In 2015, director Stephen Greene made the comedy misfire Accidental Love, starring Jessica Biel and Jake Gyllenhaal. Ten years on, here’s its bizarre story.
“Sometimes you nail love,” read the tagline to the 2015 romantic comedy Accidental Love, “sometimes it nails you.”
Unfortunately for director Stephen Greene, the movie failed to nail the US box office. Despite a quality writing pedigree and some particularly fine actors – Jessica Biel, Jake Gyllenhaal, Catherine Keener to name a few – the $26m movie made less than $140,000 in cinemas, and was left to quietly find an audience on DVD and video-on-demand.
The story of Accidental Love isn’t merely one of financial disappointment, however. It takes in name changes, money problems, abandonment, imprisonment, and fierce arguments over coughing.
Oh, and there’s no such director as Stephen Greene.
Before there was Accidental Love, there was Nailed. It was (very) loosely based on the 2004 book Sammy’s Hill by Kristin Gore, daughter of Al and a regular writer on Saturday Night Live and Futurama. In 2008, director David O Russell chose it for his next project, perhaps because its comic tone felt like a natural continuation from his previous film, 2004’s whimsical I Heart Huckabees.
Co-written by Gore herself, Nailed kept the political theme of the novel while changing its perspective. Where the source was about a congressman’s aide, the script followed a small town waitress named Alice (Biel, whose life is thrown into turmoil when a clumsy builder shoots her in the head with a nailgun.
Alice can’t get treatment for the resulting brain injury due to her lack of health insurance, and so she heads from Indiana to Washington DC to lobby for change in American healthcare. There, Alice meets a somewhat self-involved congressman, Howard (Gyllenhaal), with whom she soon strikes up a romantic relationship – all complicated by the side effects of her earlier injury, which leaves her prone to mood swings and a general lack of impulse control.
Production on Nailed got started in 2008, and the problems began almost right away. David O Russell already had a reputation for his on-set behaviour on his earlier movies; during the filming of his war drama Three Kings, there were reports of physical violence between him and star George Clooney. In 2003, the making of I Heart Huckabees was punctuated by a leaked video of Russell swearing at Lily Tomlin and throwing objects around the set.
On Nailed, a report suggested that Russell clashed with veteran James Caan. According to Entertainment Weekly, the two failed to agree on the best way to portray Caan’s character simultaneously coughing and choking to death. Rumour had it that Caan had stormed off the South Carolina set following an argument; the production’s official line was that Caan had left on good terms. Whatever happened, James Brolin was rushed in as his replacement.
By May that year, Nailed had bigger problems to deal with. The film was produced by Doug Wick and Lucy Fisher, whose production company Red Wagon Entertainment had previously found success with Jarhead and Stuart Little. This time around, they’d placed their trust in Capitol Films, a company then owned by financiers David Bernstein and Ron Tutor. Those financiers, as Wick and Fisher later put it to Collider, had “no integrity whatsoever and just had no intention of paying the bills.”
The lack of money threw the production into chaos, with crewmembers downing tools and refusing to work until their payment came through. According to Fisher, Nailed was shut down as many as 14 times, and with each delay, the production had to pay the crew more and more money for the inconvenience.
“We were literally shut down as we started, with all of those trucks, all of those people,” Fisher said in 2012. “It was really torturous; I’d never seen anything like it but what you end up doing is, [when] the crew says, ‘Okay we’re walking off on Wednesday we didn’t get our check,’ you say, ‘If we pay you Thursday we’ll give you a 10% premium, and if we pay you Friday we’ll give you a 20% premium.’ So by the time they kept getting money, it was always like a 30% premium, so it was getting more and more expensive.”
The situation became so hopelessly expensive that the production was eventually shut down entirely – just two days before filming was due to wrap.
Jake Gyllenhaal in Accidental Love. Credit: Amazon MGM.
For month after month, the film remained in stasis; although the bulk of it was shot, Russell hadn’t yet captured the pivotal moment when Jessica Biel’s Alice is shot in the head with the nail gun. And the more time lapsed, the harder it would be to get newly-filmed footage to match with the old.
(It later turned out that Fisher and Wick had intentionally held the filming of that crucial scene back, because they feared that their financers would try to cut the movie together and release it without their involvement. As we’ll soon see, those fears weren’t without foundation.)
In 2010, Russell and producers Fisher and Wick opted to abandon the project entirely. In a statement, the producers said they were “unable to stay involved” without agreeing to “concessions that are unfair, unprofessional and detrimental to the movie.”
Capitol Films had gone bust that year, but its owners, Bernstein and Tutor, had bought back Nailed and wanted to finish it; Fisher and Wick had allegedly been asked to accept 50 percent pay cuts for their services, which they declined. Shortly after, the producers and Russell walked away.
Rather than leave a compromised, creative failure to gather dust in a cupboard, Bernstein and Tutor tried to cut together a finished version of Nailed themselves, which was privately screened in 2011 to a less than impressed audience. By this point, the relationship between the financiers had begun to turn sour, as the film companies under their control – among them ThinkFilm, Capital Films and Capco – all went bankrupt.
The impressive supporting cast includes Kurt Fuller, Beverly D’Angelo and Tracy Morgan. Credit: Amazon MGM.
Years passed, and another independent company, Millennium Entertainment, bought Nailed with the intention of finally giving it a release. The edit was overseen by one Kia Jam, better known as a producer and financier; he was also, along with Bernstein and Tutor, among a consortium of investors who acquired Miramax from The Walt Disney Company – a deal worth some $650m.
It was then that Nailed was renamed Accidental Love (the title Politics Of Love was also suggested) and David O Russell’s name was replaced in the credits by the fictional Stephen Greene – a pseudonym akin to good old Alan Smithee.
Accidental Loved dribbled into a handful of cinemas in 2015 with minimal marketing support – presumably, none of the cast particularly wanted to promote a film they shot seven years earlier. Visibly unfinished, the film can’t hide the scars of its troubled production – the nail gun incident has been hacked together from the underlit footage available, and there’s little sense of flow between scenes.
A few dismal reviews later, and Accidental Love was left to quietly drift back into obscurity. David O Russell had long since moved on, finding Oscar acclaim with no fewer than three films released during Nailed’s time in purgatory – The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Another film, the Oscar-nominated comedy-drama Joy, came out the same year as Accidental Love.
(Russell’s behaviour has also continued to make headlines, including allegations of aggressive behaviour on the set of American Hustle, an incident where he allegedly punched a Sony executive in the stomach at an Oscar party, and an earlier accusation of sexual misconduct made by his niece.)
A year after Accidental Love came and went, its distributor, Millennium Entertainment, went bust. Also in 2016, financier David Bergenstein was arrested, charged with defrauding some $26m from investors; he was later sentenced to eight years in prison.
So ended an eight-year saga that few appear to look back on with much fondness. Wick and Fisher are still making movies under their Red Wagon banner, including the Divergent series and, most recently, Gladiator II. Nailed isn’t a subject they willingly bring up in later interviews.
Of their experience, David Wick simply said in 2012, “That was our first foray into the independent world, and it was really one of the great bitch slappings of either of our lives.”
Accidental Love is streaming now on Prime Video in the UK.
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