YES, THAT WILL BE FINE -- REMEMBERING GARY KURTZ 1940-2018

Gary Kurtz, comics legend Will Eisner, and me in New York, 1980

Last Monday was a day of mixed emotions for me. On the one hand, I was traveling by the L.A. Metro to South Pasadena to meet with my publisher at Third Street Press to sign the contract for them to publish my next three novels, Bully for Love, The Reluctant Heterosexual, and Journey to Where. Obviously a joyful trip. On the other hand, mid-trip I heard the news of the death of Gary Kurtz, the producer of American Graffiti and the first two Star Wars films.

It did not come as a surprise. Gary’s daughter, Melissa, had emailed on September 13th to inform me—and I assume others whose lives had been touched by Gary—that he had been ill with cancer for a while and was losing the battle. But still, Gary had touched my life, and my wife Amanda’s, so profoundly that a sudden and deep sadness struck me.

I first met Gary in 1979 at the Los Angeles International Film Exposition (or Filmex, as it was known). I had produced several programs on animation for Filmex, and after I had made my introductory remarks for one of the programs—most likely for The Animator as Actor—I walked to the back of the theater and found Gary standing there watching the films. I recognized him immediately. After American Graffiti and the first Star Wars film (known then simply as Star Wars) he was already an iconic figure in filmmaking with his handsome stoic face and Quaker beard. I was thrilled. I knew that Gary was an active friend of Filmex (I believe he was on the board of advisors) so I did not find it unusual that he would be there—but he, a current, major, big deal Hollywood producer at a program of cartoons! That was unheard of in 1979.

What I didn’t know at that moment was that Gary was a huge fan of animation. And that he would in the near future have a fireproof vault at his building in Marin County north of San Francisco—a beautifully refurbished elementary school and HQ for his Kinetographics company—that would house his extensive comic book collection.

I went up and introduced myself and thanked him for coming. He accepted that thanks gracefully and I believe it was at that time that he told me that he was hoping to have Chuck Jones’s “Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century” as a pre-feature short in front on the next year’s release of The Empire Strikes Back. Which probably gave us a few more moments of talk as I handled publicity for Chuck at that time.

I walked away from this encounter pleased and knowing that I now had a neat memory to hold onto. Little did I know that the next year Gary would become a major part of my life.

Sometime in early 1980, a fellow Filmexican (as we called ourselves) who owned an animation camera service invited me to his offices. He wanted to show me a pencil test he had shot for a young CalArts graduate. He knew that I wanted to get involved in not just promoting animation but producing it because I was frustrated that the form was mired in horrible doldrums (Disney animation was being declared all but dead and its only competitors seemed to be Care Bear features) and that it had been relegated to the wilderness of a kids-only art form. My fellow Filmexican said this pencil test featured animation that would thrill me.

I was skeptical, but he was right. It was a pencil test in the form of a movie trailer for an animated feature based on Will Eisner’s innovative, beautifully drawn comic book series, The Spirit, a sort of sophisticated superhero noir from the 1940s (if you’re interested and want to see the trailer go HERE) It was beautifully done and featured the best human character animation I had ever seen. I immediately said, “Who created this, I’ve got to meet him.”

You may not be surprised to learn that it was Brad Bird  (who years later directed The Incredibles) who conceived of and wrote the trailer and who had corralled other young CalArts animation grads to animate with him on it.

I met with Brad the next day, told him how much I love it and that I wanted to help him get it made. Brad—being Brad—said the only people he would consider showing the trailer to and working with was Francis Ford Coppola or Steven Spielberg or George Lucas or Gary Kurtz.

I told him I thought I could get him to Gary Kurtz. And, through Chuck Jones’s office, I did. We showed the trailer to Gary at the Lucasfilm Hollywood offices (known surreptitiously as The Egg Company) and he seemed to like it, although his reaction was muted, to say the least. He said to let him think about it and he would get back to us. Shortly thereafter I received a call from his assistant, the wonderful Bunny Alsup (wonderful then, still wonderful today) with a message from Gary: He was going to buy the rights to The Spirit and we would all try to get the film made.

The next six years was very much the “Gary Kurtz” period of my life. The first two years were spent negotiating the rights to The Spirit and developing the project. The second two years I joined Gary’s Kinetographics company as Director of Animation Development and his “guy” on an American/Japanese co-production that saw Amanda and me moving to Tokyo for a year. During the last two years, Gary and I partnered in a live action/animation film project based on an idea of mine.

None of these projects in development, as is often the case in filmmaking, were made. I certainly have regrets about that. But I have no regrets about the time spent with Gary. He was a unique and special man, a man whose legacy is only now being realized by some and whose potential was sadly not understood by others.

I’ve been pleased to read that a number Gary’s obituaries acknowledge his deeply important contributions to the creation, execution, and mythic storytelling that was the first two Star Wars films. Getting to know him, albeit, after his work on Star Wars, I have always believed it. For those first two films are almost universally considered superior to the third, and certainly to the years-later Lucas directed prequels. As is well-known, Gary split from Lucasfilm after The Empire Strikes Back. We had heard at the time that Lucas was upset at Gary because the film, which was directed by Irvin Kershner, had gone over budget and Lucas had to give up some rights to 20th Century Fox to make up the shortfall and that he blamed Gary for this. In later years Gary has been quoted saying that he left because he did not like that way the third film, Return of the Jedi, was being developed with more emphasis on promoting the merchandising of toys rather than deepening the storytelling of the myth. I’m sure there is truth in both reasons. What Gary told me was that as producer of Empire he felt that his job was to protect the director’s vision (Kershner’s) and not the executive producer’s (Lucas’s).

Gary understood the business of film, but it was the art of film that mattered to him.

Some of my favorite memories of Gary:

His presence in a room. Gary not only had the beard of a Quaker—he was a Quaker. He could have come from Central Casting for a remake of Friendly Persuasion with his natural stoic demeanor, upright posture, and his exuding of a Zen-like (if I can meld two religions) calm. He was not a loud, blustery, egocentric, glad-handing, backslapping Hollywood producer. Indeed, he was not a “Hollywood” anything. He was a serious yet gleeful lover of the art and potential of cinema who felt, it seemed to me, that the production was important while personalities weren’t. He had a very subtle charisma. You looked up to him. You may very well have wanted him as your guru.

And yet, he was hard to really get to know. He was at times inscrutable. At least for me. I remember that when we were scheduling our first meeting about my joining his company, he asked me to meet him at his house in the Hollywood Hills on Elusive Drive. My first thought was, never had a man lived on a more appropriate street.

Elusive Drive turned out to be a narrow dirt road that hugged a hill with a severe drop-off on the other side. It scared the shit out of me to drive it, which I immediately reported to Gary when I got to his house, saying I thought I had just been in a scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. His slight smile at that seemed to indicate that he was amused.

Later, when we were in partnership, we had a pitch meeting with Alan Ladd, Jr., then the head of MGM. Laddie, as he was known, had, of course, been at 20th when the first two Star Wars films were made, so he and Gary knew each other very well. Ladd was also a quiet-spoken, laconic man, although more cowboy than Quaker, much like his dad, film star Alan Ladd. We sat down in his office and Gary and Ladd faced off each other.

“Gary,” Ladd said in simple greeting.

A beat.

“Laddie,” Gary greeted back.

A beat.

“How are you?” Ladd asked.

A beat.

“Good. And you…”

It was like watching a ping-pong game in slow motion. But the meeting was successful, Laddie bought the pitch.

Whenever you asked Gary something requiring a yes or no answer and the answer was yes, it was never just yes. Or, sure, okay, yep, it was always, “Yes, that will be fine.”  There was something very royal about it. Not arrogant royal or egocentric royal, or “It’s good to be the king” royal, just...just royal.

Gary enjoyed comedy and humor but I never saw him break out into laughter. Nary a titter, a sustained ha-ha-ha, a belly-busting guffaw. But there was often that slight smile and possibly a chuckle. Once when we were in Tokyo together he asked me how I liked living there, and I told him how much I like the city, but didn’t relish going out into the county.

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because I’ve heard they only have those old toilets where you can’t sit but have to squat.”

“Well, actually, you know, squatting is the natural way to defecate.”  

“Yeah, but it makes it so hard to read.”

Gary was truly perplexed. “Why would you want to read?”

“Because there’s nothing more boring than taking a dump.”

I was, of course, trying to get a chuckle out of him. I think I at least got another wonderful slight smile.

At the beginning of the Japanese/American production we worked for the first year in Hollywood. My new salary allowed me to move into a larger apartment and to invite Amanda, eventually my wife, to join me. In setting up housekeeping we wanted to get one of those new-fangled home video cassette recorders. But which to get—Beta or VHS? I asked Gary for a recommendation. “Professional filmmakers only have Beta,” my guru told me. So we bought a Beta. A year later when living in Tokyo and Amanda and I was getting married Gary’s wedding present to us was another Beta for our Tokyo house. I can’t tell you how many films and programs we recorded or bought in Beta that we later had to throw out when VHS won the battle between the two formats. But that didn’t make Gary wrong. Beta was considered the superior format. It just didn’t have superior marketing.

Gary may well have been the Beta film producer. He was never involved in a success as great as the three he did with Lucas. He may well have been if, at the time, certain powers-that-be understood how important Gary had been to those successes. But it was Lucas’s name on the shingle. Not that Gary would have wanted his name on the shingle. When we were forming our partnership, I proposed that it be called Kurtz/Leiva Productions. He refused. He said he did not like naming production companies after people. His own company’s name, Kinetographics, was named after Thomas Edison’s kinetographic camera, which launched American film. It simply means, motion pictures. Gary’s interest was in the history, technology, and art of cinema, not in personalities, including his own. I did get him to agree to K&L Enterprises, but that’s as far as he would go.

Gary did not really fit in the new Hollywood that he helped create, inadvertently, I believe. A Hollywood that began to lust after blockbusters. Despite my thinking when I first saw him that Gary was a “major, big deal Hollywood producer,”  he really wasn’t. He was a filmmaker who helped in an essential way to shephard films that were surprisingly and outlandishly successful. All the “smart” people in Hollywood thought they were doomed to fail. But once they succeeded, these same “smart” people happily scraped the surface of what made them successes, ignoring the deeper, harder to create depth that was really the genesis of their success.

No, Gary was never really a “Hollywood” producer. But he was a filmmaker to his core whose legacy will hopefully never be forgotten.

The last time Amanda and I saw Gary was at his daughter Tiffany’s wedding years ago. He had moved to England years before that. After those six years of involvement with him, and a short time in the 90s, I rarely got to see him. And yet, he was rarely out of my thoughts.

If someone right now would say to me, Okay, look you can have one last hour in Gary’s presence, my only possible answer would be, “Yes, that will be fine.”