As somebody once said, there's no such thing as bad publicity. Take In The Company Of Men, a film whose PR profile is as damning as the beef industry's. Without the outraged squawking of its critics - from hardcore feminists to columnists of the hard Right - it would never have found a distributor. Films made for $25,000 just don't.
In The Company Of Men tells the story of two friends, bad-boy Chad and earnest Howard, Midwest company executives. Chad has a plan to enliven their time while on a temporary posting to another city. They've both been screwed around by women, so why not get their own back? Find a woman, make her fall in love with them then dump her. Both of them, at the same time, with the same girl! A girl so ugly she won't be able to resist! So far, so bad.
But it gets worse. The girl they hit on is deaf and lonely and she falls in love.
I was not looking forward to the screening. Indeed, what right-minded woman, or man, would want to watch such sickos getting off on emotional abuse of this magnitude? "What problems have you experienced with women?" a member of the audience asked director and writer Neil LaBute in the question-and-answer session that followed. "None. Except getting them in to see it."
And he's right. Because In The Company Of Men turned out to be one of the best films I have seen for a long time: a film whose truth and moral integrity are never compromised, which offers no sweeteners in the Judeo-Christian traditions of Hollywood: no remorse, no redemption, no retribution. To say LaBute's 20th-century morality tale has been misunderstood is putting it mildly.
With the blind prejudice of women as ballast, the film has been turned into a flagship by the very men whose vacuous brutality it exposes and shames.
LaBute says he has been "totally shocked" by the cheers of American audiences (male) as Chad, played with chilling magnetism by Aaron Eckhart, lies, cheats and charms his way into Christine's heart and bed. Even women are mesmerised. ("Give him a slap from me. What's he doing Monday?" said his LaBute's agent's secretary.)
Its power lies not only in the uniformly fine performances; the world LaBute has created, from office politics to sexual politics, is superbly observed. Directed in a spare, documentary style, it feels real. Its ever-present irony, however, has gone unrecognised by the ordinary Joe or Jo-lene.
Neil LaBute - a committed Christian, indeed a Mormon (as is Eckhart) - is still bemused by it all. The reason the film found a distributor in the US at all was its word-of-mouth success at film festival after film festival, since it first hit the indie circuit at the Sundance film festival 18 months ago.
"The critics were generally quite good, but when they were bad they were outright severe. Kenneth Turan from the LA Times called it `a psychological snuff film'. Jack Matthews from Newsday pretty much brought me into question, saying `What kind of a human being could make this?' I had quite a few solid pokes."
The kind of human being who made In The Company Of Men, LaBute, looks exactly like the dishevelled academic that he is - shy, apologetic, quietly spoken, timidly flirtatious - and he made it not in celebration. The short-sighted fat boy who was bullied at school, pushed aside by the smooth-talking bastards who had the looks and the chat, has found the ultimate public revenge. LaBute admits he is an Old Testament man. No nonsense about turning the other cheek.
The names Chad reels off, while trashing colleagues he holds in contempt, are real, genuine figures from LaBute's past.
In The Company Of Men is Neil LaBute's first film. He is a seasoned playwright whose work has been performed by radical theatre companies across the US. As part of his master's degree in the early 1990s - LaBute (34) is a junior professor of English and drama in Indiana - he spent a year at the Royal Court Theatre in London. "I cut my teeth on people like Brenton and Bond and Hare and Barker."
The idea for the film came directly from 17th-century restoration comedy. "I was always taken with verbal wit and with how much blood was drawn although you never saw any. I was always fascinated by that rakish character that got away with so much. They adored him, as did the audience, for what he was."
Although they never survived to the final cut, each character's surname originally showed its restoration roots: Chad Piercewell, Howard Vainlove, Christine Lockhart.
The story itself developed from the first line, says LaBute. " `Let's hurt somebody' was the first thing that came into my head. A premeditated hurt rather than murder was something that could be meted out in bits." The tiny budget led to artistic decisions that give the film a hard-edged reality. Although the result is extraordinarily filmic, its processes derive from LaBute's theatre past, like long takes. "It allows the actors room to really create a character instead of worrying so much about `How much did I have in my glass?' or `Where was I standing?' instead of just letting the camera run and letting people talk."
LaBute's actors were all people he knew well, working for nothing. Although everything seems as spontaneous and improvised as a Mike Leigh film (Leigh, Woody Allen and Eric Rohmer are the directors LaBute most admires), every scene was "for the most part" scripted. "All my actors came in completely memorised. They could have performed it like a stage play."
With its $25,000 budget (said to be the same as the daily catering bill for Titanic) everything was rationed, including film stock. "I edited in the camera. It was in my head as we were going along." The editing process took only 24 hours. "We had to steal time from this church who did a weekly religious broadcast on TV. We would go in and use their machines for nothing, two hours at a time on the Movieola."
As for the rebuke that there is no final denouement, no final in-your-face explanation, LaBute, like Chad, is unrepentant. "Chad thrives on deception. So there was never a moment where he could be a Bond villain and say `Now that I have you, let me explain exactly what I've done.' The whole ruse against the audience is that they never quite get to know what's going on. Aaron was so good at adapting, playing each scene realistically, absolutely flat out. As much ill as he had done, right up to the end, I think an audience really wants him to change. They have a capacity for good and they want him to be better than be is."
The women maybe. But not, I suspect, the men.