lives of Dentists opens Friday at Ritz Bourse.