Tod Lippy: You’ve been described as a “show-business blue blood”—can you talk about your family’s history in the industry? 

David Picker: My grandfather came over from Russia in the 1890s. After going bankrupt in the textile business, he borrowed a few dollars from his brother and opened a nickelodeon in the Bronx in 1912. Built it up into a chain of 18 theaters, merged with Marcus Loew and worked with Loew’s Theaters until his death in 1928. He had four sons, and they all went into the movie business. My father, Eugene, his oldest, was president of Loew’s. I was born in 1931, and of course I went into the movie business. So I had uncles, my father, my grandfather. My sister, Jean Picker Firstenberg, is head of the American Film Institute, and my daughter, Caryn, is a vice-president of Miramax—fourth generation. I don’t have any sons, but four generations ain’t so bad.

Joining United Artists must have felt like an inevitability.

I grew up in the movie business. I grew up going to movies, hanging out in my father’s office, watching movies in a projection room that he used to screen everything in. So really, it was a question of where in the movie business I wanted to go. I worked at different summer jobs. One of those was at UA, and of all of the companies I was at, it seemed the most exciting, so I started there in January of 1956.

And you began as an assistant in the ad department?

Well, you could call it that. I was kind of a gofer in the ad department, and a liaison between advertising and sales. After two years, I became an assistant to Max Youngstein, who was one of the partners, and head of both marketing and production. In those days, it wasn’t called marketing, it was called advertising, publicity and exploitation. And at United Artists, everybody was required to train junior staff who would hopefully become their replacements when they left. I worked with Max from 1958 to 1961, when he chose to leave as a partner and went into business for himself. The fact is, he left a lot sooner than anybody thought he would, so when he left, I got the job. I was, what—29 or 30 years old. I stayed there another ten years or so, eventually becoming president, and opted not to continue because it became part of Transamerica, and was no longer the company it had been. Arthur Krim and Bob Benjamin eventually came to the same conclusion when the two of them spun off to form Orion. Arnold Picker, my uncle, who was the fourth partner, and who was the international expert, had left before Arthur and Bob because he felt that this was no longer the company that he had been a part of. He didn’t continue in the motion picture business.
   But it was the single most exciting company anybody could have ever worked for.

Could you talk about UA’s corporate culture a little bit?

Quite simply, it was a company that was operating without any agenda other than the financing and distribution of motion pictures. There were no politics—the company was owned by the principles, and the basic philosophy of the company’s operation was advocacy and efficiency. As head of production, my job was to convince Arthur and Bob that the pictures I wanted to do were the ones we should do.

You had a phenomenal track record.

Well, they were terrific films. The very first picture I said we had to do was Tom Jones. After the fact, the partners admitted they weren’t that high on the project, but they felt that since my enthusiasm was what it was, and it was the first film I had advocated as strongly as that, they should encourage my enthusiasm.

How did Tom Jones come about?

The way it happened was very simple. Arthur and Bob didn’t read the script. I went over to London to meet with Tony Richardson, and I called them from a restaurant there and said, “We have to do this project.” They said, “All right. But make it a two-picture deal and cross-collateralize it with another movie in case it doesn’t work so we’ll have another shot.” I said, “That’s easy,” and the deal was done, just like that. There were no boards to deal with, no hierarchy; just four men—Krim, Benjamin, Arnold Picker and myself—who talked to each other every day. I read the scripts—occasionally Arthur and Bob did, but Arnold didn’t very often—and decisions were made.
   Basically, because of the simple tenet by which we worked, which was that filmmakers had final cut as long as they stayed within the budget parameters in the script we had approved, we were able to attract every major filmmaker in the world, from the most esoteric, classiest “art” filmmakers to the most commercial. It was an incredibly exciting place, where advocacy carried the day.

Was that final-cut policy partly a function of economics? I remember reading somewhere that, at least initially, UA was not able to spend the kind of money that some of the other majors could on projects.

The reality is that the majors didn’t know what we were doing; they basically ignored us. It wasn’t that we were doing one thing and they were doing something else. Krim and Benjamin had bought the company in the early fifties, and it was years before the other majors realized that it wasn’t that we were making pictures that much less expensively, but that we were attracting filmmakers because our philosophy of doing business was completely different. It took years and years and years before they caught on.

Did being on the East Coast have anything to do with it?

Well, really everybody was in New York. I mean, the studios were in California, but in those days all the home offices were still here.

Did you have a lot of contact with that community?

No, I wouldn’t say it was a “community.” But we certainly knew each other. And there were very, very respectful relationships. There were several instances, for example, where another company and ourselves would have motion pictures with the same background, topic, something, and you could pick up the phone and work it out.

Really?

Absolutely. This is a fact: there was no piece of information in the business at that time that I could not get a truthful answer to. I could call a friend or a colleague or somebody I knew and get information. If they didn’t want to give it, they would tell me that honestly, or tell it to me off the record and I would respect that. And in no respect are we talking about collusion—like, “Are you going to pay more than this amount?”—I’m talking about “When are you releasing the movie?” or “Is it true you’re negotiating for this?” or “Are you going to do that, because if you are, I’m not going to do this.” Whatever. Ted Ashley, who was running Warner Bros., had a picture at one point that was on the same subject as one of ours, and I said, “Look, either you go first or I go first.” And he said, “Okay, why don’t you go first.” It was as simple as that.
   Not to say that there weren’t people who were dishonest—there were—but the business has evolved from one of trust to one of distrust. When I was at United Artists, we would finance a picture, borrow money from a bank, pay the bank a loss or pay out the profits without a signed piece of paper—today, you can’t do a screen test on an actor without a signed piece of paper, a deal memo.

How involved were you in the actual production process?

We didn’t look at dailies. I mean, I visited sets occasionally, just to visit friends or whatever. But the filmmaker delivered the finished print. Most of them brought us into the process, some didn’t.

It sounds like you weren’t as likely to be perceived as adversaries.


Well, sometimes we were. [Laughs.] Especially if there were budget problems.

You mentioned having a strong response to Richardson’s script for Tom Jones. What is it that attracted you to it, and, more generally, to others?

I can’t tell you what. I read scripts, and I don’t really look to anybody’s response but my own visceral response. But you have to be familiar with the filmmaker; you have to have a feel for what they intend to do with the script. Yes, movies were far, far less expensive then to make then, but so was their grossing potential. So everything is a risk. And I don’t envy people in the towers of Los Angeles today who have to make decisions about $150 million or $200 million movies. But I will tell you that a $4 or $5 million dollar movie was just as important to us. And there were times when we got in trouble, but thankfully many more times when we didn’t.
   It wasn’t always easy, and there were personality problems, but that’s the nature of the business. You’re dealing with creative people who have very strong feelings about their work and how they feel they have to deal with people who get in their way. That’s the fun part of it.

How did you come across Midnight Cowboy?

It’s very simple. There were a lot of filmmakers we were in business with, and several we were not in business with, and one of those was John Schlesinger. I’d seen Darling and Billy Liar, and I was in London—as I was often—and I made an appointment to see John. I said to him, “Here we are: we want to make movies with you.” He said, “Well, there’s only one thing I have at the moment that I’d like to do, but you’ll never do it; it’s very dark.” And he told me about this little book by James Leo Herlihy called Midnight Cowboy. So I read it, and agreed with him that it was very dark, but told him that if he could make this picture at a specifically negotiated price, we’d develop it with him.
   So he and Jerry Hellman, the producer, agreed on the price, and we all agreed on a writer. We hired Jack Gelber, a New York playwright, and for a year they went off and worked on it. They called me after some time and said, “The script simply doesn’t work.” I said, “Well, what do you want to do now?” “We’d like to hire Waldo Salt.” I said, “Okay, hire Waldo Salt.” Another year went by, and when they came in two and a half years after our initial deal, the budget was not the same as it had been before. It was a very, very difficult situation, because we’d committed to doing it on the basis of a certain number, and they weren’t close to it. I was very emotional, because I really wanted to make this film and I felt that John and Jerry, you know, had not lived up to their end of the obligation. I remember Bob Benjamin saying to me, “Relax. Sit down. It’s only a movie.” And I said, “It’s not only a movie. It’s a great project,” etc. etc…. So we explored different options and, to make a long story short, we found a way to do it, painful as it was, and we approved a higher number. And they went off and made the movie. I went by the set once, when they were shooting outside of what is now the Peninsula Hotel—it used to be the Gotham Hotel, on 55th just west of Fifth Avenue. Didn’t see any dailies or anything.
   When it was finished, John and Jerry called and said, “We’re ready to show you our cut.” I asked how complete it was, and they told me it had everything but John Barry’s theme, which he hadn’t composed yet. They were using a temp song. So they said, “Why don’t you come on over?” And I said, “Well, you know what? I’m going to take a chance. I’m going to bring everybody.” So I had the entire marketing, sales, and executive team of United Artists—about 40 of us—go over to the theater on 54th Street between 11th and 12th to see the first screening of Midnight Cowboy. And when that movie ended—in my career, it was probably the most extraordinary response to a motion picture I’d ever witnessed. Nobody could move, nobody could say a word; we just sat there, stunned. Finally, Arnold Picker turned around and said to John, “It’s a masterpiece.”
   The temp song that he’d laid in was “Everybody’s Talking,” which he planned to replace with the John Barry. And we wouldn’t let him do it—it was just too perfect. So we bought the rights to that and left it in. John and I have been friends ever since, and subsequent to that he brought two other projects to me, neither of which I wanted to do. It was difficult—a man makes Midnight Cowboy, and he comes in with The Assassination of Trotsky, which I didn’t want to do, and Day of the Locust, which he eventually did make. But I didn’t want to do it. And then he gave me Penelope Gilliatt’s script to Sunday Bloody Sunday, and I said, “Okay.”

What about Last Tango in Paris?

That was a phone call from Alberto Grimaldi, the producer. That had been at Paramount—just like Tom Jones had been at another company. I’d been involved in the Clint Eastwood Westerns with Alberto, and he said, “Bernardo’s got this project. Here’s the cost, I can send you the treatment. It’s Brando, and Paramount doesn’t want to use him.” I asked him to send me the treatment. And we made a deal based on the treatment and, of course, the director. I was a big fan of Bertolucci’s.
   I mean, when you’re able to move quickly, give answers quickly, and when you’re known for being sympathetic to the creative process—it’s still not easy, but you have access to everything. And you know, we were tough businessmen. We didn’t roll over and play dead. But, they knew there was enormous respect for the creative process. And we were in business—it was kind of scary—with everyone. Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, I worked with them all—although to call it “work” is sort of ridiculous. And then you add on the top of that the Beatles, the James Bond franchise…

How did the Beatles’ films come about?

They came to us because the head of our music publishing operation in London had been contacted by somebody—I don’t think it was Brian Epstein—involved with the Beatles saying that they’d be interested in doing a couple of low-budget rock n’ roll movies. This was before anybody knew who they were; they were still based in Liverpool and they hadn’t exploded yet. When that idea was passed on to me, I thought it was great, so we made a three-picture deal with them. Between the time we made the deal and started to think seriously about what kind of low-budget movie we could make, they exploded. And we had them under contract. Now that it was clear that we had something major on our hands, we had to figure out who to put them with. I determined that the logical person was Dick Lester. He’d directed a sequel to The Mouse That Roared for us called Mouse on the Moon, and Walter Shenson had produced it, so I called Dick and said, “Look, we’ve got the Beatles, I’d like you to work with them, and Walter to produce it,” and he agreed, and that’s how it happened.

Had you heard their music before you made the deal?

No. Didn’t make any difference. The fact is, conceptually, I liked the idea of doing low-budget music films, and we obviously had an involvement in the publishing and the soundtrack, and we had a record company that was starting to happen, so it just made sense. Subsequent to the Beatles, we did other deals, with groups like Gerry and the Pacemakers. As you know, music-oriented films and soundtracks are valuable assets to a company.

Do you think that the fact that you were unusually young for the position you held had something to do with your interest in these various projects?

I never looked at it that way. Don’t forget—I was brought up in the business. When I joined UA after the Army in ’56, I basically knew as much or more about the motion-picture business than most of the people I was working with. I’d lived, eaten and breathed movies my whole life, and it was all I cared about. Everybody approaches their vocation a different way; mine was total—not for ambitious reasons, just for love of what I was doing. Seven days a week, 24 hours a day—it didn’t make any difference to me. I saw every movie made that I could see. You pay a price for that in your personal life, but I rationalized that in my own mind.

It just strikes me that your breadth of experience and knowledge—something one would normally gain only after working years in the business—made for a particularly potent combination with the enthusiasm and energy of youth.

I guess that’s why they gave me the shot. I mean, obviously I had no “track record” to speak of.

How did you get the James Bond franchise?

I had tried to buy the rights to James Bond before we were able to make a deal with Broccoli and Saltzman. Fleming was not an easy man to deal with—I couldn’t get them. They were there to be taken, though, and when Saltzman secured them, and then Cubby joined him, we wouldn’t let the two of them out of the office until we had a deal. Other companies had their shots at it—Columbia turned it down, twice—but nobody else stood up. And obviously, although we thought it might be a franchise, nobody anticipated the enormity of it, because that would have been foolish.

And your relationship with Woody Allen?

It was simple, again. Woody and Sam Cohn came to see me—actually, Sam the first time. He said, “You want to make movies with Woody?” I said, “Absolutely.” And we worked out a deal where within a specific fixed amount of money, the only obligation Woody had was to come and tell me what the idea was. We had a number. The fun part of it was that the first idea he came up with I didn’t want to do, because it wasn’t funny. I looked at him when he told me this idea, and I said, “Woody, I’d be very happy to do this as the fourth or fifth movie, but the first time it’s got to be a comedy.” This was a Thursday or a Friday, and he said, “Oh. Okay.” Monday he called me with another idea and I said fine—that was Bananas. That’s the way that deal was structured.
   Here’s a difference in the business. In those days, I was only interested in one thing: how much we could lose. Okay? So if the picture was a flop, you’d lose X million dollars. That’s not the business we’re in today. We’re in the business of “How much can we make?” And I will tell you that I don’t think there’s one person who’s ever been in the motion picture business who can tell you with any degree of certainty what any movie can make. But you always know how much it can lose. So we were prepared to take risks based on protecting the downside. Today, it’s very different. You need insurance policies, so you make things over and over that have already succeeded, because that means they may succeed again, as opposed to looking for things that maybe haven’t been quite done a certain way before. Very different, and nowhere near as much fun. Ask anybody.

After the Transamerica deal in 1972, you left UA to do some independent producing.

I did a deal with UA where in fact I could do three movies of my own choice within a certain budget.

And you stayed in New York?

Oh, yeah.

Lenny was one of those films, right?

Lenny was a deal I had made at UA before I’d left the position I had. Bob Fosse asked if I would produce the movie. The producer by title was Marvin Worth, who had owned the property, but Fosse had total control over it. So I became the executive producer of that. And then I did Smile, and Juggernaut, which was a script we had developed at UA with a producer and director who had not gotten the movie going.

This was your first foray into actually producing a film?

Yeah. Lenny was the first movie I’d actually produced. Bob had creative control of the movie, but we were friends, and my function as producer—which I have always believed since—was to enable Fosse to make the movie he wanted to make while at the same time keeping it within certain economic parameters. And collaborating to the extent that Bobby would get what he wanted and needed. It was an extraordinary first film to work on. I couldn’t have had a more complex, challenging, creatively exciting or personal relationship with a filmmaker. I adored him, respected him—he was brilliant. And we were able to talk shorthand. I instinctively knew what he was thinking, and I was there for him—he permitted me to be there for him. So I learned a lot
   I’m not a producer who can just sit back and be a functionary. I have to feel like—not that I get my way, ’cause that’s not what it’s about—but I have to feel like I can contribute to the project on a creative as well as economic-control level. If I can do that—if I have at least the ear of the director to listen to what I have to say, then I feel like I am fulfilling the function that I need to fulfill. Working with Bobby, working with Michael Ritchie, and then with Dick Lester on my first three movies was terrific because they were three totally different personalities, all talented in their own way.
   I’m always attracted to the director and the writer; those are the people I love spending time with, and working with. Everything else has flowed from that. It’s never been the deal, or the economic benefits. I mean, I’ve always obviously been comfortable, but it’s never been the dollar; it’s always been the experience.

You moved to L.A. in 1976 to become head of production at Paramount—

I actually moved to L.A. for personal reasons before that, and lived there for eight or nine years, during which I was president of Paramount.

What was it like moving into the studio system in L.A.?

Well, it was a different world. It’s not a world I’m nearly as comfortable in. I had enormous respect for Barry Diller, and I still do—he’s one of the smartest men I’ve ever worked with—but we had totally different personalities, and after two and a half years it was clear that my personality and his were not really compatible, and in the nicest possible sense he lived up to all the understandings that we had, and I just went off on my own and produced a couple of movies for them. But the results of my time there, which included, you know, Grease, Days of Heaven, Up in Smoke, Saturday Night Fever, making a deal with Redford for Ordinary People, just proved, at least as far as I was concerned, that I was able to bring something off with my own style. But clearly, my style and the studio style were totally incompatible.

Can you elaborate a bit more on that difference?

Well, again, I’m talent-driven and content-driven as opposed to insurance-driven. Barry and I acknowledged that the kind of projects I was drawn to were not as high-profile, big-name projects as perhaps the studio would have liked. I remember when Heaven Can Wait came along—it was a package with Warren and all the other elements and it was expensive and Barry knew how far he wanted to go in making the deal. It was more about the deal than the film. Those high-profile movies were more “studio-style” than the ones I was doing. That’s where my style differs—I believe in my own reaction to content and talent, and if I have a long enough opportunity, I always trust that it’s going to come through. To succeed within a year or a year and a half is impossible, unless you’re very lucky. But you need to establish an atmosphere where filmmakers want to work with you, and that takes some time. And of course a number of those films went on to be quite successful. But there were other people in place at Paramount after me, and a lot of credit went to them. But that happens all the time.
   Also, everything in the industry at that point was starting to change. Ancillary markets were getting larger, negative costs were getting larger—it was really starting to be a different world. And I really am a New Yorker—I do not like living in Los Angeles. I just don’t. I’m not comfortable there. The business is different. Again, it’s a place where terrific things happen, and there are wonderful filmmakers there—certainly in the UA years, we were involved with many of them—Billy Wilder, Blake Edwards, John Sturges, Norman Jewison, you name it. That isn’t the problem. The problem is it’s a different lifestyle. It’s more about perception than reality in some ways. I don’t know any other way to say this, but I have no particular interest in seeing my name in print, or being talked about in a particular way; I’m not competitive in that sense. So I really prefer to just operate with the people I prefer to operate with, and to be left alone. So it wasn’t the easiest place to be comfortable. And as the costs began to escalate, it became more and more different.

Yet after Paramount you spent several years as president of feature films at Lorimar…

Yeah, that was probably—even though we did some interesting movies—a mistake. And it was a mistake because I was led to believe that it was going to be one thing and it turned out to be something else. I hoped that maybe there was a United Artists lurking there somewhere, and there wasn’t. Once Jack Schwartzman and I realized that, it was time to move on. I mean, I had perfectly decent relationships with Lee Rich and Merv Adelson, and like them, but I didn’t go there to be just an executive. It was okay, because I’d just produced The Jerk.

Your had one more relatively short gig at a major in the late ’80s at Columbia, serving as David Puttnam’s president of production. Did you also see that as another potential UA?

Well, maybe. It was swimming upstream. The movie business had changed dramatically. David had told Coca-Cola what he was going to do, and they supported everything that he wanted to do until he got there and started to do it. It was an unfortunate series of circumstances that David found himself in. He believed what they told him, and tried to do things a certain way, and the Hollywood community didn’t respond well, and Coca-Cola eventually didn’t respond well, so, you know, it was one of those things.
   But we did some interesting movies.

You picked up the negative for School Daze, right?

Well, it was more than that. Tom Rothman, who was Spike’s lawyer, called me and we made the deal over the phone because it had fallen out somewhere else. We did some good movies there, but it was never going to work.

You knew that right away?

Shortly after I got there. David had clearly been led to believe that he was going to be supported, and Coca-Cola probably believed it when they said it. But once the community didn’t respond well, they kind of disappeared, too.

What do you mean by “not responding well”?

The fact is, David and I are both people who are talent-driven. When David was a producer and I was running Paramount, he brought Alan Parker and Ridley Scott to me, and we did their first movies. That’s a long-range policy for a studio, and it’s a policy where a lot of heavyweight players in the Hollywood community can get bent out of shape if you don’t respond to their muscle. Many establishment producers like Ray Stark, for example, didn’t like having their projects rejected by David. It was as simple as that. It was more about people whose noses were out of joint, like Mr. Cosby, who produced, starred in and later publicly rejected a picture he made for the studio. He also didn’t return the million he was paid to make it.

So after all of this you returned to New York?

I’d actually returned to New York before Columbia; I’d moved back in the early ’80s, after Lorimar. I just went back out for the year and nine months I was at Columbia. So yes, after that, I came back to New York and made a whole bunch of movies. Some were good; some were not so good. I guess my favorite was The Saint of Fort Washington. It took me nine years to get it made, and it got hurt for a number of reasons, but it’s a movie I’m very, very proud of.
   And then in the mid-’90s I made another deal with Paramount. And in two years, I had 14 scripts in development and no movies, so when Fox called and asked me if I would consider producing The Crucible, I went to Paramount and said, “Look, I’m just sitting here doing nothing. Let’s just end it now.” And we did, amicably. When The Crucible was over, my friends the Halmis asked me if I would consider helping them at Hallmark. I said I’d try it for a while, just as a consultant, and I had a great time. Under this arrangement I’m free to develop some independent films as long as it doesn’t interfere with what I’m doing, so I am. I’m having a great time here. You know, the fact is, we do the best of this kind of stuff. There’s a production of David Copperfield that Peter Medak directed which I think is just stunning. To be able to have the fun I’m having here at Hallmark, and be able to come up with ideas that push the envelope a little bit, or go into arenas we haven’t seen before in television, while at the same time developing the kind of personal movies that I respond to—at this advanced stage of my career it’s pretty nice.
   And also, talking to my friends who are out there in the middle of it all—I don’t know of anybody who should be envied. You know, there are huge amounts of money thrown around, and when something is successful, it’s nice. I’ve certainly been asked to produce some very big movies, but doing a $100 million movie just doesn’t interest me. When a studio invests that kind of money, it really is their movie—it’s not the producer’s movie. Or if there’s a major star in it, it’s his or her movie. This is not to put down the producer function, because I think guys like Jerry Bruckheimer do a brilliant job of making a certain kind of movie. But that’s not my taste, and it’s not material that particularly interests me. And if it doesn’t interest me I’m not going to do a good job. The kinds of stuff I want to do are much more personal things, whether they’re funny or dramatic or whatever. It’s really more of the kind of independent film—the mantle that Miramax inherited from the UA of the ’60s. I grew up with films being made by independent filmmakers, even though we did them at a major, and it’s what my instincts are always driven by.

You were given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Independent Feature Project a few years back; do you find that independent producers here often consult you for advice?

Actually, not that many. I don’t know probably 65 percent of the directors today. I don’t know 75 percent of the younger agents. That’s just natural, and I don’t have either the desire or the interest in doing it. When I was running studios, I knew every filmmaker, every writer, every agent in the business. But you evolve, and I’ve evolved to a point where I love what I do, and I’m still developing films, but my interests have prioritized in a different way. I used to see every movie within reason that was made. I pick and choose now. I just don’t have the interest or the patience.

What are some films you’ve liked this past year?

My favorite movie is Almodovar’s All About My Mother. It’s so extraordinary because he does a very difficult thing, which is to humanize without sentimentalizing. A talent that not a lot of people have. But I liked The Green Mile, and I liked The Cider House Rules, and I liked Magnolia, and I liked American Beauty, and I liked The Insider. I liked Hurricane—a movie I worked on for three years, but never got a script that I could get made.

In 1987, you were on a committee for the Imagen Awards—given yearly to the entertainment industry for positive portrayals of Hispanic Americans—and made a statement to the press that only one award, as opposed to the usual three, would be given because of the dearth of non-stereotypical roles for Hispanics in film and television that year. Do you think that film has some broader function than simply to entertain?

Well, it is an economic reality that the movie business is based on profit and loss. But I think that there needs to be a certain responsibility to the audience to help ensure that there’s a future to the business. That’s not to say you don’t do things that may offend some people, because I totally believe more than anything else in freedom of expression. But I think there’s an obligation to represent—both within the craft and within the audience—the broadest possible spectrum. And that means the recognition that in the United States the makeup of the population has changed, and African Americans and Hispanic Americans must be given opportunities. One of the problems we have in our business is that unless somebody mandates it, it doesn’t happen. On The Saint of Fort Washington, I had to mandate in our crew that every department be integrated. Unless somebody literally says, “This has to happen,” it just doesn’t happen, and it’s kinda sad. When I was at Paramount, we hired Joan Darling to direct First Love—the first film there, as I recall, to be directed by a woman. I wish things happened naturally, but they don’t.
   I think a lot of the movies I’ve done have entertained, but I think a lot of them also have something to say about the world in which we live, and I think that there’s kind of an ethical obligation and a responsibility to enlighten and broaden the potential audience and the potential workforce. I don’t mean to get fancy, but you either think that way or you don’t.

Do you have any opinions about John Grisham suing Oliver Stone over Natural Born Killers, which Grisham claimed led to a copycat murder of friends of his?

I think something like that might occasionally happen, but I think there’s a lot more to it than that. I don’t think there’s any quid pro quo for any of these things. What offends me more is the hypocrisy of entities that say they have no impact when they do. For instance, I’ve had television news executives say to me, “This program is untouchable”—this was 60 Minutes—and then you’d look at the fact that a golf tournament was on CBS, and somehow two weeks before they’d done a profile of Tiger Woods or something. There’s a lot of hypocrisy; I find that offensive. But I don’t think you can point a finger at any particular movie, novel, broadcast and say it was the direct cause of something.

You’ve had an enormous number of successes as a producer and executive, but also, as you mentioned, some failures; is there some point in the process where you tend to know which of the two a film is going to be?

It’s so complicated. It depends on who you are and where you are at any given point in time. You can convince yourself of just about anything.

I would think the emotional investment a director has in a project might make it more difficult for him or her to be objective than, say, someone on the studio level.

But as an executive you can pretty much convince yourself you’re going to have a success, even though an objective point of view might be that you’re not. And I don’t think there’s any one moment when you know that. There are always surprises. That’s what’s so extraordinary about what we do; it’s totally unpredictable. An awful lot of things have to come together to make anything happen, and nobody really knows. At UA, we did what we thought was going to be one of our biggest movies, called The Greatest Story Ever Told. Until several days before it opened, we thought we were going to have a big success, and of course we had a disaster. One of our top people thought that a movie we had with Stanley Kramer, The Secret of Santa Vittoria, was going to be a huge success, and almost negotiated a buyout of Stanley’s profit position. Fortunately, the deal fell apart, because nobody went to see it.
   I made a movie called Won Ton Ton: The Dog That Saved Hollywood because I wanted to do an homage to old Hollywood movie stars. I remember we had an enormous one-hour break on Merv Griffin’s television show—and then the movie opened and nobody came. I made a bet with the head of Universal on The Jerk about how much film rental we would earn. He had a much clearer vision than I did, and I ended up sending a very big contribution to his charity because I had underestimated what it was going to do. You know, Billy Wilder once said to a group of us, “There’s three kinds of movies. Musts, maybes and nevers, but the problem is, you don’t always know in the front which is which.” After the fact it’s really easy to see.
   There are four times in my life when I was absolutely, positively convinced that the movies were going to be successful, and I was only wrong once. That group was Tom Jones, Last Tango, Midnight Cowboy and Where’s Poppa? I thought Where’s Poppa? was going to shoot through the roof, but it just offended a lot of people, and nobody seemed to see in it what I saw.

What’s your feeling about test screenings?

Oh, I have a big problem with them. I mean, it depends where you screen the movie. Anything within 50 miles of downtown L.A. is idiotic. I think the only thing that really works is the actual screening itself, as long as it’s an audience that’s kind of unadulterated. We actually did it recently with one of our shows here. My problem is what happens after the screening, when you turn that audience into critics. I don’t feel comfortable with that. It’s one thing to listen and watch, because at that moment I think their response is authentic—they’re either interested or they’re not, they’re responding or they’re not. But once you put a piece of paper in front of them, and then you have a focus group, I don’t necessarily trust it, because people are being asked to give opinions. One person makes a comment, and it’s something that none of the rest of the group would have ever thought of. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I don’t take as much from them as some people do. But the reality is that studios use them. Those top two boxes carry a lot of weight.
   It’s a version, really, of readers. I mean, how many people at studios at the highest level actually read scripts anymore? Now what you have is a group of seven or eight people sitting around a table, and every creative executive is pushing their particular project, trying to—this is probably the best way to characterize it—get projects made that they think their boss will approve. That’s not what we used to do. I would try to get projects made that I believed in, that I would then try to convince my boss to do.
   There’s a famous old joke, about the woman who goes into the butcher shop and buys a chicken. The fellow puts the chicken on the counter, and she lifts up the wings and sniffs and she says, “Take it back, I don’t want it.” And five times he puts a new chicken on the counter, and five times she rejects it. Finally, he says to the woman, “Excuse me, Madame; can I ask you a question? Could you pass such a test?” I don’t know how a script can pass some of these tests. It is a different business, and the movies reflect it.

You’ve had a lifelong on-again, off-again relationship with the studio system, and by extension, Hollywood—

I don’t think it’s on-again, off-again; I think that what my career reflects is love of motion pictures, and I certainly have never been able to adjust to what I think you have to do in Hollywood, which is not only understand and care about movies, but also play a certain kind of game. With me, what you see is what you get.

Do you think the film business, which most would argue has changed considerably for the worse in the past several decades, could ever change again for the better?

I have no idea. The fact is that most movie companies today are only one small part of the companies that own them. I grew up in a world where the movie companies were in the movie business, period. That was their raison d’être. Now they’re a marketing arm of a larger entity. I’m not grousing about it, it’s just the reality of the way it is.
   I don’t know, maybe the savior will be the proliferation of information on the Internet, where there will be other ways of receiving information. On the other hand, I would not be happy with the day when I can’t go into a darkened theater and see a movie on a screen. But maybe the audiences for all these things are being chopped up a little bit—although obviously the big hit movies do better than ever, and the others do worse than ever.
   Hopefully there will be outlets for the kind of creative filmmaking that we respond to as individuals more. There were a lot of good movies this year, made by companies that were owned by studios, as well as studios themselves. I just hope that the independent spirit prevails, so that movies aren’t just a reflection of these giant companies, whose basic use of film is to market products. I don’t think we can live on a diet of such rich desserts. The calories will put us into shock.

Would you ever go back to Hollywood for another studio job?

Anybody who would hire a 68-year-old New Yorker to run a studio today should be fired.