One Degree of Separation

Probably all the bloggers on this site and anyone who works in Hollywood or New York in the great business of Show Business knows the name Bernie Brillstein.  Bernie was legendary, managing many of Saturday Night Lives’ stars, including SNL’s creator Lorne Michaels and cast members John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, and Phil Hartman. Bernie ran Lorimar for years, managed Jim Henson of Muppet fame, produced network and syndicated television and feature films with all the major movers and shakers of Hollywood, and founded the top production-management company of the nineties, Brillstein-Grey Entertainment.

I was stuck in the hospital last week for an hour-long visit that turned into a boring limbo of waiting for my ride to pick me up, some twelve hours late (thanks to a freak snowstorm and trapped traffic frozen to a stop on all highways).  I had no computer, no cell phone, and nothing to do but read Bernie Brillstein’s book, co-written with David Rensin: You’re No One in Hollywood Unless Someone Wants You Dead: Where Did I Go Right?

Before reading the book, I sort of knew who Bernie was, but he was in the agent/manager/producer end of the big blue Show Business Pool, the deep end, millions of dollars deep, while I am in the technical/camera/set/crew end of the Pool, where the dollars flowing past rarely reach your ankles.  Because we’re at such distant ends of the Business, my not knowing him personally isn’t surprising.  But what is surprising, though, is how many people he names in his book that I have actually worked with or met in the course of my little nothing job.

So with not much else to do in my hospital room, I went through the names in his book’s index and tagged those that Bernie Brillstein and I both have connections to.  Here are a fraction of those:

Matthew Broderick, Ed Burns, Chevy Chase, Dabney Coleman, Harrison Ford, Jim Frawley, Brian Grazer, John Landis, Rob Lowe, Steve Martin, Dennis Miller, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Ivan Reitman, George Schlatter, Tom Scott, Martin Short, and Bruce Willis, for a start.

Bernie Brillstein’s stories of how the deals were made that led to the eventual production hierarchies that spawned, finally, the movies I’ve worked on were enlightening.  I’ve never had occasion to ponder who first got the money together that brought the ideas or the scripts into the arena of reality, with dollars going out to everything from producers to actors to writers and from them on down to the physical manifestation of the actual making of the film.

But the myriads of decisions based on money were (and are) the foundation of everything I eventually work on, whether it’s an independent film, a big budget feature, or a television series.  This book provided a window into how the films I’ve worked on came to be, and where the millions of dollars came from that it took to produce them.

After reading the book, what’s scary, I suppose, is to know how big decisions are made: so many potentially wonderful ideas are thrown away based on a conversation, a misunderstood premise or promise, or simply one guy’s dislike of another guy.  Also what’s scary is how it’s almost always guys doing the deciding.  Even now.

But as I said, I’m at the far end, the shallow end of the Pool—a long way from big decisions or power and wealth.  Even so, there are great leveling forces that connect us all, whether we haul in $35 million for a film or $3500.

What I didn’t mention at the beginning of this blog entry is that I got Bernie’s book for Christmas from my mother, who had found it where many obscure books go to die—-at the Dollar Store.  And when I got home from the hospital, I looked up Bernie Brillstein on IMDB and found out that he died in August of 2008.

Near the end of his book, Bernie said: “The other day someone asked me why, after all I’d been through, I even bother to come to work. Easy. I don’t know where else I could have more fun.  …And for nearly forty-five years I’ve laughed more than most people I know.  Isn’t that what it’s all about—or at least supposed to be?  I think so.”

Speaking as a mere shallow-end-of-the-pool, dog-paddling, filmmaking drone, I can’t say whether or not Bernie is right.  I just know that, however many degrees of separation connect us, sooner or later we all have to get out of the pool.