Film Courage: What key steps did you take to go from being a tenured professor?
Most people would do many things that aren’t good to be in those shoes.
I’m sure first of all you had to deal with social pressure, people were 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
planned and logical than what it was at the time.
But I basically…I ran into a very inspiring many whose name is Norman Cousins who was
the editor of Saturday Review world of 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 single sentence by the Spanish philosopher [José]
Ortega y Gasset 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 his talk in my class I asked him
to come to my office and I showed him that it was framed above my desk and so needless
to say we bonded and long story short I asked him what I should do when I grow up which
I asked male authority figures all my life basically and 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…anything creative you’re encouraged
to do basically.
You can find your own way.
There are no rules and schedules and all of those kind 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 (for me) suffocating.
Which is a word that means a lot to me personally.
It’s my most ancient nightmare being suffocated and I’ve never been suffocated 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 and that’s it.
And he showed me a passage from a book by William Goldman that I hope everyone knows
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 “Wow?
That’s good.
It 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
infinitely wealthy and I didn’t have relatives in the film business so those are like the
three ways to get into business (normally).
So I thought I just have to be smarter and so I started reading contracts.
I remember a producer (I’ll never forget) asked if I could read the 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 out of the room and have a cappuccino…do that.”
So I read 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 I said “This paragraph number 48 in the fine print section in the end said the
accounting terms used in this agreement shall be redefined by the 21th Century Fox accounting
department at such time if any that litigation is entered into at such time if any that litigation
is entered into among the parties.
And I said “What does that mean?”
And he said “That is not in there?”
And I said “It is, let me show you.”
And I showed it to him.
And he said “I can’t believe that that’s still in there?
My attorney should have crossed that out.”
He had just signed the agreement?”
And I said “Well they didn’t.”
So that’s how I started learning by reading contracts because I think whatever kind of
thing you’re trying to do if it’s successful ends up 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 6-month period.
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 over 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 a
company in Canada and went to Montreal and shot them all (back to back meeting).
One movie ended on Friday and the next movie ended on Friday and it was a series of romantic
comedies.
And it came out of my teaching romantic literature and teaching publishing because a visiting
publisher was talking in my publishing class and 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 Capellanus (the Chaplin of Marie de France)
and I thought so maybe romance novels that everyone makes fun of are just an extension
of these ancient courtly stories (these love stories).
So 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 put all of the DVDs
on a shelf and they would form a rainbow.
So they were all called things like The Rose Cafe and Sunset Court and Indigo Autumn, etc.
And we did 16 of them and by that time I was fully in the business because I was in charge
of production (creative production) and within three movies my assistant and I were…we
knew what we were doing whereas we did not know what we were doing before the first movie
started shooting and then I came back to Los Angeles and because 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 ever since then.
So that was just because I thought of an idea and I didn’t know better.
If I’d know then what I know now I would never have sold it the way I sold it.
I simply went out with a concept and convinced the 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 and I wouldn’t show it to them until they signed an agreement
and they ended up signing the agreement in three days and then I manufactured the scripts
over the weekend by putting out a call to the romance novel community and getting back
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’ve
been in it for awhile is 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 I have to overcome that.
I just reached out to the head of a studio this morning.
But every time I do that 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 it was wrong so it was a light motion
to pick up the phone and call somebody.
And so whenever I get a new partner who is 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 it’s the traditional ideas that have a harder time.
So it is a completely wild and entrepreneurial frontier.
It’s probably the last frontier of American culture (the movie business) and it’s been
changing ever since I’ve been in it.
It constantly changes from a world in which video cassettes dominated (you could find
them anywhere) to a world in which we’re downstreaming from Netflix and Hulu and so
on.
The delivery methods have always changed.
And what doesn’t change (and this is the encouraging thing for writers) is 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 that create the content (the intellectual
property).
So they should be hugely encouraged.
You don’t have to understand all of the distribution methods you just need to know
how to tell a story and you’re in good shape.
Just keep telling stories.