Why James Caan called one of his favourite pictures his “great disappointment”
James Caan famously turned down so many hit movies that he once joked Hollywood executives should put every penny they have into any script he thought was crap.
When you find out that Caan said no to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Superman, and Apocalypse Now, it does add fuel to the fire that his radar for discerning good material was a bit wonky.
However, Caan wasn’t just someone who couldn’t quite see the forest for the trees when it came to hit movies; he also had very little interest in making films just because they stood the chance of attracting big fucking audiences. Instead, he was resolute in making movies he was passionate about, whether or not they had box office potential.
Cast an eye over Caan’s 1970s and ‘80s filmography, and for every Godfather, Rollerball, or Alien Nation, there are a host of smaller, more intimate projects that have been forgotten over the years. One of the movies that falls into this category is Hide in Plain Sight, a 1980 drama about the legal battle fought by a man whose children are whisked away into the Witness Protection Program along with his ex-wife and her new husband, a low-level gangster. It was based on the real-life case of New York man Tom Leonhard, who ultimately sued the federal government for taking his goddamn kids away from him.
Caan initially wanted a director like Hal Ashby to make the movie, but when that plan fell through, he decided to handle directing duties himself. Armed with a $6 million budget, he took to the streets of Buffalo, New York, to make a film he was intent on keeping realistic, eschewing the temptation to Hollywoodise Leonhard’s story at every turn. He shot with long, extended takes, favouring widescreen photography over more conventional close-ups, and he often wouldn’t extensively plan his shots until turning up on-set in the morning to speak with his actors. Naturally, this didn’t go over so well with MGM, who were footing the bill for the movie.
“They didn’t understand what I was trying to do,” Caan told the Los Angeles Times in 1980. “The crew loved it, but it confused the studio. They kept saying ‘So-and-so didn’t shoot it this way,’ and ‘Where are the close-ups?’ They were always on me.” Unfortunately for Caan, this never-ending push-and-pull with the studio wound up compromising his film in a big way. He envisioned the movie having no score, or at the very least, as little score as possible. “I wanted it cinema-verité style,” he noted. “I don’t like music to lead my emotions.” However, to his frustration, the studio insisted on a full score by Leonard Rosenman, and the disgruntled director used it as sparingly as he could.
In the end, Caan was proud of the movie he created, despite these compromises. However, the studio bungled the release so badly that it barely made back its budget, and despite critics declaring that Caan had a great future in front of him as a director, he literally never stepped behind the camera again. In 2021, he told The Independent that Hide in Plain Sight’s disappearance from cinemas was one of his “great disappointments,” and he pointed the finger of blame squarely at a couple of studio executives. “There were no sharks in it,” he said through gritted teeth, “so these two idiots over at MGM didn’t know what to do with it.”
Still, despite the debacle of the film’s release, there was one silver lining for Caan. During post-production, he sought advice from the filmmakers he knew well, such as Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, and Sydney Pollack, and one of them gave him a compliment that stayed with him for decades. “Francis said it was one of his top five pictures at that time,” Caan smiled. “That made me really happy, because you really wind up making movies for 20 guys, you know? You want your friends to like them.”
