November 11, 2002 - In many projects, there are "unsung heroes"... people whose contributions are extensive, but have been overshadowed by the passage of time (or the bluster of others).

One of those "unsung heroes" is producer Gary Kurtz, whose credits include American Graffiti, Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, Dark Crystal, and Return to Oz.

I'm not going to try and explain Kurtz's importance to Star Wars in this introduction – the interview will accomplish that.

He's currently producing Patrick Read Johnson's 5-25-77 (which you can find more information on here.

Without further ado, our in-depth interview with Gary Kurtz...

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IGN FILMFORCE: I'd like to go back to the very beginning and ask about your introduction to the film industry.

GARY KURTZ: Well, I went to film school at USC in Los Angeles. Actually, to go back even further than that, I was a music major, really, in high school in the southern California area and actually went to USC on a music scholarship to begin with. At that time, I was looking to major in composition and conducting with a possibility of maybe teaching music. But, it was a bit vague and in the first year one of the requirements of music scholarships is that you have to play in every group that's available – so I was playing in the concert band, the symphony orchestra, the opera orchestra, the wind and other small ensembles in the classical music side, as well as the jazz band and a couple of other jazz groups that were organized at the school.

IGNFF: Was that just meant to give you versatility as far as that curriculum?

KURTZ: Well, that was part of it, and also they always desperately needed members to play in the various groups and so they felt that music experience and performance – a lot of composition majors didn't know how to play anything but the piano, so one of the important things was to get orchestral experience playing an orchestra instrument other than the piano. I didn't have that problem. I played reeds primarily and then oboe and English horn, and dabbled in most of the rest of the instruments except for the heavy brass. I never tried to play anything other than a bit of the clarinet.

In that first year at USC I did the music for three or four student films. It didn't necessarily mean composing music, because the time deadlines were unbelievably short, so it meant mostly to assemble music from a variety of sources. Since they were student films, it didn't really matter where they came from – there were no rights problems. In doing that, though, I became more and more interested in the films. I had had previous experience in high school at shooting 8mm and 16mm film footage, both documentary and sort of dramatic type materials, so it wasn't a new thing to me. And I had been a keen still photographer for years, so moving to a cinema major wasn't really that big a jump.

IGNFF: ... and this would have been what, the mid-'60s?

KURTZ: No, no ... I went to USC first in 1959, so it was in the early '60s. Very early '60s.

IGNFF: So you were a part of that initial group of classes in the film department.

KURTZ: No, the film department at USC had been going on since the 1920s, since the silent days ... I guess it was the oldest film school in existence, because it started so early ... It wasn't really until the mid-'60s, after I'd finished and was gone, that the popularity of studying cinema became magnified 100 percent or more, because when I was there, it was very difficult to find enough students to make up film crews. As a matter of fact ... in the first senior project year that I was in in that term, I was doing advanced camera, as well as sound and production management and other things, and I had to work on four of the seven projects. Normally, you're only supposed to work on one! But everybody in the class that I was in worked on four or five projects, because there weren't enough people.

Then the next term, when I directed, I had a really hard time getting together enough of a crew. I had to actually do a lot of my own camera work – there wasn't a cameraperson available. Film school wasn't particularly popular at that time. It wasn't until George Lucas and his group, John Milius and those guys, who went to USC also – they didn't start until '66 – by then it seemed to be much more popular. And certainly by the end of the '60s, it was incredibly popular and they had to create all kinds of devices to wheedle out a lot of people by requiring a lot of portfolio work and films made in high school – all kinds of pre-requirements, just to get it down to a usable number of students that they could cope with.

IGNFF: During the time you were there, was it rather open?

KURTZ: Oh, it was completely open. If you had projects – either written or film projects – they would look at early film projects or just written material, scripts and proposals for projects, for acceptance. But it wasn't too definitive, because they were interested in having enough students to make up the program.

IGNFF: And at the time you were going, how respected was the film program by the industry?

KURTZ: Oh, it was quite well respected. There were a lot of people that had graduated out of the program in the post-war period – the late '40s, '50s – that had become fixtures in the industry of one kind or another – studio executives or agents or television producers or a few film directors – but ... it wasn't a straight line to the creative heart, because the other big factor was the fact that the unions in the late '50s and '60s were very strong, and you couldn't work in the industry unless you were a union member, as far as the crafts were concerned, and you couldn't get into the unions because they were closed. A closed-shop kind of system. So the experience that I got while I was a film student was working on Roger Corman kind of low-budget exploitation films, and I worked on a lot of those – 40 or 50 over a three or four year period.

IGNFF: Generally doing what type of work?

KURTZ: Well, everything really. I started out being a grip and an electrician and a sound boom operator, and on some of the later ones I was the director of photography and film editor or production supervisor.

IGNFF: So, basically, a jack-of-all-trades.

KURTZ: Yes, yes, a little of everything. On some projects, there was so few crew that they were very much like student films. I remember one picture where I was production manager and the assistant director, as well as the editor and one of the cameramen – and the second unit director as well.

IGNFF: Now ...in film school at that time, what were the aspirations for afterwards? I mean, when you talk to film students now, everyone wants to be a director right out of the gate.

KURTZ: Yes, that wasn't quite as strong then ... there was a general feeling, in the very early '60s, that people wanted to sort of break down the barriers of Hollywood and go into ALL of the various things. There were a lot of students who wanted to become editors, and there were a lot who wanted to become cameramen. There were quite a few who wanted to be directors as well, but it didn't seem to be the only thing.

IGNFF: It hadn't quite been placed on the pedestal it got placed on later, had it?

KURTZ: No, no ... the auteur theory really came out of the French new wave writings in the late '50s/early '60s, and we were reading all that stuff from Cahiers du Cinema and talking about it at school, I remember, and I think most of the students thought the concept intellectually was valid, but practically was rubbish because there're so many accidents that happen on a film. The chemistry of the group that you've gotten together makes a huge difference, and yes, picking the right people is important. But it's really difficult for a director – unless you're Stanley Kubrick – to have the final say on every single little minute detail, so all the films are pretty much a group effort. It can be pretty much assumed that most of the aspiring directors felt that way – they had no illusions about the fact that they could become like French directors were.

IGNFF: Sometimes having absolute final say is one of the worst things that can happen if you have wrong instincts.

KURTZ: Yes, absolutely. I mean, the whole point of having a group effort is that your crew becomes a sounding board.

IGNFF: I never understood the auteur theory when so much of a film is a matter of checks and balances.

KURTZ: Well, I think that intellectually the auteur theory came out of the idea of looking at a body of work – like Hitchcock's work or Hawks's work or John Ford's work – and trying to see common threads. Well, that's perfectly acceptable as an analysis of the whole career of a filmmaker, because there are going to be tying threads there. A director's not going to pick a project to do unless it has some meaning to them. You are going to find that it's just the idea of the director being the only creative entity on a picture was the aspect that I think most people felt was a bit far-fetched.

IGNFF: And do you think that that trend has become detrimental over time?

KURTZ: Yes, I do. Definitely. I especially think, since I've focused mostly on my career on producing and working with a lot of first time directors, I've felt that what's happened is that the working producer's job – basically, of being the director's partner and being his mirror and sounding bound – has disappeared and the producer's job has primarily turned to deal making. Most of the people whose names you see up on the screen don't have anything to do with the making of the film, which is a shame, really, because it leaves the director kind of totally on his own – and it means also that there's no one to say "Wait a minute, that's terrible, don't do that!"

IGNFF: There're no 'no-men' anymore.

KURTZ: There're no 'no-men'. Yes, exactly.

IGNFF: Do you think that leads to the working producer now being more of a traveling man than they were in the past? You used to be able to see that certain directors worked hand-in-hand with producers over ten films. Now you'll be lucky if they work past two films, if one of those is a success.

KURTZ: Yes, I think that's a result of most of those relationships having risen out of the deals. Sometimes the producer's relationship with the director and the writer on a project is only because either they own the property in the first place or they're the one that pulled the money together, so that there is no actual working relationship. The legwork that the producer should be doing is shared out amongst the production staff, some of it being done by the production supervisor and others, and the rest being absorbed by the director. I mean, I've never felt that it's fair to a director, in a way, to saddle him with having to deal with all that stuff. I've always felt that a good producer should insulate the director completely from having to deal with the studio and any outside influences, to allow him to get on with working with the actors and putting the film together.

IGNFF: Do you think that film schools today – and to a large extent apocryphal evidence that filters down – have made directors nowadays believe that any and all producers should be seen as enemies to whatever the vision of the director may – or may not – be?

KURTZ: I'm sure they do, because that's probably the case. The producer is looked upon as pretty much the same as a studio executive, who may not have any idea about the project. Whereas if you go back to the '60s, '70s and even before ... even of the big studios days, prior to the studios losing their real power in the '60s... the producers that were working – the Arthur Freeds of the world, and David O. Selnicks – they had the power. The directors were their hired hands. That's not necessarily great either, but those kinds of producers from the '30s and '40s seemed to have a fairly grand vision of what they wanted to see on the screen. The directors that they hired went along with them – and that was part of the studio system anyway, when they all were employees of the studio. So it isn't fair to try to compare that with what's going on today.

IGNFF: The irony is that a good deal of major directors nowadays have become those type of producers as well, bringing on other directors as hired hands.

KURTZ: Yes, exactly... Because they had the power to do that. But there're so few good movies made today, it's difficult for me to believe that it's all because the directors don't have any vision in what they want to see. I think it's primarily due to the fact that the studios are now all owned by big conglomerates who are interested in making money to the exclusion of everything else. Now, the studios always wanted to make money – that was one of their reasons for being in existence – but the men who ran the studios, no matter how difficult they were, they had some sense of what being a showman was like.

They were willing to take chances on oddball projects, and you don't see that as much anymore. There are smaller companies who will, but there's so many stories about projects floating around the last ten years that couldn't get made because the elements weren't right. When you just look at the list of the elements that the studios wanted, you know it wouldn't work that way. But it's a security blanket to have it be a Tom Cruise picture, or a Jack Nicholson picture, or whoever. Whether they're right for the project or not, the studio executive is not going to get fired if the picture fails if they have A-list talent.

IGNFF: Right – and then they complain about the audience, for not accepting it.

KURTZ: Yes.

IGNFF: I'm interested... when you talk about the Golden Age of Hollywood, as opposed to now, there seemed to be a better balance between "Okay, these are our A pictures, and then these are our B pictures, the experimental ones that we'll toss money towards, but ... we're going to bank on the A ones, if the B ones hit – fine." Now it seems that everything has to be a blockbuster.

KURTZ: Yes, that's exactly right. I mean, I was part of the program at Universal Studios in the early '70s – the low-budget program that was run by Ned Tanen which produced twelve or thirteen pictures, all under a million dollars at that time. Anything under a million dollars was considered bare bones movies. The most famous film that came out of that group was, of course, American Graffiti – and it made the most money – but all the films that were made under that program were interesting, quirky films that at least made their money back. If you count video and things over the long run, they all made money ... it's not Jaws business, but American Graffiti even wasn't Jaws business. American Graffiti was a very, very small picture that went on to do reasonably well. I think it eventually did $60 million in America, which wasn't big box office even in the early '70s. But, based on the cost of the picture, it was pretty phenomenal. The other pictures in that program – Doug Trumbull's Silent Running and John Cassavetes's Minnie and Moskowitz and Milos Forman's Taking Off and Peter Fonda's The Hired Hand and the other one that I helped produce, Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop – all of those films are interesting films and they're worth seeing today.

IGNFF: They hold up very well.

KURTZ: They do hold up very well, and because they cost so little money, the studio didn't worry about them. But no one seems to be willing to experiment with a program like that today – at all. They're not willing to make small films, or if they do, they make them by – well, they don't make them, actually. They have a classics division of some kind or another like Fox Searchlight or Miramax that seek out odd projects, and they get made independently and then just released by the studio. The studio doesn't instigate the making of those projects.

IGNFF: So they have no initial costs...

KURTZ: No, they do have costs. They wait for the filmmakers to come to them with a developed script.

IGNFF: Or, in some cases, a completely filmed project...

KURTZ: Well, yes, that happens, too.

IGNFF: It seems like the industry depends solely upon initiative, nowadays, rather than taking any risks.

KURTZ: At the time we were doing American Graffiti at Universal – which was not a picture made on the lot, although we had an office there – it was made in San Francisco, and we were very rarely at the studio. But some of the times when I was at the studio for meetings and various things, I realized in talking to some of the story department people that they had probably 100 projects in various stages of development – script development – that they were paying someone to develop. They don't do much of that anymore at all. I suppose the idea is now that the scripts will somehow be generated. Either the independent producers or the writers themselves will spend the time and energy to develop them to the point where they can be seen. I think one of the reasons that there're so few good movies is that that process has been truncated so much. Too many films go into production before they're ready.

IGNFF: With the belief that it can be fixed on set?

KURTZ: Well, yes, I'm sure that some people would say that, but I think that they're looking at them as some sort of cannon fodder, really. They don't really care. If everybody gets their fees and they make enough money to pay the mortgage, then that's the end of it. There's not much passion involved in the concept of the film.

IGNFF: Conversely, when you also talk about the idea of everybody looking for a sure hit, do you think that – on the flip side – there also is a tendency nowadays to overdevelop projects?

KURTZ: That has happened. I don't think it's as much of a problem as the underdeveloped project, in a way. I have known about projects that have had eight writers and been seven years in development that have just been so developed that they can't even be made. There's either too many costs or the script has lost all meaning because the writers forgot what the original concept was.

On the other hand, you can always point to projects like Rainman that went through that kind of process – seven or eight writers, lots of directors and years of development – and it turned out fine. I don't know if there's anything inherently wrong with the process. I think that as long as the focus is trying to make the project better – as long as that is kept as the vision – then I suppose it doesn't matter how long you spend in development. But after a while, the energy behind a project starts to wane, so I think you have to be careful.

IGNFF: Do you think there's a difference between trying to make a project better and trying to make a project bankable?

KURTZ: Yes, I do. I think that, to be realistic, no producer or director wants to lose money on a project – or they don't want to lose their investors' money. Most, I think, are responsible enough to look at a project and say, "Okay, this is a worthwhile risk at 25 million, but not at 50," and that's how they kind of pursue it. I certainly do that, and always have. Looking at a script and saying, "Yes, I think a target audience might go see this one."

When we proposed Star Wars to the studios, no one wanted to consider it – primarily because it was science fiction, and science fiction wasn't popular in the mid-'70s. There hadn't been any real space opera type of science fiction since Forbidden Planet from the mid-'50s, so it certainly wasn't considered popular then. But, what seems to be the case generally is that the studio executives are looking for what was popular last year, rather than trying to look forward to what might be popular next year.

IGNFF: To set a trend as opposed to following one.

KURTZ: Yes, because they're afraid of the audience. No one's been able to read the audience, ever, so you have to kind of rely on your own instincts. In the case of Star Wars, George and I had dinner one night, and we were looking through the paper while we were editing American Graffiti. We were looking through the newspaper, looking at the film listings to see if there was anything out there worth going to see. And, there wasn't. Discussion came around to Flash Gordon, and wouldn't it be great to have a Flash Gordon kind of science fiction movie – that would be great. We'd love to see that. That's sort of the gestation of Star Wars – and that was based on something that we wanted to see, that we would pay to go see! And no one was making it.

I think that that has to be one of the major driving forces behind any project – would I go see this? I know there was also the adage ... I think it was David Puttnam, actually, who said in one of his interviews that he wanted to make sure that everything that he put his name on, he would be proud to have his family go see. And I think that that's important, too. It doesn't necessarily mean you can't do tough projects – you couldn't do an R-rated project because you don't want your six-year-old to go see it – it's just the concept that, if you're proud of what you do and what's up there on the screen, then that means that you've put energy and effort into it and you believe in it.

IGNFF: And you actually enjoy having your name attached to it.

KURTZ: Yes.

IGNFF: So it's more of a pride in work issue, as opposed to an age bracket issue, when you talk about that family quote.

KURTZ: Yes, yes. Exactly.

IGNFF: Backtracking just a little bit, we were talking about towards the beginning of your career, working on the lower budget films. How did you transition to mainstream Hollywood work? What was the process for doing that?

KURTZ: It was quite convoluted, actually ... '66 I think it was. It was at the height of the Vietnam War. I was drafted into the Marines, and I spent three years in the Marines as a cameraman, a director of documentaries – even though I was actually a conscientious objector and I never carried a weapon. I carried an empty pistol holster. I was just very lucky, actually, to come through unscathed. I had four or five close friends who were also cameramen who were killed.

That took a big chunk of time out, and I got out in '69, and Easy Rider came out in '69. That was sort of the beginning of the rebel era. When I talk to filmmakers now and say that I made most of my films in the '70s – at first anyways – most of the film students now look upon that era as sort of a wonderful golden age of independent filmmakers and doing interesting projects. If you look at the films that came out in the '70s as opposed to the '80s and '90s, that is true to a certain extent. But I realize that when I was a film student, I looked back at the '30s as sort of the golden age of Hollywood – I would have liked to have been working in the '30s – so perspective changes of course, every decade.

IGNFF: What, for you, defined a golden age?

KURTZ: Well, I think that for us, when I was a film student, the reason that the '30s were looked upon that way is because it was the big studio system. Every studio was turning out 40 or 50 films a year. It meant that almost anything got made – good, bad and indifferent. Now sure, there were a lot of crap movies and there were a lot of B potboilers, but there were a lot of really wonderful films that came through that system. The John Fords and Howard Hawks of the world would make three, four films a year!

So, I suppose as a film student looking at that, when you have to struggle to put together a million dollars to make a little film, the idea that the system was all in place and there was no struggle really – you just got a script or you presented a script, and you made one picture after another – there was a big advantage to that system. There're a lot of detriments to that system, too, but I think the end result was that a lot of really good films came out of that. When we were film students in the early '60s, what was being churned out wasn't particularly good, and there weren't very many films. It was difficult to get into the industry, and so it just didn't compare at all.

The film students now looking back at the '70s are looking on it as everybody's read the Raging Bulls book – and other books about the '70s – and the films that were made during that time... Bob Rafelson's films and Francis's films, and Marty's films, Bogdanovich's first film, The Last Picture Show, and all the beginnings of that kind of independent filmmaker era. Many more of the '70s films have this... not all of them, but a great many of them... have this imprint as sort of non-studio, independent, interestingly structured stories. What would be classified by today's Hollywood as sort of art-housey kind of movies.

IGNFF: Do you think that the rise of the director as a force during the '70s almost led to that sort of bubble being self-destructive? I mean, when you look at what happens towards the end of the '70s, and what happened in the '80s when the implosion of egos occurred...

KURTZ: Yes I do, actually. I think that may have been inevitable. I think that also, there was another factor – in '80 or '81, I think, most of the major studios were starting to get taken over by the conglomerates. That was another big factor in the change.

IGNFF: Corporatization?

KURTZ: Yes.

IGNFF: As a producer, when did you notice a sort of seismic shift in that?

KURTZ: I think it was in the early '80s, really, in talking to the studios about projects and trying to get some interest in the making of things, and spending all this time in trying to develop projects the studios weren't sure about.

One of the most frustrating things ever, for any producer or director or writer even, is this process of pitching an idea, getting someone interested in it, getting development money, and going ahead and writing the screenplay – putting together a package – and then presenting it to them, and they say, "Oh, well, I'm not sure, really. Let's see what happens," and they never make it. And they're not willing to give it up – they're not willing to put it into turnaround so that you can take it somewhere else, because they're afraid that it will be the E.T. problem of becoming a big hit for some other studio and making you look silly.

So they just put it on the shelf – and I don't know how many projects I've been involved with that ended up that way and never got made. Projects with a good idea, good stories, good screenplay – they could have been made, and did have interest from other companies – and they could have been financed. Anybody you talk to probably would tell you stories about that. It's not uncommon, and it is one of the problems that didn't seem to be the case in the '70s – almost everything that got fully developed got financed by somebody.

IGNFF: During the early '70s, wasn't it still the case that a good deal of the people running the studios at the time were good people? Wasn't that still the age of the creative studio head?

KURTZ: Pretty much. I mean, it was the tail end of the dynasties, of the big executives. Universal was still being run by Lew Wasserman. He had very eccentric tastes, and he made a lot of very, very commercial movies – you know, the Pillow Talk kind of movies, and the things that we now look at saying, "Well, that's sort of middle of the road, high gloss, soap opera kind of stuff," that hasn't held up that well in terms of great classics of all times, but it was very popular at the time.

They also made a lot of other movies – they sprung to make Jaws, they made Duel, and they did American Graffiti. They did all this low budget stuff as well. I think that there are parallels with most of the other studios. The year that Star Wars was released, 1977, Fox had Fred Zinnemann's Julia out that year, and Herb Ross's The Turning Point. I think that those were the two other major pictures that they had that year. Both of those are very good – good, solid films, and very different. They had a lot of other films, too. More formula kind of films, but they seemed to have more variety – all the studios had more variety.

Now everyone wants another Jurassic Park, and they don't want to have a great variety. As you mentioned earlier, this idea of assigning certain projects as prestige projects – it didn't matter if they made money because the studios name was on them and they looked good. They don't do that now. They're not interested in doing that.

IGNFF: Right – if there were dinosaurs that hit big last year, let's have dinosaurs again this year.

KURTZ: Yes.

IGNFF: It's almost as if the film industry has taken over the mentality of television, as far as what's the bankable formula for the year.

KURTZ: Yeah, but the way things are working, television – not broadcast television so much, especially in America, but cable television, HBO especially – has taken over the sort of vanguard of interesting programming. A lot of little movies that would have come out in the cinema in the '70s now come out as an HBO movie, because it's too costly to market it to the cinemas.

IGNFF: Do you think that's a recourse or do you think that's a situation of, "Well, that's the best we can get nowadays when it comes to that kind of diversity in the industry"?

KURTZ: I think that it's a combination. I think there's a realistic feeling that these films have a limited audience, and it costs a fortune to put them into the cinemas with the cost of prints and how many screens you have to put them in to cover the country effectively. Then there's also this mania about big numbers in the first weekend or two. I think everyone forgets that Star Wars, or any of the films that came out in the '70s, tended to be platformed – where they came out in a few cinemas. Star Wars was released only in 37 cinemas. That would be laughable today. Then they expanded it. It did better than Fox thought – I have to say that – and so they expanded it earlier than they thought they would, but it never was in more than 700 cinemas at one time. Now, your average high budget potboiler movie, like ... Pearl Harbor, Mummy Returns, and the rest – they all released in 3000 cinemas. That's a big expenditure on prints.

IGNFF: And 95% of films don't even run longer than a couple months.

KURTZ: That's right. Star Wars was still in the cinema six months after it opened.

IGNFF: And then what – it was re-released the following year?

KURTZ: Well, actually, some of the cinemas carried it for a whole year, and then it was re-released the following summer, that's true, in a kind of weird pattern that Fox had. That pattern isn't used anymore for any picture – it has nothing to do with the commerciality of the picture. If you look at a good movie this last summer – a big hit, like Shrek. It was released in 2500 cinemas and it wasn't around in the theater – even though it was doing really well, it kind of petered out – after about ten, twelve weeks. That's a change in the audience pattern, to a certain extent. Everybody wants to see the new thing.

IGNFF: If you were to apply today's theories to when Star Wars was released – if that had been a huge release on, say, 3500 screens, similar to Episode I – and it played for a month, made its money then – the same amount of money it would have made in the year and a half that it eventually played through the platformed release – do you think that the film would have had the same impact?

KURTZ: No, I don't, actually. It's really difficult to try to compare that. First of all, we were very lucky in the sense that Star Wars came out in the summer of '77 when there wasn't anything else to compete with it, really. The other big picture that was coming out in May/June in that period was supposed to be Willie Friedkin's The Sorcerer, the remake of Wages of Fear – and it tanked, basically. It was a terrible movie...

IGNFF: I would agree with that.

KURTZ: There's no reason to remake Wages of Fear at all. But, even if you were going to remake it, you should have made a better picture than that. But, to our benefit, it didn't stay in the cinemas more than three weeks. There was no competition at all, so in effect, Star Wars had the summer. Combined with that, we had the additional publicity value of the fact that, in the first month, there were huge queues around the block. We knew there were a certain number of science fiction fans who were anticipating it and would come the first week.

We knew it would be full houses for the first week or so, but the way we sold it to Fox was on the basis that we thought we could make our money back from our hardcore science fiction audience, and we didn't have to rely on it being a break-through picture. There wasn't anybody in marketing that we could make believe that this project had a wide audience potential.

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Continue on to the second part of Ken's conversation with Gary Kurtz – in which Kurtz discusses the difficulties Star Wars went through during development, the film industry of the 1970s, how George Lucas changed from the days of American Graffiti to the end of The Empire Strikes Back, the importance of the pre-production process, and more.