Pauline Kael - Brian Kellow [177]
News of Pauline’s difficulties was inevitably leaked to the press, and Newsweek quoted one studio insider as saying that she “did a masterful job of alienating everybody within six weeks.” Pauline claimed that she was pleased to be relieved of her producing duties because “producers just stand around and wring their hands,” and asserted that her new post was much more to her liking. But her new job soon became even more problematic than the old one had been. There was a distinct hierarchy at Paramount: Diller was the studio chief; Michael Eisner, an old ABC-TV colleague who had helped launch the monster hits Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley, and whom Diller had induced to join Paramount, was CEO; and Donald Simpson was senior vice president of worldwide production. Unfortunately for Pauline, Simpson was the one who effectively ran studio operations—and the executive to whom she was directly answerable. Simpson would soon become a Hollywood legend, one of the individuals who changed the industry permanently with his “marketing first, production second” paradigm. He helped refine the idea that a movie blockbuster did not require careful planning before being presented to the studios; a mammoth hit could spring from a pitch that lasted no more than thirty seconds. Sometimes it could even spring from a single line, a single idea—as long as it was something the marketing executives could sell. This became known as “high concept,” memorably described by Simpson’s biographer, Charles Fleming, as “a supercharged, simpleminded creature, an Aesop’s fable on crystal meth.” Pauline’s own notions about developing properties ran completely opposite to Simpson’s, and she soon found herself caught in the crossfire of studio politics.
One of the difficulties was that Simpson had not been involved in the hiring of Pauline; Beatty had cut the deal directly with Diller, who ultimately handed her over to Simpson. According to Toback, Simpson had been enraged, feeling that he had been treated like a studio errand boy. It was he who made the decision to kill Love and Money, and he decided, on principle, to block whatever Pauline proposed. Years later he told Toback that when Pauline was put under his supervision, “It was a cake put in my lap, and all I had to do was take out my knife. Rarely in life can you pay back an insult so easily and so quickly.”
Surviving studio correspondence bears out that this was the state of affairs in which Pauline found herself mired. She attempted to launch a number of projects after being taken off Love and Money. One was Quinces, an original script by her good friend and Great Barrington neighbor, the humorist Roy Blount, Jr. It went nowhere, and everything for which she subsequently expressed enthusiasm was routinely shot down by Simpson. “Dear Pauline,” he wrote to her in late July, “as we discussed last Friday night at the Brian De Palma movie, this is a piece of material that we are not interested in. We just don’t believe in it as a movie.” On another occasion, referring to a script called Dixianne, Simpson wrote, “Eisner and I have reviewed one more time and, unfortunately, it is still pass. Clearly this is a case of oversight versus foresight. At least, as Roy Blount Jr. would say, ‘You’re batting 500.’ Warmest regards, Don Simpson.”
Soon enough she realized that it was not possible for her to survive in this environment. She was appalled by the coarse behavior of some of the executives, particularly at one casting session, in which she witnessed a selection of actresses’ eight-by-ten head shots divided into two piles: “Would fuck her” and “Wouldn’t fuck her.” She had assumed that people would want to listen to what she had to say, and she quickly understood that while they might be polite on the surface, they regarded her as completely disposable. She was