Book Description

With tales from the set of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane to why a well-known actor trashed Eds office and why a major Hollywood mogul tried to turn all of Tinsel Town against one of Eds films, readers will learn what it takes to produce a film and survive the jungles of Hollywood, laughing all the way. This smartly written, surprising, hilarious memoir written by a legend with over 50 years behind the scenes, takes us from Bette Davis to Elizabeth Taylor, Stanley Kubrick to Scott Rudin, Harrison Ford to Jim Carrey. As a top studio exec and one of Hollywoods most revered producers, Feldman has seen the film business like no other.

Mr. Vonnegut and the Movies

By Tom Barton, April 2007

Even to the iconic Kurt Vonnegut, movie producing was something of a mystery.

Literary icon Kurt Vonnegut was the neighbor of a good friend of mine on Manhattan’s East side in the two years before his death on April 11. Kurt was having health problems last year and my friend volunteered to stay with him when he otherwise would have been by himself.

The book I co-wrote with movie producer Ed Feldman (“Witness,” “The Truman Show”) about his career, “Tell Me How You Love the Picture,” had just come out and my friend gave a copy to Kurt when he went over to stay with him. Kurt took a look at the cover and quickly retired to his study without saying a word. About an hour later, after reading Chapter 1, Kurt returned and said, “I never knew what a movie producer did.”

When my friend told me this, I was amazed. Four of Kurt’s novels had been made into feature films, most notably “Slaughterhouse-Five,” directed by George Roy Hill. Kurt had been involved to varying degrees in the productions. Yet Kurt, a brilliant and savvy observer of life, didn’t know any more about what a movie producer does than the average person.

The comment that I receive most often about the book (and the newly-released audio version) is that it opens people’s eyes about how big-budget movies are managed. There seems to be a view held by the general public that movies are wasteful enterprises, full of overpaid and pampered actors and directors. The recent stories of profligate spending on the financially disastrous “Sahara” appear to support this view.

Ed Feldman, on the other hand, has enjoyed a very lucrative career by bringing big movies in on-time and at, or near, budget. Ed is in his seventies but has turned down at least three big-budget studio pictures with A-list actors in the last few years. (They kept wanting him to produce the “difficult” projects.)

The reason the studios kept turning to him was because he was very good with the budget while still bringing in a quality project. He knows how to spend money wisely.

One of my favorite Ed Feldman stories concerns a dispute Ed had with Lauren Holly, Jim Carrey’s then-wife, during production of “The Truman Show.” The Carreys were to fly from the Florida set by private jet to a movie premiere in Los Angeles on the studio’s nickel. Ed tried to save the studio $18,000 by using a slightly smaller plane. Holly would have none of that and threatened that Carrey might not return on time to resume shooting.

Eventually, the studio approved the larger plane to keep the star happy but Ed had the satisfaction of knowing he had done the best he could to contain the cost.

Big-budget, highly-creative projects need not be money pits if they are managed smartly but firmly. In the book, we make the statement that moviemaking is one of the riskiest commercial activities on the planet because no one knows how a movie will do at the box office. Exerting effective financial control on the production end lessens the overall risk significantly because the marketing end can be such a crapshoot. It can be a “given” in a sea of unknowns.

These lessons were not lost on Kurt, a surprisingly pragmatic individual. A few weeks after he had read the book, we were introduced. As he shook my hand, he said matter-of-factly, “Good book.”

©2007 Tom Barton