8

show business laid the groundwork

EVERYONE MUST start somewhere, and having a passion for a field is critical to finding your own voice in business. It will allow you to build a foundation that you can later apply to other trades. Consider this your base of operation. When you are first looking for a vocation, keep your eyes open to all possibilities. The great songwriter and lyricist Sammy Cahn, who earned twenty-two Academy Award nominations for his work, was once asked, “What comes first, the music or the lyrics?” Sammy replied, “The phone call.”

For me, the beginning was acting. I did not pursue it; acting actually came to me. (Late bloomers, take note: This happened after I had graduated from college.) When I was a navigator in the navy, the cargo ship to which I was assigned put in at the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. There was nothing for me to do while they scraped the barnacles off the bottom, so I called a friend of mine named Phil Minor and asked if he wanted to have dinner. Phil was directing the play Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello. Because he was in rehearsal from 3:00 p.m. until 9:00 p.m., he suggested that I come to the theater and watch rehearsals, and then we would grab a bite when he was finished.

I arrived at the Theater De Lys (which is now the Lucille Lortell Theatre) around six o’clock. I sat and watched the rehearsal process for three hours, and that is what hooked me on acting. I thought, “You use your mind. It is intellectual. You have to read the script to learn your lines. You use your body, so it is physical.” But, most of all, acting was emotional at a very high pitch because the character has a concentrated, imaginary life. You spend that time on stage every night creating this imaginary person who is telling a whole story of his life in two hours. This was all very appealing to me.

As I’ve already said, I never wanted to be a cog in the machine of corporate life. I kept my options open and looked around for things that interested me, and, when I found something I was passionate about—acting—I jumped in. It wasn’t my life’s plan when I started out, but it fulfilled a lot of my needs to be creative.

It also became the steppingstone for everything else that I have done. Above all, getting into acting was my first major lesson in making my own rules in order to succeed.

I started my career as a theater actor in New York, or, rather, as an actor looking for work in the theater. I worked a variety of odd jobs to pay the rent while searching for acting roles. I waited tables at Schrafft’s Restaurant on 42nd Street; I worked as a lifeguard on Long Island one summer; I even drove a cab. Every theater actor goes through that, as do others pursuing their business dreams. You do what you have to do to earn enough to pay the rent and eat until you can bring your idea to fruition. I followed through because acting interested me.

My show business career has encompassed theater, television, and movies. I have acted and produced in all three disciplines. I have always been more attracted to movies and TV shows that speak to the human condition than to those that merely entertain—it is an attraction to ideas over operations, if you will. When I played “Gambler” in Cool Hand Luke, which starred Paul Newman, one of the other actors whom I respected, Lou Antonio, said to me, “We are going to do a lot of crappy movies over our lives, but this will be a good one, and we will be proud of it one day.” Time proved him right.

I have played several roles of which I am proud. One that comes to mind immediately is the dangerously immoral child molester I played in the TV movie One Terrific Guy, which was directed by that same Lou Antonio. The movie made headlines when it prompted a young California girl to confront a molester whose abuse she had feared to expose. This resulted in the man being convicted and sent to prison.

I was never the kind of actor who searched out stories to bring to the screen so that I could play the lead, partly because I never wanted to limit my opportunities. There is nothing wrong with being a specialist, but you should keep your eyes open for other general opportunities in your chosen field. For me, this meant finding ideas and bringing them to the big and small screens, using contacts I had made in my primary vocation as an actor.

Some of the most interesting projects in which I was involved were ideas that I developed as a producer. My wife, Amy, who was a producer for Good Morning America, and I were the executive producers of a movie for HBO titled Perfect Witness that was based on an article I had read in The Wall Street Journal about people who are forced to testify when they witness criminal activity. The article described an average white-collar person who had graduated from a nice eastern school and had a wife in the PTA. The guy had witnessed a professional “hit” but refused to testify because he and his family had been threatened by known Mafia gangsters. As a result, Robert Morgenthau, at that time U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, put him in jail for contempt until he relented. In order to solve the dilemma, the man ultimately agreed to testify, as a result of which he and his family had to enter the witness protection program for the rest of their lives. It was the moral dilemma that fascinated me: You must weigh doing the right thing against the personal price you will have to pay.

Amy and I pitched the idea to HBO, which financed the writing of a screenplay. In Hollywood, it’s best to use the studio’s money for development, rather than your own. In fact, it’s imperative that you do so. Otherwise, the studio has no selfish interest to protect. Remember this when you are raising money for a new business.

“nobody knows anything”

On the surface, show business might sound like a more creative endeavor than real estate development or banking, but it can often be less creative. For starters, there are two words in show business. The first is the entertainment part (show), but the second makes the entertainment possible (business). Without business, no show.

That point has been driven home with a sledgehammer over the past decade as the culture of BIG has taken over the entertainment business much the way it has dominated other industries. Five major companies—Viacom (and its sister company, CBS), News Corporation, Walt Disney, Sony, and NBC Universal—own all the major movie studios and television networks, as well as cable, electronics, and home entertainment enterprises. Comcast, the nation’s largest cable carrier, purchased NBC Universal from General Electric, creating the biggest colossus of all.

Size stifles creativity. Big begets big. The theory seems to be that the bigger the parent company, the bigger the movies need to be. No longer do studios produce a broad array of movies. Major event movies such as Avatar, superhero movies with sequels like the Spiderman spectacles, and franchises like Harry Potter are the order of the day.

No matter how much studios spend, the fact of the matter is that movies and television shows represent a different product from consumer goods. They are supposed to be creative enterprises, and they should not be churned out by a production line. Just because a studio head has three straight successes does not mean that he or she has a formula for making a hit. As William Goldman, screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Marathon Man, and other films, famously wrote in his book Adventures in the Screen Trade, “Nobody knows anything.” Otherwise, every film would be a hit and make money. The fact is that only one out of five ever makes a profit!

M*A*S*H is an example of that. It was reported that Fox sold the first round of M*A*S*H in syndication for something in the neighborhood of $27,000 an episode. By the time the third reruns came around, the show was one of the most popular ever on TV, and Fox was selling the reruns for more than $1 million each. The studio didn’t know what it had until the public decided. This is often the case, not only in entertainment but in other businesses as well.

One thing I learned very quickly is that if a camel is a horse built by committee, then so are many movies and TV shows. The process of putting them together is often the opposite of a creative endeavor because you have so many people generating input: producers, directors, actors, art directors, cameramen, and so on. And then, there are always two or three executives on every show, and they each have opinions, many of which are in conflict.

Alan Alda and the author riding to work.

Once I was working on a TV script with Bob Klane, who wrote the novel and the screenplay Where’s Poppa?, a hit comedy. We turned in the script and then went to a meeting with a group of network executives. The head of the network told us he loved the script; he just wanted the main character to be more aggressive. “No problem,” we told him.

Bob and I went away and made the changes. We turned in the new draft and were called back for a second meeting. Same people, different issues. This time, the head of development told us that she wanted the main character to be more open to change. No problem, we told her.

Bob and I again went away and made the changes. We turned in the new draft and were called back for a third meeting. Same people, different issues. This time, the head of marketing told us that he needed the protagonist to be more sympathetic. No problem, we told him.

Bob and I went away for a third time and made the changes. We turned in the new draft and were called back for yet another meeting. Same people, different issues. This time, the head of production told us that he needed the protagonist to be more decisive. Problem, but we didn’t say so. If a camel is a horse built by a committee, we were definitely wandering in the desert.

Writing in circles is very frustrating. Bob told me that he was not doing any more work because the executives did not know what they were talking about. I agreed, but, rather than quit, I hatched a plan. “Let’s just turn in the original draft,” I said. “They’ll never know the difference.”

Bob agreed. We printed out the original script, changed the date and the opening description, and submitted it. Word came back from the head of the network that we had nailed it. They all loved the script. However, there was this one more tiny little change they wanted in one of the ancillary characters: The bartender who stuttered should not stutter. The character was based on the legendary Joe Frisco, one of the great comedians of all time, who elevated his speech affliction to the highest level of comic art. But they didn’t get it!

Often, there comes a time in your life when you say, “Enough! I can’t satisfy everybody. This is my best shot, and if you don’t like it, that’s your problem, not mine.” The horse had become a camel, and then they broke the camel’s back. Sometimes, in business, you actually have to take the word “no” for an answer, even when you are right.

I heard a similar story a few years ago. In order to prove the same point, some writer submitted a copy of one of the great screenplays of all time, Casablanca, to all the major studios, after changing the title, all the characters’ names, and the locale so that the screenplay was completely disguised. It was rejected by every studio!

Take it to heart: Nobody knows anything.

put up or shut up

Even when you are a small cog in the big wheel, there are times when you can use the “business” side of “show” business to make the show side work. It is a moment that all start-up businesses face. It is called putting your money where your mouth is, and, no matter what you do, at some point you will have to write a check to support your idea—or threaten to write one. There is nothing more liberating than betting on yourself.

During the third season that I starred in the sitcom House Calls, I told the network I wanted to incorporate the tragedy of Harvey Milk, the slain gay-rights crusader, into an episode. The episode would begin with all the doctors in the locker room changing into our white coats. I’d ask one of the doctors if he was going to be around over the weekend. He would say that he was not because he was marching in the gay-rights parade. We would then have the response of the hospital administrator, followed by the parade. Next, all the doctors would be in a bar, and a lunatic would come in and shoot the gay doctor. We would then rush the doctor back to the hospital and team up to save his life.

The network’s response: You cannot have a lead character, particularly a gay one, gunned down in a half-hour comedy. Comedy … as in “ha-ha!”—remember? I tried to explain how we could make it work, how this moment of tragedy made this story real and poignant and that that is what made the comedy work, because all good comedy is juxtaposed against the truth of tragedy. Just look at M*A*S*H. Then I offered to shoot two versions—and pay for my version. They couldn’t object to that. We shot my version first, showed it to the network and held our breath. The brass liked it! The bluff had worked! What if they had said no? Would I then have had to put up the money? We will never know.

The episode, entitled “Gays of Our Lives,” aired and won an industry award. The network executives weren’t wrong; they were trying to be safe. Nobody gets fired when you play safe. But you don’t win awards, either! As Confucius said, “Man who ride two horses soon fall between.”

There is also a larger lesson here on how to deal with committees. You listen to everyone, and then you say, “That’s a wonderful idea. We’ll take it under advisement.” And then you go off and think about it. Remember, the conventional way is always the safest, but it generally represents a compromise and is never the best way. That is not arrogance; it’s just the realization that you cannot satisfy every conflicting point of view.

In this chapter, I’ll relate a number of anecdotal examples from my show business experience that taught me much about managing people. I trust that you, the reader, will find things with which you will identify and that will help you, particularly when you have to meet a demanding schedule and budget. Once again, how you treat people in a creative and positive way can make the difference between success and failure.

getting some control

Even though I had acted in the theater early in my career (and returned in my middle years), I went into producing because it was a business over which I had at least a modicum of control. Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring to get work is not fun in any business. I wanted to be entertained, but my primary concern was the business side of the equation. I partnered with Manny Azenberg, who is a close friend and a seasoned theater producer by trade.

I met Manny through a mutual friend, the writer-director Frank Gilroy, and we hit it off. We played tennis together, and Manny even stood up for me at my wedding. Over his twenty-year career, he has staged some sixty-five Broadway productions. I liked Manny’s approach to producing theater, which he summed up to the New York Times as follows: “I am there to service people. A producer creates an atmosphere—or tries to—that is genuinely comfortable, so the best creative work can take place. You try to keep peace, because there are so many disparate groups within the theatre.”

This is one of the films I made with Frank Gilroy.

The first venture Manny and I worked on was the comedy Einstein and the Polar Bear by Tom Griffin. The play was originally done in 1980 by Hartford Stage, a regional theater company. Manny and I bought the rights and went about mounting a Broadway production.

One of the people we went to for financing was my friend Manny Gerard, then an executive at Warner Bros. He wanted to get the studio into the Broadway business, so he sent us to the woman assigned to handle that area. She told us that the studio did not like betting on just one play because of the odds. To that extent, she was correct. The studio ended up financing Einstein and the Polar Bear, as well as two other plays. The plays were only somewhat successful, and, in the end, they never fully paid back the original investment.

Two years later, Neil Simon wrote Brighton Beach Memoirs, the first of his autobiographical trilogy. Manny Azenberg had known Neil for years. They met playing on the Barefoot in the Park softball team. (What a line-up: Manny played shortstop, Neil played second base, and Robert Redford played third.) Neil brought the play to Manny, who asked me to be involved as a producer.

I went back to my contact at Warner with Brighton Beach Memoirs, and her response was they would not invest unless Neil made several changes to the play. That would be like asking Moses to rewrite the Ten Commandments! I laughed and asked this woman, “You are going to tell Neil Simon what is funny?” Her response was, “Well, yes.” I could not help myself. Very politely, I asked, “Are you sure you are the right person to tell Neil Simon what is and what is not funny?” Warner passed. The play was a Big Hit.

There are two things you need to know about the theater business. First, the play is sacrosanct. Even when the playwright does not have the stature of Neil Simon, the playwright’s guild contract protects his work. Second, Neil hits the commercial bull’s-eye 75 percent of the time. There is no other playwright in America in the past fifty years who can equal his track record, so in show business he is about as good a bet as there is.

Now along comes the second play in the trilogy, Biloxi Blues. Because Brighton Beach Memoirs was such a big hit, I was certain Warner would be interested. I called again, but the answer was again no. The result: another Big Hit. Needless to say, we did not call them about the third play, Broadway Bound. After two hits, there was a long list of people who wanted to invest. As expected, Broadway Bound was also a Big Hit.

There is a certain amount of ego attached to investing in a Broadway play. If you are part of New York society, having your name on the playbill of a Broadway hit is a status symbol. You are given tickets to the premiere and access to premium seats that you can pass along to your acquaintances. For years, there were plenty of people making $40 million a year on Wall Street who were willing to drop a couple million on a play or musical. However, many of those people have dropped a lot more in the derivatives market in the past decade and found their names in The Wall Street Journal—in a decidedly unflattering light. Not necessarily a desirable status symbol.

Ego aside, there can be a financial upside to investing in plays and musicals, though it has contracted in recent years. The investors in each show form a limited partnership and put up the money for the original run. That partnership is given certain rights that continue in perpetuity. For example, if the Kennedy Center, in Washington, D.C., wants to stage Brighton Beach Memoirs, it has to pay a royalty to both the playwright and the original investors. Same story when The Odd Couple was done with two women instead of two men.

In 1997, Manny and I worked together on a Broadway musical called Side Show, the story of conjoined sisters who rise from being a circus act to being stage performers in the 1930s. The play was critically acclaimed, ran for ninety-one performances, and ended up being nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Play, but it did not make money. Why? Because there are times when the circumstances of a business change, and you have to recognize that and adapt.

By 1997, the circumstances of financing a Broadway play had changed. To earn its money back, a show needed to run at least six months. When I first became involved in producing on Broadway, it wasn’t as difficult as it is now to make a profit. When you found a good piece of material, you would invest a small amount of money for a backer’s audition, raise more money, and then book a theater. To narrow the odds, we focused on coproducing Neil Simon plays. Why? Because he is right 75 percent of the time.

The problem today on Broadway is that costs have skyrocketed. When Brighton Beach Memoirs was staged nearly thirty years ago, the capitalization for the show was $500,000. The revival in 2009 was capitalized at $3 million, and that probably was not enough. By 2009, the amount you needed to take in each week to break even had gone from $140,000 to $300,000 a week and rising.

The increase in costs is partly due to the existence of rigid rules about labor. Thanks to their union contract, for example, the stagehands get more and more money for doing less and less work. If you look backstage on a one-set show any given night, you will see five paid stagehands on the job, four of whom are playing poker. For years, the system worked to a degree because there were so many Wall Street Masters of the Universe who wanted to be “producers.” As that number began to dwindle, so did the funding of new Broadway ventures. Every economic problem on Broadway has been met by raising ticket prices, because the theater owners would not take a strike. Now, ordinary people cannot afford to go to a Broadway show because the ticket prices have skyrocketed from $20 to $100, $250, and even $500. These price hikes have also chased away the younger generation. When I first went to the theater, it cost $1.20 a ticket. When A Chorus Line opened in 1975, seats were $15 each. So Broadway has now basically become a tourist attraction where event shows like The Lion King and Shrek: The Musical, backed by major corporations, are successful and the traditional ones struggle.

There are three main theater owners in New York City—the Shubert Organization, the Nederlander Organization, and Jujamcyn Amusements—and they are essentially in the real estate business, not the theater business. It is not unlike many other businesses where the little guy has been shoved aside by big business. Start-ups—new works by young playwrights—have been squeezed out by large corporations and the Big Three theater owners.

and here’s to your legs, mrs. robinson

Some people who work in the arts treat its institution like religion, but I have never felt that way. Taking your craft too seriously inevitably leads to inflexibility and stagnation. The truth is that painting, directing a film, or writing a play is not any more noble a pursuit than, say, being a bricklayer. Can the arts engage you to the fullest? Yes. Are they more engaging than filing paperwork in the insurance business? From what I understand, yes. But they are no more honorable. Somebody once said, “If a play fails, it is only a play.”

That being said, certain senses of mine come alive when I see well-performed theater, which is why I became involved in producing. For a business that requires hands-on management, producing could not be more exacting. You have responsibility for the financial side of the equation, and you also have to manage the aesthetics. That is where creative solutions can make a difference.

In 1980, a play titled Duet for One by Tom Kempinski was presented in London. The play told the story of Jacqueline du Pre, the celebrated cellist who was married to the renowned pianist Daniel Barenboim. Because du Pre was afflicted with multiple sclerosis, her accomplishments were all the more remarkable. In this case, she was literally fighting for her life. The entire first act is devoted to her telling her psychiatrist how she is being tortured by MS; in the second act, she is overcome by depression and emotionally self-destructs.

Manny Azenberg and I flew to London to see the opening-night performance. When du Pre collapsed and broke down, I was overcome with emotion, almost sobbing. A very stiff Englishman sitting in front of me turned around and said, “I say, young man, could you get control of yourself.” I thought, “If you do not go to the theater to have a cathartic experience, why are you here?” But most of those Brits weren’t moved one iota, and we hoped for a better response on Broadway.

Back in the States, we started by casting Ellen Burstyn as Jacqueline du Pre. She had just starred in the box office hit The Exorcist, and she told us that she wanted the same co-star, Max von Sydow, and the same director, William Friedkin (known by one and all as Billy). She also wanted the acting guru Lee Strasberg to play the psychiatrist.

There were two problems with her proposed creative team. Hiring von Sydow made some sense, but going after Billy was complicated. This was a small, intimate play, and Billy was a major movie director coming off the one-two punch of The Exorcist and The French Connection, for which he had won the Academy Award. But we made a couple of calls, opened our wallets, and booked them both for our star. For his part, Billy had very diverse artistic interests, so doing a play appealed to him.

As for Lee Strasberg, he was a fragile seventy-nine years old. Manny and I knew there was no way he could endure eight performances a week, so there was big risk involved, both human and financial. We told Ellen our concerns, but she gave us an ultimatum: If we did not get Lee, then she was out. The decision was made for us.

We did not get Lee.

Because Duet for One was driven by the du Pre character, we had no play until we found a new leading lady. The piece was a real tour de force for an actress, and I had an idea. Anne Bancroft was a friend of mine, so I sent her the play. At first she resisted, saying she was no longer interested in Broadway at this point in her life; it was just too much work. After I begged her to just read the play, she finally consented, and that was the hook. She was overwhelmed by what this woman had gone through.

On Broadway, the producers do not attend rehearsals, which is a good thing because I know from being an actor that the actors don’t want to hear from the producers, just the writer and the director. Knowing one side of the equation was about to help me solve a problem on the other side.

One day during rehearsals, Billy called us and said that we had to come down to the set. He and Annie weren’t talking. Any decent producer should not just be the guy who raises money and shows up at the premiere. If you are any good, you need to be many things, not the least of which is a referee in disputes between the director and the actors.

Manny and I arrived at the theater and listened to both sides. The problems between them had been mounting. Billy felt that Anne was not taking his direction. Anne felt that Billy was over-bearing. This had come to a head over the fact that Anne’s acting process was intuitive, rather than intellectual.

If actors are traditionally playing a nonfictional character, they often immerse themselves in the life of the person, the biography, if you will, particularly if the person was a famous historical character, like a president, a general, or a king. In this case, Jacqueline du Pre was a world-renowned classical musician.

Annie’s idea for preparing to play Jacqueline du Pre was to listen to Frank Sinatra recordings. But this assaulted Billy’s aesthetic sensibilities. He was appalled. How actors get to a part is very personal. Rarely do people understand how the great ones get there, and, believe me, Anne Bancroft was a great one. Many times they do not know themselves how they do it. Whether they follow a method or some emotional intuition is not material.

I could identify with Anne’s plight. Once I was acting in a movie entitled Once in Paris…, written and directed by Frank Gilroy, who was a Pulitzer Prize–winning author. We had a big argument on the set about a certain scene. I was trying to make a logical point that if I played the scene the way he wanted me to, it vitiated a subsequent scene at the end. He was the writer and the director, so I was swimming upstream with my argument. I really respected him. I asked him if he would shoot it both ways and promise me that when he looked at both takes he would honestly pick the one that worked best. I also told him if he did not pick my version, I would be on the next plane back to the States. Just kidding. He picked it anyway.

The actors in Duet for One had reached the point of dress rehearsals, so they were wearing some of their costumes. I watched the run-through, and, when it was finished, we all sat around and talked about the character. Anne was great, but I had a suggestion that I thought might assuage Billy’s point about aesthetics.

I pulled Anne off to the side.

I said, “Annie, let me ask you something. Why are you wearing that drab dark pantsuit in the first act?”

She replied, “It’s conservative. I think it looks attractive.”

“Forgive me for asking, but do you have some objection to wearing a nice skirt or dress?”

She asked, “Why?”

“Number one, you have the best-looking and most advertised legs in the world from the ads for The Graduate,” I said. “So why not show them off?”

She asked, “What does that have to do with this play?”

“You’re playing a diva. A bigger-than-life person. And [raising my hand] if you don’t start up here, when you have your nervous breakdown, you have nowhere to go,” I began. “I want to see a woman who is in full bloom at the beginning so when she finally shatters, it has the theatrical impact of tragedy.” Remember, there are only two characters in this play. “Not only do we need to hear it, but we need to see it! Don’t misunderstand me; in my book, you are one of the great actresses of this or any other time. You can be acting your pants off, but the audience needs the enhancement of visual impact.”

Anne got it immediately. So, in the first act, instead of coming on stage looking like a Russian peasant, she looked dazzling. The audiences saw that. Then, when she ended up telling the psychiatrist that the plumber had come over one day and she had slept with him because she had hit bottom, it carried real weight. And Billy no longer cared if she listened to Sinatra in her dressing room.

By the way, no books can teach you how to successfully manage a group of people working on a deadline project. Maybe reading about the experience of those of us who have produced can give you some insight into what you might anticipate. But when the central core of the project is the dynamics of people, you might just find yourself flying by the seat of a pair of your best creative pants. Whether it is movies, television, or theater, no one knows what makes it work. Otherwise, everything would be a hit, and there would be no need for creative producers.

stick to your guns against the odds

As you might imagine, I am biased toward artistic works with themes that defy convention. Anything that attempts to defy convention in any area is immediately more interesting to me. It is the challenge to succeed against the odds that drives the entrepreneurial spirit. Manny and I saw a play in London entitled A Month of Sundays by Bob Larbey, the story of two men in an old-folks home who refuse to be subjected to the routine of a patronizing system that homogenizes the patients, which became the basis of the HBO production Age Old Friends. I have always been attracted to material that involves individuals against the system, the little guy who prevails against all odds. So we bought the U.S. rights.

In April 1987, we moved A Month of Sundays to Broadway, with Jason Robards playing the lead. The show ran nineteen previews and four performances. Yes—four. By any measure, it was a failure. Why didn’t it work? I don’t know, but I refused to give up on this allegorical work of art, a theme with which I so identified. We also needed to find a way to recoup some of our investment.

We reconceived the play as a movie and sold it to HBO, which wanted to shoot the film in Canada to qualify the production for a tax incentive called Canadian Content, whereby the government of Canada, in its desire to attract movie production to the country, gave tax breaks to movie companies if they hired Canadian actors, directors, cameramen, and crew and shot the films there. So we signed Hume Cronyn, who was Canadian, and then looked for a Canadian director. After hemming and hawing over a long list, we ended up with a director who was not our first choice but who was available—and Canadian. We were also facing a deadline with the availability of the actors and the crew. This is an integral part of show business. Because it is a project-by-project business with no long-term commitments, people make themselves available for only a limited period of time and then move on to something else. Everyone connected to the process also has an opinion and immediately assumes the attitude of a casting director and critic. “Why wasn’t so-and-so cast in the lead? It should be somebody else, and that ending, it’s just terrible. It should be changed.” Nobody said it’s easy. When you are the producer, you are always trying to stay on the horse before it becomes a camel.

When the film was completed, we screened a rough cut for Hume Cronyn of what was now called Age Old Friends. He experienced many different emotions, from fatigue to outrage. At one point during the screening, he actually fell asleep watching himself! At the end, when the lights came up, I turned and asked him what he thought. He said, “It is the worst piece of shit I have ever done in my life.” Then he put his finger in my chest and said, “Do not tell me you are going to fix it with the music.” Then he got up and walked out!

“You’re wrong,” I yelled after him. “There is a movie in here, and we are going to find it.” He got in his car and drove home, and we spent the next month and a half trying to locate the hit we knew we had in all the film we had shot.

Re-editing is not the right word. We completely remade the movie in the editing room. In any business, beating a dead horse will never get you to the finish line. So what tells you when to give up and when to persevere? All businessmen face this kind of problem at some point in their careers. I think the answer is in the initial inspiration, the nascent research that convinced you to begin the project. Once again, paying attention to homework, to detail, and then allowing the creative process to work through the alternatives will lead you to the best working choice. We were able to make these choices in all the material that we had assembled, and ultimately that is what made the film work.

Hume won both the ACE and the Emmy awards, and, in one of his acceptance speeches, he kindly acknowledged that his initial reaction had been wrong. I was happy for Hume and happy that the movie was successful. At the risk of being pretentious, I think what sustained our assiduity was the original idea that fundamentally this old-folks home was a microcosm of the state, in the sense that the allegorical subtext was about individual freedom prevailing over a totalitarian world.

show business is not a good bet

At the risk of discouraging anyone, plain and simple, the odds of success in all areas of show business are very low. A friend of mine named Wally Weisman is the chairman of the board of the Sundance Institute, which runs the preeminent independent film festival. One year, I asked Wally how many pictures were submitted, and he said, “More than five thousand.” From those, they select 130, and, of those 130, about a dozen make it to a theater near you. Somebody is paying to make those films. People are acting in them, and there are many more people working behind the scenes that we never see. Thousands of dreams are packed in every frame, which is the part that can make it so painful when it doesn’t work.

On Broadway, the odds are also stacked against the playwright. In movies, the writer is generally paid to write a screenplay, whether or not it ever sees the big screen. In the theater, everything is written on spec. The difference between the two comes when the work is produced. In movies, the screenwriter has no input. In the theater, the playwright is the most powerful person in the room. The guild contract grants him cast and script approval. The financier can ask for changes, but the playwright has the right to refuse to make them.

Though I relish the emotional interaction of theater, my bottom line when it comes to entertainment is to look for a multilayered business. Quite aside from my acting and producing, I found another way to make money in show business. I was involved in a specialty distribution company that sold movies through telemarketing. This was back when telemarketers weren’t greeted with hostility and regulated by the government. The company, which was based in Salt Lake City, sold wholesome family movies with no curse words or sexual innuendo. These were about boy-meets-girl. Girl owns dog, loses dog. Boy and girl search. Boy finds dog. He and girl bond and live happily ever after. What was unique about the business was not the movies being sold but the calling system used to sell them.

We licensed the calling system from a third party and then perfected it. First of all, we took the person who was consistently the best salesperson and recorded him asking a series of yes-orno questions, as well as certain follow-up phrases. The computer then called customers and asked those questions. The equipment was so perfect that you could not tell a computer was “talking to you” because it was interactive. The opening line was something like, “Hey, Joe, how are you?” The person on the other end of the line might say, “Fine. Who’s this?” At this point, a salesperson would listen to the call and type in a response that would be spoken in the same voice. Occasionally, the computer would even laugh and say, “That’s good.” This process allowed a salesperson to work multiple calls simultaneously.

The calling system had other applications. For instance, it could be used in emergencies. Say a tornado was coming to an area. The system could immediately call 25,000 people and warn them to seek shelter. As telemarketing became a tougher business, we ended up selling the company to a competitor before we were able to fully realize the potential of other uses. However, our improvements to the calling system, along with our extensive database, enabled us to earn a profit on the sale.

There is money to be made in show business, but there is also a certain sense of satisfaction to be derived from doing something not just for its literary value but because it has something to say about the society in which we live.

People often ask me why I continued to act once I had other business interests. The simple answer is that I am fascinated by it. There is nothing more satisfying to me than immersing myself in a challenging part. I don’t look down on the craft the way some people do who have left acting for other vocations. Quite the opposite. It still holds that same fascination for me that I felt the day I watched that rehearsal of Six Characters in Search of an Author and saw firsthand the physical, emotional, and mental gymnastics that acting requires. Where else could you find that?

Actually, a friend of mine later said that I could experience that same sensation driving race cars, an activity that’s both mental and physical. I said, yeah, but you can get killed driving a race car. He said, you can get killed in the theater, too—look at Lincoln. I said, that’s true, but he was killed by an out-of-work actor.

Like any out-of-work actor, if someone offered me a terrific part today, I would take it in a heartbeat.