PLUME: I think that adds to the existential nature of the film.

KURTZ: Yes, it does. And the actors that we used – aside from Warren Oates, Dennis Wilson, James Taylor, and Laurie Bird – were all locals … We did a call where we actually cast some of the locals, and then came back and shot them, three months later. But, they were still from the area, so they seemed to fit into the environment.

PLUME: Which again, I’m assuming, is not the kind of thing that you can easily quantify to a studio.

KURTZ: No, you can’t at all. From a production point of view, the studio wants to have control of all the elements. As an ex-production manager myself, I certainly would concur with that. You want to have the peace of mind of knowing that when you hire 100 extras, that you’re going to have them on the set, and you’re going to have costumes for them, and that’s something that you preplanned. If you do this kind of movie, though, and you just want to show up – like there’s a scene in Two-Lane where James gets fed up in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and he gets out of the car and he goes to a bar – and that bar was a bar in Santa Fe on Saturday night. All the people that were in there were people that were in there. We only shot two scenes in there, so we only were in there about three hours. We had pre-lit the bar in the afternoon, when it was closed, so we just turned on the lights, asked the people if they wanted to be in the movie, and shot the scenes. And that was the end of it… You just don’t make Hollywood movies that way. They would have vetted everybody and used a place that was closed, and brought their own people in there. Because, if they had had to shoot for three days, they would want to know that they could get them back.

PLUME: But again, knowing that those are authentic locals, that’s a very tangible quality that you see on screen.

KURTZ: Yes, I think that you can use whatever production method works for you – there’s no one best way. But, you have to have the experience to know how to do that, how to take advantage of that.

PLUME: As a producer, what’s the middle ground that you find? I mean, you don’t want complete anarchy, either.

KURTZ: No, you don’t want complete anarchy, but you look at the scenes. I mean, if half of your picture takes place in an apartment, on the 37th floor of some building in New York, you might want to consider building that in the studio, because you’re going to be in there for four weeks. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to shoot that on location.

If you’re talking about street scenes where it’s all done in one day, there’s no reason – and I’ve done it many times – why you just can’t put the camera in a second floor window and shoot scenes with hidden cameras and shoot real people on the street. We did it in Hong Kong, we did it in India, and we’ve done it in many places in Europe, and it works extremely well – you get much more believable street scenes.

On the other hand, if you do a film like Tootsie, where they have street scenes in New York City where everybody walks into the camera lens where you’re dollying down the street at an extra, it looks that way. Now, for that film, it didn’t matter much, because that was the style of that film. It’s a good film, it’s funny, it’s worth watching anyway. But, if you were doing a harder edged film, then you might consider doing it a different style. I think that that’s the kind of thing that you decide in preproduction – you look at what works best for the story you’re telling. It doesn’t fit any particular pattern.

PLUME: When you look at filmmaking nowadays, do you think there’s a greater interference by the studio in determining those kind of things in preproduction?

KURTZ: I don’t know, really. I wouldn’t think so. I think it’s just a lack of effort on the filmmaker’s part. I seriously doubt if the studio would say, “You have to do it this way.” They don’t much care. As long as they know that it will be done on time, and the script is approved, I think they don’t much care how you do it. It’s just a matter of does the director want to spend the effort …

PLUME: So it’s that “good enough” mentality?

KURTZ: It’s that “good enough” mentality, yeah. You do just the minimum you have to, to get by. Or, on the other hand, like Pearl Harbor, you do all of these razzle-dazzle CGI shots that don’t add anything to the film, except add length, and aren’t very interesting.

PLUME: Because you don’t have a decent script to begin with.

KURTZ: Exactly. So you’re wasting your time. All the energy’s put in the wrong place.

PLUME: Well, do you think that the industry over time – when you talk about preproduction in the golden age, the ’30s and the ’40s and the ’50s and so on, where a lot of time was spent to make sure all the ducks were in a row – do you think that filmmakers today have lost that concept of foundation building? Putting together a team…

KURTZ: Well, that’s a pretty general statement. I’m sure there are lots of examples of that. I think that there are still filmmakers around that can do that, and do it quite well. There are good movies that are still being made, fortunately. So I don’t think it’s lost, particularly. I think it’s a matter of expediency. It’s also a matter of the time you spend in preproduction. I’m a big believer in long preproduction time.

In American Graffiti, we had no money – but we had to have all these cars, so we spent three weeks advertising on rock & roll radio for cars to be in this movie… cars and drivers who looked vaguely late ’50s. We had about 300 people show up, and we took a picture of the car and the driver and took their details, and each night when we needed cars we’d put out this call and call about 40-50 people, and maybe 20 would show up. It didn’t cost us anything, it was free – we just had to feed them. That was the only way we could make the production value work for the money we had, but it took three weeks of work to build that database of people to do it.

Now, if you only have two weeks of preproduction – which a lot of these smaller films try to squeeze by with now – you’re not going to have time to do that. I think it’s really critical. I’m a big believer that for every week of shooting, you need two to three weeks of preproduction – and I don’t care what level the picture is. As a matter of fact, if it’s a small picture, you probably need more preproduction than you do if it’s a big picture, where you have a huge preproduction staff that can help you.

PLUME: And that kind of preproduction pays off in spades when the film itself runs smoothly, doesn’t it?

KURTZ: Oh, it certainly does – it certainly does. Unfortunately, a lot of contemporary films – mostly big, not too much small ones anymore – have a deadline for release, which means, before you start shooting, you know you have to deliver by a certain date. It cuts your possibilities. In both American Graffiti and Star Wars, the studio had no deadline on when the film should be finished – it wasn’t going to decide on how it was going to release it until after it saw something put together. So there was no prerelease date. That’s the ideal kind of set up. Now, if you’re going into production on a film in September, probably there’s a May, June or July release date staring you in the face already, which means that you have to take that into consideration when you plan your schedule.

PLUME: Do you sometimes think that if one of these productions, instead of rushing right in, had taken an extra week – regardless, you still have the set date – that a week’s extra preproduction might save a week and a half, two weeks towards the end because you could finalize that script, you could finalize that design, instead of this mentality or working on the fly as you go along.

KURTZ: Sure. On Godfather I, Francis spent a tremendous amount of time sitting with the script and writing these copious notes about every single scene. Everything from – you know the scene where Sonny is driving in the car, and goes down to the tollbooth and gets shot? Francis had all these notes about driving during the war – that was during the Second World War – and all these people who’d lived through it were talking about the fact that the roads were completely empty, because rubber and petrol were all rationed. So that scene has virtually no cars in it – there are no cars on the road. The studio saw the rushes and said, “Where’s all the traffic?” And Francis said, “There isn’t any traffic, because it’s during the war, and there wouldn’t be any traffic.”

It’s just little things like that. If you have the time to spend with your script, and you can think about it and write down all the thoughts that you have about it, that’d be a big help. Jean Renoir said in an interview we did with him when we were film students – I worked on a crew that did an interview with him – “Spontaneity is a wonderful thing, but if it doesn’t come, you have to have an elaborate plan as a backup.”

PLUME: That’s a great quote. In your personal experience, what is the worst experience and the best experience that you’ve had when it comes to having all your ducks in a row for a production? What defines a bad experience and what defines a good experience for you?

KURTZ: Well, I think that American Graffiti is one of the best experiences, because we had the preproduction time and it was a fairly simple shoot – but it was also one of those that was done in a quasi-documentary style, which means as long as we had all of our elements together, we were fine and everything went extremely smoothly. So, that would be one of my best experiences. One of my worst was a little film I made to help out some friends here… we made it in England back in ’89… called Slipstream. I don’t know if you ever saw it.

PLUME: I watched it a few weeks ago, in fact.

KURTZ: Really? Slipstream is one of those things that actually has a lot of good elements in it, but ultimately doesn’t quite work, because the energy of the film changes dramatically. It was supposed to be – the script was very, very hard-edged, heavy R, rough, and gritty …a rougher than Blade Runner kind of look at the future, basically. Then a week before shooting, the financiers – which were an English company – decided that it had to be a family film, so all of the rough stuff had to be taken out. And, frantically, we worked on rewriting various bits – even after shooting started – and the film ends up a bit of a mess, because the focus and the energy that was there originally gets dissipated in trying to make something out of something that wasn’t there in the first place. I don’t know what your impression of the film is…

PLUME: It seemed very disjointed.

KURTZ: It’s very disjointed – big chunks of story that disappear completely, that were never even shot. I begged them to let us postpone shooting for six weeks so that we could restructure the thing, and they wouldn’t do it, so it was a very, very annoying and frustrating experience for me. I hated it. I’m a big flying buff, and I liked flying, I spent a month flying micro-lights and picking the aircraft – which I think was one of the best part of the film.

PLUME: Yes, I would have to agree. That definitely seemed like the film that went from A to B to D to R to Z.

KURTZ: Exactly, and that’s a very good case in point of what NOT to do. If the rules change and you have to regroup, then you just need to fall back and spend the time to regroup and do a decent job.

PLUME: At what point did you become involved with American Graffiti?

KURTZ: Right away, actually. What happened with American Graffiti was that, before we made Two-Lane, I told you I had visited Francis at Zoetrope in San Francisco, and we talked about other projects and things, and one of those things was a Vietnam War movie – which was Apocalypse Now. At that time it was a script that John Milius had written for George to direct. They were just finishing THX, and I was the only person in all the people that Francis knew, or any of his group there, that had been in the military and knew anything about the military. On one of the occasions when I was up there – I was staying at Francis’s house, and we had spent a lot of time on a variety of things – he drove me out to George’s house to do some editing on THX, because I wanted to see what Techniscope looked like because I was considering using Techniscope for Two-Lane, and THX was shot on Techniscope as well. So we went out and ran a part of the film at George’s house and sat and chatted with George about Techniscope and things in general – that was the first time I had ever met George.

PLUME: What were your initial impressions?

KURTZ: He seemed very much a typical film editor type – very quiet, not very assertive, certainly not a Hollywood type at all. So we went away from that, and we did use Techniscope and I was going to use some of Francis’s equipment, his Techniscope cameras, but in the end they were being used for something else, so I had to get Techniscope cameras from somewhere else in Hollywood. When Two-Lane was finished shooting and we were editing it, Francis rang me up again, and I went back up to San Francisco and we had several other meetings about this war film, the John Milius script. We decided to try to put it together, and Francis’s company owned the rights, and George was now finished with THX and Columbia was interested in Apocalypse.

This was after Two-Lane was finished and delivered. I spent about six months scouting for locations and doing a lot of legwork and research on jungles and helicopters for Apocalypse. The reason that Apocalypse is shot in the Philippines is because that’s the only place that had helicopters and jungle to match. Every place else I looked at – there’s a lot of great jungles around, South America and lots of other places – but no helicopters available. Then Columbia got cold feet because the war was still going on, and the approach that we had to making Apocalypse was to do it all in 16mm, all handheld, all quasi-documentary style, and actually hire a couple of Japanese crews to go into Vietnam and shoot stock footage in the real country. We couldn’t go there to do that, but a Japanese crew could.

PLUME: You could have just parachuted John Milius in…

KURTZ: Yeah, that’s right.

PLUME: I’m sure he was eager to volunteer for that.

KURTZ: Yes, I’m sure. Eventually Columbia got cold feet and said, “Well, the atmosphere is not conducive to a comedy about the Vietnam War.” Remember that the original script for Apocalypse was much closer to M.A.S.H. than it was to Heart of Darkness. It had quite a bit of black humor, and it isn’t the film that Francis made – he rewrote the script considerably, and changed a lot of the things. Now, his film is a very good film, but it’s just different, that’s all. It’s completely different than the one we were going to make. So Columbia backed out, and George said, “I’ve got this idea about a rock & roll movie I’ve always wanted to make, about cruising.” We started talking about that, which eventually became American Graffiti.

PLUME: Was the concept [of American Graffiti] pretty much what made it to screen?

KURTZ: The idea was there – it was about a bunch of kids hanging out, on one night. There were several versions of the script that went through, and Willard and Gloria Huyck added their version of the final draft which added a lot of humor and clever dialogue. But it was pretty much from the original idea, in terms of the concept and what it was about.

PLUME: It was adding a little bit more warmth to it?

KURTZ: Yes. When American Graffiti was finished, it became a surprise hit, really. The studio didn’t know what to do with it. They had an exhibitor screening, and the exhibitors all liked it, but the marketing people said, “How are we going to sell this film? It doesn’t have anybody in it.”

PLUME: Except for Opie.

KURTZ: Yes, Ronnie Howard. But, Ned Tanen said, “Well … the critics will probably like it. It’s a good, solid, critics’ film.” So, they came up with this plan to release it in one cinema in New York and one cinema in Los Angeles, and hope that the critical response was good enough so that they could help sell the rest of the exhibitors around the rest of the country. They had already pre-sold certain territories, almost playing it as a second half of a double bill – which still were floating around at that time – but to Lew Wasserman’s credit, when the film opened in New York and Los Angeles and the critical responses were very good, he forced the sales department to cancel all those bookings and they rethought the whole thing, and it was released on a much more word of mouth kind of basis.

Now that is the film that had a very interesting history in terms of its release – in the tenth, and fifteenth week of it playing in this single cinema in New York and Los Angeles, it was doing better business than it did in the first two or three weeks. That proved that that technique was correct for that film – it certainly was what sold the film, the word of mouth and the good critical response. I was in New York on the night it opened. I went to the opening screening and listened to the audience – I had seen it thousands of times… This is one of the hard things about a film that you’ve made, is you find that it’s almost impossible to sit through anymore.

PLUME: Just because of sheer repetition?

KURTZ: Yeah, just the repetition of everything. So I sat there and listened to the audience, and I said, “Well, reaction wasn’t bad. It’s pretty good. It’s pretty good.” I went from there to Universal afterwards, and we waited until midnight, went out to dinner and then came back to the studio office in New York in 5th Avenue and waited for the papers to come out at midnight – and went through them with a fine tooth comb looking at all the reviews and pulling review quotes to put in the ads. The reviews were generally very, very favorable, and we were very pleased, and it made a huge difference to their confidence about how to handle the picture.

That was really what happened with American Graffiti. Then it went on to win a Best Picture Oscar nomination, which was totally out of the blue – no one thought of that one at all. Compared to the other pictures that were around that year, there was no reason for it to be nominated for anything, because it just didn’t make that much impact. But, you never know – the voters are a strange group. Then immediately after that – that was part of a two-picture deal, actually, American Graffiti… I forgot a little bit of the story, which was we had a script development deal with United Artists. Two pictures – one was this rock & roll movie, and the other one was a science fiction movie. United Artists didn’t like the script for American Graffiti, and passed on the rest of the deal, basically, and we ended up taking that deal to Universal to make American Graffiti as part of that program. Francis loaned us his name, really, as executive producer – because the studio wanted some known name associated with the picture. So he in effect loaned us his name to be on the picture.

PLUME: And at one time was going to purchase the picture, wasn’t he?

KURTZ: Well … it was never serious … he wishes he had, actually – he could’ve made a lot more money! After American Graffiti was made, the other part of this deal was this science fiction script, and Universal looked at the first treatment, first draft, of Star Wars and passed on it.

PLUME: Which was radically different from what made it to screen, right?

KURTZ: Well yes, radically – but they just weren’t interested in science fiction at all at that time.

PLUME: There hadn’t been anything, so this would be, what – ’74? So at that time, the most recent science fiction film was still – Silent Running came out in ’74 or ’75?

KURTZ: I think it was ’74, and that was a Universal picture, too – but it wasn’t a good sign, because it didn’t do all that well. It made its money back, but it was like American Graffiti in the sense that it was part of the under-a-million dollar program, but it didn’t make anything like the box office impact that American Graffiti did. If it had, then maybe Universal might have been interested.

PLUME: So the last science fiction film, basically, still was 2001?

KURTZ: Yep, and 2001 wasn’t a good example, because it took five years to make its money back.

PLUME: And it wasn’t a space opera.

KURTZ: No, no it wasn’t. Definitely not.

(continued below…)

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