Word: paramounts
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...wood legitimacy. Author of award-winning short stories, screenwriter of such intelligent exploitation movies as The Lady in Red and Alligator, gifted writer-director of the no-budget Return of the Secaucus 7 and the low-budget Lianna, Sayles has traded up. His new film is being released by Paramount Pictures, was shot with a union crew, and is the first Sayles movie he has not edited on the kitchen table of his home in Hoboken, N.J. But Baby, It's You is not the traditional calling-card film of an ambitious young talent, shaping its dexterity...
...cover story. "Everything about this show was big, including the number of people who worked on it," comments Los Angeles Correspondent Denise Worrell of the 18-hr. TV epic that is based on Herman Wouk's 1971 bestseller. "I caught Producer-Director Dan Curtis on the Paramount lot, working on the last Winds of War episode. I drove to Montecito, a suburb south of Santa Barbara, to talk with Robert Mitchum, a gifted storyteller who answers almost every question with an anecdote. I interviewed about 20 people connected with the program: Jan-Michael Vincent at his favorite Malibu hangout...
...sequel, War and Remembrance, and he jealously guarded the results of his labor. For years he had no trouble resisting the persistent blandishments of film and TV executives. Finally, in 1977, under the ministrations of Barry Diller, a former ABC executive who had become chairman of Paramount, an extraordinary offer won him over. ABC paid Wouk an estimated $1.5 million, gave him approval of director and producer and, to meet his desire for a high-toned context, allowed him some say over commercials (he wanted none for such things as toilet paper and feminine-hygiene products). Furthermore, ABC agreed...
...direct the project, Paramount executives were convinced that they needed a general as much as an artist. They turned to Dan Curtis, 55. Though he had an unimpressive list of credits, including a couple of horror movies and the soap opera Dark Shadows, they felt sure that he had the passion, talent and physical stamina for the job. Wouk was put off by Curtis' record. Only after Paramount sent him two nonhorrific Curtis TV specials did the novelist agree to see him. "He came to my home, but he wasn't wearing the bar mitzvah suit I figured...
Some of the blame for that must fall on Curtis. Paramount wanted a general to manage this vast project, and in Curtis it got one. Like Ulysses S. Grant, he eventually gains victory, but his tactics can be clumsy, and his formations are sometimes ragged along the edges. He is not, in short, an elegant director. His main concern is to keep the action moving, which he does...