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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
A frank talk with Gil Cates, the man who's producing the biggest TV show of the year.
Mar 23, 2001 | Of all the thankless jobs in show business, producing the annual Academy Awards must rank below being Bruce Willis' hair wrangler. The executive producer is responsible for coordinating hundreds of needy, high-profile egos, choreographing a four-hour mix of introductions, film clips, performers and host material and making sure that, in the end, the right envelope makes it to the stage at the right time.
Putting together one show takes three months, and each year, the spectacle of a show names 24 winners. At the same time, nearly 1 billion people are examining the show with a magnifying glass, looking for the screwups of live television and the miniature scandals set off by this winner or that. At the end of the day, the news shows don't talk about the logistics that go into scripting the stars into fairly seamless live television, with almost every conceivable reaction shot readied, with fail-safe after fail-safe preparation for emergencies. Instead, they talk about the ever-increasing running time, the vapidity of the dance numbers and a few tasteless dresses. The producer can't win.
You'd never know it listening to Gil Cates.
The seasoned director has more than 20 movies to his credit (including "Oh, God Book II" and the Oscar-nominated Gene Hackman tear-jerker "I Never Sang for My Father"). He will be directing his 11th Academy Awards telecast Sunday night. Cates, who says he loves the gig as much as he did when he started directing the show, is a maestro of self-congratulatory pomp and circumstance, a man with a Zen-like armor of nonchalance that protects him from the slings and arrows of Oscar bashers.
I recently chatted with Gil Cates via phone. He diplomatically danced around questions on Joan Rivers, his most egregious Oscar show and the top-secret list of hosts to replace Billy Crystal.
You're the Michael Corleone of Oscar telecasts -- every time you think you're out they just pull you back in. Why do you keep doing this to yourself?
Oh, that is so funny. I love that. Well, when I did the first show [back in 1990], I was sure I was only going to do one. The truth of the matter is, the people with whom I work are very nice and it's just a fun show to do -- even though the climate has gotten a little testier over the years.
And by "testy" you mean ...
Well, the level of caring and kindness has somehow diminished throughout the country and I guess we reflect that as much as anything else.
As someone who spent the majority of his career directing movies and plays, what was the lure of doing an awards show in the first place?
Essentially what happened is that I was on the board of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences the year after the '89 show Alan Carr had produced. The then president of the academy was Richard Kahn and he appointed a committee of academy board members just to look into the show in terms of ways of improving it and things to watch out for. Also on that committee was Karl Malden, and when he was made president of the academy the following year, he said to me, "OK, big shot. You got all these ideas, so why don't you produce it?" I had been asked to do it before and just wasn't able to, so this time I thought it would be fun. It was quite accidental and quite innocent.
What's the most creatively fulfilling aspect of doing a program like this?
One is, of course, getting all these people together to do the show live. There's no retake on that, there's no tape delay -- it's totally live.
Part of the excitement is around the fact that all this happens live at that given time. I think essentially people watch us because they like horse races -- they like to see who won and who lost.
There is a certain satisfaction that my colleagues and I get from presenting these 24 awards or so in a way that seems as painless as possible. Time, regardless of the length of the show, seems to go fast. I know a lot of the folks who watch the show would [disagree] that anyone is making an attempt to do that, but I can assure them that we all do.
The other thing is to try each year to somehow surprise the audience with something that you do or educate them about something they've never seen before. I take great pleasure out of the fact that one year we did a year devoted to women and one of the film packages was on women in editing. People in our industry, let alone the lay world, were surprised to learn that until the '50s editing was done mostly by women.
[Or] take dance, for example. Dance is in deep trouble in the United States, so some people get their first opportunity to see dance of any kind on the Academy Awards show. All those reasons make it fun to do the show, plus the fact that it's nice to have a period of a couple of months where people return my phone calls.
You've received a lot of flak in the past for overloading the telecast with too many of the aforementioned film montages and dance numbers. How do you respond to this criticism? And feel free to address your detractors by name.
My favorite critic story is about a show five years ago. We got a review in the New York Times that called us one of the best awards shows in recent memory and said that it went along quickly and flawlessly, etc. The Los Angeles Times called it a lengthy bore. Frankly, and you want my honest-to-God opinion ...
We expect nothing less.
I don't spend much time listening to what the critics of Academy Awards show say. You know, the critic's view is based generally on preconceived notions or ignorance. I still meet people who tell me they're annoyed at the fact that the Academy Awards show explains the rules in great detail -- the show hasn't explained those in 15 years! People tend to slobber one show onto another show and they really kind of forget the differences between the two. Basically, the issue for me is, Can we make the show entertaining given its length and the number of awards that are mandated to be presented? The show is very much like the World Series; its length is the length necessary to do the job.
