Living Up to Their ‘Code’

Polly Draper remembers precisely when she got around to asking Michael Wolff about the facial tics he had worked so hard to disguise on their first dates.

“We had gone out a few times,” says Draper, perhaps best known for her portrayal of Ellyn Warren in the hit television series “thirtysomething,” “and I just couldn’t’ figure out what was going on.”

“So she just turned to me,” interrupts Wolff, seated alongside Draper, now his wife, at breakfast at the Four Seasons, “and said, ‘What’s the matter with you, anyway?’ ”

It’s a memory that now evokes laughter over the sheer awkwardness of the moment, but it was a tough experience for Wolff, a jazz pianist who led the band on “The Arsenio Hall Show.”

Wolff has Tourette’s syndrome. Like many people with the disorder, he had worked hard to conceal and obscure the multiple motor and vocal tics that are its primary characteristics. First described by (and named after) French physician Georges Gilles de la Tourette more than a hundred years ago, it perhaps is best known, unfortunately, as the “cursing disease.” Only a small percentage of those afflicted with Tourette’s, however, experience the involuntary public display of cursing and obscenities known as coprolalia.

They eventually married and had their first child. Their process of dealing with Tourette’s and the continuing embarrassment it caused Wolff, and Draper’s concerned awareness that her husband’s efforts to conceal the disorder were often far less effective than he supposed, eventually found their way into her first screenplay.

Called “The Tic Code,” it opened Friday, a rare example of an independent film completing its long odyssey through production to release without sacrificing any of its essence.

“I actually started out,” says Draper, “with the desire to write something about an intense relationship between a mother and son, particularly because I’d just come off ‘thirtysomething,’ playing this high-strung, neurotic woman who couldn’t be a mother if she tried.”

When Draper began to consider using Tourette’s syndrome as a complicating factor in that relationship, she ran into a wall of resistance from her husband, who had otherwise been immensely supportive.

“The first thing he said was ‘Please don’t write about Tourette’s,’ ” recalls Draper. “He had not gone public and was still extremely embarrassed about it. So I backed off. Then, after a week or so, he thought maybe it would be a good idea, so long as the story didn’t appear to be based on him.”

Draper agreed and did not model the story on Wolff’s life, even though it takes place in a jazz setting. One of the principal characters is Miles, a talented 12-year-old pianist (played by Christopher George Marquette), who has Tourette’s syndrome and aspires to become a jazz artist. Another is world-class jazz tenor saxophonist Tyrone (portrayed by Gregory Hines), who works hard to conceal his own Tourette’s. The third main character, the boy’s mother, Laura, is played by Draper.

Wolff’s sensitivity to personal comparisons in the script was diminished when he realized how important the thread between jazz and Tourette’s syndrome was to the story.

“It couldn’t have been anything but Tourette’s,” he says, “because of the emotional freedom--it’s about a person who has no inhibitors in their brain, so everything comes freely--and that’s what jazz is.”

“Right,” adds Draper. “It’s an uninhibited form of music. So you put them together and it becomes a very interesting, very compatible combination. And that clearly took it away from another disease-of-the-week sort of thing.”

Getting the project off the ground was another matter.

“It’s been a seven-year process since Polly wrote the script,” explains Wolff. “It took five years to get the money. Then, after we made the film, it took another couple of years getting distribution.”

The business people they talked to, says Draper, were convinced the interracial romance between Laura and Tyrone “was a real bad idea. Especially for the foreign markets, they said, that we could never sell in Japan and Germany.”

Draper was asked why--if it was not really an issue that the character was African American--he couldn’t be white.

“In the jazz world, an interracial romance wouldn’t be an issue,” Draper says.

“I wanted the Tourette’s to be highlighted. I wanted to show that he was more comfortable with the fact that he was black than he was with the fact that he had Tourette’s--so deeply seated that he uses his blackness as his excuse to avoid being in the relationship, when he knows that’s not the problem at all, that it’s because he can’t deal with his Tourette’s.”

But that was only the first obstacle. Tourette’s was another.

“They thought it was just too weird,” says Draper. “They asked me, ‘Can’t you use some other adolescent problem?’ And I said, ‘You mean, like acne?’ ”

A Litany of Strikes Against the Film

A third issue was a young person in a starring role in a picture that was not a “kids’ film.”

“We were told,” adds Draper, “that they didn’t know how to sell a movie like that. ‘It has to be one thing or the other,’ they said. They were very confused. It was really fascinating.”

A fourth was the focus on jazz rather than any one of a variety of more fashionable pop music styles.

“But all those elements had to be present,” says Draper, “because they all go together to make up the whole story--jazz, Tourette’s, the interracial romance, the connection between the youthful and the mature experience with Tourette’s.”

Keeping the elements together meant turning down any number of big studio offers of financing.

“Even if we were told, ‘You’ll get this much money if you’ll make this change,’ ” says Draper, “I just couldn’t do it for that reason. If I couldn’t understand it in an artistic way, then I couldn’t fathom doing it.”

But the project, shepherded by Draper and Wolff with co-producer Karen Tangorra, finally went into production with funding from the Imperial Bank and a consortium of Canadian investors. Director Gary Winick came on board after Norman Rene, the original choice, died.

Shot in areas around Greenwich Village, with many scenes set in the historic Village Vanguard jazz club (although actually shot elsewhere), the picture--largely thanks to Wolff--provides a strikingly authentic view of the jazz world. And Draper largely succeeds in creating a strong female character within an unusual family grouping.

The creative goal accomplished, finding a distributor was the next mountain to be climbed. Draper and Wolff first submitted it to a series of international film festivals.

Among its numerous awards, “The Tic Code” won the best picture and the Crystal Bear trophies at the Berlin Film Festival, best actress (Draper), best actor (Marquette), best picture and Grand Jury Prize at Italy’s Giffoni Festival, a Best Picture/Reel-to-Reel Award at the Vancouver Film Festival and the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Musical Achievement (for Wolff’s score) from the Hamptons International Film Festival in New York.

Upbeat reviews in the entertainment industry trade papers Variety and the Hollywood Reporter also helped. Lion’s Gate Films finally agreed about a year ago to distribute “The Tic Code.” And the somewhat unusual decision to give it an airing on the Starz! cable channel last April started a buzz about the film even before it received a theatrical release.

But the real success story is the tale of how an offbeat independent film about a difficult subject was successfully guided through the rocky shoals of the movie world by a determined married couple.

“We worked hard,” says Wolff, “and it’s almost hard to believe that it’s been seven years in the process. And Polly was pregnant with our second son for some of the scenes--which we had to shoot from careful angles--when all she really wanted to do was go home and sleep.”

“In some respects,” adds Draper, “it was just dumb luck that got us through it. But the key thing was that Michael and I were so clear about what we wanted the movie to be. And we just weren’t going to make it any other way.”