Monday, April 1, 2019

Mary-Kate, Ashley and Me


    Everything is online, where it can easily be found. But because of the endless mass of information, some tidbits hide in plain sight. Google my name—go ahead, plug "Neil Steinberg" into the search engine. You'll see, on the left, a listing, my Wikipedia page and this blog and such. On the right, a little box, with the fly-on-the-ceiling column bug perspective the paper took years ago, and some of the books that nobody but me thinks about anymore.
    And movies. I don't talk about the movies much, for reasons that will become clear. But in this Me Too moment, I suppose I should get ahead of the curve and spill the beans myself.
     "Getting There," "Our Lips are Sealed" "Passport to Paris" —what are those? They are the direct-to-video movies made by the Olsen Twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley. I was the producer of the movies. If you are unfamiliar with Hollywood, the producer puts up the money and makes profit—or, as it often turns out, takes the loss. 
     How did that happen?  The Olsen Twins were fairly big stars at the time. They debuted as infants on "Full House" and had a variety of cameos while developing themselves as pre-teen fashion icons.
     It was a different era. The late 1990s, I took several protracted leaves, supposedly to raise our newborns with my wife. But I had time on my hands—they napped a lot. I got bored, money was tight—these were unpaid leaves—and I took a variety of freelance assignments. Rolling Stone asked me to profile this pair of 12-year-olds, the Olsen Twins, who were introducing their own line of glitter that was popular among music fans.  They came to Chicago as part of their promotional tour—FaceFantasy the stuff was called—and I went down to the Ambassador East and met them and their manager.
     Journalists know how difficult it is to interview children, even one-on-one. Now make it two kids, two girls, two 12-year-old twins who have been famous literally their whole lives. They never took their eyes off the big television in their suite, but laid on their stomachs, watching. When their manager snapped it off and asked them to look at the nice man and answer his questions, they shot me a single glance of searing annoyance and contempt that is burnt into my retinas to this day, let out a howl of laughter and began gibbering to each other in their own private language, twaddling their fingers together in some kind of private twins code.
     Not an auspicious start. The manager—April Fowler, I can't forget that name—and I repair to the bar where, many martinis later, I had learned of her woes, how difficult the twins were to work with, what a fortune could be made for the person who would snap the whip and get them in front of a camera. 
     I woke up the next morning with the worst hangover of my life, notes scribbled on a bunch of bar napkins, and a contract to produce the next three direct-to-video Olsen Twins movies. My wife thought I was insane, but she was bearing the brunt of a newborn and a toddler. I had money from a book. Next thing I knew I was paying for gaffers and best boys and set designers while flying around the country, trying to find bigger fools and convince them to kick in even more money into our movie.
     Given the Olsen Twins history of successful ruinous litigation against anything critical written about them, I suppose the less I say now, the better. Let's just leave it that the movies had a way of departing radically from my initial concept as producer. For instance, what I proposed as "Nursed by a Wolf," casting the twins as female versions of Castor and Pollux and retelling the founding of Rome as a madcap adventure turned into "Passport to Paris" a romp through that exceedingly expensive city. "Our Lips Are Sealed" began as a meditation on duality in Western culture, yet ended up a chase movie set in even-more-expensive Australia. 
     Economics and my own demands at home left me little time to visit them on set or exert the control I probably should have as producer. I remember the last check I wrote—$1,234 worth of long-distance phone calls between Sydney and some boy in Montclair, New Jersey. Then I was depleted and nudged aside by investors with deeper pockets, retaining producer credit and what little of my pride remained. 
    Anyway, enough of this. I'm kind of sorry I brought it up. The Olsen Twins actually deal with my stint as their money man in a somewhat kind fashion in their recent biography, "Our Struggle" (Knopf: $26.99). You can read their description here. 


     
     

14 comments:

  1. Had me there for a sentence or two

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  2. Well done! I do so enjoy your April Fool's posts every year. Olsen twins producer, thanks for the good laugh this morning!

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  3. Never bought it for a second.

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  4. I'm a little surprised you didn't mention your cameo in "Billboard Dad" being cut. I remember that as being very unsettling for you at the time. But, I suppose it's just more water under the bridge.

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  5. Funny and never could stand those brats. You had me going for a bit.

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  6. As for some interesting facts about the Olson twins: they weren’t just fairly famous; they had the highest Q score in the industry, which is based on positive recognition. When you watch them on Full House as actual babies they were clearly remarkable able to deliver lines on cue at an age when many kids don’t even speak. Their sister is one of the best actresses around and it makes you wonder what would have happened to them if they had never been on tv so young.

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    1. The twins were doomed by prolonged exposure to Bob Saget, a man whose talent-to-success ratio is the most lopsided in entertainment history. His rendition of "The Aristocrats" even more distasteful than usual by his mere presence. Elizabeth Ashley must not have spent much time on the set with her sisters.

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  7. May have overplayed your hand with April Fowler ;)

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  8. I didn't figure it out until halfway through. Nice job!

    So, why ARE those movie covers associated with you on Google?

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    1. Different Neil Steinberg. We actually had lunch, years ago—I think I wrote a column about it. Maybe I can find and post. He has my books on his coffee table (but no, I don't display the videos he sent). Nice guy.

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  9. I'm always bitching and whining about scams, and warning others to beware, and then I get easily fooled today, of all days. At least until the last couple of paragraphs. Not the first time, either...I also got fooled into believing spring had arrived. This morning I shoveled the remains of three inches of heavy, wet snow from the front sidewalk.

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  10. Hey now, I'm in the process of moving and had to select just a limited number of books to inhabit my new office space until all the books follow me. "An Alphabet..." is one of those!

    No, I will not talk about my own sordid entanglements with the twins; statute of limitations hasn't kicked in yet.

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