The Unkindest Cut
How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7,000 Movie and Put It All on His Credit Card
de Joe Queenan
In February 1993, mean-spirited movie critic Joe Queenan read a newspaper article that would change the course of his life. The article described a movie called El Mariachi which supposedly had been made for a paltry $7,000. Armed with the information that someone could make a movie for a paltry $7,000, Queenan now set out to prove that anyone could make a movie for a paltry $7,000. Two years later, on a bitterly cold February evening, Queenan's film, Twelve Steps to Death, would win first prize at the First Tarrytown International Film Festival, nabbing the coveted Golden Headless Horseman Award. But before Queenan would have his night of triumph, there would be many financial, physical, and emotional disasters. A knife stabbing on the set of the film. Massive cost overruns. Sabotaged equipment. The tearful resignation of his seven-year-old son from the cast. A ruined marriage. And the consternation of his oldest, wisest, and closest friends, who questioned the wisdom of making a $7,000 film about a sociopathic Los Angeles cop whose wife and children had been killed two years earlier by a schizoid anorexic recovering alcoholic with Attention Deficit Disorder who was fleeing an abusive, chocaholic husband who used to beat her up whenever he had one too many of the nougat caramels. Yet in the end, Queenan did what he set out to do, producing a film that is without question "the most expensive $7,000 film in history."
