Ongoing Tragicomedy

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Nikki Finke isn't assessing the catastrophic Nailed shoot with the right spirit. When a film has been shut down for the fourth time because people aren't getting paid, it might as well be the fifth or the eighth or the twelfth time. This level of repetition pushes events out of the agony realm and into that of near-farce. Meaning that a Lost in La Mancha-styled doc about the making of Nailed could be an inspired tragi-comedy.

This hasn't been an "indie film shoot from hell," as Finke has put it, as much as a gift to whomever has had the moxie and foresight to shoot it all (including interviews with ThinkFilm's Mark Urman and Capitol Films' David Bergstein) and cut it into something special. The doc that could result might turn out to be better than Nailed itself.

The main-character role that Terry Gilliam played in Lost in La Mancha could be split in the Nailed doc between Urman (the impassioned, frank-talking realist) and director David O. Russell (the gifted filmmaker fueled by anger, aggression and a comic appreciation of the absurd). One thing I would definitely want to see in this doc would be Urman saying the following (which is taken from Anthony Kaufman's 6.19.08 Indiewire piece about the ThinkFilm meltdown) straight to the camera, and with feeling.

"I feel terrible if people are hurt by our financial problems. We're not moving forward on other people's blood, I can assure you. We're not [expletive deleted] people -- we're in trouble. And if people end up getting [expletive deleted], we're [expletive deleted], too, and we can all be on the unemployment lines together."