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The Smashing Machine: A Bar Interview with Jon Greenhalgh, Producer

by Kim Gatewood

I have been working with Jon Greenhalgh at the bar Off the Wagon for about 4 months. I serve cocktails, he is the barback (the “assistant bartender” who does everything but serve you drinks). One afternoon he started telling me the story of the first movie he ever produced, about an ultimate fighter in Japan. Turns out, he’s the producer of one of the biggest documentaries about Ultimate Fighting (The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Mark Kerr, currently airing on HBO). It was a little hard to believe. He has a constant 5 o’clock shadow, wears clothes from the Salvation Army, curses, and goofs off.

So, I sat down at work with Jon to find out the challenges of a first-time movie producer and to find out a little bit more about him.

JG: I first moved to NYC about eight years ago. I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do with myself. For my first job I played Barney the dinosaur for little kids’ birthday parties. That didn’t last long though, I was not used to being around kids. After being attacked and dragged to the ground by a vicious group of eight-year-olds, who would not stop until they pulled Barney’s big purple head off, I accidentally screamed “GET THE FUCK OFF ME!” So that job ended rather abruptly.

Then I went on to become a trader’s assistant on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. I was awful at that as well. I had no interest in money so to sit all day and track it moving up and down was just torture. I spent most of my time in the smoking room reading my shitty poetry to whoever would listen. After a while I knew I could no longer live that type of existence, but I needed to get fired so I could collect unemployment. So one morning I had my roommate shave my head into a big pointy Mohawk and I put on my suit and tie and went to work. Needless to say, my boss took one look at me and fired me. And then I was too lazy to file for unemployment anyway.

Not long after that I found my way to bartending, which was a good way to make a living and still have enough time to focus on other things.

Jon, at the premiere of his movie, got a haircut but did not shave.

KG: Your name is pronounced Green – halj. Why is your last name so hard to say?

JG: Greenhalgh – this is kind of a sad story. But the truth is, my grandfather grew up in an orphanage and he was never adopted, so when he turned 18 he ended up taking the name of a woman who worked there. He really didn’t know her very well, so he was never really sure how to say the last name and the mispronunciations have just, kind of, progressed from generation to generation. That is that story.

Jon’s nickname is Greenballs. His sister’s nickname is Greenbush.

KG: How did you go about producing the movie?

JG: I don’t really know how regular movie producers do it. This was a documentary film, which we pretty much made with four people: a producer (me), two cameramen, and a sound guy. So what I did was, call up the subject, Mark Kerr, and got his approval, and he said he was into the project. Next I spoke to the director John Hyams, because I knew I wanted this guy to be my partner because I trust him very much and he’s very good at what he does. And the first place that I started raising money was from behind the bar at Jake’s Dilemma. There was a patron there, Mike Masone, who was always a big fan of me and another guy that worked on the film, Neil Fazzari. We told him the idea and he absolutely loved it, and he ended up giving us $40,000 to get started. So, we started shooting. We went to Japan with forty grand. Well, actually first we bought our own equipment. We bought two cameras (Sony DSR200A, which at that time were about $5,000 each), a DAT machine, and a light kit, which ran us about $25,000, so we went to Japan and started shooting.

We were out of money after our first trip to Japan, so we started editing footage together and showing it to different investors to see if we could raise money that way, which we did. We were able to kind of raise it in small chunks here and there, all the way up until we had about $230,000, which is half of what we needed, and then we cut a decent sized trailer and got it to this company called Solaris, who saw it, loved it, and they ended up wanting to put in the final $230,000 in the movie.

So my role in that was pretty much doing everything. As far as when we were shooting, I was the guy who was not holding the camera, so I was constantly trying to either arrange interviews with whoever was around or just see things that the cameramen and sound guy really couldn’t see to kind of tip them off to what was going on around. There are two different kinds of producers. There’s financial and the other kind is really hands-on, which is what I did. I kind of had a hand in every creative decision that was made throughout the film, from shooting all the way until we were done with editing. So I was the jack of all trades and when it came down to a rift between me and the director, we would just kind of work it out and see, we’d try out both of our ideas to see which one we liked better. Luckily, we never ran into to much trouble because we always kind of had the same vision for the film. I also shot with one of the cameras, too, but only the trips when either one of the cameramen didn’t go, but that happened kind of a lot so… I did everything there was to do. It was really good learning experience.

A review in Penthouse did not mention Jon once.

KG: You make a cameo in the movie.

JG: The cameos that I made in the movie were purely by mistake and when I look at it today it really pisses me off because I should have known to be out of the way of the camera and if you notice, it really only happens one time which is Mark Kerr’s first fight that he loses against the Russian guy. That was actually our first trip and I was not that camera savvy yet, knowing how to stay out of the shots at all times. And it’s kind of funny because I could have dressed to kind of fit in the crowd, but instead, being very naïve, I wore an American flag bandana in the middle of a 100% Japanese crowd, which was just so dumb. And you can see me in the back, after Mark loses his fight and he’s speaking about what fighting means to him and what the loss is about, I’m in the background chewing my cheek, just looking completely neurotic and freaked out of my mind, which I was because now that this guy lost, I had no idea where our story was going.

KG: How did the Japanese like you?

JG: The Japanese were incredibly rigid. And I was over there trying to negotiate a contract with them to allow us to shoot these events, but every trip, all four of our trips there, it would happen at the very last second. They would put us through the wringer saying “No, no, no, producer says, no, no, can’t do it, can’t do it” and then we’d press, press, press, and right when it would come down to it they would give in at the end and we got to shoot pretty much everything we wanted to. People say in Japan they absolutely love Americans. That was not my experience. They may love American culture, but pretty much everywhere we would go, they would say “No, no, no, Japanese only.” So we really couldn’t go to a lot of places we wanted to go. The only place we could really go and move about freely was a place called Rapongni which was a totally tourist district which was a lot of fun, we had good times over there.

Jon told me the highlight of his acting career was in a movie called One Dog Day where he played an irate bartender who wore nothing but a grass skirt and played cards all day with a midget.

KG: How has your life changed?

JG: I guess my life changed. I went from a bartender, before I made the movie, to now currently, I am a barback, so I have lost money, which is kind of ridiculous. But I’ve learned a bazillion different things. I know the moviemaking process inside and out. And for me it was like getting a master’s degree in film. I have all the hands-on experience I need to make another one. Plus the experience of actually conceiving an idea, executing, following it through to the end, and selling the film, is just something that makes me feel good about myself, lets me know that I have the ability to conceive a project and follow it through.

At work one night, Jon was telling us that he had to get off the phone with the president of Sony because he was going to be late for his barback shift.

KG: How did you stay objective during the editing process?

JG: That was really difficult. The hands-on editing was done by the director John Hyams and we meant to edit for six months and we ended up editing for a little more than a year and a half. And I have to say that his objectivity was completely blown out of the water because that’s what happens when you sit there and stare at it for 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for a year and a half. You get lost in the footage, especially when you’re dealing with 500 hours of footage, which we had. So I was constantly trying to keep the objectivity because for the hands-on guy it’s really really difficult. We stayed in the room together for the final, I would say, two months. It was the two of us in there 14 hours a day, 7 days a week until we finally got it done.

But keeping your objectivity is really tough – there’s some really tough emotional stuff in the film and on one hand I want to tell the story the way it was and on the other hand I don’t want to reveal these deep dark secrets of someone that I care about. The art involved in the project is what became in the foreground – that was the most important thing to me: telling the story in a way that was truthful and true to my subject. The other part of that, I’d have to say, is that we did attempt to keep him on the likeable side because if you don’t like the main character of any story the story is not going to succeed. People are not going to be interested in someone they do not like.

KG: You were roommates with Mark at Syracuse University, which allowed you to get really intimate with your subject, but in some of Mark’s darker moments, how was it watching your friend break down?

JG: I’ll tell you the story of when Mark was trying to first come off of Nubain, which is an injectable opiate. There was a period where he said, “OK, I’m going to kick drugs, but I do not want to go to rehab.” So we made the decision that I, alone, would stay with Mark while he came off of these drugs. So I sat there for four days with him and watched him literally crawl up the fucking walls. Scratching and itching. For 72 hours straight – three whole days – the guy had these violent hiccups that sounded like his eyes were going to pop out of his head. That was a really really horrible period.

By the end of the fourth day, it became evident to me that this problem was way beyond me. I suspected that he was taking some kind of opiate and the truth finally came out. He was not shooting up, but he was taking Vicodin on top of this Methadone stuff that he was using to try to kick the Nubain. And at that point, he overdosed. So, we put the cameras down and we all came around him, and had a big intervention. I called his friends from home, who flew in. We reached the point when we needed to put the cameras down and take an active role in trying to help this person we cared about. To see someone you care about going through something like that was very very painful and makes you think, what’s more important, my movie or this person’s life. When it came down to it, this person’s life was more important.

Kimmy Gatewood is a comic, improviser, and actress in New York City. She is currently on the national touring company of Chicago City Limits. kimgatewood@hotmail.com.