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\u2019d 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<\/a>, had \u201cno integrity whatsoever and just had no intention of paying the bills.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWe were literally shut down as we started, with all of those trucks, all of those people,\u201d Fisher said in 2012. \u201cIt was really torturous; I\u2019d never seen anything like it but what you end up doing is, [when] the crew says, \u2018Okay we\u2019re walking off on Wednesday we didn\u2019t get our check,\u2019 you say, \u2018If we pay you Thursday we\u2019ll give you a 10% premium, and if we pay you Friday we\u2019ll give you a 20% premium.\u2019\u00a0 So by the time they kept getting money, it was always like a 30% premium, so it was getting more and more expensive.\u201d<\/p>\n The situation became so hopelessly expensive that the production was eventually shut down entirely \u2013 just two days before filming was due to wrap.\u00a0<\/p>\n For month after month, the film remained in stasis; although the bulk of it was shot, Russell hadn\u2019t yet captured the pivotal moment when Jessica Biel\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n (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\u2019ll soon see, those fears weren\u2019t without foundation.)<\/p>\n In 2010, Russell and producers Fisher and Wick opted to abandon the project entirely. In a statement, the producers said they were \u201cunable to stay involved\u201d without agreeing to \u201cconcessions that are unfair, unprofessional and detrimental to the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 among them ThinkFilm, Capital Films and Capco \u2013 all went bankrupt.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 a deal worth some $650m.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was then that Nailed was renamed Accidental Love (the title Politics Of Love was also suggested) and David O Russell\u2019s name was replaced in the credits by the fictional Stephen Greene \u2013 a pseudonym akin to good old Alan Smithee<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Accidental Loved dribbled into a handful of cinemas in 2015 with minimal marketing support \u2013 presumably, none of the cast particularly wanted to promote a film they shot seven years earlier. Visibly unfinished, the film can\u2019t hide the scars of its troubled production \u2013 the nail gun incident has been hacked together from the underlit footage available, and there\u2019s little sense of flow between scenes.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019s time in purgatory \u2013 The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. Another film, the Oscar-nominated comedy-drama Joy, came out the same year as Accidental Love.\u00a0<\/p>\n (Russell\u2019s behaviour has also continued to make headlines, including allegations of aggressive behaviour<\/a> on the set of American Hustle, an incident where he allegedly punched <\/a>a Sony executive in the stomach at an Oscar party, and an earlier accusation of sexual misconduct<\/a> made by his niece.)<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/a> Nailed isn\u2019t a subject they willingly bring up in later interviews.\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"Accidental](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/accidental-1-800x417.jpg\")
Jake Gyllenhaal in Accidental Love. Credit: Amazon MGM.<\/p>\n![\"Accidental](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/accidental-2-800x424.jpg\")
The impressive supporting cast includes Kurt Fuller, Beverly D\u2019Angelo and Tracy Morgan. Credit: Amazon MGM.<\/p>\n