Open wide: Alan Rudolph goes dental

Alan Rudolph jokes that the surest way to snag a project in New York is to leave Manhattan. The famed director, whose just-released film “The Secret Lives of Dentists” opens on the island this week, had no sooner sold his New York apartment than the phone rang with an offer. “I said, ‘If we sell this, we’ll get a project in New York City,’” Rudolph said, “and now I’m packing, I’m leaving.”

Alan Rudolph jokes that the surest way to snag a project in New York is to leave Manhattan.

The famed director, whose just-released film “The Secret Lives of Dentists” opens on the island this week, had no sooner sold his New York apartment than the phone rang with an offer.

“I said, ‘If we sell this, we’ll get a project in New York City,’” Rudolph said, “and now I’m packing, I’m leaving.”

When not making movies, Rudolph lives quietly on Bainbridge Island – the New York apartment had served as a second home for him and his wife Joyce, who came to Bainbridge from Los Angeles in the late 1980s.

His next project, a satiric look at the advertising world, has come together so fast that the parts aren’t yet cast.

In fact, Rudolph has hardly had a chance to enjoy the kudos that his current film is garnering.

Based on a Jane Smiley novella, “The Secret Lives of Dentists” follows the unraveling marriage of characters played by Campbell Scott and Hope Davis. Like other Rudolph films tackling psychologically complex material, it doesn’t flinch from portraying the anguish below the surface of daily life.

A man’s chance discovery that his wife is having an affair is played out against their joint dental practice; his decision to ride out the storm is made with a backdrop of the family’s bout of flu, a malady that generates enough heaving to put one in mind of a Roman banquet.

The movie features a screenplay by Craig Lucas, who penned the film “Longtime Companion” (1990). He tried for 12 years to have the film made, and numerous directors passed it over before Rudolph signed on.

Rudolph, who usually writes his own scripts, says stepping back from that part of the filmmaking process has been liberating.

“I didn’t have to will the whole experience through,” he said. “There was a separation that allowed for interpretation.

“And, it happens to be good. It’s something I would have written myself.”

Rudolph is considered an “indie” filmmaker, but doesn’t like the label. He does, he notes, predate the term now used to categorize filmmakers who work independent of major studios, usually on small budgets.

“I was doing this since the mid-1970s, before the word ‘independent’ existed,” Rudolph said, “and before that I worked with (Robert) Altman, who is the independent.”

Rudolph says his place in the scheme of things was neatly defined by his “best friend in the Northwest and elsewhere,” novelist Tom Robbins.

“(He) and I refer to our ‘careen,’” Rudolph said. “The trade-off is to do what you want.”

Indie, Jr.

In 1973, Rudolph – then just 30 years old – served as second assistant director on Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye,” followed by “California Split” in 1974 and “Nashville” in 1975, on which he worked as assistant director.

“Welcome to L.A.” marked Rudolph’s own directorial debut in 1978.

Fifteen films have followed, including the commercially successful “Choose Me” (1984), a look at urban relationships that layered fantasy and reality, and “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” (1994), on the gifted and garrulous writers who met for drinks and “dish” at Manhattan’s Algonquin Hotel in the 1920s and early ‘30s.

When Rudolph decided to focus the film on humorist Robert Benchley, rather than making an extended close-up on the unhappy Dorothy Parker, it was a choice informed by his father’s real-life friendship with Benchley.

Father Oscar Rudolph’s long film career began in the second decade of the 20th century as a child actor in silent movies with Mary Pickford, and continued through the 1970s as director of such television shows as “Playhouse 90,” “The Lone Ranger,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Batman” and “My Favorite Martian.”

Alan Rudolph’s career in film was a choice to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Despite his long list of credits, Rudolph spends comparatively little to make a film. The average cost of a Rudolph production is about $5 million.

A compressed time frame helps keep costs down; it was just three months from the first phone call about “The Secret Lives of Dentists” to a finished film.

Modest budgets and “permanent outsider” status are a badge of honor of sorts for the handful of filmmakers who choose not to parlay independent success into full-blown commercial features.

Rudolph’s track record is enough of a draw to pull in accomplished actors.

“There’s a certain level of professionalism I need to attract,” he said. “They don’t come to me to make money.”

Whatever wisdom there is to be found in reflection, Rudolph will have little time for analysis over the next few months; he has already left for New York to film in mid-town Manhattan.

But he invites fellow islanders to see “Dentists,” which opens Friday at the Lynwood Theatre.

“If people on Bainbridge Island come who don’t go to a lot of movies because they’re busy with kids, they may relate to it more than people who go frequently,” he said. “You find details of your life performed in the way that you live it, but it’s a film, it’s a movie.”

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“The Secret Lives of Dentists” directed by islander Alan Rudolph, opens Sept. 19 at Lynwood Theatre. The film stars Campbell Scott, Hope Davis and Denis Leary as Slater. Call 842-3080 for more information.