William Katz has had a long and varied career, as an assistant to a U.S. senator; an officer in the CIA; an assistant to Herman Kahn, the nuclear war theorist; an editor at The New York Times Magazine; and a talent coordinator at The Tonight Show. He is the author of ten books, translated into 15 languages. When I asked him if he'd ever written about his various careers, he said that he hadn't but that he would be happy to do so. His posts on his work for the Tonight Show are here and here. In his post today, Mr. Katz looks back with a gimlet eye on his work in the film industry:

I've done two posts on The Tonight Show. I'll get back to the Carson era, but thought readers might be interested in some comments on Hollywood -– the film industry, where I've been a prisoner of conscience for years.

My role in Hollywood has been as a supplier of what is termed, "underlying material." Mr. Dickens, Mr. Hemingway, Moses, you too are suppliers of "underlying material." The term applies to books, stories and Commandments that are translated into screenplays, and occasionally into movies. As I've found out, very occasionally.

I've had more than 20 options. Let me explain: An option is the way Hollywood acquires most material. A company gives a writer a fee, maybe 10 percent of the purchase price, with a promise to pay the rest - "exercise the option" - after a set period, if they decide to make the film. Only about 11 percent of feature-film options are ever exercised. The ratio is better with TV movies, but the TV movie industry is moribund. The chances of selling a TV movie today are about the same as the chances of finding a pro-lifer at a Women in Film meeting.

While your book or story is under option, you're "in development," or, as it's usually called, development hell. This has been compared to a young mother being in labor for a year. The producers try to develop a script that vaguely resembles your story, or to attach "elements" -- a director, a star, some guy's girl friend, some guy's boy friend, that can enhance the chances of the film being made.

It's a kind of agony, but that doesn't mean people are unpleasant. The contradiction of Hollywood, as Mel Brooks put it, is that "they kill you with nice." They love you, they love your wife, they love your dog, they love your book ("adored it"), they love everything about you ("great briefcase"), and then...nothing happens. One of my mentors, the superb producer David Brown ("Jaws"), once remarked that it's amazing any film ever gets made. There are so many forces pulling in so many directions.

Wait. Is this, you ask, the industry that gave us "Gone With the Wind," "Casablanca," and "Singin' in the Rain"? No, it isn't. The question I'm asked most often is, "What went wrong out there?" Why do we see on the screen the self-absorbed mess that we too often see? From my time in development hell, let me try to answer, maybe with some fresh notions.

Consider: Not long ago I developed the story of a West Point cadet whose fireman father had been killed on 9-11. This was the same family President Bush praised in his 2006 West Point graduation speech. It was a service family -– a fire officer father who'd given his life, a soldier son, the soldier's brother, himself an aspiring fireman, and a mother who'd been teaching school the day her husband was killed.

I called a well-placed Hollywood power broker to get the project launched. I told him the story, and pictured the family, rightly, as the best America has. There was a long pause. Then he blurted out, "Wait a minute! Those are the people who elected BUSH!"

Welcome to Hollywood, 21st century.

There's a story about the great director, Alfred Hitchcock, that illustrates what's happened to our movies. Hitchcock was lecturing to film students in Los Angeles. The subject was "Rear Window," a Hitch classic. One student rose with a question. "Mr. Hitchcock," he asked, and the quote is approximate, "the scene where they dig up the dead dog in the courtyard -- wouldn't it have been more logical, Mr. Hitchcock, if the killer had buried the dog far from there, away from the murder scene?" Hitchcock simply stared at the kid and asked, "Young man, did a chill go up your spine when they dug up that dog?" The student replied, "Oh yes, Mr. Hitchcock." So Hitchcock explained, "That's why I did it."

That's why he did it. He did it because Alfred Hitchcock knew what business he was in. He was in the entertainment business. His job was to give us two hours of stylish suspense –- not to sell us his political opinion, change the world, or follow the logic of English 101. He directed movies, not "cinema." And we loved them.

In Hitchcock's prime we had studios that actually made films. They had under contract actors, directors, writers, everyone needed to make a movie. Some derided the studios as "film factories," but that's exactly what they were. They made movies, nothing else. They knew what business they were in, and they had a feel for their audience. No, not every film was classic, and there were justified complaints about dictatorial studio regimes, but a remarkable number of great movies came out of that system. It was the movie business.

There must have been something electric about working in the Writers Building at MGM in that era. Not only could writers consult with each other, but they could go to one corner and find Arthur Freed, producer of the MGM musicals, or another and visit Roger Edens, the studio's musical genius. The meetings must have been major events.

Those studios also ran superb schools, to turn young talent into stars. I recall, once, watching Marilyn Monroe walk across a room. She had the carriage, to cite an earlier story in this post, of a West Point cadet. It hadn't come naturally. She'd been taught. When I worked on the Tonight Show, I saw that training come out constantly, even in the way stars handled interviews. A major singer told me that she'd accepted an MGM contract, with no guarantee of large roles, just to attend the studio schools.

Studios today are, as one producer friend called them, "plaster palaces." They're ATM machines for producers. They finance films, and they have facilities, but they don't make movies. Can you imagine Steve Jobs, at Apple Computer, having to negotiate an individual contract with every person he needed to create the iPod? That's the way things are in Hollywood today.

The result has been vastly inflated costs, enormous delays, exhausting rounds of negotiations that take time away from making movies, and a general destruction of spirit. In the days of real studios, a screenwriter could be assigned to a project in an afternoon. I've seen it take eight months.

The upshot: A common line in the industry is that Hollywood doesn't shoot movies today, it shoots deals. Yes, there are fine films still being made. And there are TV series with the creativity of "24." But the small number of good, entertaining films, contrasted with the vast costs, has driven audiences away and placed the industry in jeopardy.

The modern, chaotic system has also had a number of other effects, which I'll discuss in later posts. I'll sign off, though, by noting that the greatest complaint I hear from friends in the business is that, more and more, they're working with people who have little interest in their work.

They used to call the studios "dream machines." Now, it seems, the greatest dream of many young executives is to have lunch at a new, trendy restaurant.

How very sad.

Posted by Scott at 05:57 AM  |    |