Dr. Ken Atchity, Producer/Author: Diversity has always been something that I’ve been
in love with because when I was in college I took English and Classics kind of double
major because I couldn’t decide which one to go for.
When I heard about comparative literature my last year at Georgetown I thought “This
is perfect, it’s the study of different cultures.
And it’s about putting things together.”
So I’ve written crazy pieces like comparing Wallace Stevens to Petrarca and Dante with
Joyce and that’s what I think is the most interesting thing is when you juxtapose two
things or three things rather than focusing one thing.
That’s one of the things where the academic world annoyed me about sometimes until I discovered
comparative literature and took that degree at Yale and ended up teaching that and I think
that the rest of my life has been an extension of working in more than one discipline.
In addition to movies, I’m very involved in books.
I’ve just finished another book of my own and I publish books because four years ago
I realized I was having a tough time after selling books to New York for 20 years or
more and having more than 20 New York Times Best Sellers
purchased by conglomerations around the world there was not much chance for a young, new
voice, what they were looking for is established brands and you know the old joke that Stephen
King could publish the phone book with his name on it and that’s just the way it is
in this huge country where marketing and branding is what it’s all about to get the attention
of this 300 million audience.
So I came up with the idea and what was happening to me is because I couldn’t publish things
as easily as I could before I published 250 books, and sold them to publishers and I could
take those books to Hollywood and sell them to Hollywood.
They no longer had books to take to Hollywood so I decided to start my own imprint (Story
Merchant Books) which I did and that was five years ago and we’ve published over 200 books
now.
And I now take them to Hollywood and set them up as series or set them up as movies and
no one seems to mind that they are not Random House books.
They don’t even look at the publisher basically.
They listen to me pitch the story at lunch and then they take the book home and read
it.
And so I’ve always been involved in sort of comparative situations because I’ve got
New York publishing and Hollywood and I’ve used them back and forth against each other
because Hollywood has this huge respect for books and New York has this awe of movies
primarily because of the marketing money associated with movies they can then ride along with
when they publish the book.
We are having a big auction on a book that is appearing this summer after 22 years called
THE MEG and we sold it 22 years ago, that’s how long it’s been.
We developed it through one of my companies and then sold it to a publisher and then we
sold it to the studio and it’s been 22 years in development hell until finally it’s getting
made.
And one of the good things about stories is that they’re timeless.
One of my favorite examples which is no solace to its author Herman Melville is that Moby
Dick sold about 60 copies prior to Melville’s death and within two decades after his death
it became not only an international bestseller but The Great American Novel.
So the stories are timeless and that’s what writers are capable of doing, of creating
something timeless which is of immense value obviously to the human race.
The Iliad and the Odyssey were composed thousands of years ago and yet there are still on every
bookstores shelves, you can find them all over the Internet.
So the power of stories I’ve always loved the fact stories can grow up to be a book
or the same story can grow up and be a movie.
Once I had a screenplay that I loved that won the Nicholls award, one of the highest
awards in the business and it was placed almost at the top (not quite).
But I read it, loved it, tried to sell it to the studios.
They all thought it was too original, the didn’t know who the author was and they
ended up passing.
So I told the author “Let’s turn this story into a book.”
And so long story short, we did and I sold it to a major publisher and within a couple
of weeks of selling it to a major publisher, we had an auction in Hollywood and sold it
to a major studio and it went into development.
And we’ve done it kind of the opposite way as someone was trying to write a project in
one form and I told them to write it in the other because of a random conversation with
an editor and she thought it sounded like the best novel she’d ever heard and he wasn’t
a novelist but long story short within three months he wrote a novel, we sold it and then
sold it for 1.2 million dollars to a major studio in Hollywood.
So I thought “That’s my comparative literature background.
The idea of having two different worlds to put together and recognize how they are related
to each other.
I learned that there are wormholes between New York and LA because when I was just beginning
to shop the novel in the second case I send it to only one publisher which was the person
who told me it sounded like a great idea (she didn’t know I only sent it to her, but I
sent it to her alone) and three days later I got a call from George Clooney’s partner
asking if he could option it and I said “How did you hear about that?”
And he said “I can’t tell you.”
And I said “Well…if you can’t tell me…do you want to read it?
What do you want to do?”
And he goes “No…no…we’ve read it already and we want to make an offer on it.”
So that began an auction on that property too.
But I learned that there was a wormhole going on because I called the editor and fished
around talking to her and she denied that anyone had ever read it outside of her office
which couldn’t have been true because clearly someone had read it, got snuck out through
the wormhole.
I thought I could only have done this if I had the whole mentality of I will not find
my niche if I’m only working in films, I will not only work in books, I will work in
both and love them both.
They are just two different forms of storytelling and why can’t any story that’s dramatic
end up in both camps and that’s kind of what I’ve done throughout my career is try
to get the story for both camps.
Film Courage: It’s funny too because I would think the entrance into the literary world
(the New York literary world) is much more based on pedigree and different things, whereas
Hollywood…you’ve got a great script?
Anything goes, you’re in the front door if they like you.
So it sounds like that’s not always the case, that’s my perception of it.
Dr. Ken Atchity: Without offending you, it’s an old fashioned, 1950’s perception.
Because you can have a great script and get no where in Hollywood.
It’s getting it to the right person that matter.
And even with a great script as that (where I talked the guy into writing the book) and
then sold it to an auction too.
He had a great script and he was able to get it to people but they didn’t buy it because
what’s happened in the last 20 years is that Hollywood and New York have become corporatized.
They’ve all been acquired by international conglomerate and there isn’t a single studio
that isn’t owned by some foreign accumulation with the exception of Disney which is of course
itself an international conglomerate, right?
But Sony owns Columbia and Paramount is owned by CBS, Viacom.
So because of that the executives have totally changed from a world in which (and the same
is true in publishing) from a world people with guts and vision made decisions about
doing the story, publishing it or green lighting a movie.
Now it’s corporate people wearing suits who are very worried for their jobs, who I
alway say their main focus is on their gold card and their Mercedes and they don’t want
to do anything to jeopardize that.
Whereas the heads of studios in the old days would just take changes “This is a great
story.
I love it, I’m going to do this story.”
But now they have to show marketing reports (and this is true in New York just as well)
because Hachette has bought the old Warner books and CBS owns Simon & Schuster, Touchstone
and all those things.
Every one of the big companies, Holtzbrinck owns Macmillan, Thomas Dunne Books and Tor
Books and St. Martin's Press and Penguin Doubleday, Random House, they are all part of one huge
foreign conglomerate (and so on).
So because of that every one has to think like corporate employees.
They have to provide marketing marketing P&L’s to the editorial department and the marketing
department.
The marketing department has the last say not the editorial department.
They go “How do you know we’re going to sell 100,000 copies of this book?”
“Well I just have a gut feeling.”
“Well sorry, your tract record doesn’t justify you having a gut feeling.”
So they’ll let a really talented, brilliant editor make a couple of decisions like that
a year.
If she doesn’t prove it out by those books becoming best-sellers, she gets less leash
every year and the same is true in Hollywood.
And the studios have gotten even worse because they are focused now entirely on brands and
in the last six years or so they are now doing a fraction of the number of movies they used
to do because they’d rather spend two hundred million dollars on a brand then take a 50
million dollar chance on a great story that has no track record.
That’s why TWILIGHT got kicked out of Paramount.
It was sitting there in development hell for several years and Paramount didn’t get it
and they didn’t understand why it was going to be great.
Someone came along and bought it from Paramount and cashed out on it and Paramount goes “Oh?
Okay, well…”
They didn’t have any regrets because there is no they there.
No one sits around wringing hands, they are all doing understandable logic and no one
lost their job over it, that’s the important part.
Whereas if you green light a movie and it goes down the tubes, you can lose your job.
Then you’re out shopping for a new Mercedes at another place.
So that’s kind of what’s happened to our world.
In the meantime, the need for stories continues and storytellers are still hugely in demand,
you just have to find a new path each time, that’s why I started the Imprint so I could
get around the issue and then I just take to New York big brands like something with
the word Kennedy on it or Dracula and I can sell those still but I know I can’t sell
smaller books.
I try sometimes because I love the books so much but invariably it comes down to we better
publish this ourselves.