The Producer

By Randall Couch

Jon Avnet, C’71, removes his baseball cap and stretches one arm along the sofa. Looking around the room, he pulls a word out of the air: “Footprints.”

“Where we place our footprints now,” he says, “will determine the path we’re on in 10 years.” The soft-spoken Hollywood mogul is talking about Penn’s future as a leader in cinema culture, but the statement could be a motto for his own journey. It’s a career that is by his own admission improbable, and one that has developed his capacity to be tough and pragmatic in order to nurture the things he believes in.

It began at Penn, where a TA in an undergraduate writing course told him the images in some poems he’d written were fresh and striking – that he showed talent. “That validation came at a crucial time for me. Like a lot of kids, I was self-critical and full of doubts. But I began to think, ‘Maybe, just maybe, I can do this – I can create something.’”

He moved on to Sarah Lawrence College, where he studied theater and film, doing everything from hanging lights to directing. His mentor there was Wilford Leach, who also ran the now legendary La MaMa ETC, an experimental theater club on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. “Stuff that we would do at college served as workshops for La MaMa,” he recalls. For someone interested in film, that experience was especially useful, since La MaMa’s performances were multimedia events.

Avnet remembers his own efforts during this time as a series of disappointments. “In my own mind, they were failures, and I yearned to get to something that wasn’t totally embarrassing.” He persisted. “What motivated me, pure and simple, was that I loved film. I loved what it could say, and how it could move people.

“In a psychology class, I read R.D. Laing’s case study of a woman, very disturbed and actively suicidal, who saw a movie that I love called ‘La Strada,’ by Fellini. When she heard Richard Basehart’s speech to Giulietta Masina, who plays an abused woman – it’s almost a silly speech, about every pebble having a purpose – this very disturbed woman responded by feeling that maybe she had value too. When I read that story, I thought, ‘My God, if a film can give someone hope – save a life or motivate a life – maybe that’s a worthwhile profession.’”

While still an undergraduate, Avnet convinced family and friends to invest in his first serious short. “Confusion’s Circle” introduced a young unknown named Richard Gere. Well received on the festival circuit, the movie earned Avnet a directing fellowship at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

At AFI he earned money by shooting celebrity stills and later by reading scripts for Mike Medavoy at United Artists. “It was a great way in,” he recalls, “because I got to see professional scripts – part of the writer’s learning curve.”

Before leaving AFI, he took a job with a producer team. The first project he worked on was the 1973 Bruce Lee vehicle, “Enter the Dragon.” “They said to me, ‘Come … pay some dues, and then we’ll give you a directing job,’ because they were doing these low-budget movies. Diligent puppy that I was, I jumped at the opportunity. But after two and a half years, when the time came for me to direct my movie, they said the budgets had gone up and they couldn’t make it happen.

“At that point I made a decision, a poor man’s version of Scarlett O’Hara: I’m never again going to put myself under other people’s control. I would take my limited production experience and try to develop projects as a producer so that I could build some credibility. Then, when I’d done that, I’d direct more or less on my own terms.”

Looking back, Avnet smiles. “Now that plan is as whimsical as it is practical. It was very unlikely to happen, and it worked out exactly that way. I gave myself about 18 months to try it before I’d have to get a job again. Fortunately, my wife was working at the time. So I partnered with a guy named Steve Tisch, whom I’d worked with on a film called ‘Outlaw Blues’ that our company had produced, and together we invested about $20,000 in four projects and tried to get them made.”

Avnet defines a producer as the highest-profile helper on a film. “It’s kind of a miracle each time a movie gets finished,” he says. “It’s so complicated. The principal skill a producer needs is to be a really good problem solver. It takes a lot of attention to detail and a kind of relentlessness. And then there’s the law of inertia: nothing moves until it’s acted upon by an outside force. That force is often the producer’s will.”

He cultivated relentlessness. Tisch/Avnet productions succeeded in making some films, and he didn’t need to look for a job. Then, in 1983, they brought out “Risky Business,” which made Tom Cruise a star and rewarded investors with a $4.2 million opening weekend.

Avnet recalls that the director, Paul Brickman, had wanted to shoot a scene in the restaurant on the 97th floor of Chicago’s Hancock Building. “So I went up and tried to get permission, and the guy who ran the restaurant there said no. So I said, ‘Don’t say no, say maybe. Think about it. I’ll make it worth your while – and not just in terms of the payment; I know a lot of people.’ He said no. So I said, ‘Don’t say no, say maybe.’ We went around like that four or five times until he finally said, ‘Listen, you’re being a real pain, Avnet. You’re not going to shoot here.’ So I called up a few friends and found out who owned the building. And I discovered that someone on the board of directors was friendly with Steve’s [Tisch] family, so I got him on the phone, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, you can shoot there.’ So I said, ‘Well, be nice to the guy; he was just trying to do his job.’ Then I get a call from the restaurant guy, who said, ‘Anything you want.’ That’s a producer’s job: finding a way to get him to say yes.”

“Risky Business” was followed quickly by NBC’s TV movie “The Burning Bed.” The drama brought unprecedented attention to the plight of battered women, reaching more viewers than any previous movie on the network. Nearly 100,000 women, Avnet estimates, called a special hotline to seek help. “That,” he says, “was about as satisfying as it gets.”

So at 34, 13 years out of college, Avnet took stock. He had gained movie-making experience, taken financial risks, learned to bring films in on budget and gained a reputation as a writer’s producer – somebody who could help sharpen a script and get it produced. He had his platform; it was time to write and direct his own films.

Avnet and Tisch dissolved their partnership; in 1986 Avnet teamed up with Jordan Kerner. The next year he began work on a project that would see his own creative vision rewarded, the 1991 release “Fried Green Tomatoes.” None of the studios where he pitched the project responded to Fannie Flagg’s novel or to the script. “I knew they wouldn’t; it was just too odd. ... So I had to go the independent route. In order to get my first movie as a director made, I had to use all the producing skills I’d developed when I was paying my dues.”

The movie was a surprise box-office hit, inaugurating a genre of women’s ensemble stories. Jessica Tandy was nominated for an Academy Award – as was the screenplay. Avnet’s relentlessness had paid off. “Things had worked out extremely well for me. I had created a name for myself, I’d been involved with projects that had affected the cultural landscape, I’d been all over the world – some amazing things. So in the mid 1990s, I made a conscious decision to help some young filmmakers – just as people like Tom Pollack and David Geffen had taken a chance on me. Then about seven years ago, my associate Marsha Oglesby showed me this six-minute pilot of Kerry Conran’s.” That six-minute movie, the result of years of Conran’s obsessive labor on his Macintosh computer, would become, with Avnet’s
help, “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.”

Not only did Avnet buy a building and create, in effect, his own studio to realize Conran’s dream of a movie whose actors would perform in a digitally created retro-fantasy world, but he sold A-list stars Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Angelina Jolie on the project. During development, he shielded the unworldly Conran from studio executives who would have homogenized his vision and then sold domestic distribution rights for the finished picture to Paramount.

Avnet is as proud of Conran’s successful transition to cowriter and director as he is about having produced a milestone in cinema technology. “In the end, it comes down to the story – whether people care about what happens to the characters,” he says. “I think we made a good movie.”

Avnet’s writing, producing and directing schedule is as busy as ever, but he continues to give back as a member of the SAS Board of Overseers, as an adviser and industry link to Penn’s Cinema Studies Program, and as a regular guest at the Kelly Writers House. “The nurturing of talent is a critical part of a university education,” he insists. “Exposure to people who are doing creative work at a high level is really important. In a very structured place, you need something a little less structured – something that pushes you to go beyond rote work to original thinking. That’s what I hope I, and the people I work with, can contribute to Penn.”

Randall Couch last wrote for the magazine in the spring 2004 issue.