THE UNKINDEST CUT

One looks at motion picture and television credits today and sees multiple producer credits… sometimes literally dozens of names… culminating only recently with the motion picture, Ferrari, where fully 52 individuals take some form of producer credit. It all adds to the speculation as to just what it is a producer does.

There are, of course, multiple answers depending on the medium, the individuals involved, and the era to which one is referencing. I spent a good part of my erstwhile career fighting the proliferation of credits, advocating for the importance of the singularity of one voice, that of the storyteller, as the basis for every project.

I began my career at a time when the producer was that individual; the one with the vision to make a film and/or TV project in the first place, who put all the pieces into place, who hired the writer to write the script, the director to bring to life on the stage what it was that was printed on the page, and was the final word on which actors would play the various parts. It was the producer who did all those things, as well as being the sole liaison between the financing entities and the artists involved in the film’s creation.

Clearly it is not that way anymore. Today, Broadway is a literary medium where the author has an inordinate say over just what it is that is being presented on that stage. Neither the producer nor director has that kind of power in the theatre of the 21^st century. Motion pictures have become a director’s venue, and only television bears a slight resemblance to the producer as showrunner that I remember from those days of the long ago.

As big a job as it was back in my day, I always held that it was a job for one person although sometimes, to good effect, that one person might hyphenate and become both producer and director, or producer and writer, or producer and actor, or… in the case of Charlie Chaplin… all four of these things. There are always exceptions for true genius. For the rest of us, I hold to my conviction that these functions are singular jobs.

Many producers have had an especially strong imprimatur in their respective arenas. No one has ever matched David Merrick and his Broadway career that lasted six decades. There were a lot of writers and directors over that half century involved in his projects, but there was no mistaking a David Merrick production.

Almost anyone could direct a Walt Disney movie, but no matter who takes on that task, anyone and everyone watching that movie can tell it is a Disney flick. Talk about imprimatur, the style of producer Walt Disney still resonates more than fifty years after his death.

Dozens of different directors and writers plied their craft at MGM for Producer Arthur Freed, but it was the producer’s stamp that was clearly on display with Singin’ in the Rain, On The Town, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, Meet Me in St. Louis and Gigi.

I was thinking of this the other evening as I screened one of my all-time favorite movies for my grandson, now a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. Alex indulges me in this pastime, but I suspect (hope, at least) that what we are sharing is more than feigned interest on his part.

The movie we were screening was Amadeus, directed by Academy Award Winner, Milos Forman, and as the movie droned on… and on… I found myself twisting in my chair even more than my grandchild did.

Movies do not always stand the test of time. There are some terrific flicks from yesteryear that disappoint on viewing today. Coming quickly to mind is Where’s Poppa? I remember it being a hysterical comedy over 50 years ago. It lays an egg today. The Band Wagon… one of my all-time favorites, a musical I have often ranked above Singin’ in the Rain, does not hold up nearly as well as it did in my memory… although Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse remain a great dancing couple, and the Dancing in the Dark number still makes me weep.

On a recent viewing, I found All the President’s Men slow and plodding in its story development. In fairness, it was all sort of news back in the Nixon era, but it drags on and on today. And Five Easy Pieces… a revelation in 1970… is pretty much a stinker in 2024. Neither Three Days of the Condor nor Body Heat hold up all that well, and the picture that catapulted Tom Cruise to fame (Risky Business) has little of the charm and humor I remember so vividly.

Which brings me back to Amadeus. Could 1984 really have been that long ago? How could such a fabulous… flawless, I once thought… motion picture stink up the room as much as what I was viewing on my 90” television screen in 2024?

I was in the midst of apologizing to my grandson (I think Alex really, semi-secretly relishes these moments of his grandfather’s humiliation) when I noticed a banner on the cover of the Amadeus DVD.

“Director’s Cut” is what it said in big bold letters. A quick bit of research, as to what it was I saw at the screening held by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nearly 40 years ago, revealed that the award-winning version I saw then was NOT the “Director’s Cut” but a film that was over 20 minutes shorter than the version just screened in my living room.

Do you see how these notes ideally come full circle? Yes, folks, that is what a producer does. Saul Zaentz, three-time Oscar winning producer (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Amadeus, The English Patient) is the one with the kahunas to say to internationally acclaimed director Milos Forman, “…the picture is too long, Milos, and these are the cuts I want made.” And, surprise, surprise, the difference between the two versions is astounding.

This Director’s Cut was released years after the original; one would have to guess that director Milos stewed over this note from his producer for over a decade, since it took him 18 years to get Orion Pictures to go back and alter the Oscar winning Amadeus to his specifications and put back the clunky 20 plus minutes Zaentz had him take out.

I don’t know what Zaentz thought or felt about that.  Perhaps it is enough to say the award-winning team of Zaentz and Forman never again worked together after Amadeus. Zaentz went on to win the coveted Irving Thalberg Award from the Motion Picture Academy given to “creative producers whose bodies of work reflect a consistently high quality of motion picture production” and (for The English Patient) his third Oscar. He was a great producer.

There is no question that Milos Forman was a fine director, but perhaps it suffices to say that two-time Academy Award winner Forman never received an Oscar for a film that wasn’t produced by Saul Zaentz.

Around the time I was born there was a song, which Barbra Streisand brought back thirty years later in the 60s, called Sam, You Made The Pants Too Long. From what I hear, Ms. Streisand should have thought of that while editing her recent autobiography. Whatever, it certainly was the message Forman ultimately chose to ignore much to the disadvantage of his own film. As my mother often said, “be careful what you wish for, lest you get it.”

You made the coat and vest fit the best,

You made the lining nice and strong,

But Sam, you made the pants too long.

Songwriters: Fred Whitehouse, Milton Berle, Samuel M. Lewis

You have now been warned. If, like me, you yearn to re-visit Amadeus… or, I am going to guess, any vintage or classic from the past, beware of the add-on banner: “Director’s Cut” or, any other reference to a newly hyphenated version which subverts the collaborative process that was once at the core of making motion pictures.

And while in the strolling down memory lane mode, let me take this moment to apologize for an error on my part. In a recent review I referenced the 1945 film Rhapsody in Blue and its star, Alan (sic) Alda. What I should have written was not Alan, but Robert Alda, the father of the M*A*S*H leading man.

It was a weird mistake for me to make. I have never met Alan Alda, but I did meet his father, back in the 1960s on the set of Daniel Boone, when Robert Alda, famed star of stage and screen, came to see his youngest son, Anthony, play a featured role in my Fess Parker starrer.

I remember that star-struck day very well and was saddened to learn while re-checking my facts for this paragraph, that the boy who his father came to watch back in the late 1960s, tragically died over a decade ago at the age of 52 and over a decade after his father, Robert Alda… star of Broadway’s Guys and Dolls and Hollywood’s Rhapsody in Blue had preceded him.

Given my oft-stated sensibility to credits and their proliferation, the irony of my having made such a mistake is not lost on this writer. The minor piece of good news is that this addendum, and its reference to credit where it is properly due, does… at the very least… help to end this piece on a properly thematic note.

 

Barney Rosenzweig