The strange story of David O Russell’s Nailed

Nailed began to hit headlines in 2008, when filming was interrupted by a string of set-backs. The first was the departure of actor James Caan, who’d reportedly walked off the South Carolina set following an argument with Russell. The official line was that the break-up was amicable; some reports, including one from Entertainment Weekly, suggested that Caan and Russell had fallen out over a scene that involved the actor both choking to death and coughing at the same time.

In May, news emerged that filming on Nailed had been put on hold; the problem, it gradually became clear, was its financing. According to independent producers Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, who’d previously been behind such films as Jarhead and Stuart Little, Nailed‘s financiers were of “of questionable integrity.”

“…we went with a financier of questionable integrity that turned out to be of no integrity whatsoever and just had no intention of paying the bills,” Fisher told Collider, “and he didn’t.”

Money problems would plague Nailed throughout 2008, as allegations emerged that the people in charge of the purse strings – David Bernstein and partner Ron Tutor – were failing to pay the cast and crew on time. When the Screen Actors Guild and the International Alliance of Theatrical & Stage Employees got wind of what was going on, they demanded that the cast and crew remain away from the set. Then the financiers shut the production down altogether – just one day before the shoot was due to be completed.

With the production essentially bankrupt, Nailed remained in limbo for two years, and Russell eventually abandoned it altogether in 2010. The director later described the experience as “painful” and “Kafkaesque.” 

“That was like, ‘How can it get much lower than getting divorced, having to put your kid in a special boarding school at a young age, and being broke and not knowing how to make a movie?’ Russell said of Nailed‘s troubled production. “Well, it can get worse. You can make a movie that doesn’t get completed because of mysterious financing.”

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/LXnwaMZ