Chapter 9, Bernie Brillstein, Producer! (Cont’d)
Excerpt from Where Did I Go Right? (or: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead), by Bernie Brillstein (with Cheryl Henson)
Being a producer is a different world from being an agent and manager. You’d think the skill sets would be pretty much the same, and to a degree they are, but there are more moving pieces in production. As an agent or manager, you just need to focus on the client. As a producer, you have to consider cost, schedule, talent selection, talent management, studio scheduling, set construction, and things like union rules and legal constraints, particularly with child actors.
You even have to consider shit like catering and if anyone on the set is a strict vegetarian Orthodox Jew who is allergic to seafood. God forbid you bring that person the bacon-wrapped scallops!
When I first joined Disney as a producer, they tied me to David Lazer. I learned on the job, sticking primarily with TV shows like the
World of Magic or
Muppet Show, but also dabbled in movies. This latter mostly involved talking Card Walker down from the ledge.
Porky's had just made box office bank and it left him shell-shocked[1]. “What is this world coming to?” he thought. Did he miss the entire ‘70s? It bled over into our productions. Card was certain that Charlie Wilson’s swinging putz in
Never Cry Wolf was going to singlehandedly destroy the Disney brand. And Ron Miller’s new film
Splash, with its naked mermaid? Forget about it! It was all Jim, Ron, David, and I could do to keep Card from cancelling the whole project. Even so, absolutely no T&A. Even Godiva Hair was pushing it.
When the Disney Channel was launched, I finally branched out on my own, acting as the show runner for
Waggle Rock and produced for
EPCOT America and
Thingamajig. Things were looking up!
And then, suddenly, David announced his early retirement in the spring of 1983, not long after producing Card’s retirement show. He’d been suffering from severe joint pains and other symptoms for years[2]. He planned to retire to his home in the Hamptons and would visit periodically for consultation work, but he was out of the business. Suddenly, his time was up and I was thrown into the lead spot on many of his former productions. I got dragged into meetings with Tom Wilhite and some of the motion picture work he was doing, both with Disney and with the new Hyperion label. It was sink or swim! I needed help, so, after squaring things with Jim, I recruited Diana Birkenfield, who was the old Muppets producer before David came on board[3]. Jim and Diana had never quite gotten along, but I was more than prepared for her acerbic personality after years of dealing with needy clients.
Because, you see, while production is indeed a different world from agency and management, there is one area where my previous work comes in extremely handy: talent management. This may come as a shock, but sometimes big stars or even little stars (hell, especially little stars!) can be hard to work with. They make ludicrous demands. They have impossible needs. They argue with the director, writers, producer, and even their fellow actors. My years of talking my talent down from the ledge as an agent and manager paid dividends here. In the end, the talent mostly just needs to know that they’re being listened to and feel like they have some control. And in the end, what makes a good agent and what makes a good producer come down to this: knowing when to shut your mouth and open your ears.
This may sound strange coming from me if you’ve been listening to me flap my jaws for the last several chapters, but it’s true, and it’s critical. So many great talents, be they in front of the camera or behind it, destroy their careers prematurely because they talk and they don’t listen. They make everything about
them when it needs to be about
us. And for a producer as much as for a manager, it’s about that “You Attitude”, only the “You” in this case is “You All”. You can’t focus on the neediest player unless that’s the one who’s playing the critical part that day. You need to focus on the
production and everyone there.
Take that as today’s bit of wisdom: a producer is like a talent manager, but their client is a production, not a person.
Now Cheryl’s starting to wonder if I’m getting paid by the aphorism.
So, Tom and Diana and I started working on movies together, bit by bit. We worked on
Splash with Brian Grazer. I tried without success to get a script rewrite on
Trenchcoat, which I thought was awful[4]. Diana greenlit a Richard Donner high fantasy epic staring Kurt Russell called
Ladyhawke[5], though I had my doubts about fantasy movies after
Dragonslayer flopped. Despite Card’s insistence that “ghosts aren’t funny”, I managed to greenlight and executive-produce a script called
The Ghost Busters from my old client Danny Ackroyd[6] under the Fantasia label. Whether ghosts are funny or not, Danny and Harry Ramis are fucking hilarious and could make “Attack of the Shit Monster” into a laugh riot.
If Card resisted
The Ghost Busters he sure as shit threw a fit about a crazy Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis film called
Back to the Future. Steve Spielberg loved it, and Jim’s daughter Lisa, now working for him, was pushing us hard to take it. The script was gold. Time travel, humor, love, learning to stand up for yourself. It had been rejected by every studio for being too sentimental, but ironically Card was flat out opposed to the deal because it was too risqué because the star’s own mother in the past falls in love with him[7]. The whole teased incest was never consummated, obviously, but just the
hint was enough to make the old men panic! Not only that, but the Bobs’ last three flicks,
I Wanna Hold Your Hand,
1941, and
Used Cars, had all bombed.
But Jim and I stood our ground. The script was solid, the “incest subplot” was just a background gag playing with the “if you met your parents when they were your age” thing, and if Steve liked it, you knew it was going to be a hit. And Card wasn’t the CEO any more, nor the chairman. His word carried weight, but so did Jim’s, and Ron and Ray agreed to take a chance on the Bobs and their time travel flick once we got Amblin to agree to share the cost and the production, which would also take on the Fantasia logo and get released for late summer of ‘84 after
The Ghost Busters, Diana would take on the production along with Bob Gale.
We kicked around some other, bolder ideas. I pushed hard for greenlighting a crazy Lem Dobbs script called “Edward Ford” about a well-meaning, but perpetually out of work cowboy actor, which really spoke to me as a former agent and manager. I’d managed that guy! Who in this business hadn’t? Jim liked the loose, experimental structure and the bittersweet finale. But Card, retired, but still on the Exec. Committee, opposed it immediately due to all of the sex and “gay stuff”. I promised, fingers crossed, to toss out the script, and secretly conspired with Diana and a small team to produce it behind their backs.
Thwarted, I stuck with films already in production. When delays and cost overruns on
Return to Oz were driving the management to the brink of firing its first-time director Walter Murch, I pushed hard to get him replaced with Frank Oz.
Come on, it was serendipity! Oz directed by Oz[8]! But no, Murch may have been out of his league on directing, but he had big friends in Hollywood like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Murch stayed, and the film suffered for it, in my humble opinion.
So, instead, my first foray into film production would be with the Muppets. I knew exactly what I wanted to see: the
Muppets on Broadway, directed by Frank Oz. I’d been pushing Jim to do a Muppets Broadway Show for years[9]. Why not a movie about it? I could then use the movie as a back-door pilot to push a stage show, first at a Disney park, then on Broadway itself.
We began production that spring and began filming that fall, even renting time on Paramount’s New York set after working a deal through Michael Ovitz[10]. It had everything: big stars, dazzling songs by Jeff Moss and the Sherman Brothers, a cross-country journey to New York, a huge Broadway-style stage production with a chorus line, a visit to Sesame Street, a Waggle Rock cameo, a love story, a case of mistaken identity…it even had the Muppets as babies. Muppet Babies.
The previews drove America nuts: Kermit and Piggy in diapers. The film, and the merch, sold itself. We made a good $28 million off of an $8 million budget[11]. We got Oscar and Grammy noms for the music. I spun off the Broadway Review from the film as a lip-synced Muppet stage show at the Magic Kingdom parks. I even got it “Off Off Broadway” where it earned a Tony nom for Music and won the Tony Drama Desk award for Set Design for its innovative “stage within a stage”, which nested well with the metatextual narrative, or so they tell me. We lost the Set Design Tony itself that year to
Sunday in the Park with George, though.
But real the big winner from my first film production was the Muppet Babies. I spun the Muppet Babies off into a Muppet series for the Disney Channel, and then a CBS Saturday morning cartoon[12]. It was like printing money.
Not bad for a fat kid from the Lower East Side, assuming you consider Park Avenue East the “Lower East Side”.
[1] The success of
Porkies (1982), an immature, unapologetically sexist teenage soft-core sex comedy, completely rocked and shocked the management at Disney. I guess they’d never seen
Animal House or
M*A*S*H. Card Walker allegedly (per
Disney War) vowed that if the American public didn’t want Disney’s type of movie, then they’d just stop making them, which the book indicates was partly responsible for the studio only releasing 3 films in 1983.
[2] This happened in our timeline too, but in 1981. His symptoms have been described after the fact as consistent with Lyme disease. He lived on Long Island, NY, for years, which was an early hot spot for the tick-borne illness. He held on longer in this timeline due to the excitement of the new career opportunity.
[3] Henson brought her back to HA in our timeline following Lazer’s early retirement. Lazer still produced for HA on occasion, for example
The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), and he will still make appearances in this timeline.
[4] In his autobiography, Brillstein seemed to display a preternatural ability to spot a hit or a flop…or so he tells us after the fact.
[5] Helm-tip to
@marathag.
[6] Brillstein was heavily involved in getting
Ghostbusters going in our timeline too. Dan Ackroyd, John Belushi, and most of the SNL alums of the ‘70s-‘90s were Brillstein clients. They came to him in our timeline with the idea and he helped them sell it. Here, he simply produces it instead.
[7] Disney rejected
Back to the Future in our timeline specifically because of the “incest subplot”. Oh, and yes,
Ghostbusters and Back to the Future. I swear I didn’t rig this; those are actual likely butterflies from this TL. Dumb luck, really, rather than any Henson magic behind these acquisitions.
[8] One of the many things that
I wanted to do, but was thwarted by the laws of probability. I also wanted Oz to direct
Something Wicked This Way Comes. Alas, both films were in production prior to Oz joining the team.
[9] As he claims in his autobiography in our timeline.
[10] Interesting butterfly: with Bernie now a producer at Disney, his daughter Leigh went to work for the family agency rather than going to work for Ovitz. This avoids the cruel way Brillstein accuses Ovitz of treating her, which avoids the proximate cause of their very public, very acrimonious falling out. Here, for the moment, he and Mike Ovitz remain friendly rivals and occasional collaborators rather than arch enemies.
[11] Directly comparable to our timeline’s
Muppets Take Manhattan.
[12] He cajoled a reluctant Jim into greenlighting the latter in our timeline. It was a smash success.