Film Courage: What key steps did you take to go from being a tenured professor? Most people
would do many things that probably aren't good to be in those shoes to a
movie producer . I'm sure first of all you had to deal with social pressure
people probably trying to talk you out of it maybe not? What steps did you take?
Dr. Ken Atchity, author/film producer: Well in retrospect you can always make it look more you know planned and
logical then that it was at the time but I basically I ran into a very inspiring
man whose name was Norman Cousins who was the editor of Saturday Review world
in those days and he came to speak in a class of mine at Occidental College and
it turned out we shared a motto that no one else in the world had ever heard of
and that motto was a was a single sentence by the philosopher Nash
philosopher or take a guess a that said I think the only immoral thing is for a
being not to use every instant of its existence with the utmost intensity and
I had never heard anyone else quote that but after after his taught in my class I
asked him to come to my office and showed him that it was framed above my
desk and so needless to say we bonded and long story short I asked him you
know what I should do when I grow up which I asked male authority figures all
my life basically and he he told me after we got to know each other that I
should consider the entertainment business because it was much broader
than the academic world and people can basically do whatever you know it
anything creative you're encouraged to do basically you could find your own way
there are no rules and schedules and all of those kinds of things that we find in
academia and I love academic you know the world and the ideas that are
exchanged and all of that but it was restricting and it was you know for me
suffocating which is a word that is means a lot to me personally it's my
most ancient nightmares being suffocated and I've never been suffocated and you
know in the entertainment world I've been terrified a lot but not suffocated
and so he encouraged me and I thought well I don't know anything about the
entertainment world other than movies that I've seen that's it and he showed
me a passage from a book by William Goldman that I hope everyone know is
called adventures in the screen trade and the passage was that the only
important rule in Hollywood is that nobody knows anything and I thought well
that's that's good means it's a level playing field so I set out to learn as
much as I could and I realized that I wasn't 18 years old in the mailroom at
William Morris and I wasn't you know infinitely wealthy and I didn't have
relatives in the film business those are like the three main ways to get into the
business normally so I thought I just have to be smarter so I started writing
reading contracts I remember a producer he'll never forget I asked him if I
could read a distribution contract and he said yeah I can let you read it but I
can't let you take it out of my office you can go up the other room and have a
cappuccino and but you know do that so I read it and I came back an hour later
and I said I'm confused about some things I read here can I ask you a
couple questions and he said sure and he I said this paragraph number 48 in the
fine print section at the end says that accounting terms used in this agreement
shall be redefined by the twentieth century-fox accounting department at
such time if any that litigation is entered into among the parties I said
what does that mean and he said that it's not in there I go yes it is let me
show you how I showed it to him and he said I can't believe that that's still
in there mate my attorney should have crossed that out he had just signed the
agreement and I said well they didn't so I started learning that's how I started
learning by contracts was I think whatever kind of
thing you're trying to do if it's successful ends up with being a bunch of
contracts so you might as well start backwards with the contracts and long
story short while I was preparing myself that way over a six-month period I I
came up with an idea that I sold basically on a wing and a prayer not
knowing how to do it but it ended up being within the next 12 months 16
movies that I was completely in charge of and raised half the money from Warner
Brothers and half the money from from a company in Canada went up to Montreal
and shot them all back-to-back meaning one movie ended on
Friday and the next one began on Monday and it was a series of romantic comedies
and it came out of my teaching romantic literature and also teaching publishing
because a publisher was talking and went up in my publishing class a visiting
publisher was talking to my class and he was telling me he was telling us what
goes on the cover of a romance novel and I realized as he listed the things that
were on the cover that he was basically reciting the rules of courtly love that
I was teaching in another class that were written in the 12th century by
andreas capital honesty the Chaplin of Marie de France and and I thought so
maybe romance novels that everyone makes fun of are just an extension of these
ancient courtly stories these love stories and I came up with the idea of
doing a series of movies that imitated these love stories and were marketing
friendly because they all had colors so you could have put all the DVDs on the
you know on the shelf and they would form a rainbow
so they were all called things like The Rose cafe sunset court indigo autumn etc
and we did sixteen of them and by that time I was I was fully
in the in the business because I was in charge of production as a creative
production and within three movies my assistant I were you know we knew we
were doing whereas we did not have any idea what we were doing before the first
movie started shooting and then I came back to Los Angeles and became a
literary manager because I didn't have resources to option properties but as a
literary manager you can produce properties by managing the property and
that's what got me going and ever since then so it was that was how the
transition occurred and it was just because I thought of an idea and I
didn't know better if I known now what you know what if I'd known then what I
know now I would never have sold it the way I sold it I simply went out with the
concept and convinced several Studios to look at it seriously and none of them
had looked at a script or anything like that and one of them Warner Brothers
wanted to see a script and I wouldn't show it to them until they'd signed an
agreement and they ended up signing an agreement in three days and then I
showed them they manufactured the scripts over the weekend by putting out
a call to the romance novel community and getting back you know ideas for the
script and so on so it was a fluke and one of the hardest things about being in
the business when you're been in it for a while is the there grows up this huge
accumulation of experience that you have that makes you know that you shouldn't
just pick up the phone and call the head of a studio and and I have to overcome
that I just reached out to the head of a studio this morning but every time I do
it it's like having a 500-pound weight in your hand to pick up the phone
because you know that's wrong but somebody like me back then I didn't know
was wrong so I you know it was light as the light motion to pick up the phone
and call call somebody and so whenever I get a new partner who's not involved I
always say don't be afraid to tell me your craziest ideas because
this is a world in which crazy ideas work and you know it's it's the
traditional ideas that have a harder time working so it is a completely wild
and entrepreneurial frontier it's probably the last frontier of American
culture though the movie business and it's been changing ever since I've been
in it it constantly changes from a world in which videocassettes dominated and
you could find them everywhere and to a world in which we're down streaming from
Netflix and Hulu and so on and the delivery methods have always changed and
what doesn't change and this is the encouraging thing for writers is that
the need for stories has only gotten greater and greater with the
proliferation of hundreds of channels they all have one thing in common they
need programming they need content and writers are the ones who create the
content the intellectual property so they should be hugely encouraged you
don't have to understand all the distribution methods you just need to
know how to tell a story and and you're in good shape just keep telling stories
you
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