Dave continues his natter with Eduardo Montes-Bradley, and this time tracks how the filmmaker paired up with Margaux Hemingway for a decent little stalker flick.

“When E! Entertainment called me after Margaux died, they asked me if I knew why she killed herself. I said, ‘She probably saw my movie’.”

With Smoothtalker (1990) shifting a satisfactory number of copies to video stores, Eduardo Montes-Bradley and his wealthy production partner, Javier Gracia, wanted to up the ante for their second stint in the straight-to-video game. Having used (and arguably abused) helmer Tom Milo first time out (“I made his life miserable,” admits the scripter/producer), Montes-Bradley elected to assume directing duties himself and took the reins of DOUBLE OBSESSION (1992).

Casting began in the offices of Michael Candela. Although the ‘90s would see the cattle call agent create quite the name for himself in the field of erotica and Playboy productions, his set-up was decidedly inelegant at the time of Double Obsession‘s making.

“Do you remember The Producers (1968)?” asks Montes-Bradley. “Well, I went to see Candela and his partner; two lowlife casting agents in Beverly Hills. They were a disaster! Always drunk and zipping their pants up. We were sitting there, and like the Mel Brooks movie, one of them sits up and says, ‘Oh! Margaux Hemingway is getting out of jail!’. I asked why and they told me that she had owed money to the IRS. ‘That’s bad, ’I replied – only for Candela to slap his face against the desk and go, “No! That’s good!”. Because a lot of people were doing this: we were all getting a list of actors who had a proportion of their wages being withheld by the Screen Actors Guild in order to pay the IRS. They needed work.”

“So Margaux it was. We met her at the Rose Café in Venice, and we instantly hit it off. It really was great. When I left she said that I was the first guy not to ask her anything about her grandfather. I said, ‘Well, your grandfather is somebody to read, but you’re somebody to look at.’ After Hemingway, I began to look for other actors. Frederic Forrest joined us. Great actor. Probably regrets being on our movie – Maryam d’Abo regretted taking the role for sure! You have to remember that these are films that none of us wanted to make. OK?! [Laughs] Why were we doing it? Well, I can’t do anything else. I can’t work at Target, y’know!”

In terms of content, the most saleable asset of any low budget production is if it resembles a recent hit or trend. As luck would have it, Double Obsession started shooting the very same week as Single White Female (1992), and both The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (1992) and Unlawful Entry (1992) went before cameras a month either side of them. Stalkers and psychos were heading for boffo box office – and a direct-to-video riff on the topic was guaranteed money in the eyes of distributors.

Is Hemingway suited to playing certifiable?

Alas, more so than most considering her tragic history.

In Double Obsession, she toplines as Heather Dwyer: a college girl obsessed with her roommate, Claire Burke (Maryam d’Abo). Things come to a head when Claire falls in love with a classmate (Scott Valentine), and Heather’s possessive nature rises to the surface. The further Claire grows from Heather, the deeper Heather’s fixation becomes. Years go by and Heather’s demons appear to have intensified, driving her to acts of extreme sadism and murder. Ironically, it’s only Claire – the object of her deadly attention – who’s capable of stopping her.

There’s a lot wrong with Double Obsession. Performances are a little off kilter, some scenes stifle a laugh instead of a scream, and the script is incongruous at best. None of this is news to Montes-Bradley, of course. Originally penned by Rick Marx – a prolific screenwriter who switched from porn (Wanda Whips Wall Street (1982)) to mainstream (Platoon Leader (1988)) and back again with consummate ease – large quantities of Columbia’s finest export convinced Montes-Bradley to add his own less than stellar ideas.

“We wrote the script on drugs! I made the terrible mistake of trying to cannibalise all my intellectualism into it. That’s why you see the pictures of Freud and other people, because I thought I was exorcising the flagrant shallowness from Hollywood by bringing in a European touch. It was never going to work! So much pretentious intellectualism being brought into a stupid film!”

“Rick Marx fought with me and said, ‘You’re paying me to write a script that you’re going to ruin!’. We paid him good money too. I’d turn to Rick and say:

“In this scene he needs to say this.”

“‘But that doesn’t make any sense?’ would come the reply.”

“Precisely!”

“I was bringing in my Buenos Aires shrink background and my arthouse sensibility, and this guy knew I was making a mistake. The general rule of thumb is that anytime anybody says something outrageously awkward in the film, that’s my line. For example, when Hemingway grabs d’Abo’s daughter, kisses her on the lips then says, ‘She didn’t taste half as good as you did!’ – that’s me! [laughs].”

Nevertheless, despite the kerfuffle, and irrespective of the troubled Hemingway appearing slightly out of it at times, Double Obsession went on to score a good return on video (“We got an offer from ICM of half a million dollars when we were in our second week of editing”). It would be hard to begrudge it of that, too. A bona fide example of hedonistic filmmaking on the fly, Double Obsession isn’t a classic – but with a handful of effective setups and a particularly intense (and wonderfully ambiguous) conclusion, it’s a satisfying bit of VHS era exploitation.

“I was thirty!” Montes-Bradley concludes. “I was getting paid $300,000. That’s a shitload of money. People were pushing us to do stuff like this. They were asking for it! It was an audacious project. I wish I had half of that audacity today. I feel a sense of embarrassment. I feel a sense of pride. I’m pleased my producers didn’t lose money, and I’m pleased that everyone got paid”.

“We all make mistakes man… [laughs].”