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Features
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New Line's Old Pro
In his youth, he snagged a film award that has also been claimed by Scorsese and De Palma. But it’s what followed that really defined the career of Bob Shaye.
Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 4:10 PM
By Telly Davidson
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Amy Graves/WireImage.com
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Event host Larry Gelbart
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This past Tuesday, international writers’ organization PEN USA’s West Coast branch held its annual Literary Awards Festival amidst a backdrop of Hollywood glamour and exclusive film industry prestige at the Beverly Hills Hotel. It was an appropriate setting, as this year’s range of honorees reflected a great many achievements in quality filmmaking and television.
The ceremony and dinner were presided over by Oscar, Tony and Emmy royalty Larry Gelbart (M*A*S*H, Tootsie), who balanced the often somber context of many of the awards with the gallows humor that is the trademark of most of his plays, shows and films. The evening’s top-billed Lifetime Achievement Award went to literary fiction superstar Jane Smiley, for her body of novels dissecting the inner tensions of rural and lower-middle-class family life, while at the same time fearlessly championing cultural tolerance and free thought in her non-fiction and political essays.
Balancing the “books” was quintessential film industry insider and New Line Cinema founder and chairman Bob Shaye, who received the Award of Honor for his stellar motion picture career.
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Amy Graves/WireImage.com
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Bob Shaye with Office star Rainn Wilson
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The Office star Rainn Wilson (who also co-stars in New Line’s spring 2007 release The Last Mimzy) gave Shaye a bravura introduction before presenting him with the plaque. Wilson noted Shaye’s background as a Fulbright-graduated attorney and winner of 1964’s award from the Society of Cinematologists for Best Short subject directed by someone under 25 (other winners include Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma), before launching New Line while still in his late 20s, in 1968.
Indeed, one of the reasons PEN singled out Shaye for the honor is his - and New Line’s - remarkable diversity. New Line’s first notable US movies were John Waters’ camp classics from the early ‘70s, and the progenitor of ‘70s and early ‘80s slasher films, 1974’s barrier-bashing bloodletter The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
A decade later, New Line gave birth to Freddy Krueger. The box office success of Wes Craven’s signature “nightmare” put New Line on the Hollywood map and throughout the next decade, Shaye continued to keep his finger on youth culture’s pulse with icons like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the “shagadelic” world of Austin Powers, bay-bay!
Yet judging by these artistically humble beginnings, few would have predicted that during the 1990s and into today, New Line would also become a pre-eminent producer of literary, high-quality filmmaking. But that’s where Shaye’s career truly came into awards territory, as he cannily used the receipts from these mass-appeal, low-budget blockbusters to finance serious, award-winning filmmaking.
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Amy Graves/WireImage.com
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Simpsons creator Matt Groenig
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Just a few of his critical and commercial successes over the past decade and a half include Magnolia, My Own Private Idaho, About Schmidt, Hoop Dreams, Shine, The Sweet Hereafter and a little number called Lord of the Rings. Not to mention stepping up to release Robert Altman’s final film, this summer’s Prairie Home Companion.
The Award for Best Screenplay (published in 2005) was given to George Clooney and Grant Heslov, for last year’s Oscar-nominated Good Night and Good Luck. While Mr. Clooney was perhaps too busy being honored by American Movie Classics for his fine body of acting and directorial work to show up at PEN, his co-writer Heslov - humorously noting at one point that he was the handsomer of the two - stepped up to receive the prize.
Meanwhile, Best Teleplay went to Alex Tse for his fearless Showtime movie Sucker Free City, about the boiling-over melting pot between Asian, Hispanic, and African-American “gangstaz” in San Francisco. (Interestingly, the winner of the 2005 Best Picture Oscar, Paul Haggis’ Crash, did not even make the final five among PEN’s screenplay finalists.)
PEN judge Michael Sragow explained that in awarding Good Night top prize against the crushing competition of Brokeback Mountain and Capote, he was recognizing the film for the tricky task of capturing both the then-defeat of McCarthyism while also “questioning the import of Murrow’s triumph” in the long run.
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Amy Graves/WireImage.com
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Actor Danny Huston
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If Sragow’s comments sound like a subtle dig at our current President, it was purely intentional. The “Cheney-Bush Junta”, as last year’s Lifetime Achievement recipient Gore Vidal terms it, has no love lost among most of these PEN wielders.
San Francisco Chronicle journalists Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada received the prestigious First Amendment Award for their refusal – at risk of prison time – to name a confidential source in the face of a federal prosecutor appointed by the Gonzales Justice Department to look into a Grand Jury leak in the Barry Bonds drug-abuse scandal. And the Freedom to Write Award was handed out to Iraq’s journalistic community as a whole.
Gelbart sadly noted that to individually recognize any of Iraq’s best and most notable journalists (thereby “outing” their names to the general public) would be to essentially sign their death warrants, as the country continues to degenerate ever further into civil warfare.
As is often the case, several notable actors also served on PEN’s advisory board overseeing the awards. This year’s lineup included Teri Garr, Michael Parks and Dana Delany, following such past actor-advisors as Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward and Brian Cox. For this year’s event, Sidney Sheldon, Norman Lear, April Smith, Lorraine Despres, Carleton Eastlake and Bruce Joel Rubin rounded out the sizeable screenwriting contingent behind the awards program.
[Telly Davidson, a regular FilmStew contributor, is the author of the brand new glossy paperback TV’s Grooviest Variety Shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s (Cumberland House). For more information, please click here.]
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