Ex-cop satisfied with film on family’s bloody history

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This article was published 30/08/2002 (8819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

NEW YORK CITY — It would be too easy to write off the plot of the upcoming film City By the Sea as a far-fetched police melodrama.

The central character, respected New York detective Vincent LaMarca (Robert De Niro), is a cop whose father was a convicted baby-killer. And it looks like Vincent’s estranged son Joey (James Franco) has inherited a killer gene when he is the principle suspect in a drug murder.

It seems simply too coincidental and too Hollywood to be true. One is reminded of the equally unlikely 1975 New York drama Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al Pacino robs a bank to fund his lover’s sex-change operation, and ends up taking the bank hostage.

Yeah, right. Like that could happen.

Actually, both movies share a common veracity. Both are based on true stories.

In the case of City By the Sea, the man to prove it is Vincent LaMarca himself, a retired police detective who might easily have found himself embarrassed by a film that exposes his family’s bloody laundry for the world to see. At a New York press junket, the bald-pated fiftysomething ex-cop warrants his own press conference, apart from the usual junket suspects of stars and director.

One sympathizes with the detective all the more since his character does not emerge as a simple protagonist in the film, which emphasizes LaMarca’s absent-father culpability in the downfall of his junkie-son Joey.

“I had those feelings of guilt about not being there for my son because my ex-wife made it difficult and I took the easy road and said, ‘Oh, the heck with it,’ and moved on with my life.”

On the other hand, hey, there are worse things than being portrayed by Robert De Niro on screen.

“Nobody ever asked me,” LaMarca says. “But he certainly would have been my first choice and he was obviously the right choice.”

The film, directed by Michael Caton-Jones (This Boy’s Life), occasionally embellishes the facts of the story with multiplex-friendly dramatic touches, which LaMarca accepts as necessity.

“My life, your life, that’s not enough for somebody to sit in a movie theatre and pay 10 bucks a head,” he says. “If this was a documentary, it wouldn’t be anything at all.”

On that score, LaMarca may be naive. After Joey was arrested, his father was approached by the late Mike McAlary, a respected Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, who turned the family LaMarca’s story into the 1997 Esquire feature Mark of a Murderer. The movie, adapted from that story, stays true where it counts, LaMarca says.

“There were liberties taken, there’s no question about that,” he says, adding that he had his own agenda when it came to a movie version of events.

“I was concerned with how some of it would come out,” he says. “But my concerns were addressed how my father was portrayed, they use a real soft hand with him, and how my son was portrayed,” he says. “I wanted him humanized, I didn’t want them to see a criminal.

“I was not a consultant or anything, but they made sure I knew what was going on and the bottom line is that they went out of their way to address what I was concerned about.”

As for the “liberties” taken, suffice it to say, the actual case only involved one murder, and the senior LaMarca actually was married at the time of the events, as opposed to De Niro’s long-term, no-strings courtship with Frances McDormand.

“I’ll tell you the truth, the liberties taken don’t mean anything,” says LaMarca, who says the film captures his, and indeed the typical cop’s, tendency to keep his feelings buried under a stoic veneer.

“My wife could relate to Frances McDormand,” he says, referring to a scene in which her character has to “drag out” the cause of LaMarca’s internal turmoil.

“Police work is high stress, a lot of divorce, a lot of suicide, a lot of alcoholism, so the job itself is conducive to getting that way,” LaMarca says. “I don’t think it’s uncommon for a cop to react that way. You have to. I can’t even count how many dead bodies I’ve probably seen during the course of a 20-year career. You couldn’t possibly be taking all that stuff home with you.”

LaMarca believes the film’s message is one of accepting responsibility.

“You’re responsible for the choices you make in your life, not anything else. You, you made that choice, now you live with it, deal with it,” he says.

“Don’t be blaming it on the drugs, because you made the choice to take the drugs in the first place. Don’t blame it on the surroundings you’re living in or anything else because if you didn’t make the choice to be there, you didn’t make the choice not to be there.”