‘ ‘Getting a film made is a combination of inspiration and perspiration.”
Getting a film made is the keynote of success in Hollywood. How good it is, or how bad it is, is irrelevant. Hollywood, as one journalist commented, is a “town where you fail upward.” If you get a deal to make a movie budgeted at $10 million, and it’s a colossal failure, the next film you produce will probably cost $15 million. If you get $100,000 salary for the film that bombs, you’ll get $150,000 for the next one. And it keeps on going.
There are lessons to be learned from the people who get movies made. For a producer, buying a screenplay is one thing; getting the script made into a movie is another. And that’s the bottom line.
As producers, Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer represent the hands-on approach to moviemaking; they conceive, create, and design their projects from inception through completion.
But there are some producers who represent a more entrepreneurial approach, working on many projects simultaneously at different stages of the process, assembling the material—either script, book, novel, or article—then bringing together the writer, director, and star or stars, then presenting this package to the studio for financing. They make their deals based on the quality of the “package.” These producers are called “packagers.”
Producers who package their movies can be selective about which properties they put their energies into. Some projects may take a year or two to put together; others, up to seven or eight.
Peter Guber is the quintessential producer, the man who stands at the hub of the creative process and puts all the elements together to make a movie. He calls himself a “creative entrepreneur.”
Guber, with his partner Jon Peters, has individually or collectively produced, or executive-produced, such highly acclaimed films as Midnight Express, Missing, The Deep, The Color Purple, Flashdance, An American Werewolf in London, Gorillas in the Mist, and Rain Man. In short, Peter Guber is a mover and a shaker. He gets things done.
We met for our interview in the conference room of his new offices across the street from the William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills. Guber and Peters recently merged their company, the Guber-Peters Company, with Barris Industries, creating a diversified entertainment complex specializing in films, TV, music, and the print media.
Personable, lean, and trim, with a substantial pony tail, Guber looks younger than his forty-odd years. I was impressed with his manner and presentation. He’s a man who radiates confidence, success, money, and power.
While pursuing an M.B.A. degree at New York University’s Graduate School of Business, Guber was recruited by Columbia Pictures. After two years in Casting and Creative Affairs, he became worldwide head of the studio, overseeing the development and production of such films as Tommy, Shampoo, Taxi Driver, The Way We Were, and The Last Detail.
In 1976 he left Columbia Pictures, formed and became co-owner of Casablanca Records and Filmworks with the late record entrepreneur Neil Bogart. At that time Casablanca, under Bogart’s leadership, had a tremendous roster: Donna Summer, Kiss, The Village People, Cher, Mac Davis, Robin Williams, Woody Allen, The Captain and Tennille, Giorgio Morodor, and more.
After Bogart’s death Guber formed the Guber-Peters company with Jon Peters and has undertaken production of such films as Innerspace, The Witches of Eastwick, Batman, Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities, and Carl Sagan’s Contact. As of this writing, Guber-Peters have many projects in different stages of production. Batman is to be shot in the fall in England; Contact, directed by Roland Joffe, will be shooting soon; Capa has a script by Menno Mejyes (The Color Purple), and Oliver Stone will direct; Rain Man, written and directed by Barry Levinson, stars Dustin Hoffman and Tom Cruise (the winner of several Academy Awards).
Guber-Peters has purchased the rights to The Bonfire of the Vanities, the number-one best seller by Tom Wolfe.
Among his other accomplishments, Guber is a member of the teaching faculty at UCLA, and is a member of the California, New York, and Washington, D.C., bar associations.
It was a rainy and overcast day in L.A. when I went to see him. Billowy clouds swept across the western sky as we sat in the plush conference room and talked about his role in making movies.
Guber underscored his close collaboration with partner Jon Peters on all business and creative affairs. “1 see myself,” he began, “as a producing filmmaker, a creative entrepreneur. Our business is not called show show, it’s called show business. It’s that blend of understanding you have to have in order to get your movie made, so you have to be entrepreneurial sound. You have to be willing to take a risk economically as well as creatively.
“The geography of every project is different. On some, you take only a creative risk, like acquiring the rights to a book; others, you develop yourself. Some projects you have to be willing to share the proprietorship of the project, and how that is shared determines what role my partner and I play and what credit we end up taking.
“Sometimes,” he continues, “I’m simply an executive in my company; we may, for example, acquire a piece of material that already has a producer attached, and we assist him or her in the execution of the project. We help lay out the strategy, raise the financing, package it, generally assist and support them in their needs, and after that’s all done, they go off and make their film.
“Other times, we become intimately involved in the development and acquisition of material, participating in the creative process. I’ll find the material, and commission the screenwriter, either by myself, or with my partner and another producer, or possibly with a studio executive.
“There are many times when we become directly involved in an actual production capacity. On some films we may not stay on location but are involved in the post-production phase, conceptualizing and managing the marketing of the film,” something which Guber is particularly adept at, and for which Guber-Peters will take an executive producer credit.
“And then,” he goes on, “there are those special projects where my partner and I actually produce the film. We become intricately involved with every element of producing and marketing the film. We may find a book before it’s published and decide to acquire it with our own funds. Then we’ll begin the delicate process of finding the writer and developing it into a screenplay. Sometimes we’ll bring in the filmmaker at this stage, and we’ll be with the project on a day-to-day basis, and then we’ll take the producer credit. So I define the credit we take by what job we do on the picture.
“After all,” he emphasizes, “if you don’t get the film made, you don’t have anything. You don’t hear someone saying I hear there’s a great script playing in Westwood. The only criterion you can use about a producer is, did he or she get the film made; then you can ask, is it good or not?”
Though Guber-Peters purchased the rights to the novel The Color Purple “in order to get it made,” he says, “and to get Steven Spielberg to do the picture, we had to step aside because he wanted his people to produce the movie. So we became the executive producer. I would have preferred to stay on as producer, because I had a lot invested in the project. While it wasn’t in our best emotional interests to do that, it was certainly in our best economic interest, and in the interest of the project. So we did what we had to do to get the film made with the best creative talent.”
The first job of the producer, Guber reminds us, is to get the film made. “It’s a function of melding circumstances and opportunity together and knowing what to do with it,” he continues. “It’s a process of selection, as well as creation. A good creative producer, or executive producer, or creative entrepreneur, has the vision and the determination to see it through. He must have the romance to convince the director, the studio, and the talent to go along with that vision. He must have the tenacity and wherewithal to bring these elements together and coalesce them into a unified whole. He must have the drive and enthusiasm to keep it all together through whatever bumps and grinds occur during the process of getting the movie made.”
This certainly sounds good—passionate and dedicated—but words are cheap in Hollywood. How do you go about applying it and making it work? What is it that attracts a producer like Peter Guber to a script, book, idea, or article?
“I’m moved by something emotionally,” he says. “I don’t figure it out, it doesn’t start in my head, it starts in my heart, my gut, my groin.”
What happens then?
“At that point, I begin to develop a strategy to translate what I feel. Whether it’s a play, a book, or an article in a newspaper, like Midnight Express, or an original idea somebody pitched, like Flashdance, where you had an unknown director [Adrian Lyne], a first-time writer [Joe Eszterhas], and an unknown star [Jennifer Beals]. Or a song or rock opera like Tommy that provides the basis of a story line or situation for a movie. Whatever it is that makes me laugh, or cry, or become emotional in some way becomes the motor for the whole thing.
“What spurs me on is very simple; I want to see this as a film.”
I found this simple statement expressed in interview after interview after interview. What intrigues anybody in Hollywood, what propels someone into an active mode, whether an agent, development executive, producer, or reader, is something that strikes them emotionally.
A short time ago one of my students called me from New York. She wanted my advice, she said, and then went on to explain that she had written a screenplay that a number of people in L.A., agents and producers, had read and liked, “but they all said it didn’t ‘live’ for them; it didn’t leap off the page.”
They said it was different, interesting, and unusual, but they were going to pass on it, but they would be happy to read anything else she cared to submit. As soon as I heard that, I knew it was a setup. I already had an idea of what was coming.
We talked awhile about the script, about her writing, and the comments of the agents and producers. I was testing the waters up to then, and just before we hung up (in screen writing, you enter the scene at the last possible moment), I asked her what her story was about. So she told me. It was a story about a professor at a Midwestern university doing nuclear research who accidentally stumbled onto a very important find which became a political issue for a nuke-antinuke confrontation, and of course the CIA and KGB become involved. The professor goes through some past-life regressions and learns the source of his discovery, and so on.
I stopped her right there. No wonder, I said. The subject matter, the use of the political situation, nuke-antinuke, CIA, KGB, is old hat. That subject matter has saturated this town like a wet sponge and no one’s interested anymore.
But what about his past life regressions? she asked. What about them? I asked. That part of the script is certainly new and novel, I said, but the readers of the script were getting turned off by the political issues just the way I did. They made their decision before they finished reading the screenplay.
No matter how it’s done, no matter how interesting it is, or how well written it is, it’s old stuff. You need a fresh look, a fresh environment, a fresh approach. “Fresh and original, with a twist.”
I’m beginning to understand that the choice and selection of the subject matter is the most important thing in selling the screenplay. Once you have found your “arena,” action, and characters, and weld them into an interesting story line, and you have a good, solid first-draft script, then you can plan a strategy that helps you get it to the people who can say yes to a project.
What does Peter Guber do when he finds a script he likes? After all, he is both buyer and seller. How does he plan a strategy?
The first question Peter Guber asks himself when he responds to a script is “What would the film look like? Is it lighthearted, drama, slapstick, or science fiction? Is it going to require special effects? Is it going to be a big-budget enterprise? So the first thing I do is define what it is. Recognize what it is. You always ride the horse in the direction it’s going.
“If this picture is a $20 million film shot with animals on the top of a mountain in Africa, it’s unlikely a new young director from UCLA will be a good selection. That would be wasted energy. It’s just too hard to swim upstream. So what are we going to do to pull this off?
“Number one, we’ll need a top director—like Jim Cameron, who did Aliens, or Oliver Stone, who did Platoon. The real key is to make sure the project has a shape and direction to it, so the financier, or the studio/distributor, can see the project as a film as opposed to development.”
The key factor is to determine what will be the hub of the project in terms of getting the film made. Such is the case with Gorillas in the Mist (Anna Hamilton Phelan), the story of Dian Fossey, the famous anthropologist who was studying gorillas in Rwanda when she was mysteriously murdered. No one knows who did it, or why.
“This story,” explains Guber, “takes place in Central Africa, on an extinct volcano some eleven thousand feet high, in the dense jungle, with eight-hundred-pound silverback gorillas; it is a monster project, both figuratively and literally. At an early date, it was determined that the key to this movie would be the director; someone established, who could deal with animals, the logistics of handling a large crew in foreign terrain and under difficult conditions.”
At this same time Warner Bros., Universal, and an independent producer, Skip Steloff of Heritage Entertainment, were all developing projects about Dian Fossey. Once she was murdered, there was a feeding frenzy. The studios threatened each other, Skip Steloff had news conferences, and ultimately everybody realized they either had to work together on this project or not at all. So Universal and Warner Bros, joined forces and Steloff, the independent, was forced out.
Arnold Glimcher, who developed the Fossey project at Universal with Anna Hamilton Phelan’s screenplay, and Peter Guber got together. After an initial clearing of feelings, “we hit it off pretty good,” Guber remarks. “He was from Boston, I was from Boston. He was a sailor, I was a sailor.
“So we joined forces and ended up agreeing to use his director, Michael Apted, and his script. Arnold went off to Rwanda and produced the film. We are the executive producers, and Arnold Glimcher the producer.
“Ironically, the element that provided the momentum for this project was something quite different. I describe momentum as being the critical element in getting the picture made. In Gorillas the momentum was achieved by securing the natural-history rights in Rwanda so we could photograph the actual gorillas, then getting support from such groups as the African Wildlife Foundation. They were instrumental in this regard.
“While this was a true story, we felt it was critical that we have legal releases from the people we were going to portray. Since Dian Fossey had been murdered [still unsolved at this writing], we could avoid the normal requirement of certain clearances. Since we had these clearances as well as permission from the country and the National Park System of Rwanda, we created the hub that held everything together.
“Formulating a strategy and executing it requires a combination of inspiration and perspiration. In this case the key was to create a critical mass, to secure enough elements to get the project breathing.
“It’s not only inspiration. You need the perspiration and the experience and the tenacity to see it through. I get my point of reference from where I want to be at the end, what I want it to look like. [Just like writing a screenplay—you’ve got to know how it ends before you begin.]
“So we set up the strategy of how to get there, plug in the success element that will generate the critical mass, and unleash the momentum of how we’re going to achieve it, which hopefully will lead us to the gold at the end of the rainbow. What we do, really, is buy other people’s dreams and make them our own. One has to be a dreamer to be a really top producer; to be successful you have to have a goal, and a goal is simply a dream with a time limit.”
Organizing and planning a strategy. Notice how Guber first defines what he wants to do, then searches for the pieces he needs to put together, determines the “success element,” then visualizes the path, the process, by which he can get it made.
“The key,” he says, “is not to get in your own way and let yourself be overcome by your own ego. The producer must deal with thousands and thousands of details that have to be looked at and handled in concert with an overall plan. God, as they say, is in the details.
“No one really knows how a project will turn out, whether the ingredients will work. After all, the same ingredients that go into a chocolate mousse may go into making a souffle.
“Some projects take a long time to put together and the sheer weight of it tests your commitment. That’s what happened with Batman,”
After Guber and Peters acquired the rights to Batman from D.C. Comics, they spent years going from one deal to the next, putting their own money into a number of screenplays. Nothing happened until Tim Burton (Pee Wee’s Big Adventure) expressed some interest in the project. A new writer, Sam Hamm, was commissioned to do yet another draft, and during the writing Burton decided to do Beetle juice.
The budget for Batman was estimated at $20 million; it would be a “big” film, and would require stars to get it off the ground. Through the efforts of Jon Peters, Jack Nicholson was signed to play the Joker; at the same time Michael Keaton agreed to star as Batman. Beetlejuice opened, did well, and all ingredients blended together to keep the project alive.
“The trick,” Guber says, “is to stay out of the way and let other people help you make it happen.”
“What is it that’s marketable about this project?” he asks rhetorically. “How do you give it momentum, breathe some life into it? And how do you present it so everybody sees the same vision you do?
“The farther out you go, the more exposure you’ll have and therefore more opportunity. If we really go far out, and put money into it, we’ll have a director, script, and star, and we’ll be sitting there with maximum clout to make an unbelievable deal.
“We know, for example, that if we went to the studio and said here’s the book The Bonfire of the Vanities, the number-one best seller in the country, winner of the Pulitzer prize, we could get a deal. If we wanted to add Michael Cristofer, the Pulitzer prize screenwriter who wrote The Witches of Eastwick, we could get a better deal. And if we wanted to wait until the script was completed, financing it ourselves, we could probably fold in a filmmaker like Larry Kasdan, Mike Nichols, or Adrian Lyne, all people we’ve talked with about the project. Then we could say we’re going to make this picture at a modest price by today’s standards, $15 million, and we’ll have it for you by November 10, before the Christmas season, and pre-Academy Awards.
“At that point, you can be sure every studio in town will be knocking at our door, asking what do we have to do to get this picture? And we’ll say, you don’t have to do anything. We’ll finance the whole picture ourselves. And they’ll say what do we have to do to get this picture?
“Now you’re sitting there making a killer deal on the picture. A killer deal.
“So, you ask, why wait?
“Simple. To develop the project to that point you have to establish what the risk-reward ratio is; each one of these steps requires a large investment. A screenplay by an established screenwriter can cost anywhere from $300,000 to $400,000; attaching a director on the project is probably another $150,000 to $200,000—just on development alone.
“If the script doesn’t work, and the director takes on another project, you’re sitting there with a lot of unrecouped costs which the studio doesn’t want because they would have to start out with a financial burden. Then it’s not momentum you’re dealing with, it’s resistance—drag—and that might bring the project down. But if it works, it’s magic.
“If we had started all the way back and just made a deal for the book, we could have made a nice deal. But you’ve not taken any of the risk, therefore you won’t get the reward.”
It is not uncommon in Hollywood for certain projects to take several years before the script is bought and the movie made. Twenty years ago, Dennis Shryack (see Chapter 1), wrote a spec screenplay called Count a Lonely Cadence, based on the novel by Gordon Weaver. Shryack had optioned the book with his own money ($500). At that time, he was a literary agent by day, a screenwriter by night. The response to his first draft was enthusiastic, but nobody felt it was the right time for this type of picture.
The story, about a rebellious young man in an army stockade and his relationship with five black prisoners and the commander of the stockade, is a solid character piece that addresses the concerns of young people everywhere. Every year some studio, producer, director, or star would express interest in doing the material and would pay the option money. And every year the result was the same. Kenny Hyman, formerly head of Warner Bros., was the first, followed by Phil Feldman, producer of Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (Walon Green), then Marty Erlichman. Even Kirk Douglas encouraged Shryack not to give up hope for this project; after all, Douglas told him, he had spent fifteen years trying to bring Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to the screen, and it was his son, Michael Douglas, who finally accomplished it. One of the first actors interested in it was Martin Sheen, but at that time, 1968 or 1969, he did not have a big enough name to get the project off the ground.
Shryack put it on the shelf and continued writing screenplays; Gauntlet and Pale Rider are just two of the thirty screenplays he’s written during the last twenty years. With his new partner, Michael Blodgett, author of Captain Blood, four of his original screenplays are scheduled for production or release in 1989, including his favorite, Turner and Hootch, a story about a cop and his dog.
Shryack kept getting phone calls about Cadence; he would send it out and there would be interest for a while, but the person or company would pass. Then one evening when Dennis Shryack and his wife were in a restaurant having dinner, Martin Sheen and his wife and a few friends came in and sat down in the next booth. After debating with himself, Shryack finally got up and introduced himself to Sheen as the screenwriter of Count a Lonely Cadence. Sheen became excited and spent the next twenty minutes talking about the script.
A few days later, Sheen called. He wanted to activate the project but was no longer interested in playing the lead; he wanted his son, Charlie Sheen, to play the lead, and he would direct. As this book goes to press—twenty years after Martin Sheen first expressed interest in Count a Lonely Cadence, Sheen is raising the financing in Canada and hopes to begin shooting within a year.
Twenty years. A labor of love sometimes pays off when we least expect it.
Peter Guber told me that several of his favorite projects, now in various stages of preproduction, took many years to get off the ground. Batman took more than ten years to get made. Capa, the story of the famous war photographer, has occupied Guber for more than eleven years; I asked him why he would spend so much time on one project. He replied that Capa was “an amazing man who made a career of looking death in the face.
“Why did he do that?” Guber asks. “What was it about him that made him do that? Was he a hero or was he just confronting his own mortality? What makes somebody be like that? He went through three of the great wars, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and Vietnam. We see in him the face of death, and we experience in him the face of life, through the women he loved. It’s The Way We Were, it’s Out of Africa in Europe. It has all the same elements, almost epic in stature. There’s real strength in Capa. It’s not topical, or trendy; it’ll be in this year, it’ll be in next year, it’ll be in the year after that, like Gandhi or The Last Emperor. Whenever you make it, it’ll be in. It’s not like Dance Fever or Salsa, you know. That’s only in this week.”
Though the Guber-Peters Company has more than fifty projects in development, Dangerously, from a screenplay by Jim Cash and Jack Epps, Jr. (Top Gun)—a story about a cop who’s been kicked off the force and has to solve a twenty-year-old murder—has been in the works for seven or eight years. Inner space took more than six years of active pitching and presentation before it got the green light to be made into a movie.
You’ll usually find that anything of value, anything of substance or quality, usually takes a long time before it’s sold, or made. There is no such thing as an overnight success in Hollywood. A script that is written, sold, and made into a movie within a few years is the exception, not the rule. Patience, persistence, and determination is what works in this town, the same way it does in life. Maybe that’s the lesson we all need to learn. A freshly planted fruit tree doesn’t bear fruit immediately. It has to grow, mature, and blossom, and after a certain period of time, when it’s ready to bear fruit, it does. It’s the same with selling a script, and getting it made.
As we were finishing up our interview, I nonchalantly asked Guber why some films get made and others don’t. He laughed and said, “Why does this woman love this man and not another? Why are you wearing this jacket and not another? Why do you like this car and not another?
“There has to be a leap of faith for every movie that gets made. There is a pusher, someone who goes around and pushes the project forward, from place to place. Usually that’s the producer. Then there’s a leaper, someone who reaches out, whether it be a studio or financier, and says I’m going to make that. The leaper says, I believe in this, and I believe in you. The louder the push, the bigger the corona surrounding it, and the more likely the pusher will find a receptor for it.
“So the question of why one film gets made instead of another has any number of answers. It’s usually because the critical mass of one film seems to be hotter. It’s got a hotter director, a hotter writer, it’s got somebody who has just come off a successful picture, so somebody at the studio feels that this particular film has a greater chance for success than another.”
By the same token, some films get made because of luck, circumstance, and timing. Not to mention the fact that a director is broke and can’t make his alimony payments or his house payments and needs a project, any project, to pay off his debts. Or, as is so often the case, a star needs work, and whatever script is around that suits his image, gets made. It doesn’t have to be the best around, and it usually isn’t; it just has to available.
Timing is everything in Hollywood. Not luck, though that sometimes helps, but persistence and knowledge of how the industry works. That information can be power. One day when I was at Cinemobile—it was right after the success of M*A*S*H—my boss walked in the office, threw a script on my desk, and said read it immediately. I said I’ll do it after lunch, and he said no, do it before lunch. So I read it.
It was not very good. As a matter of fact, if I recall correctly, reading it on an empty stomach, and finding it necessary to cancel my lunch appointment, I gave it a 4 out of 10. When I finished reading it, I called my boss and gave him my opinion. He said okay, and hung up. Then he started making a lot of phone calls.
Later I found out the circumstances. Elliott Gould and Donald Sutherland, the stars of M*A*S*H (Ring Lardner, Jr.), wanted to work together and there was a six-week break in their schedules. So they were looking for a script. This was the only script around at the time that fit their needs. It ended up being called Spies. It was a dreadful movie and a dismal flop at the box office.
That’s why some movies get made and others don’t.
“The quality of the screenplay,” says Guber, “is critical to the success of the film. When all is said and done, and you see the fancy dailies with great production values, the wonderful locations, and beautiful costumes, what is up on the screen is the story. But getting it made requires four skills on the part of the motivator of the project. Commitment; the person has to be totally committed to getting this movie made. Enthusiasm; there’s so much drag on a project, so many reasons for people to say no, so many obstacles to overcome, you’ve got to be your own cheerleader to see it through successfully.
“Then there’s inspiration; you’ve got be inspired. It can’t just be hard work, it’s got to have some magic about it. There’s something more than just the words that keep you going. If you just wanted to shoot the script you could stand it up and take pictures of it! The script is the start point, the blueprint, the foundation, but the magic comes with the filmmakers and the actors and the director and the production designer and the location and all those elements that go into making a movie.
“So what pushes it across the line? Momentum. Momentum means that the project looks like it’s going to get made. It may be a studio hearing about something, tracking it down and then intercepting it from going somewhere else. They have to chase it, court it; it has to be valued. Now, everybody wants something that somebody else wants, especially in Hollywood. So it’s got enough elements in it to keep it moving forward.
“There’s a balance between inspiration and perspiration. Now, if you get a brilliant script that’s a 10, it doesn’t need anything; what’s on the page is on the stage. I could give it to my dog and I can go to a studio and say this dog is the producer and the studio would say okay.
“But that’s the exception, not the rule. The writer has to understand that the elements he or she needs to add to this project are more important than just selling it to someone for a price. He’s betting on those people’s capabilities to get the movie made, because once a film gets made, the more chance he has of being successful.”
Today it’s not enough to sell the screenplay. What’s more important is getting the movie made. And you have to do whatever it takes to get the job done. Selling the screenplay, as Guber emphasizes, is a combination of inspiration and perspiration. That’s what we can learn from someone like Peter Guber. How to overcome all those obstacles that drag a project down and keep it from happening. How to be persistently relentless.
There’s a great line from Larry Kasdan’s Body Heat, where William Hurt accidently meets Kathleen Turner and her husband, Richard Crenna, the man they’re planning to murder, at a restaurant. During their conversation, Richard Crenna tells William Hurt that what stops most people from being successful in their lives is “that they don’t know the bottom line.”
“What’s the bottom line?” Hurt asks.
“Doing whatever it takes to get the job done,” Crenna replies.
It’s something we all need to remember.