'Smurfs' producer's other job? Film school dean

This post has been corrected. See the note at the bottom for details.

Veteran movie producer Jordan Kerner spent nearly 10 years finding a way to make “The Smurfs,” which earned $35.6 million in its U.S. opening last weekend. But it’s not his long track record in Hollywood, which includes producing everything from “Less Than Zero” to “The Mighty Ducks,” that interests me most. It’s his other job: dean of the school of filmmaking at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

I went to film school myself at Northwestern University, back in the stone age, when we still shot with 16mm cameras, lugged around Nagra sound recorders and edited footage on ancient Moviolas. We'd occasionally be treated to lectures from visiting filmmakers, who'd regale us with tall tales about their exploits. But if you wanted any real-life experience, you had to move to Los Angeles and find a job. Thanks to Kerner’s innovative ideas, undergrads at UNCSA are getting an education not just in theory and production, but in the often less-than-glamorous aspects of life in the trenches of Hollywood.

Kerner has recruited a host of faculty members who still have their day jobs, which helps give students a grounding in the kind of pragmatic problem-solving necessary to survive on a film set. Through a shadowing program, students get to spend weeks at a time on movie sets, seeing their professor (or in the case of Kerner, their dean) in action. Nearly 80 students spent time on “Smurfs.”

“We set it up as part of our internship program, but not just to get coffee, but to see how movies are really made,” he told me the other day, sitting in his office on the Sony lot. Every two weeks, a new group of students would establish residency on the film, listening to budget discussions he would have with the studio or sitting in on script revision meetings among Kerner, the screenwriters and director Raja Gosnell.

“During the shoot, if Raja went up to talk to an actor, our kids would be right there with him. They also got to spend time with our editors, visual effects supervisor, sound designers and other crew members. Sometimes the discussions were difficult, but that was the whole point--it's a way to learn the whys and why nots of filmmaking.” (It being 2011, students had to sign release forms promising not to blog about what they saw.)

From the point of view of Andrew Porter, a 2010 graduate of the school's screenwriting program, the shadowing experience on “Smurfs” was an eye-opener. “It was pretty amazing to watch the drafts of all the scripts come through, and see what stayed and what was replaced,” he recalls. “The script really evolved a lot. In one draft you'd see some part of the story that you thought for sure would stay, and then it would be gone. But after you got to hear all the discussions, you'd realize why they'd made the changes.”

Tom Ackerman, a veteran director of photography on such films as “Anchorman” and “Balls of Fury,” has been teaching cinematography at UNCSA for three years. He's also a big believer in the shadowing process, having brought a flock of students to spend time with him on “Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked,” which will hit theaters this Christmas. He also has his students listen in on his conversations with his agent so they can develop an understanding of the demands of the marketplace.

When he was back in Los Angeles, doing a quick music video shoot, Ackerman had students sit in on his production meetings, via Skype, so they could follow the flow of the production. “It makes their teacher more relevant, because you're teaching something that you're still practicing,” he says. “It's great to teach theory, but the students need to see that theories often evaporate under the pressure of trying to get a movie made. Everyone knows that cinematographers try to create great images, but you also have to exercise leadership and be able to manage the resources that you're given.”

Kerner never imagined himself being a film school dean – in fact, he never went to film school himself. But after surviving a freak staph infection and enduring the disappointing showing of a pet project, 2006’s “Charlotte’s Web,” Kerner was looking for a new challenge. He became dean in 2007, agreeing to split his time between Los Angeles and Winston-Salem, where his wife and three daughters now live.

UNCSA, a state school with 270 film students and tuition far below institutions like USC or AFI, has its share of prominent young alums, notably director David Gordon Green (“Pineapple Express”), writer-director Jody Hill (“Observe and Report”) and screenwriter Travis Beacham (“Clash of the Titans”), who often return to share their experiences. But Kerner felt the school needed more outside professionals on the faculty, so he recruited a host of industry pros, including producer Bob Gosse, who co-founded The Shooting Gallery and Peter Bogdanovich, who teaches a freshman film class.

Eager to broaden the students' horizons, Kerner has everyone taking art history, which he believes will help students “see the world composed in a way that stimulates individual expression.” Students in the producing program will soon start studying Mandarin since Kerner is convinced that China is “where much of the funding for film is going to come from.”

My biggest concern with today's film schools is that they tend to offer students far more instruction in technique than in actual ideas, which is perhaps one reason why we see a generation of filmmakers who seem to value box office success far more than artistic accomplishment. The star directors in today's studio system, from Todd Phillips to Michael Bay, operate more as careerists than auteurs.

But the student films I watched from UNCSA were loaded with strong ideas, wit and imagination – which may come as a bit of a surprise, given that the dean is the guy producing commercial fare like “The Smurfs.” Kerner, though, sees his work as dean as contributing to enhancing the business more than any one movie he might make.

“When I arrived, we had way too many student films that were full of close-ups of smoking guns, employing the imagery of video games,” Kerner says. “Filmmaking isn't just about coolness and pose--you need bigger subjects to tell.” So Kerner started an American Immersion project, where students gain a deeper understanding of character and story by spending several weeks at places like the Veterans Artificial Limb Hospital in Philadelphia and Habitat for Humanity in New Orleans.

“They can't take cameras or recording devices--just a pad and pen,” says Kerner. “The whole idea is to go out and get to know people, hear their stories and get under their skin. The whole idea is to find ways to take what they've learned and adapt it to their work.”

As much as Kerner would enjoy seeing his students make lofty art, he is enough of a realist to realize that they also need what it takes to actually land a job. Since much of the job market today is geared toward the web, animation and TV commercials, Kerner is a proponent of short-form storytelling.

“Our kids are going to have to think clearly in short bursts, because that's where the action is,” he says. “But we want them to have their own voice, because having a unique voice is what sets you apart from everyone else.”

[For the record, 12:55 p.m. Aug. 5: An earlier version of this post used a photo of "Smurfs" director Raja Gosnell but identified him as Jordan Kerner.]

RELATED:

Movie review: 'The Smurfs'

Set Pieces: The Smurfs' New York digs

'Cowboys & Aliens' narrowly beats 'Smurfs' to top the box office

-- Patrick Goldstein

Top photo:  "The Smurfs" director Raja Gosnell, left, and producer Jordan Kerner. Credit: Mark Renders / Getty Images

Lower photo: Jordan Kerner in New York City in July. Credit: Cindy Ord / Getty Images

Donald Trump bows out of presidential race; comics everywhere are crushed

Oh boy, it's going to be fun to watch Lawrence O'Donnell Monday night on MSNBC, now that the news has surfaced that Donald Trump has -- as O'Donnell predicted from the very start -- pulled the plug on his 2012 presidential bid, disappointing both die-hard conspiracy theorists and thousands of nightclub comedians, who've been getting lots of mileage out of Trump jokes for the past few months. But it was O'Donnell who emerged as Trump's most vociferous critic, blasting away at his crackpot claims that President Obama wasn't born in the U.S.

Trump, as you remember, said he'd dispatched a team of investigators to unravel some deep, dark plot to keep Americans from discovering that Obama had been born outside the country. O'Donnell not only bashed Trump, but he wailed away at NBC, which broadcasts Trump's popular "Celebrity Apprentice" show, for playing dumb about the obvious -- that the network all along had planned to renew Trump's show, which would make it impossible for him to also run for president.

"NBC has created a monster who is using his NBC fame to spew hatred reeking with racist overtones and undertones," O'Donnell said on his show a few weeks ago. "Those NBC executives should not be allowed to survive another day of involuntary entanglement in the Trump hatred campaign."

Trump's campaign was dead in the water the minute Obama released his long-form birth certificate.  While Trump had initially earned strong poll numbers among likely Republican voters, his numbers plunged after Obama lanced the birth boil. According to Politico, in a recent poll, 71% of registered voters surveyed nationwide said there was not "any chance" Trump could win the presidential election.

I suspect most people felt that way from the very start, but that didn't stop the national media from treating Trump like Woody Allen at Cannes, hanging on his every word and behaving as if he were a plausible presidential contender when, in fact, he was simply another over-the-hill gasbag, engaging in a canny demonstration of media manipulation. The sad truth is that the media are ridiculously easy to manipulate, whether you're a TV personality, a hot-headed sports icon, a blowhard documentary filmmaker or a quasi-presidential candidate. Once you capture the public's fascination with shameless spectacle, you can ride a wave of attention all the way to the bank.

When Trump is finished with his TV career, he should teach a class in "101 Ways to Bamboozle the Press." It would be a treat to see a master at work.

-- Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Donald Trump, waving to a crowd at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Nashua, N.H. Credit: Jim Cole / Associated Press 

 

Tracing the showbiz roots of James O'Keefe's NPR sting

The news media haven’t figured out what label to pin on James O’Keefe, the wily troublemaker whose hidden-camera sting could be the smoking gun that leads to a cutoff of further federal funding from NPR.

The press has resorted to all kinds of fanciful descriptions, dubbing O’Keefe a conservative activist, guerrilla documentarian, gonzo journalist, modern-day muckraker, independent filmmaker, citizen journalist, daredevil videographer and video sting impresario. Oh, and did we mention a sneaky little punk who cheats context to destroy careers?

Whatever you call him, he’s become the most controversial newsmaker in the land, having nabbed a top NPR fundraiser badmouthing the “tea party,” leading to the resignation of the public radio network’s chief executive. That undercover operation followed O’Keefe’s use of similar techniques to expose wrongdoing at the community group ACORN in a sting where he dressed as a pimp, accompanied by a young woman posing as one of his prostitutes.

O’Keefe, 26, has gone after liberal-oriented institutions but cites as a major influence the famed left-wing activist Saul Alinsky, saying he has adopted Alinsky’s strategy of making “the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” But perhaps O’Keefe’s biggest influences come from the la-la-liberal world of show business, especially the comedy playbook of Sacha Baron Cohen, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. One of O’Keefe’s partners in the NPR sting even went by the name of Simon Templar, which surely reveals a bit of showbiz inspiration, since Templar was the secret agent Roger Moore played in the ’60s TV series “The Saint,” a character, like O’Keefe, with a penchant for disguise.

Like O’Keefe, whose confederates in the NPR sting posed as members of a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated organization, Cohen is a masterful provocateur. He made his name as a brash British comic on the TV series “Da Ali G Show,” where he posed as a gold-chain encrusted hip-hop dunce who goaded a variety of government officials and civic leaders into making all sorts of inappropriate remarks, terrified of appearing less than cool in front of such a cheeky hipster.

Prodded by some leading questioning on the show by Cohen, James Broadwater, a conservative Republican congressional candidate, was inspired to say that Jews would go to hell if they didn’t follow Christianity. After he was roundly criticized by various Jewish organizations, Broadwater demanded that the FCC exert more sway over “the liberal, anti-God media” and proclaimed himself a “proud friend of Israel.”

Cohen’s best-known character was Borat, a clueless, vaguely anti-Semitic visitor from Kazakhstan who ended up starring in “Borat,” a huge hit movie. In the film, Borat goaded boozy frat boys (playing themselves) into complaining that minorities ran America and persuaded the patrons of a redneck bar to happily croon “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”

Just as the Ali G and Borat characters were born out of the comic assumption that many people, especially in a famously decorous country like England, would feel obligated to play along with Cohen’s characters, no matter how clueless or bigoted, O’Keefe’s NPR sting was based on the expectation that an NPR fundraising executive, at lunch with two potential big-time donors from a Muslim Brotherhood-style organization, would indulge his guests by trashing the "tea party" and denying any Jewish influence over NPR coverage, noting that they “own newspapers obviously.”

Cohen’s victims, like O’Keefe’s, often claimed they were entrapped. But as Cohen told me several years ago, he simply created a character that would help expose people’s real behavior and beliefs, which is exactly what O’Keefe has attempted to do with his sting operations.

The whole art of pretending is a staple of modern political comedy. I doubt that O’Keefe would admit to watching Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report,” since conservatives view Stewart and Colbert as part of the despised liberal media, but both shows could have been a big influence on his theatrical escapades. When “The Daily Show” correspondents report a story, their segments are often set up as stings, as with a recent piece by Aasif Mandvi, who confronted the head of a Nevada union after he discovered, while interviewing men on a picket line, that the union was paying temporary workers nonunion wages to man a picket line demanding better pay from Wal-Mart.

Mandvi’s shock was almost certainly pure pretense, since “The Daily Show” clearly discovered the news long before they dispatched Mandvi to Nevada, but that sort of fiction is now built into the show’s comedy. The same goes for “The Colbert Report,” which casts Colbert as a Bill O’Reilly-style blowhard, allowing Colbert to satirize the way conservatives react to news of the day. You might also say that NPR was “Punk’d,” in memory of the Ashton Kutcher-hosted MTV series that used many of the same hidden-camera techniques seen in O’Keefe’s stings to play pranks on unsuspecting celebrities.

There has been a lot of hand-wringing in media circles over the ethics of O’Keefe’s work, with all sorts of old-school journalists dinging him for using deception to get his scoops. Even though the damage is already done, his NPR story has taken some lumps, most surprisingly by Glenn Beck’s website, the Blaze, which revealed that O’Keefe, as he has done before, took the NPR fundraiser’s remarks out of context, using deceptive editing.

But why has the mainstream media treated O’Keefe’s provocative pranks as major news stories? After all, when Ali G and Borat used almost exactly the same technique to embarrass people, it was treated as clever satire. It just goes to show, as Jon Stewart has often said, that there’s little difference between real news and fake news anymore.

 --Patrick Goldstein

Photo: James O'Keefe. Credit: Bill Haber / Associated Press

Photo: Stephen Colbert. Credit: Carolyn Cole / Los Angeles Times

The Oscars take another dive: Can anyone save this sinking ship?

The Academy Awards are in trouble. Trouble with a capital T, as they say in “The Music Man.”

This year's show was roundly panned by critics, and viewership was down 10%, with an even bigger drop in the key 18-49 age category. It's not that people don't want to watch award shows: In January, the Grammys had their highest audience in 11 years. The Emmys, the Golden Globes and even MTV's Video Music Awards were all up over the previous year. But this year's Oscars, which were supposed to be new, young and fizzy, fell flat like New Coke. At 83, the Oscars definitely need some Viagra.

On the Web, most of the negative buzz focused on Anne Hathaway and James Franco, the Oscars' youngest-ever host combo. (One of the raging post-show debates revolved around the question: Was Franco stoned or just pretending?) But hosts are the least of the Oscars' troubles.

The issue wasn't the crop of movies, either. The five best picture favorites — those movies whose filmmakers were up for best director — were sizable hits. “Inception” and “Toy Story 3,” also among the best picture nominees, were box-office behemoths. People do tune in to watch the Oscars when they've seen the nominated movies. But even the 2006 telecast, which had the five lowest-grossing best picture nominees in recent history, had higher numbers than this year's show.

The real problem is that the Oscars are like a thriller where everyone knows who the killer is before the movie has even begun.

The Academy Awards have spawned a six-month-long orgy of air-headed punditry and marketing hype. In September, with the arrival of the Telluride and Toronto film festivals, the lineup of Oscar contenders was already being sliced and diced. By early December, you could go to virtually any Oscar pundit website and find an accurate forecast of the 10 best picture nominees. By the time the guild awards were finished in early February, the suspense was long gone — even a casual fan could've easily picked the vast majority of winners of the major awards. And when Franco and Hathaway took the stage, not only did everyone know who was going to win, they had already heard their acceptance speeches at any number of lesser shows.

Today's Oscars are the news you already know. These days, no one waits for news, which is why no one watches network news broadcasts or reads newsmagazines anymore.

The motion picture academy's board isn't totally clueless — they know they've got big problems. But like oh-so-many boards of directors, they're a serious-minded but clubby group of insiders who've only made cosmetic nips and tucks when major surgery is needed.

The academy has resisted the one fix that could change the downward ratings trajectory: moving the show to the first half of January, which would give it a chance of regaining control of its own destiny. All the other award shows — starting with the Golden Globes — owe their clout to the fact that they are viewed as bellwethers for the Oscar race. If the Oscars leapfrogged the Globes, the show would have an immediacy it hasn't had in years.

One proposal that makes sense is organizing a World Series-style awards week in early-to-mid-January. The four major guild awards could unfold on consecutive nights from Wednesday through Saturday, and the week could culminate with the Oscars on Sunday. Instead of the slow drip-drip of award show results, the predictive guild prizes would come at such a dizzying pace that the Oscars might regain some element of surprise, since no one would have time to do much pondering over all the other shows before the big night.

The academy is worried about technology issues, because an earlier Oscar date would require members to vote online. That would provide instant results but open up the possibility of WikiLeaks-style mayhem. Of course, it seems hard to believe that the industry that developed such sophisticated 3-D technology and video on demand couldn't find a way to keep the academy's sainted Oscar ballots secret.

The academy has another bullet to bite: It has to acknowledge that it's putting on a TV show. As one studio executive told me this week: “We're supposed to be in the entertainment business, yet we can't even put on an entertaining show.” If the academy was willing to bump its Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award to a separate ceremony, reducing the peerless Francis Ford Coppola to an embarrassingly wordless cameo while other winners got to thank their agents and managers, then it should be pragmatic enough to move its technical awards like makeup and sound mixing to another ceremony, with taped highlights on the Oscar telecast.

That would leave room for something the show has been missing in spades — an emotional bond with its audience. Just as NBC tapes featurettes introducing obscure athletes to Olympic viewers, the academy needs to give casual fans a rooting interest in the back stories of the gifted artists who are up for major awards but aren't household names.

Whether it's a supporting actress, screenwriter or documentary filmmaker, if we got a window into their world earlier in the show, maybe we'd stick around to see how they did when their category came along. If the nominees are willing to endure months of mindless cocktail chatter with showbiz journalists to boost their Oscar chances, then surely they'd spend a day with an Oscar TV crew taping a background story.

This isn't exactly rocket science. Any half-smart marketing expert could offer the academy a dozen more bright ideas. But it's time for the academy to stop dithering and start reinventing a show that bears an unfortunate resemblance to a dinosaur — very big and on its way to extinction.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Colin Firth after winning the Oscar for actor in a leading role at the 83rd Academy Awards. Credit: Chris Carlson/Associated Press        

 

The Oscar box office mystery: What brought adult moviegoers back to the theaters?

For years, everybody has had a field day taking potshots at the Academy Awards, saying that the Oscar-nominated movies had no mojo with American filmgoers. Conservative critics said liberal Hollywood was woefully out of touch with rank-and-file movie fans. Indie producers said the Academy was picking perfectly good movies, but the films couldn't compete with the studios’ costly, wall-to-wall marketing of their comic-book franchises.

In any case, damning evidence of the disconnect was there for all to see. “The Hurt Locker,” last year’s best picture winner, earned a paltry $17 million in the theaters, the lowest box-office take for a best picture winner in modern history. In 2009, three of the five best picture nominees couldn’t crack the $35 million mark in domestic earnings. In 2007, the best-picture winning “The Departed” was a hit, but none of the four other nominees even made $60 million.

This year is different -- very different. There are now 10 best picture nominees. Two of them, "Inception" and "Toy Story 3," were big summer blockbusters. And if you look at the five best picture favorites -- meaning the five films whose filmmakers are also up for the best director Oscar -- they have something remarkable in common. The films (“The King's Speech,” “The Social Network,” “The Fighter,” “True Grit” and “Black Swan”) have all made more than $85 million at the U.S. box office, with three of the five films having passed or on track to pass $100 million.

Talk about unprecedented. According to Paul Dergarabedian, the box-office guru at Hollywood.com, there have never been five best picture nominees that all made that much money in any Oscar season. In fact, in 2006, the year “Crash” won best picture, none of the five nominees made $85 million.

It's worth offering a few comparisons to illustrate just how impressive this showing is. “Black Swan,” which was co-financed by 20th Century Fox’s specialty Searchlight division and only cost $13 million to make, has just passed the $100 million mark -- putting it on track to outperform all of big Fox's 2010 releases. “True Grit” has made $160 million, outgrossing such high-profile studio comedies as “Little Fockers” and “Jackass 3-D.”

“The King’s Speech,” which cost $12 million to make, is nearing $100 million in the United States, meaning it has outgrossed “The Green Hornet,” the biggest commercial release of 2011. Sony’s “The Social Network,” which has made $96 million, is a much bigger U.S. hit than either “The Tourist” or “How Do You Know,” the studio’s two star-studded, end-of-year releases.

This is great news for adult moviegoers, who proved that they will come out to support films that get good reviews and remain in theaters long enough to capitalize on great word of mouth. But is it a happy accident? Or could it be a sign of a commercial rebirth for quality films?

According to Sony Pictures co-chairman Amy Pascal, this was all about good filmmaking. “These were just good movies, the way Oscar movies used to be decades ago,” she told me. “They weren't fringy art movies. They weren't made to win prizes and nominations. They were made because they were good commercial bets. You have to remember that in the old days, it was Warner Bros. that made ‘All the President's Men,’ not a speciality division. I think it's really encouraging because it’s a reminder that what’s good should also be what’s commercial.”

It's important, however, to remember that good movies don’t exist in a vacuum. Just as young moviegoers have been trained to expect a deluge of special-effects driven superhero movies in the summer, adults realize that Oscar season -- which now stretches from October through February -- is the one reliable time of year when they can actually find a well-made drama at their local multiplex. Thanks to the Oscar hoopla, serious films can enjoy the kind of long theatrical run they are denied at any other time of the year.

This year's Oscar-nominated films have benefited from the absence of stiff competition from the studio behemoths in January and February. Business in 2011 is down 24% from 2010, with the weekend box office off for 13 straight weekends from the previous year. Some of that can be written off as early 2010’s “Avatar” effect, but not all. When this year’s Oscar crop was building steam in December and early January, there were only two decent-sized hits to compete against, “Tron: Legacy” and “Little Fockers.”

The lack of competition carried over into 2011. Only eight films have been in wide release so far this year, compared to 12 a year ago at this time, allowing the popular Oscar best picture films to make millions more and hold on to their screens.

“It's been great news for us, because the Oscar films are the films we provide at our theaters,” said Ted Mundorff, whose adult-oriented Landmark Theaters chain is enjoying a 13% bump in business from a year ago. “This holiday season, when people wanted to get out of the house, they went to see the story-driven films, not the special-effects pictures.”

Michael London, a producer who’s made awards-season films like “Sideways” and “The Visitor,” said “even if it is a fluke, it could still become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

“When you see all these movies made by gifted filmmakers do so well, it's bound to embolden producers, writers and most importantly, distributors, knowing that if it happened once, it can happen again,” he said.

Though most of the studios gave up on their specialty divisions in recent years, that might not be such a bad thing; as long as they were around, their parent studios were less likely to be emotionally involved in the kind of risk-taking necessary to make quality-driven adult films. If there's any bad news, it's that we won't see any immediate impact from this season’s Oscar box-office bonanza.

In the outside world, change comes remarkably fast. In just a few weeks, demonstrations demanding democracy spread like wildfire from Tunisia to Egypt, toppling governments, spurred by in part by social networking. In Hollywood, it takes far longer to recognize a populist, moviegoer-driven revolt. Even if studios are scrambling now to find a host of story-oriented films, it could easily be two years before we'll see results in the theaters. For all its fascination with fads and trends, the movie business is far more open to evolution than revolution.

--Patrick Goldstein    

Photo: Natalie Portman, best actress nominee in "Black Swan," at the Academy Awards nominee luncheon this month.

Credit: Mario Anzuoni/Reuters

If you go for a drive with Randy Newman, watch out!

Randy Newman has always had bad luck as a driver. To make matters worse, Newman has never had great vision either -- he endured a number of eye operations as a kid and still wears thick glasses. But when it comes to his scrapes and crashes, it sounds as if bad luck has had as much to do with it as bad eyesight. One night when I was doing an interview with Newman and Pixar's John Lasseter, Newman began regaling us with the gory particulars, leaving us both nearly weeping with laughter.

So when I finished talking to Newman about his Oscar exploits, I asked him if he could revisit some of his crash scenes. Here's his take on why things always seem to go wrong once he's behind the wheel.

-- Patrick Goldstein

 

Randy Newman on playing at the Oscars: 'It's not, ahem, a great audience'

Randy Newman made himself famous writing pungent, often hilarious songs about oddballs, fat boys, short people, Huey Long and anyone else he thought was worthy of a satiric jab in the ribs. When he saw the fiery racist Lester Maddox on "The Dick Cavett Show," he wrote a song about him. When the Cuyahoga River once caught fire because it was so polluted, Newman celebrated the occasion with the song "Burn On." His songs were always full of irony, even if the millions of fans who've sung "I Love L.A." at Lakers games might not be thinking about the lyrics when they're crooning the infectious chorus. Newman says he wrote "Lonely at the Top" for Frank Sinatra, but he didn't want to do it. It was Sinatra's loss, not ours. 

Newman has also been writing movie music for nearly 30 years, which has earned him an amazing 20 Oscar nominations and one win, for the "Monsters Inc." song, "If I Didn't Have You." It was long-overdue recognition, even if it still leaves him 25 nominations and eight wins short of his uncle Alfred, the film composer and longtime 20th Century Fox music director who won nine Oscars and was nominated 45 times during a 40-year career. This year, Newman is nominated for his song "We Belong Together," from "Toy Story 3," and will perform on the show.

Newman was as sardonic as ever when he sat down to talk with me the other day, offering anecdotes about the ups and downs of his 20 Oscar nominations. He remembers watching the Oscar telecast on TV as a kid, seeing his uncles Alfred and Lionel conducting the live orchestra. "Lionel did it once when Jerry Lewis was hosting and the show ran short, if you can imagine that," Newman recalled. "So Jerry, looking for things to do, yelled at him in his Jerry Lewis voice, 'Liiiiionelllll! Liiiionelllll!' And Lionel yelled back, 'Jeeeeerrry! Jeeeerrry!' "

Newman shakes his head. "Lionel was very funny, but very vulgar too. When he won an Oscar in the late '60s for 'Hello, Dolly,' the guy he won with had two Oscars in his hand, so Lionel sort of leered, 'Well, I'm glad I didn't do 'Portnoy's Complaint.'  Orchestras were always complaining about him cursing, even under the most sacred of circumstances."

Newman has performed his songs at the Oscars a number of times, which he views as something of an underwhelming experience -- except for when he won: He received a spontaneous standing ovation from the musicians in the orchestra, which nearly brought him to tears. "It's a long show and it's hot in there and if you're playing, you're playing to a crowd where the majority of people haven't won anything, so they don't even want to be there. I mean, it's not, ahem, a great audience."

He waves his arm, as if pushing someone offstage. "To be truthful, they have me on too often. I can't imagine why they'd rather have me than Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. The whole experience is so strange that I guess it's fun. I don't get nervous too often when I perform, but I do at the Oscars. If you make a mistake, everyone knows it. I did the show once with Lyle Lovett and I guess I was trying to help him relax, so I told him, 'Don't worry, it's like a fourth-rate vaudeville show.' And then I screwed up and came in too early on 'You've Got a Friend.' So I wasn't much help."

Read on for this week's first installment in Newman's reminiscences about his Oscar nominations:

Hollywood puzzler: What do Eminem, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon have in common?

There was a long list of actors, some of them big stars, who dropped out of the running to play one of the two lead characters in "The Fighter." But when I was having lunch with "The Fighter" producer David Hoberman the other day, he revealed something I hadn't heard: The first person who had a shot at playing Micky Ward, the film's blue-collar hero eventually portrayed by Mark Wahlberg, was ... Eminem. "We actually first developed the project for him," said Hoberman, who spent so long putting "The Fighter" together at Paramount that the studio went through four production chiefs during the film's gestation period.

Actually, for showbiz insiders, the real shocker about "The Fighter" is that the film has earned Hoberman his first Oscar best picture nomination. Now 58, Hoberman has been a Hollywood fixture for decades, working for Norman Lear and then as an agent at ICM before joining Disney in the mid- 1980s, just after Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg had began their herculean efforts to reinvent the studio. Hoberman became head of production at Touchstone in the late '80s before running Disney's entire motion group for a half-dozen years in the 1990s, cranking out family movies and warmhearted comedies.

Since 1996, Hoberman has headed Mandeville Films, where he's produced dozens of movies, including such easygoing comedy fare as "George of the Jungle," "I'll Be Home for Christmas," "The Shaggy Dog," "Beverly Hills Chihuahua" and "The Proposal." Many of the movies have been hits, but none of them have attracted the kind of rave reviews that get you good seats at the Oscars — much less the seven nominations garnered by "The Fighter," including a best picture nod.  

So for Hoberman (and his Mandeville producing partner Todd Leiberman), "The Fighter" is a huge first. Even though he insists he's never craved being in the Oscar game, Hoberman admits he's emotional about finally joining the elite best picture club. "Being 58, to have this movie after making more than 30 movies as a producer, it's a pretty extraordinary experience for me," he told me. "I'm really grateful for it, mostly because we put so much effort into getting the movie made."

That's an understatement. The producers tossed out the first script they commissioned when it played too much like a documentary. They brought in Lewis Colick, who penned a script that first got the project greenlighted. It was that point that the producers went to Wahlberg, who committed to playing Micky Ward. Paramount wanted to be in business with Darren Aronofsky, so he was brought in to direct. In the course of trying to find a name actor to play Ward's half brother, Dicky Eklund, the producers approached Matt Damon, who showed enough interest in the part that the producers hired an A-list screenwriter, Paul Attanasio ("Donnie Brasco"), to do a rewrite.

Hoberman isn't sure why Damon eventually passed — "maybe his schedule got nuts or maybe he didn't like the draft." But the production team moved on, zeroing in on Brad Pitt, who spent time talking to Aronofsky about the project. Hoping to reel Pitt in, the producers hired another writer, Scott Silver, to do a new draft of the script. Silver became a key player on the film, but Pitt eventually took a pass too.

To make matters worse, Aronofsky's movie "The Wrestler" became a film festival sensation and ended up being a leading contender in the 2009 Oscar race, earning the filmmaker a host of enticing studio offers. So he dropped out of the project too. "We totally understood," Hoberman says with a shrug. "He had a lot of great offers, all these people coming at him, and we still had nothing."   

Regrouping, Hoberman and Lieberman sent the Silver script out to three new directors, including David O. Russell, who won everyone over with his ideas and energy. Russell had worked with Wahlberg in the past, so the actor was eager to stay involved. The producers approached a series of new actors for the Eklund part, including Joaquin Phoenix, of all people, but after Christian Bale threw his hat in the ring, everyone eagerly embraced him as being a perfect foil for Wahlberg.

Well, everyone except for Paramount, which was happy to release the film, but didn't want to finance it. With Wahlberg's help, Hoberman went to Ari Emanuel, Wahlberg's longtime agent, who recruited Ryan Kavanaugh's Relativity Media to put up the $25-million budget. "I totally understand Paramount's reluctance," Hoberman says. "Studios really aren't in the business of making these kind of dramas. They really didn't want to do an R-rated film if it didn't have stars like Brad Pitt or Matt Damon in it."

All's well that ends well. "The Fighter" not only found itself right smack in the middle of the Oscar race, but having already made $83 million, it has easily outgrossed Paramount films like "Dinner for Schmucks" and "Morning Glory," which are the kind of comic fluff that studios are willing to bankroll. As for Hoberman, he doesn't sound like a man who's been bitten by the Oscar bug.

"I'm a product of Jeffrey Katzenberg and the Walt Disney studio," he says. "Our whole identity was about doing comedies. If you look at the people we worked with back then, from Julia Roberts to Danny De Vito and Bette Midler, you could say we made stars, not Oscar films." Hoberman knows he's no Scott Rudin, who buys bestselling Oscar-bait novels the way kids buy baseball cards. "To this day, I'm still trying to find an executive who can bring books into our company, but I'll certainly never be that guy. As a producer, I was trained in the Disney system, and it just rubs off on you in terms of your interests."

So Hoberman is enjoying the limelight, but he isn't changing his style. He and Lieberman are producing "The Muppets," which finishes shooting at Disney on Friday. "This is one of those beautiful Hollywood moments, and I'm enjoying every minute," he says. "But I'm not like Dicky Eklund, who thought it wasn't good enough to just be in the ring, that you had to win. For me, just being around all these other great Oscar movies, that's good enough for me." 

— Patrick Goldstein

Photo: David Hoberman at the Producers Guild Awards last month in Beverly Hills. Credit: Albert E. Rodriguez / Getty Images.

 

Jeffrey Katzenberg's notorious memo: How does it hold up 20 years later?

In late January 1991, fax machines were humming all across Hollywood, spreading the news that Jeffrey Katzenberg, then head of production at Disney, had written a scalding, often self-critical 28-page memo blasting the movie industry's “tidal wave of runaway costs and mindless competition.” Hollywood's “blockbuster” mentality, he lamented, had turned films into assembly-line products with a shelf life “somewhat shorter than a supermarket tomato.”

Sound familiar?

Back then, studio chiefs were still relatively discreet about the inner workings of their business, so Katzenberg's memo (read it here) was particularly shocking because he named names — not only calling out other studios' flops but also complaining about the excessive time and energy Disney had put into “Dick Tracy,” the Warren Beatty film whose swollen budget ate up nearly all its profits. Though Beatty was still one of the biggest stars in town, Katzenberg said that the next time Beatty came to the studio with a project, we “should slap ourselves a few times, throw cold water on our faces and soberly conclude that it's not a project we should choose to get involved in.”

The memo, intended only for internal consumption, ended up being printed in full in Variety. The rest of the media quickly leaped in, with the New York Times noting that the memo inspired months of “anger, resentment, debate and jokes within Hollywood.” Bill Murray, appearing on “Larry King Live” to promote Disney's “What About Bob?,” complained about the memo's dismissive attitude toward stars. Mike Medavoy, then chairman of Tri-Star Pictures, called the memo “self-serving palaver.” Beatty, who'd been a close friend of Katzenberg's, stopped speaking to him. Disney Chairman Michael Eisner privately fumed about the leak.

Twenty years later, the memo makes for fascinating reading. It's clearly one of Katzenberg's first efforts to transform himself from a dogged production executive best known for a punishing work ethic into an industry strategist and spokesman, a role he has assumed in recent years as the leading proponent for 3-D movies. But what's even more compelling is how prophetic the memo looks today, especially in the way that it offers an early glimpse into the kind of risk-averse managerial thinking that has come to dominate today's movie industry.

When I called Katzenberg to ask if he'd discuss the memo, he politely declined, saying that as someone who never watches any of his old films, he viewed it as an unrewarding exercise. “Wild horses couldn't get me to do it,” he said with a laugh. “I couldn't get past the first paragraph without breaking into a cold sweat.”

At the time, the part of the memo that received the most attention was its scathing assessment of “Dick Tracy,” which cost nearly $50 million to make, more to market and sucked up hundreds of hours of Katzenberg's time in dealing with the famously indecisive Beatty, who had dinner with Katzenberg virtually every night during the film's extended production. The film barely covered its costs while “Pretty Woman,” which starred the then-unheralded (and inexpensive) Julia Roberts, was a breakout hit. It cost a modest $14 million, yet it grossed an astounding $463 million worldwide, then a record for Disney.

Katzenberg and Eisner's original model for Disney had been to make movies with low-cost stars, so it's little wonder, after “Dick Tracy,” that Katzenberg advocated reviving that strategy, warning that the studio's initial success was based on “the ability to tell good stories well,” not on “big stars and name directors.” Katzenberg stressed that the studio should be in control of its own destiny, focusing more on “stories that make us care” than on stars or production values.

Movie stars were bad for business. As Katzenberg put it: “Unreasonable salaries coupled with giant participations comprise a win/win situation for the talent and a lose/lose situation for us. It results in us getting punished for failure and having no upside in success.” His blunt assessment of the “celebrity surcharge” of dealing with movie stars has been adopted today by many studios, most notably at the fanatically disciplined 20th Century Fox.

The memo anticipates some of the biggest changes in studio thinking about making family-oriented movies, especially when you realize that the most successful family movies are animated. But Katzenberg's memo, for all its prophetic thinking, is laced with a bitter irony: He repeatedly stresses the importance of hiring a stable of in-house writers who felt they had a stake in the studio's success and could transform Disney into a quality-driven idea factory. But if you were to point to a company that exemplifies that vision of a studio, it would be Pixar.

Pixar has always been three steps ahead of the company Katzenberg went on to found, DreamWorks Animation, both in terms of commercial consistency and awards-season plaudits. And Pixar was such a creative behemoth that Disney ended up buying it for more than $7 billion.

Pixar operates much as Katzenberg envisioned his ideal studio, propelled by a collaborative cadre of brilliant creative minds, including Pete Docter (“Up”), Andrew Stanton (“Wall-E”) and Lee Unkrich (“Toy Story 3”), who've served in every capacity at the studio, from story artists, animators and voice actors to writers and directors.

DreamWorks Animation had lots of success, especially with its “Shrek” franchise, but its films are still marketed on the voices of celebrities like Eddie Murphy who, while they don't get the salaries they earn in live-action films, still often receive back-end payments. Pixar's films are sold via strong concepts. They cast to character — you rarely see a marquee actor doing a voice in a movie like “Ratatouille” and “Wall-E.”

That's not to take anything away from Katzenberg, whose thinking has ended up being a big influence on much of present-day Hollywood. But maybe he should consider re-reading the memo after all. Some of DreamWorks' recent films, notably “Monsters vs. Aliens” and “Megamind,” have felt all too much like “Dick Tracy” when it comes to a focused story and character. What Katzenberg said in 1991 is still true now — for all the appeal of new technology and special effects, the original idea is king.

 --Patrick Goldstein

 Photo: Then-Disney production chief Jeffrey Katzenberg in a file photo from 1994.

Credit: Associated Press

Super Bowl's true Hollywood moment: The best ad was NFL selling itself

There was hardly any real mention of it on Fox during the hours and hours of hype that accompanied that national holiday that is Super Bowl Sunday, but the NFL is girding for a horrific labor clash over a new collective bargaining agreement that could put the coming NFL season in jeopardy. So I guess it was no surprise that the NFL, which sees itself as a national institution that's too big to fail, put some serious muscle into presenting itself in the best possible light before the game began, running an astounding faux patriotic ad for itself, narrated by Michael Douglas, that cast the league as a hallmark of American values, second only to, well, maybe Clint Eastwood.

Called "The Journey," the short film put together by Fox Sports was a more effective propaganda vehicle than any of the much heralded car, beer and movie ads that normally grab our attention during the Super Bowl broadcast. It opened with a series of Americana images guaranteed to stir our souls, all symbolizing the perilous odyssey our country has traveled -- immigrants streaming past the Statue of Liberty, soldiers landing on Omaha Beach, the young John F. Kennedy Jr. saluting at his father's funeral, Martin Luther King Jr. orating at the March on Washington and rescue workers raising a flag at Ground Zero.

Then, oh, so gently, aided by a celestial choir, the visual images melted into a series of scenes of football triumphs, as Douglas cannily linked the pride we take in our nation's accomplishments with the rugged glory of the two football teams prepared to do battle. Or as he said: "Tonight, here we are, united, to see their journey. Two storied franchises, one founded by a shipping clerk ... the other named after the proud steel mills that forged this nation. Green Bay and Pittsburgh, where the game of football is in their blood. This is so much bigger than a football game. These two teams have given us the chance, for one night, not only to dream, but to believe."

OMG! If it had been a McDonald's commercial, we'd all be quietly appalled by the shamelessness of it all. If it were an ad for a Disney movie, we'd be insulted by the studio's chutzpah. But because it was the hallowed NFL, and we were all revved up for a brutal football clash, everyone in front of my TV set was raising a beer to the sky in a triumphant salute. I don't know exactly who came up with the brilliant idea for the ad, but I'm guessing that more than one GOP presidential aspirant who was watching turned to an aide and said, "Find out who cut that spot. Let's get them locked up for 2012."

The NBA finds better singers to do the National Anthem, Major League Baseball casts its World Series in a more nostalgic light, but when it comes to making itself feel like an irreplaceable part of the national fabric, no one casts a hypnotic spell like the NFL. Green Bay may have won the game, but it was the NFL, hand in glove with Fox Sports, that did the best job of burnishing its image.

--Patrick Goldstein

Photo: Super Bowl MVP Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers celebrates after winning Super Bowl XLV 31-25 against the Pittsburgh Steelers in Arlington, Texas. Credit: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images