PLUME: But how many book companies – what was the book company, was in the U.K., that went out of business because of Episode I?

KURTZ: Almost went out of business, yeah. A lot of the toys didn’t sell. A lot of the collectors who collect this kind of merchandise… collectors are the ultimate junkies – they have to buy every box, every packaging of every toy so they have a full collection, and even they didn’t buy a lot of the stuff. I think that there’s an energy around collecting and it didn’t happen with this. Maybe the next one it will. It never was there before Star Wars, either. Movie merchandise was really a problematic thing. Occasionally you would have some success, and most of the time you wouldn’t, and there never was any real answer for that.

PLUME: How annoyed are you to always get asked these Star Wars questions?

KURTZ: Well, it does get a bit much after a while. Occasionally I do a convention for friends in Holland and Scandinavia and they’ll have Star Wars fan clubs and things, and I’ll go talk to them. It is very interesting that the films generate so many died-in-the-wool fans, still, after all this time. And it’s very easy to look upon groups like this, and you say, “Jesus, why don’t you guys get a whole life?” But, as I said before, there’s a resonance there, there’s a kind of archetypal energy that surrounds the original films, especially the first two, that people have gotten a lot out of. That is actually what real fandom comes from. The Star Trek television series and the films have some of that, too – some are a lot better than others, but you associate with something like that because you feel you’ve gotten something out of it and you want to talk to other people that have as well. There isn’t anything wrong at all with that kind of fandom, I don’t think. It’s a bit like Galaxy Quest – did you see Galaxy Quest?

PLUME: Yes.

KURTZ: I thought it was a great film, because it pointed out both the kind of idiotic side, and the kind of really sincere side of what fandom is all about.

PLUME: All while being a good film.

KURTZ: Yes, yes, at the same time, which is a good feat. I think for me, one of the problems with Episode I was that it didn’t have any humor to speak of.

PLUME: Well, at least not anything above a five-year-old level.

KURTZ: Yeah, yeah. And I just wish there were enough tangential things, enough sidebars that there was a subtext going on sometimes, rather than just what’s on the surface. There are a lot of movies that are made on the “what you see is what you get” approach to movie making. A lot of them have done really well, but I’m not a fan, generally, of those kind of movies. So I’m probably not the best one to comment. I thought The Mummy Returns was awful. I thought Lara Croft was awful.

PLUME: I would agree with both of those.

KURTZ: They’re awful …it’s not because they’re not well made – they actually are well made, from a physical production point of view – it’s because the scripts are incredibly weak and the actors have nothing to do.

PLUME: There was an air of desperation in both of them.

KURTZ: Yeah.

PLUME: I actually kept looking in Mummy Returns to see where they stashed the kitchen sink, because I knew it must be in there somewhere. But now on to Dark Crystal. You had said, “Working with Jim again.” Had you worked with Jim previously?

KURTZ: I had worked with him briefly in early Sesame Street days and the Muppet Show era. Not much really, just in some character stuff and then also because of my past association with him and loving puppets anyway. I brought Jim and his creatures up into Empire to help design and fabricate and do Yoda. When we were designing Yoda, we knew it had to be done hand puppet style. We had talked about a lot of different things, on Empire, about doing it as a drawn creature or 3-D graphics creature or come up with a lot of off the wall ideas, and rejected them all for the idea that if it’s a character that’s there, on the set – that we can photograph at the same time – then the actors can inter-react, basically. The great fear was that he wouldn’t look real enough, he wouldn’t work well enough. But I think it worked out very well, and we had three operators and we rehearsed everything very extensively. It was a very slow process, but it did work.

Jim was already working on the characters for The Dark Crystal – he had been for year. He had people working on Dark Crystal characters three years before, when I saw him in New York just when Star Wars opened. The idea for The Dark Crystal was that the entire film would be full of these characters and they would interact with each other on the real stage – and how many other puppeteers we would have to have to make them work would be what would be required. In most cases, of the big characters, it was three, sometimes four. When you had lots of big characters on the screen at the same time, like the scenes with the Skekses and the UrRu together, there were 14 characters on the stage – and that meant, like, 21 puppeteers hiding somewhere.

PLUME: Just the logistical nightmare that must have been. As a producer on that film, what exactly did your duties entail?

KURTZ: Since Jim and Frank [Oz] were both directing, it was primarily making it happen, really. I told some film students – they were asking about what the definition of a producer was – and I said, “You know, in today’s films, you probably have 15 producer credits – lots of executive producers and associate producers and co-producers and all that. Most of these people helped get the financing together to make it possible for the film to happen. As such, they probably deserve some kind of credit, whether it should be a producer’s credit or not, I would argue with it, but they did help get the resources together to make it possible. But the producer’s job is to actually make the film happen. To assist the director in whatever is necessary, to shield them from having to deal with anything aside from having to work with the performers when they’re shooting.”

That’s what I did on The Dark Crystal – work out the organizational plan. The Creature Shop was notoriously lax at meeting time deadlines. They were very, very creative, but their people didn’t work to any particular time deadlines. They would work 18 hours at a stretch, and then disappear for three days, sleeping. You know, that kind of thing. So we had to have a slightly more formal organizational structure for the shop to get all these characters done. It wasn’t just the main characters – there were hundreds of incidental little characters… trees and plants and little creatures and things in the jungle and the woods. The film was full of all kinds of background stuff that you probably don’t even notice most of the time.

PLUME: I know that, in talking to Frank Oz, he had mentioned that he was very insecure on that film… in fact, I think his quote was, “Jim should have f***ing fired me numerous times.” How did that manifest itself to you?

KURTZ: I would never recommend co-directing, really. I think the problem isn’t that the people don’t see the same vision, it’s that it’s very difficult to judge what’s right for the moment. There was a lot of time spent sitting and discussing, not so much arguing …neither Jim nor Frank has a personality that is a screamer. The discussions were very measured, but there still were a lot of differences of opinion about how things should be – even when we were working on script revisions and looking at how to cut things down and other aspects of it. With the dual directing thing, it made it quite difficult. It ended up being that a lot of the time when Frank was principal performer, that Jim would just direct, and Frank wouldn’t say anything. We might have a discussion beforehand, but when they were actually shooting, Jim would just direct. In those cases where Jim was the principal performer, Frank would direct and Jim wouldn’t say anything. It sort of developed into that kind of scenario, informally. It wasn’t something that we sat down and said, “This is the structure that it will have to be.” It just happened.

PLUME: How did that affect you as a producer? Was it basically a meeting of three when you discussed things?

KURTZ: Pretty much, yes. I was trying to kind of hold everything together. We worked very slowly. One of the problems with the two directing business was that there were endless discussions on the set in the beginning, in the first few weeks. I kept telling them that we’d never meet our deadlines this way, and in the end, I ended up being the second unit director myself. I ended up shooting all the action unit stuff, the backlight stuff, the fight between the Garthim and the Landstriders, and all that kind of stuff.

PLUME: Just out of necessity?

KURTZ: Out of necessity, because they were still shooting away on interiors and things. It was fun, and it was nice to be able to do it, but it was just trying to speed us up a bit and get us done in time. It was definitely never going to be a blockbuster kind of movie – it was a very, very specialized kind of story and type of film from the very beginning. We just had to try to make it as accessible as possible. I mean, the first test screening we had of the film, in Washington D.C., we still had the Skekses speaking in a funny foreign language which we had created out of Ancient Egyptian. And without subtitles, I must say. With the idea – which was very much an intellectual conceit that we all had, I’m afraid – that we didn’t have to have any subtitles because the scenes that they’re in are so obvious… that what they’re saying to each other is so obvious… that the audience will get it. What happened from the preview cards and other people we talked to – yes, the audience did get what the key to scene was, but they weren’t sure they did. They were always worried they were missing something.

PLUME: So they spent too much time trying to analyze, instead of watching the film?

KURTZ: Yep, so we gave up on that and decided they had to speak English. We didn’t want to subtitle a third of the movie – that was big – so we had them speak English.

PLUME: What exactly was Jim’s hope for the film?

KURTZ: He wanted it to be a kind of classic fantasy. If the rights had been available, he would have probably wanted to make Lord of the Rings. It had already been destroyed by Ralph Bakshi and his aborted animated version, so that wasn’t possible. Kind of the next best thing was to create your own, and Brian Froud was a really good designer and creator of a kind of fantasy world that was extremely unique. It would have never been done before. There had never been a film made with all mechanical characters … there had been films that had mechanical characters in them, but they always had humans in them.

Now, in retrospect – and at the time we had a long discussion about it – it probably would have been better if Jen and Kira, the most human-life elfin characters, had been human beings. We did talk about it, but Jim was so set on having it be an all mechanical character film, that that colored his opinion about that. Dramatically, it probably would have been better if those two had been humans, because we would have gotten much more emotional resonance out of those characters. The other characters, which were all very strange and non-human, were fine the way they were, and the emotionalism seemed to be there. But those two, their faces were quite difficult to get any strong, emotional reaction out of.

PLUME: Where did the money come from for the film?

KURTZ: The money for The Dark Crystal came from Lew Grade’s company. Right at the very end before the film was released, Lew Grade’s company folded up. It was bought out because he had had so many disastrous movie problems. The last three or four films went to Universal to distribute – which wasn’t a great idea, because Universal really didn’t want them, but that was just part of this deal. They didn’t have much hope for The Dark Crystal at all in America. They just said there’s no audience for this film, it probably won’t make a million dollars. In the end, it did very well, considering the kind of marketing they put behind it. It did 45, 50 million in a very specialized market. We were all very pleased. I suppose the sad and somewhat ironic thing about Lew Grade’s company was that the last two films – The Dark Crystal and On Golden Pond, the Jane Fonda/Henry Fonda film – did very well. If he had held out a little longer, he might not have had to sell the company, but you never know in those kind of things.

PLUME: So, transitioning out of Dark Crystal, what was the next project that you set your sights on?

KURTZ: Well, I had been working on several scripts. A friend of mine, Walter Murch, had done a version of an Oz story, and he wanted to do a kind of Return to the Wizard of Oz kind of story, and we talked about it at great length. Disney was interested seriously in doing it, so we said, “Well, it’s a chance to do something” – a really interesting fantasy. It was quite a difficult situation, actually, because by the time we got into production, Disney was in serious trouble in the mid-’80s and they stopped the project two or three times. The management changed three major times. By the time the film was finished and ready to be released, the Eisner-Katzenberg regime was in and they didn’t really want to know anything about the project – they just wanted to bury it and three other films made by the previous regime. Which is very demoralizing, and yet they did eventually release it, but without putting very much behind it, and it didn’t do very well theatrically. It was one of those films that was very difficult to market. The artwork and things marketed it as if it was sort of a bright and bubbly sequel to Wizard of Oz – that’s what the audience expected. It wasn’t that at all. It was quite dark, actually. I don’t know if you’ve seen it.

PLUME: Yes. Oh yes. It disturbed me as a child, but I have grown to appreciate it.

KURTZ: It didn’t satisfy any of the audiences, and I suppose a really astute marketing person would have told us to stay away from the L. Frank Baum Oz stories, because The Wizard of Oz set the tone for the audience’s perception about Oz. Although The Wizard of Oz as a film was nothing like the original book, that’s what people expected. So, when this film – which was an amalgamation of the second and third books, really, lumped together – came along, it was much more like L. Frank Baum’s novels. But the audience that loved The Wizard of Oz didn’t like it, because it wasn’t a bright and bubbly musical. We had a kind of no-win situation, in a way; unless it had been marketed very, very carefully – which it wasn’t.

It was a very, very frustrating thing for me, and it drove me away from Hollywood. I just didn’t want to have anything more to do with Hollywood companies for a long time after that. I just said, “I just cannot put up with this anymore,” and so I didn’t. I went away, actually. I was living in England anyway during this time and just flying back and forth as necessary, but still it was kind of the last straw for me. I just didn’t see it as possible to work in that environment and be satisfied. I knew a lot of other people who were, and that was fine for them, but I just couldn’t handle it. Partially, it was that whole thing. Twice during the picture they tried to fire Walter. He was difficult as a director, because he’s a wonderful editor but he’s not very spontaneous. He plans things out very meticulously, which is what editors do best. As a director, you have to be pretty spontaneous, because if your plan doesn’t quite work, you don’t flog it to death – you try something else.

PLUME: It requires flexibility.

KURTZ: Yeah, a lot of flexibility, and he didn’t have a whole lot. It was his first film as a director, and we were all trying to help him as much as possible, but he had a clear vision in his head of what he saw, and if it wasn’t working, he didn’t have much to fall back on in terms of spontaneity. It was tricky. In the end, to keep him from being fired, I ended up having to bring in reinforcements, in a way. I got Francis and George to come over and talk to him, and then talk to the studio and say it’ll be okay, and he’ll be fine. In effect, it was just buying time, really, so we could finish the shooting. Because he didn’t do anything differently … they were just worried because it was a bit behind. It wasn’t really over budget or anything, it was just a bit behind schedule and they were worried about him as a first time director anyway. Because the management changed so often, though, it was really difficult to get into a rapport with anybody at the studio.

PLUME: Which was harder for you, or for him?

KURTZ: He didn’t have to deal with it a whole lot, and so it was probably harder for me. But they cancelled the picture a couple of times … they insisted that they put another guy on, as sort of a co-producer, Paul Maslansky, who had made a lot of low-budget films, and was a good, experienced production type. And he was fine… we got along with him fine. It was just a concern about the picture kind of going out of control, and the truth is that the Eisner-Katzenberg regime – when they came in – probably would have cancelled the picture if they could have, but we were almost finished shooting then. It was too late, really.

PLUME: At least it can be said that the film has found an after-market….

KURTZ: Yes. Yes it has. For years and years and years you couldn’t buy it on video or DVD or anything. They never re-released it like they did their other films. I had a laserdisc of it that was in Japan that Disney put out in Japan only. But I see now that they actually have put out a video of it.

PLUME: I think it’s a special edition, even.

KURTZ: Yeah.

PLUME: I think it did have some critical response that was positive to it.

KURTZ: Oh yes. There was quite a few. We had an interesting test screening with the National Research Group, where we screened it for a mixed group of parents and children. The parents, I think about 75% of the parents, felt it was way too scary for kids below 12, I think. Some of the kids who were young were a bit scared. But when the research people spoke with the kids, they said they liked it a lot, they had a great time. The parents of those very same kids said they felt that their kids would never want to see anything like this film.

PLUME: I think, what, Harlan Ellison called it the greatest film ever made?

KURTZ: Harlan is prone to the superlative, I think. The interesting thing about it is that I show it to film students occasionally because this is a film that’s ostensibly a children’s film about going into a fantasy world. Yet it is not sentimental, and it is quite scary in a lot of ways – and yet children respond to it. It isn’t sappy. One of the criticisms was that it wasn’t funnier, it didn’t have more humor, but there’s a certain amount of strange humor in the whole repartee between Dorothy and Billina, the chicken, constantly throughout the story. But …it’s not a rip-roaring comedy type movie.

PLUME: It’s a disturbingly dark comedy.

KURTZ: Yes, it is.

PLUME: I mentioned earlier it’s something that it is appreciated more as one gets older…

KURTZ: Yes, I think it is. A real problem that we had with the film is that it ends about three times. We had a very difficult time trying to figure out how to get out. Because of the way the story is structured, we had to come back from Oz to Kansas, and so – even within Oz – there’s a couple of endings. Actually the end of the movie, energetically for the audience and for all practical purposes, is when Dorothy makes the right guess in the trinket room at the end and brings back her friends… and when the gnome king is overcome, at the very end. Emotionally, that’s the end of one, and the whole business of the big parade and all the Oz characters and the princess and all of that is a coda really. But then we have another coda, of her having to go home. It was really difficult. We knew that that was a problem in the script, and we never did solve it completely. I still don’t know how best to have handled that because you can’t just dump Dorothy out of the story at that point and take her back to Kansas.

PLUME: Although, technically, comparing it back, the original Wizard of Oz had the same problem.

KURTZ: It did, but it worked better in the Wizard of Oz, I think, just because of the way it was handled and the kind of movie that it was. I think that if I were doing Return to Oz now, I would have eliminated a lot of the celebration in Oz and the whole “stay here with us, Dorothy” and would have gotten the princess out, and gotten her out quicker somehow. A movie is what it is because that’s what happened at the time – that is one of the reasons why I rail against this idea about changing movies all the time. This is a very common practice now, which I really don’t like – on any movie. I don’t like the Special Editions of Star Wars and all these other movies that have come out with a super-duper director’s cut like the special edition of Close Encounters. You name it. Practically every movie now does it, because they can do it for DVD.

PLUME: The ironic thing of it is that no matter how many times someone protests that no, it was their original intention, any choices they make now are going to be colored by their experiences since they made the film.

KURTZ: Oh, absolutely. The reason is that there is a whole emotional vortex around how a movie is made, and it captures a certain flavor of the moment. What’s a perfect example? The Sweet Smell of Success, Sandy Mackendrick’s film, made in the mid-’50s in New York. It’s a very harsh, downbeat, dark, film noir film – terrific film. It’s one of my favorite films. If he would have made that film 10 years earlier or 10 years later, it would have been an entirely different movie, even from the same script.

So this idea of adding things – the problem with the Special Edition of the Star Wars films is that fixing a few matte lines and adding a couple of spaceships into shots is fine. I don’t think anybody would notice that. But actually adding scenes that don’t make any difference – they actually don’t have any effect whatsoever on the film… and all of those digitally enhanced shots of robots floating around and creatures walking through the frame… call attention to themselves. Are much worse, actually, I think. Primarily because CGI work – and that CGI work was done by ILM, which is the best there is – the CGI stuff does not fit in with the mechanical style of the original film. If the whole film would have been made today, then the CGI work would fit in much more, because that’s the way all the visual effects would have been done.

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