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Tell Me How You Love the Picture
A Hollywood Life
By Edward S. Feldman, Tom Barton St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2005 Edward S. Feldman
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-6435-1
CHAPTER 1
WHAT I DO IS PRODUCE
I gave the door a confident knock. I have arrived, both literally and figuratively.
My employer, 20th Century Fox, had sent me over to the St. Regis Hotel to discuss a marketing campaign on a film with truly one of the giants of the business, the legendary, almost mythical producer David O. Selznick.
Selznick had produced one of the great films of all time, Gone with the Wind, as well as classics such as Rebecca and A Star Is Born. And now at age twenty-seven, I was meeting with him one-on-one. Pretty good for a kid from the Bronx in his first real job, making all of $112.50 a week. Yes, I had arrived.
"Ed Feldman to see Mr. Selznick," I said to the assistant when the door opened. I was ushered into the sitting room to have breakfast and talk business with the great Selznick.
A few moments later, Selznick strides in and offers me his hand. "Ed, I'm David Selznick. A pleasure to meet you."
The breakfast meeting went well. I explained what we had in mind for the campaign. Selznick listened attentively, gave me feedback, ideas. We talked about the picture — a remake of A Farewell to Arms — and then about the film business in general. I was feeling really confident now. Why, we were almost equals.
From out of the blue, Selznick says, "You know, Ed, this is probably the most important moment of your life."
And I reply, "Why do you say that, David?" No Mr. Selznick for me.
"Because you are having breakfast with the most important man in the history of this business."
God, I thought, no one told me Selznick was a kidder. Well, if it's witty banter he wants, I can deliver. So I said quickly and jauntily, "David, it's such an ironic thing for you to say that here because three weeks ago in this very same suite, Darryl Zanuck told me the exact same thing."
Now, here's where the scene switches to slow motion as I absorb every agonizing detail — a real your-life-passes-before-your-eyes moment.
Selznick says nothing. He glares at me. Without missing a beat, he leans over, picks up the phone, and dials a number. I don't get the impression he's planning to tell the folks back at the office what a damn funny guy Feldman is.
"Mr. Spyros Skouras, please. This is David Selznick. I'll hold."
I'm frozen, paralyzed. Some half-chewed toast just sits there in my mouth.
"Spyros, I want Ed Feldman fired!" he screamed.
Now, Spyros Skouras ran Fox. I saw him all the time. In the hall, in his office, in the screening room. I'm doomed.
I could hear Skouras clearly through the phone because he was talking very loudly. "David, I can't fire Ed Feldman. You're asking me to do the impossible."
Thank God, I thought. Fox is sticking up for me. One of the heavy hitters of the film business is asking for my head and they're backing me up. What a great company.
Selznick is getting angrier and angrier. "Why can't you fire him, Spyros? Tell me. Why not?"
"I would fire him, David, if I knew who the hell you were talking about. How can I fire him and I don't even know who he is?"
Exit Feldman. I quietly got up, set my napkin down, and walked through the front door. Selznick never noticed — too busy yelling at Skouras.
I worked for Fox — for Skouras — for nine years. He spoke with me often, greeted me in the hall, saw me at meetings, saw me in the steam room. But usually he saw me with other people, a producer or director or someone. He would say to me, "You're a smart young man. Someday you'll work for me."
So for the entire nine years, before and after Selznick, he never knew who I was or that I was employed by Fox.
And you know what? After my disastrous encounter with "the most important man in the history of the business," that was just fine with me.
* * *
I'm a producer.
That young kid, nearly fired for mouthing off to a self-important big shot producer, now produces feature films for a living. For the record, these films are called feature films because they're shown in movie theaters before they reach home video and cable TV.
And they tend to be very, very expensive. The average production budget of the last four pictures I produced was in the neighborhood of $85 million each.
And lately they tend to feature big stars. Over my career, I've produced movies with Harrison Ford, Mel Gibson, Jack Lemmon, Glenn Close, Jim Carrey, and Eddie Murphy. This partly explains why the movies have been so pricey.
But working with stars goes far beyond that. Take Harrison Ford. He is much more than a big movie star. He's a generous, talented actor whose tremendous contributions to the making of a film are well over and above his considerable acting skills. Harrison is very smart — he's someone you always want to be in business with.
It's amazing that the general public often knows so little about what a producer actually does on a picture. Part of this is because a producer's role on a film depends on the particulars of the project itself. Some individuals are given a producer credit if they helped acquire the script or arranged financing but had little to do with the development and production of the film. A person is sometimes granted a producer's credit because he or she was involved with an early version of the project and has contractual rights that carry over.
Some people confuse the movie's producer with the director, and that's not unreasonable when directors also produce their own films. On most projects, the producer is the general manager and the director actually makes the picture. If you drew an organizational chart of a typical movie, the director would report to the producer. (With superstar directors like a Steven Spielberg, it's probably the other way around.) But in the workaday making of the movie, the producer and the director are more like partners.
So what do I do as a producer?
Well, one thing I don't do is put up my own money. And it's not that I don't believe in the projects. It's that producing a movie and financing a movie are two different things. Financing a movie is for investors who analyze the risks and potential returns of a number of projects, then invest their capital accordingly.
There was one scary time when my house was on the line to help pay for one of my movies. It was a little low-budget flick called Hot Dog ... The Movie. But I don't do that anymore.
What I do as a producer is pretty simple, when you get right down to it. I'm the guy the studio hires to bring them a completed movie.
Many times, I acquire a script myself. It might be complete and ready to go, or in need of a rewrite or the like — Witness, The Golden Child, Save the Tiger, for example. Other times, I'm brought in to literally supervise the making of the film after someone else has developed it — The Truman Show, Forever Young, and Green Card were like that.
In both cases, the studio basically says, "Ed, here's $70 million. Go off and make this movie. Probably the script needs work, so we'll need you to consult with the director, the writers, and us. We might even need a second or third rewrite. Use good people on the picture but watch your spending — you have $70 million to spend and it's basically up to you to spend it wisely. If you run into problems, let us know. In fact, we'll be looking over your footage and production reports a lot to see how things are going. But you're in charge. We're there to help and we may show up once in a while but we won't hover around. Now good luck, Ed. Godspeed and all that. We're counting on you. Win one for the Gipper."
It's not really that simple, but that's the gist of it.
Moviemaking is one of the riskiest commercial activities on the planet. No one really knows how a movie is going to do. After screening The Truman Show for the first time, Sherry Lansing, then head of Paramount, turned to me and said, "Ed, you've made the most expensive art film in history."
Now Lansing is a top-flight movie executive. To call a movie an "art film" is to say that it's a good, high-quality work but that it seems to appeal to a very limited, specialized audience. Art films will typically play in small, possibly stand-alone theaters appealing to a more sophisticated audience. You know the type of theater I mean. When they're not showing the latest art film, they're running a Fellini retrospective, drawing a few film buffs who debate why the director used such-and-such a camera filter.
Studios categorically do not spend $50 million to $70 million on "art films."
MGM has a famous motto, "ars gratia artis" —art for the sake of art — that dates back to 1928. A retooled version could apply to all the major studios (and I don't mean this cynically): "art for the sake of money." (Mel Brooks even joked about this in one of his movies.)
Well, The Truman Show ended up a huge hit, financially and critically. We hit a home run, out of the park, and the ball finally landed three miles away.
I was a producer on another film, K-19: The Widowmaker, which starred Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. It told the compelling true story of the Soviet Union's first nuclear submarine, a vessel so ramshackle that it nearly caused a nuclear explosion in the North Atlantic. The film was well made and directed. It was tense and gripping. Harrison and Liam were wonderful in very tough roles (they played Russian submarine commanders). The critics loved it. Paramount released it in prime time, midsummer 2002, with a huge, expensive marketing push. Our ace in the hole — Harrison Ford, one of a select few superstars who can bring people to a film with his persona.
But the audience stayed away in droves. The film cost its backers $90 million (Paramount was only distributing it) and took in $35 million in North America box office and even less abroad.
With K-19, we tapped the ball up in the air and it fell right into the catcher's mitt. Yer out!
Meanwhile, in this tortoise and hare pennant race, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, staffed with talented unknowns and costing a mere $5 million, grossed over $240 million at the North American ticket booths, becoming one of the top romantic comedies of all time. We — K-19 — outgrossed it for three weeks starting in July 2002, right after we opened. Then we were almost gone completely two weeks later and Greek Wedding was still trotting along.
And all the major studios — I mean all — had turned Greek Wedding down. Try explaining that to your stockholders, Mr. Movie Mogul.
Now that's a risky business to be in.
Everyone looks back on Titanic as if it was always destined to be a hit — the highest-grossing film in history — from the get-go. But people have selective memories.
A friend of mine once tried to arrange a conference call with James Cameron, Titanic's writer and director. Cameron was hard at work on the script and his time was very, very scarce. Cameron's assistant was apologetic and explained that Cameron was writing a script based on the sinking of the Titanic, something not that many people were aware of early in the effort. My friend was incredulous — what an odd choice for the great action director James Cameron. Besides, the Titanic story had been filmed several times before and everyone already knows the ending!
During the filming of Titanic, the cost went wildly over budget, making 20th Century Fox, the lead studio on the film, look like it had an out-of-control train wreck on its hands. Another Waterworld. Hollywood tongues were wagging at a furious pace and the words were not kind. Fox's very survival, or at least the tenure of its senior executives, was questioned.
Then an odd thing happened. It opened and people went to see this three-hour-plus mega-epic and loved it, especially teenage girls and young women. They went back again and again, sobbing each and every time over Leonardo DiCaprio's tragic, selfless love for Kate Winslet. You just know there was many a young man who "got lucky" after taking his date to see Titanic.
The money rolled in, and Fox and Cameron were now geniuses. (The real geniuses were at Paramount, who put up a fixed amount to partner on Titanic, then split the take with Fox. Fox had to shoulder the cost overruns alone.)
* * *
At the end of the day, a good producer is valuable to movie studios because he or she helps them tame the risk of moviemaking. The studios pay me very well to manage these mega-dollar productions competently, keep problems to a minimum, come in at the budgeted cost figure plus a standard contingency allowance, and deliver a high-quality movie to them, so they can market it to the masses.
With all the other risks they face, they don't need a big-dollar headache happening three thousand miles away. It costs over $200,000 a day to shoot a big movie on location. If the picture runs five days behind, that's more than $1 million down the drain. The studio chiefs like to get a sound sleep at night and that's why they need good producers.
And that's what I do for a living.
* * *
And the work — well, sometimes it goes like this ...
In late 1996 through mid-1998, I produced The Truman Show for Paramount and Scott Rudin with my friend the extraordinary Australian Peter Weir directing. As most people know by now, the film centers around a young man and his life. He seems very ordinary — except that his life is really a television show and he is the show's unwitting star. All of his friends and family are paid actors. He is an international phenomenon but he doesn't know it. Hidden cameras are everywhere, following him constantly. Jim Carrey played the man, Truman Burbank, in his first dramatic role.
There are two central characters to the piece, Truman and the director of the television show, the enigmatic Christof.
The movie was fully cast by the time we began shooting in Seaside, Florida, on the Florida Panhandle near Panama City. Seaside is the ultimate planned community, looking something like an idealized version of a 1950s American town. Idyllic, worry free, controlled. Most of the film's principal photography occurred in and around Seaside.
Now, because of the nature of the story, Christof is never actually seen in Seahaven Island, Truman's fabricated hometown. Throughout the film, Christof sits in an elaborate TV control room, behind the fake sky that looms over the island.
So there was no need to film any of Christof's scenes in Florida. Later we would move the production to the Paramount studio lot in Hollywood and shoot all of Christof's scenes together on a soundstage. Then the scenes would be combined with the Florida footage to tell the story.
Dennis Hopper was playing Christof as we began the control room shooting at Paramount. Hopper had had mixed success over his career but he was capable of delivering strong, magnetic performances in unconventional roles. David Lynch's Blue Velvet was one of his best.
But it was well known that during phases of his life, he had been a heavy drug user. He had talked about it publicly. The word we had on him in 1996 was that he was drug-free and reliable. The last thing a big $70 million picture needs is a secondary lead who shows up late or delivers an erratic performance. And God forbid we would ever find him stoned in his dressing room. With those fears behind us, Peter Weir and Paramount were satisfied that Hopper would work out fine.
But he didn't, and it wasn't because he was using drugs. On Day 1 of the Christof scenes, we knew we were in trouble. Hopper was not off to a good start in the role. For one thing, he was having difficulty remembering his lines.
Keep in mind that much of the movie was shot and rough-edited by the time Hopper arrived. We knew we had a winner. Almost all of Carrey's performance was finished and he was terrific, exceeding a lot of people's expectations.
All it took was that one day of shooting to question Hopper as the right actor for the role. Peter Weir was exasperated but passive. But I didn't wait for Peter. I called Paramount and Scott Rudin, and told them we might need to replace Hopper and that we should start looking around. They said fine — we'll pay him off and go with someone else if necessary.
Hopper wasn't needed again on the set for a while. Then one day we call on him to read lines off-camera as Christof while we filmed Jim Carrey in the water tank on the Universal studio lot. Christof and Truman have a dramatic exchange as Truman escapes from his imprisonment by boat at the end of the picture. In the scene, Truman hears Christof's voice through a loudspeaker — Christof is still in the TV control room behind the fake sky.
Hopper's delivery wasn't what we anticipated. We had to replace him.
Peter was reluctant to release Hopper. I told him, "Look. He's going to bring down the whole picture. If you continue with Hopper, believe me, you will be back here reshooting the last three weeks of the movie."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tell Me How You Love the Picture by Edward S. Feldman, Tom Barton. Copyright © 2005 Edward S. Feldman. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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