‘Highball’: Noah Baumbach’s foolish experiment
These days, Noah Baumbach is one of Hollywood’s premier purveyors of a unique brand of indie comedy-drama that attracts some of the best actors in the business. The likes of Marriage Story, The Meyerowitz Stories, and While We’re Young have built upon his earlier works like The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding beautifully, and his style is now instantly recognisable. The same can’t be said, though, about a film he made at the very start of his career – a film he felt he never got right and ultimately tried to abandon.
After making his first impression in Hollywood with 1995’s Kicking and Screaming, Baumbach followed up quickly with 1997’s Mr Jealousy. This romantic comedy starred Eric Stoltz and Annabella Sciorra and dealt with the uncomfortable emotions that manifest when young, previously carefree people are forced to accept their status as adults in society. Around the time of the film’s release, it was reported that Baumbach had held on to much of the cast to make a smaller comedy named Highball that was to be shot in only six days – but then this movie failed to materialise for several years.
In 2005, Baumbach admitted to The AV Club that the reason Highball didn’t see the light of day was simple: he didn’t get it right. He confessed, “It really was an experiment, and kind of a foolish experiment because I didn’t think about what the ramifications would be if it didn’t work. But it was made with all the best intentions, which was to try and make a movie in six days, and use all the same people from Mr Jealousy, with all their goodwill, and bring in some more people.”
Sadly, Baumbach was forced to concede that all the goodwill in the world won’t help you make a coherent film if you don’t have the time or money to see it through. He lamented, “It was just too ambitious. We didn’t have enough time, we didn’t finish it, it didn’t look good, it was just a whole mess.“
Unfortunately for Baumbach, though, he wasn’t able to simply cast his embarrassing failure into the abyss and never think about it again. At the time, the film was abandoned and in an unfinished state, and he fell out with one of the producers, who also gave up on it. However, in 2002, the film resurfaced on VHS and DVD after being hastily assembled by the producers who wanted to recoup something from their investment.
Baumbach was outspoken about this cut being assembled against his wishes, and he successfully lobbied for his directing and writing credits to be attributed to the fictitious “Ernie Fusco” and “Jesse Carter.” However, he understood the nature of the beast and grumbled, “If Justine Bateman and Rae Dawn Chong are in your movie, someone’s going to try to make money. It doesn’t matter if you finished it or even felt like you got a movie out of it.”
Even though the film was released without Baumbach’s name attached to it, he was savvy enough to realise that anyone in the know would be aware it was his work. It was a bittersweet time for the filmmaker, who simply saw the movie as a failed experiment, not an actual entry in his filmography. To him, it was no different than the amateur films he made with his Hi-8 camera during his summer breaks from college, yet someone had seen fit to show it to the world on DVD.
At least Baumbach was able to see the funny side, though, when he compared Highball to Mr Arkadin, a 1955 noir that Orson Welles called the “biggest disaster” of his career because of his loss of creative control on the picture. Like Highball, it was lost for several years before finally being released in the US in 1962 in a form not to his liking.
Baumbach joked, “Highball is my Mr Arkadin, or one of the many Orson Welles movies that are all a thousand times better than Highball.”
