Warren Skaaren, Movie Mogul
Here's the man who's selling Texas to Hollywood. If you think that's easy, then you don't know Hollywood or Texas.
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"The internal politics in this business is incredible," says Skaaren. "HolIywood is based on some very expensive fantasies. Stars are intelligent like Mother Nature. They just aren't very linear people. We'll show some people, say, the country around San Antonio and the production manager says it'll never do—even if San Antonio would be perfect—because the production manager has a farm back in Greenville, South Carolina, and he wants the studio to shoot there. I don't worry about losing a location because you have absolutely no control over the situation. One company got down to the point of committing to the hotels, and then I got a call one day from the producer about something else, and he kind of added, 'Oh by the way, we're shooting the picture in Kansas.' Texas was going to be a backup location."
You don't have to come with grips* to Texas.…Or anything else. Except maybe a scenario. Or a script. We've got everything you need to shoot a Lawrence of Arabia. A Patton. An African Queen. A GWTW. An Airport or a Waterfront.…We even have the props. Homegrown settings. Natural. For takes instead of fakes…
—TFC ad in The American Cinematographer, trade journal for movie cameramen.
*a little pun, folks. "Grips" is what they call stagehands on a movie set.
Skaaren budgeted $31,000 for advertising Texas geography in film biz trade journals last year. That'll go down to $21,000 this year as word gets around Hollywood about the friendly, cooperative folks down Austin way. Another $10,000 has gone for a color videotape cassette library of Texas scenery to browse through. The rest of the money goes for salaries and lots and lots of Hertz mileage.
"We need another person," says Skaaren. "If all the productions come to Texas that say are going to come, Diane and I just won't be able to handle them. I mean, when somebody calls me in Austin at 2 a.m. and says he's landing at Houston at 6 a.m., what can I do?"
Skaaren says he finds himself used as a gofer every now and then (a showbiz term: a flunkie who "goes for" things). But "I don't take it very seriously. I know they don't know what they're doing and I know we do. They're like tourists, actually, trying to make a profit on their trip. I get to talking to some of these people and they're talking about all the money they're going to spend in Texas, and I start to realize that they don't have a dime and what they really want me to do is put them on to some oil miIlionaires who'll finance their picture for them."
Other than a helpful hand and a big smile the TFC can offer filmmakers no more. "We don't give freebies. We can't pick up any tabs. Freebies turn to resentment very quickly." Skaaren ends up liking most of the people from Cloud Cuckoo Land he must work for; but he sees no special reason why he should have to suffer fools and boors.
"I don't like the idea lots of movie people have that everyone outside of LA or New York is dumb," says Skaaren. "There are still people who think everyone in Texas had to be a minor conspirator in the killing of Kennedy. Yeah, still. We'll take movie people into somebody's home, like we were doing in River Oaks in Houston for The Thief Who Came to Dinner, and the people who own the house are gracious and helpful and the minute we hit the street the movie people are really tearing the house and the people down, just because the house won't work for them."
There was just a teensy little bit of hassle between the TFC and Bud Yorkin, who produced and directed Thief, which was shot almost entirely in Houston. "The commission was almost no help at all," said Yorkin. "We had to do everything ourselves."
"There was a personality clash," says Skaaren.
"For the sums of money movie people routinely pay out," says Skaaren, "they expect things to move. They just don't realize that people have to think things over here. If you ask a small-town sheriff to block off the main street for three months, he's going to have to think about running for reelection in the fall.
"I remember once going through a small town in East Texas, very poor, and here's this guy who represents one of the people who makes the whole moving-image business in this country what it is, and he turns around to me and says, 'How do these people stand it? They look like they're living in a commercial!' The film people don't understand their own bias."
For The Sugarland Express, Skaaren had to schlepp with the Department of Public Safety. The script of that film, which stars Goldie Hawn, is about a DPS officer who's kidnaped by two fugitives. There was no way the picture could have been made without DPS cooperation (the finale involved 200 cop cars assembled) and the DPS was none too pleased with the screenplay. "They weren't sensitive to technical details and that bothered the DPS. We had to clean some things up a little, and after that the DPS was wonderfully cooperative."
Skaaren's biggest triumph of persuasion came during The Getaway negotiations when he was able to talk director Sam (Mr. Macho) Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch, Straw Dogs) into changing the Forties period of the script to present-day Texas, since everybody on the location scouting expeditions was going mad trying to find places that hadn't been Taco Bell'ed to death. "It was about 2 a.m. and Sam was on one of his macho things," said Skaaren. "He will test people this way. If you back down, he'll have no more use for you, but if you stand up to him he'll respect you. We had our little scene and I yelled at him a little, and after that everything was all right." Lucky you, Warren.
Lucky Warren, too, the day he was walking through a Dallas ghetto helping black actor-director Raymond St. Jacques find locations for his Thirties-period film The Book of Numbers. "We were walking right down the middle of the street. St. Jacques is a very flamboyant guy, and I was the only white guy anywhere and then this guy, he must have been crazy, started running toward us down the street, taking off his clothes…"
And so it goes. In addition to the films aforementioned, Skaaren has accomodated the makers of an NBC-TV pilot called "Hernandez—HPD," shot in Houston (the producers wanted to stage a suicide inside the Astrodome; the Astrodome folks weren't wild about the idea). Plus many commercials. He is presently confident that Peter Bogdanovich, who directed The Last Picture Show on location in Archer City (before the TFC existed), will be returning to shoot something called Texas Girl in Dallas (stars Cybill Shepherd and Marcello Mastroianni). He is confident that John Wayne will shoot a cop story soon in Houston…Universal tells him they'll use Lubbock for The Buddy Holley Story.
But before we leave, Warren, we wanna slow down the lowdown. Let's hear the dirt. Time for a snappy, vicious star anecdote. What's the most delicate thing—this sounds like a "Dating Game" question—you've ever had to arrange in the line of duty?
Skaaren had to think a minute ("I thought I'd have all kinds of terrific stories to tell from this job, but I can never remember them").
" A director of…international prominence, let's say, called me one night about 3 a.m. He was afraid he had an, ah, terminal case of a discreet disease. But I had been forewarned of his hypochondria. I talked to him for about half an hour in glowing terms about the impossibility of that situation. He didn't feel that he had contracted the disease in Texas. He just thought the time had come to stop the onslaught of this dread disease…At any rate, I promised him there would be a specialist waiting the next morning at breakfast for him. But as I anticipated—since I did not call a specialist—the next morning at breakfast the whole thing was forgotten.
"That sort of thing happens."
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