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. He admits to degrees from The University of Chicago and Columbia. 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 reflections of his work for the Tonight Show are here and here. In his post today, Mr. Katz follows up on "Hollywood, hurray for?" Mr. Katz writes:

In my recent post on what I've found in Hollywood, I mentioned Alfred Hitchcock and his classic, "Rear Window." I also raised the question, "What went wrong in Hollywood?" To provide some answers, consider this imaginary scene, played out in a studio executive's office. The time is now. Alfred Hitchcock, rotund and dour, enters, sits down, and faces what one comedy writer likes to call "a fetus in a three-piece suit."

STUDIO EXEC: Uh, nice meeting you, Mr. Hitchcock.

HITCH: Of course.

STUDIO EXEC: Let's get right to the point. Your script - "Rear Window" -- look, it's not for us.

HITCH: Oh? Why?

STUDIO EXEC: Why? Please, Mr. Hitchcock, look at the plot. A man smart enough to pay New York apartment prices kills his wife. That's a red flag, right there.

HITCH: People kill spouses all the time.

STUDIO EXEC: But, Mr. Hitchcock, we have no-fault divorce. Why would he kill her?

HITCH: Because no-fault divorce doesn't make a movie.

STUDIO EXEC: Then he does a lot of suspicious things and –- I can't believe this got by you -- leaves the blinds open so some guy across the courtyard, who happens to be in a wheelchair, sees him. Oh, come on.

HITCH: Don't you want to know what the man in the wheelchair does?

STUDIO EXEC: Well, sure, but...And another thing: This man has a wealthy girl friend who helps him figure it out, and actually gets into the killer's apartment. Mr. Hitchcock, a modern woman would hire someone, like a lawyer.

HITCH: So the lawyer gets into the apartment and risks being caught? Who would care?

STUDIO EXEC: Bottom line, it doesn't speak to me. Well, I've got a meeting in five minutes. Thanks for coming in. If you have something else for us...

HITCH: I'll be sure to look.

STUDIO EXEC: Oh, Mr. Hitchcock, before you go, I didn't have time to read your credits. What have you done?

HITCH: Young man...you first.

Now, clearly, that meeting never took place, but it's a slightly overdrawn version of meetings that do take place every day in today's Hollywood. They reflect the problem that I call TMCG –- too many college graduates, of whom, I freely admit, I'm one. The industry dare not speak its name, and it's rarely, if ever, discussed in these terms. But everyone knows the problem: To a large degree, Hollywood, in its executive ranks, has replaced talent with education, and what you get is the scene described above, where all the life, the emotion, the entertainment value of a story is ripped out, replaced with analysis and more analysis.

Don't get me wrong. I'm certainly not saying that higher education automatically makes someone a bad filmmaker. There are wonderful artists who've had fine educations. Richard D. Zanuck went to Stanford. The late Jack Lemmon held a Harvard degree. But young people, in particular, are very much affected by the way they're taught to think in college –- and that approach has nothing to do with making movies.

The Duke of Wellington reportedly said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. The movies of today were written in the classrooms of Princeton. But it's highly unlikely that a 2007 Princeton graduate would imagine anyone singin' in the rain. He'd take a cab. And by the way, Mr. Kelly, the umbrella is held over the head, to keep us dry.

Mitchell Parish was one of our greatest lyricists -- "Star Dust," "Moonlight Serenade," "The Stars Fell on Alabama." Some years ago he was honored in New York. He came out before the concert began and spoke to members of the audience. He said, "When you hear my lyrics, don't analyze them, feel them." It's wonderful advice for anyone in entertainment, but not the kind of advice you get in English 101. "Hollywood," David Lean, the British director of "Lawrence of Arabia," said, "forgot how to tell stories." It forgot because Hollywood forgot how to feel. When Bogart says goodbye to Ingrid Bergman at the airport in "Casablanca," we feel it, we don't analyze it.

And how would "Casablanca" fare in today's Hollywood? Not too long ago a local reporter sent out the script of the movie, under a different title.

Almost no one recognized it.

The TMCG problem has another effect. It separates Hollywood from its audience. A talent agency head boasted that half his interns come from Ivy League schools. Well, that's wonderful, and I'm sure they're good, intelligent young people. But I've seen that, too often, they don't think of themselves as the audience. The audience is "those people out there."

Sometimes they're called "the flyover people," those who live between Los Angeles and New York. Many young staff members in Hollywood today would never choose to see the films their studios finance.

An industry is, ultimately, its hiring practices. And the hiring practices of Hollywood resemble those of investment banking, not entertainment. A friend of mine, himself a Harvard graduate, quit the industry, saying, "I got tired of working with people who see movies as just a glamorous alternative to Wall Street." Anyone who takes meetings in the film business today knows exactly what he means.

In a future post I hope to discuss another aspect of the college influence on Hollywood -– the coming of political correctness. There have always been radical ideas in the film industry, but now they carry with them the stamp of great universities. Look at campus politics today, and you see Hollywood ten years down the line.

Oh, by the way, I said that the short scene I wrote at the start of this piece never happened. Well, let me come clean. It kind of did -– but not to Alfred Hitchcock. It involved Fred Zinnemann, one of our greatest directors -- "High Noon," "From Here to Eternity," "A Man for All Seasons," "The Day of the Jackal." Not long before his death he met with a young studio guy who did in fact ask him what he'd done. Zinnemann, the story goes, stared down the kid and finally replied, "You first." There is no record of the answer.
It had to be brief.

PAUL adds: What's that great Hitchcock quotation? "Some movies are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake."

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Posted by Scott at 05:35 AM  |    |