PLUME: With the belief that it can be fixed on set?

KURTZ: Well, yes, I’m sure that some people would say that, but I think that they’re looking at them as some sort of cannon fodder, really. They don’t really care. If everybody gets their fees and they make enough money to pay the mortgage, then that’s the end of it. There’s not much passion involved in the concept of the film.

PLUME: Conversely, when you also talk about the idea of everybody looking for a sure hit, do you think that – on the flip side – there also is a tendency nowadays to overdevelop projects?

KURTZ: That has happened. I don’t think it’s as much of a problem as the underdeveloped project, in a way. I have known about projects that have had eight writers and been seven years in development that have just been so developed that they can’t even be made. There’s either too many costs or the script has lost all meaning because the writers forgot what the original concept was.

On the other hand, you can always point to projects like Rainman that went through that kind of process – seven or eight writers, lots of directors and years of development – and it turned out fine. I don’t know if there’s anything inherently wrong with the process. I think that as long as the focus is trying to make the project better – as long as that is kept as the vision – then I suppose it doesn’t matter how long you spend in development. But after a while, the energy behind a project starts to wane, so I think you have to be careful.

PLUME: Do you think there’s a difference between trying to make a project better and trying to make a project bankable?

KURTZ: Yes, I do. I think that, to be realistic, no producer or director wants to lose money on a project – or they don’t want to lose their investors’ money. Most, I think, are responsible enough to look at a project and say, “Okay, this is a worthwhile risk at 25 million, but not at 50,” and that’s how they kind of pursue it. I certainly do that, and always have. Looking at a script and saying, “Yes, I think a target audience might go see this one.”

When we proposed Star Wars to the studios, no one wanted to consider it – primarily because it was science fiction, and science fiction wasn’t popular in the mid-’70s. There hadn’t been any real space opera type of science fiction since Forbidden Planet from the mid-’50s, so it certainly wasn’t considered popular then. But, what seems to be the case generally is that the studio executives are looking for what was popular last year, rather than trying to look forward to what might be popular next year.

PLUME: To set a trend as opposed to following one.

KURTZ: Yes, because they’re afraid of the audience. No one’s been able to read the audience, ever, so you have to kind of rely on your own instincts. In the case of Star Wars, George and I had dinner one night, and we were looking through the paper while we were editing American Graffiti. We were looking through the newspaper, looking at the film listings to see if there was anything out there worth going to see. And, there wasn’t. Discussion came around to Flash Gordon, and wouldn’t it be great to have a Flash Gordon kind of science fiction movie – that would be great. We’d love to see that. That’s sort of the gestation of Star Wars – and that was based on something that we wanted to see, that we would pay to go see! And no one was making it.

I think that that has to be one of the major driving forces behind any project – would I go see this? I know there was also the adage … I think it was David Puttnam, actually, who said in one of his interviews that he wanted to make sure that everything that he put his name on, he would be proud to have his family go see. And I think that that’s important, too. It doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t do tough projects – you couldn’t do an R-rated project because you don’t want your six-year-old to go see it – it’s just the concept that, if you’re proud of what you do and what’s up there on the screen, then that means that you’ve put energy and effort into it and you believe in it.

PLUME: And you actually enjoy having your name attached to it.

KURTZ: Yes.

PLUME: So it’s more of a pride in work issue, as opposed to an age bracket issue, when you talk about that family quote.

KURTZ: Yes, yes. Exactly.

PLUME: Backtracking just a little bit, we were talking about towards the beginning of your career, working on the lower budget films. How did you transition to mainstream Hollywood work? What was the process for doing that?

KURTZ: It was quite convoluted, actually … ’66 I think it was. It was at the height of the Vietnam War. I was drafted into the Marines, and I spent three years in the Marines as a cameraman, a director of documentaries – even though I was actually a conscientious objector and I never carried a weapon. I carried an empty pistol holster. I was just very lucky, actually, to come through unscathed. I had four or five close friends who were also cameramen who were killed.

That took a big chunk of time out, and I got out in ’69, and Easy Rider came out in ’69. That was sort of the beginning of the rebel era. When I talk to filmmakers now and say that I made most of my films in the ’70s – at first anyways – most of the film students now look upon that era as sort of a wonderful golden age of independent filmmakers and doing interesting projects. If you look at the films that came out in the ’70s as opposed to the ’80s and ’90s, that is true to a certain extent. But I realize that when I was a film student, I looked back at the ’30s as sort of the golden age of Hollywood – I would have liked to have been working in the ’30s – so perspective changes of course, every decade.

PLUME: What, for you, defined a golden age?

KURTZ: Well, I think that for us, when I was a film student, the reason that the ’30s were looked upon that way is because it was the big studio system. Every studio was turning out 40 or 50 films a year. It meant that almost anything got made – good, bad and indifferent. Now sure, there were a lot of crap movies and there were a lot of B potboilers, but there were a lot of really wonderful films that came through that system. The John Fords and Howard Hawks of the world would make three, four films a year!

So, I suppose as a film student looking at that, when you have to struggle to put together a million dollars to make a little film, the idea that the system was all in place and there was no struggle really – you just got a script or you presented a script, and you made one picture after another – there was a big advantage to that system. There’re a lot of detriments to that system, too, but I think the end result was that a lot of really good films came out of that. When we were film students in the early ’60s, what was being churned out wasn’t particularly good, and there weren’t very many films. It was difficult to get into the industry, and so it just didn’t compare at all.

The film students now looking back at the ’70s are looking on it as everybody’s read the Raging Bulls book – and other books about the ’70s – and the films that were made during that time… Bob Rafelson’s films and Francis’s films, and Marty’s films, Bogdanovich’s first film, The Last Picture Show, and all the beginnings of that kind of independent filmmaker era. Many more of the ’70s films have this… not all of them, but a great many of them… have this imprint as sort of non-studio, independent, interestingly structured stories. What would be classified by today’s Hollywood as sort of art-housey kind of movies.

PLUME: Do you think that the rise of the director as a force during the ’70s almost led to that sort of bubble being self-destructive? I mean, when you look at what happens towards the end of the ’70s, and what happened in the ’80s when the implosion of egos occurred…

KURTZ: Yes I do, actually. I think that may have been inevitable. I think that also, there was another factor – in ’80 or ’81, I think, most of the major studios were starting to get taken over by the conglomerates. That was another big factor in the change.

PLUME: Corporatization?

KURTZ: Yes.

PLUME: As a producer, when did you notice a sort of seismic shift in that?

KURTZ: I think it was in the early ’80s, really, in talking to the studios about projects and trying to get some interest in the making of things, and spending all this time in trying to develop projects the studios weren’t sure about.

One of the most frustrating things ever, for any producer or director or writer even, is this process of pitching an idea, getting someone interested in it, getting development money, and going ahead and writing the screenplay – putting together a package – and then presenting it to them, and they say, “Oh, well, I’m not sure, really. Let’s see what happens,” and they never make it. And they’re not willing to give it up – they’re not willing to put it into turnaround so that you can take it somewhere else, because they’re afraid that it will be the E.T. problem of becoming a big hit for some other studio and making you look silly.

So they just put it on the shelf – and I don’t know how many projects I’ve been involved with that ended up that way and never got made. Projects with a good idea, good stories, good screenplay – they could have been made, and did have interest from other companies – and they could have been financed. Anybody you talk to probably would tell you stories about that. It’s not uncommon, and it is one of the problems that didn’t seem to be the case in the ’70s – almost everything that got fully developed got financed by somebody.

PLUME: During the early ’70s, wasn’t it still the case that a good deal of the people running the studios at the time were good people? Wasn’t that still the age of the creative studio head?

KURTZ: Pretty much. I mean, it was the tail end of the dynasties, of the big executives. Universal was still being run by Lew Wasserman. He had very eccentric tastes, and he made a lot of very, very commercial movies – you know, the Pillow Talk kind of movies, and the things that we now look at saying, “Well, that’s sort of middle of the road, high gloss, soap opera kind of stuff,” that hasn’t held up that well in terms of great classics of all times, but it was very popular at the time.

They also made a lot of other movies – they sprung to make Jaws, they made Duel, and they did American Graffiti. They did all this low budget stuff as well. I think that there are parallels with most of the other studios. The year that Star Wars was released, 1977, Fox had Fred Zinnemann’s Julia out that year, and Herb Ross’s The Turning Point. I think that those were the two other major pictures that they had that year. Both of those are very good – good, solid films, and very different. They had a lot of other films, too. More formula kind of films, but they seemed to have more variety – all the studios had more variety.

Now everyone wants another Jurassic Park, and they don’t want to have a great variety. As you mentioned earlier, this idea of assigning certain projects as prestige projects – it didn’t matter if they made money because the studios name was on them and they looked good. They don’t do that now. They’re not interested in doing that.

PLUME: Right – if there were dinosaurs that hit big last year, let’s have dinosaurs again this year.

KURTZ: Yes.

PLUME: It’s almost as if the film industry has taken over the mentality of television, as far as what’s the bankable formula for the year.

KURTZ: Yeah, but the way things are working, television – not broadcast television so much, especially in America, but cable television, HBO especially – has taken over the sort of vanguard of interesting programming. A lot of little movies that would have come out in the cinema in the ’70s now come out as an HBO movie, because it’s too costly to market it to the cinemas.

PLUME: Do you think that’s a recourse or do you think that’s a situation of, “Well, that’s the best we can get nowadays when it comes to that kind of diversity in the industry”?

KURTZ: I think that it’s a combination. I think there’s a realistic feeling that these films have a limited audience, and it costs a fortune to put them into the cinemas with the cost of prints and how many screens you have to put them in to cover the country effectively. Then there’s also this mania about big numbers in the first weekend or two. I think everyone forgets that Star Wars, or any of the films that came out in the ’70s, tended to be platformed – where they came out in a few cinemas. Star Wars was released only in 37 cinemas. That would be laughable today. Then they expanded it. It did better than Fox thought – I have to say that – and so they expanded it earlier than they thought they would, but it never was in more than 700 cinemas at one time. Now, your average high budget potboiler movie, like … Pearl Harbor, Mummy Returns, and the rest – they all released in 3000 cinemas. That’s a big expenditure on prints.

PLUME: And 95% of films don’t even run longer than a couple months.

KURTZ: That’s right. Star Wars was still in the cinema six months after it opened.

PLUME: And then what – it was re-released the following year?

KURTZ: Well, actually, some of the cinemas carried it for a whole year, and then it was re-released the following summer, that’s true, in a kind of weird pattern that Fox had. That pattern isn’t used anymore for any picture – it has nothing to do with the commerciality of the picture. If you look at a good movie this last summer – a big hit, like Shrek. It was released in 2500 cinemas and it wasn’t around in the theater – even though it was doing really well, it kind of petered out – after about ten, twelve weeks. That’s a change in the audience pattern, to a certain extent. Everybody wants to see the new thing.

PLUME: If you were to apply today’s theories to when Star Wars was released – if that had been a huge release on, say, 3500 screens, similar to Episode I – and it played for a month, made its money then – the same amount of money it would have made in the year and a half that it eventually played through the platformed release – do you think that the film would have had the same impact?

KURTZ: No, I don’t, actually. It’s really difficult to try to compare that. First of all, we were very lucky in the sense that Star Wars came out in the summer of ’77 when there wasn’t anything else to compete with it, really. The other big picture that was coming out in May/June in that period was supposed to be Willie Friedkin’s The Sorcerer, the remake of Wages of Fear – and it tanked, basically. It was a terrible movie…

PLUME: I would agree with that.

KURTZ: There’s no reason to remake Wages of Fear at all. But, even if you were going to remake it, you should have made a better picture than that. But, to our benefit, it didn’t stay in the cinemas more than three weeks. There was no competition at all, so in effect, Star Wars had the summer. Combined with that, we had the additional publicity value of the fact that, in the first month, there were huge queues around the block. We knew there were a certain number of science fiction fans who were anticipating it and would come the first week.

We knew it would be full houses for the first week or so, but the way we sold it to Fox was on the basis that we thought we could make our money back from our hardcore science fiction audience, and we didn’t have to rely on it being a break-through picture. There wasn’t anybody in marketing that we could make believe that this project had a wide audience potential.

PLUME: If there was criticism that Star Wars got from the studio during development, what was it?

KURTZ: It was too difficult to understand. I have to admit that the script was difficult, because you couldn’t see any of the visual effects – all you read were dialogue scenes, some of which seemed like gobbledygook. The talking robots and the giant wookies – all of that kind of stuff that doesn’t read very well on the page. It’s a very visual experience – science fiction in general, and Star Wars in particular. Without being absorbed into that environment, it was very difficult to explain to someone what it was going to be like. Whereas some scripts read in a very literary way – they read like a Steinbeck novel. They read wonderfully. Doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to be great on the screen, unfortunately, but a lot of them are. Some scripts just read better than others. We had the same problem with American Graffiti – it didn’t read well at all, since it was a music-driven piece, and it was impossible to explain to anybody that the musical undercurrent of every single scene in the film had a direct impact on the audience’s reaction to the scene.

PLUME: It was the glue that held the film together.

KURTZ: Absolutely. We ended up having to take a tape recorder into the executives’ office and play a couple of cuts of music saying, “This is the kind of music we’re going to use in the film.” I even played a clip from Wolfman Jack on the radio.

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