Minutes of the Last Meeting

Ned Tanen was the head of production at Universal Pictures in the '70's and Paramount in the '80's. He was my first boss in Hollywood when I became a creative executive at Paramount in the Spring of 1987. He died last week, and looking back on our first meeting and his influence on my life, it is still a mystery to me how he took a chance on a kid from Chicago with few connections in the industry.

 

The Ned Tanen Appreciation Society held its last meeting a few months back.

Members in attendance that night were Lindsay Doran, Michelle Manning, David Nicksay, Richard Fowkes, myself and the great man himself, full of piss and vinegar as always. We had all worked for Ned when he was the head of production at Paramount Pictures, and despite the often transitory nature of the film business, we had managed to stay in touch over the years since.

The members of our informal society varied at each gathering. And apart from our small group, I suspect those who are members in abstentia or merely in spirit are probably too numerous to count. Although I submit for the record that Ned, for all his plaudits and accomplishments in Hollywood, never received any award or formal recognition, and was not nearly as appreciated as was his due.

It was the seventh or tenth or perhaps the dozenth annual meeting, when and how they started or how annual they actually were being not nearly as important to record here as the warm feelings and debt of gratitude that brought us all together each year to sit once again at the feet of our leader and mentor and hear him cackle with merciless glee at the state of the business he had left behind and in which we all still toiled and squirmed.

Sean Daniel, a founding member, should have been there but sent his last minute regrets, regrets I am sure he now regrets even more. Bruce Berman and Kathy Lingg's chairs, so often filled with laughter and memories and news from the front lines that Ned fondly devoured along with each meal over the years, also stood empty in person but not in spirit that night, and now forevermore.

The Society's goal was simple and its accomplishments were few; there was no formal membership, as anyone who loved Ned and had been touched or moved or inspired or intimidated by him was welcome. There were no dues, as just knowing about the Society probably meant that your dues had been paid, most likely in the body blows and hard knocks that this business doles out like daily bread, and the much harder-earned ability to laugh at them, of which Ned was an unparalleled master.

But the purity and simplicity of our mission meant that we had the rare pleasure in life of accomplishing what we set out to do, which was on just that one night, each time it happened, to let Ned know what he meant to each of us, without ever coming close to saying anything like that aloud in his presence, God forbid.

So what did we appreciators so appreciate?

Everyone will have his or her own testimony to offer.

For me, Ned was the Last Real Studio Boss. He was the head of production at Universal and later Paramount when those companies were not yet small parts of much larger globalized media corporations in the “content” business. The business of studios then was actually making movies, and when Ned was the head of production, he told the marketing and distribution folks what movies he was going to make and they were going to sell, not the other way around.

He had a gold-plated masters degree in the art of “keeping it real”.

How many times do I recall him piercing some inflated moment with his favorite mantra, “We’re not curing cancer, Horberg!” Or his description of our grand artistic filmmaking endeavors as really being the “Art of Putting Asses in Seats”. He’d often chuckle “we’re inching our way to greatness here” to take the piss out of anyone in danger of taking themselves or what they were doing too seriously.

In a town full of hyperbolic claims of greatness and p.r. machines dedicated to building monuments of ego, how refreshing it was to have a boss who could have legitimately bragged about being behind some of the biggest commercial successes in Hollywood history, but preferred instead to refer to himself as the man who green-lit “The Nude Bomb” starring Don Adams or “The Gong Show Movie”. And only privately admit that the movies he was proudest of making when he was running production at Universal were “Missing” and “Resurrection”.

This was a complicated man, an often angry man, and his comic self-deprecation, and his incredibly tough and often thorny personality did not hide the fact that he was sensitive to how he was perceived by others and the slights he felt he had suffered.

He told me once that the pressure of working for legendary mogul Lew Wasserman and his right hand Sid Sheinberg in the Black Tower that was the Universal headquarters back then was so great, that he kept a set of guns and ammunition in the trunk of his car, and would occasionally leave work and drive to the desert in the middle of the day to fire off some rounds and relieve some of the stress.

I didn’t know of his history with armaments on the day I first met him, but it was a good thing I didn’t, as I was scared out of my mind anyway. I had flown in from Chicago for an interview for a job as a creative executive at Paramount Pictures in the spring of 1987. It was a meeting that lasted only five minutes. He was friendly but direct in a way that bordered on gruff. I couldn't have made much of an impression, as I spent much of the meeting staring at the enormous wooden baseball bat leaning against the wall of his office, a curious memento that I found out later was an oversized replica of the bat made famous by Robert DeNiro in the memorably brutal scene in "The Untouchables", a recent Paramount success under Tanen. Unlike the unfortunate character in DePalma’s movie, I didn't get beaten to death, but I got the job, which, given the fraternity hazing quality to the life of being a studio creative executive, turned out to be almost the same thing.

It is hard for me to believe now that in fact Ned was only my boss for a little over a year. But whether it is for a day, a minute or a lifetime, you know when someone you've encountered has etched an indelible mark on you that will have a profound effect on all that you do afterwards. For me, Ned was one of those people.

He apparently worked by choice without a contract, which gave him the right, which he exercised quite freely, (in fact almost like clockwork every Friday right after our weekend read meeting, or really on any occasion that it suited him) to threaten his boss, studio chief Frank Mancuso, with walking off the job. And then one day he did walk off and never came back. There was the usual announcement and succession plan and producing/consultant deal, and the business of the studio seemed to go on, but something ineffable had surely been lost.

How could I forget the day he came into the screening room where a bunch of executives were nervously waiting for him to watch the dailies for what was meant to be a bright, shiny studio action comedy, but was feared to be a turkey-in-the-making.

Ned sat down. Watched for a few seconds. "What are you running in here...Ironweed?" Ned quipped. The picture was canceled a week later.

Once, Lindsay Doran and I had the unfortunate experience of casting a young actor as the male lead in the film version of Stephen King's "Pet Sematary", which Ned had green-light quickly because of a writer's strike at the time. In Ned's mind, and only in Ned's mind, the actor bore an uncanny resemblance to a young Peter Guber, and it became a running gag that he endlessly tortured us with. "You're the only two idiots in the world who could make Pet Semetary starring Peter Guber" he would shriek.

Ned was a natural at giving out nicknames, and once thus named, you would forever so remain for him. Richard Lovett, then one of the young Turks and now the head of the powerful Creative Artists Agency was "Ringlets" for his then curly mop of hair: "Get Ringlets in here" he would yell to Teddy Zee, or Lance Young, or one of the other Vice Presidents working for him at the time. Uber-agent Michael Ovitz, with whom he would spar daily in the endless tug-of-war between the talent and the money, was always O-vitz with the emphasis heavily on the last syllable, I guess as his way of trying to give the Emperor a little less clothes. Sir David Putnam, whose aristocratic artistry was an easy target for Tanen's sense of himself as a self-made prole, was "MiLord"; his close friend director Joel Schumacher was always “Shu-ma-shay” said with the snooty affectation of someone turning the pages of Cahiers du Cinema. Clint Eastwood's Kowalski character in Gran Torino had nothing on Ned for old-school attitudes when he was on the warpath.

But for all of his color, Ned had an amazing skill set for an executive, that seemed to come from his gut, an instinctive approach to making movies honed from a lifetime of experience. More than anyone I ever worked with, he seemed to know exactly when to be tough, when and where to draw the line, to walk away from a deal or a movie or to go toe to toe with the talent to get to the best result whatever the personal cost. And when to be supportive, to listen, to be the filmmakers best friend and fiercest ally, to give the extra day, or extra money for reshoots, to step up and pay the price for the script or the star or the director that would make the difference.

All of these skills were on display that first summer that I went to work for him, when he famously convinced the very reluctant makers of Fatal Attraction, including Stanley Jaffe, Sherry Lansing, Michael Douglas, Glenn Close and director Adrian Lynne, that the masterpiece they thought they had made in which Glenn Close's stalking character takes her own life to the strains of "Madame Butterfly" was actually at its core a monster movie, and that the test screening audience loved the movie but was profoundly dissatisfied with the ending because the monster cannot kill itself; he, she or it must be slain by the hero. A few months of high-level Tanen diplomacy, new pages, and a ton of money on a reshoot later, the film had a new ending and became one of the highest grossing and culturally iconic films of the era.

As Richard Fowkes put it "when you think about it, Ned's talent came from one simple, but all too rare quality: he Told The Truth." Unvarnished. Raw. Not always pretty. But straight. If it were going to be a bad meeting, he'd walk in and sit down and say, "There are good meetings and bad meetings. This is going to be a bad meeting." With Ned, you almost always knew where you stood. And somehow it made you feel better, even if what you were hearing was often a cold dish of reality.

Thinking back to that last meeting, I see the aging warrior walking to his car after the meal and our affectionate goodbyes outside. You never think that the last time you see somebody is literally going to be the last time you see them, but now I can't help but feel this image of Ned take on the mythic power of another image in my sad, nostalgic imagination: the final image of John Wayne as Ethan Edwards in John Ford's seminal western "The Searchers", framed in the doorway, ultimately a loner in spite of his social skills, walking into the future, or the past, as somewhere deep inside a voice says "They don't make 'em like that any more."

Those are my Minutes of the Last Meeting.

The great and long forgotten writer Gene Fowler wrote a book of the same name many years ago; he also delivered the eulogy at the funeral of a past giant Hollywood figure, Myron Selznick, the brother of David, which I quote from here, for Ned.

"We loved him. We knew his great place in the busy province of the motion picture. Indeed, many of us owe our good fortune to him. For he was both brilliant and wise, Oh yes, we knew, admired, loved - sometimes quarreled with him during the heat of battle - for we are volatile and impulsive in the arts. We remember that he was a loyal friend and an unbeatable foe during the days of crisis. He had prejudices, we say frankly, and he was not perfect. He had moods. He could and did fight both with fist and brain. We loved him for his courage.  And we admired him for the quickest mind since the pioneer days...."

 

Thanks, Ned.

Rest in Peace.

 

 

Ned Tanen

1931-2009

Comments

[mbarlow]

Thanks for this, Bill. I never work for Ned, but he was legendary among those, like you who worked for him and dealt with the brunt. I had a different breed of mentor, one less accustomed to telling the turht, and could say many things, but not the one big thing about truth-telling that you are so eloquent about here.

All best,

Michael Barlow (mbarlow7@gmail.com)

[mary]

The most wonderful obituary for a person who clearly was a major influence and a good friend.

[Carrie]

So glad to read that Tanen loved "Resurrection" as much as I do; what a terrific offbeat film with nuanced performances by Ellen Burstyn and Sam Shepard.

[Molly McCall]

Thank you for so eloquently describing Ned and the meaning of his friendship to you and so many others. He was so generous in spirit and one of the funniest people I have ever known. I printed this out last year and have kept it to occasionally read when I find myself missing him. I pulled it out and read it again yesterday...it's hard to believe it's been a year. Your words remind me of just how unique and complicated and wonderful he was.