Another Life for Katz Film Encyclopedia

Ephraim Katz is alive and well and living in New York and, at long last, working on a revised edition of his monumental “The Encyclopedia of Film.”

These tidings will probably not be universally understood or hailed, but to thousands of serious film fans and film journalists, the news is very good indeed. The Katz encyclopedia, first published in 1979, is widely regarded as the best one-volume compendium on film information there is.

The late Leslie Halliwell’s “Filmgoer’s Companion,” with its far more numerous but skeletal entries, is an irreplaceable quick-check on film dates and credits. Halliwell, being English, was particularly strong on British actors and directors. His own quirky, acerbic personality shines through his choice of illustrations, random quotations and really terse (three to five words) summations of careers. The “Companion” has also, very use fully, gone through several updatings.

The encyclopedist’s own personality is largely invisible in “The Encyclopedia of Film,” but Katz’s essays, their length measuring the importance of the subjects, are masterfully objective interpretive biographies of the lives and work of the men and women of the movies. Other entries deal with technologies, terminologies, whatever you always wanted to know about the movies, but didn’t know whom to ask.

The double-columned pages in small type offer 85 inches on D. W. Griffith, 55 on Welles, 36 on Hitchcock and 24 on John Ford.

The frustration has been that the world of motion pictures changes with unrelenting speed, and Katz’s heroic work, unrevised or updated, has had a declining usefulness. My list of missing names, scrawled on the endpapers, includes Barry Levinson, Peter Shaffer, Alan Parker, Michael Apted, Richard Donner and Andre Konchalovsky among several others.

When I read not long ago that a new printing of the encyclopedia was due out, I checked to see if it was a revision. It isn’t, but there’s one coming, as I discovered when I tracked down the author to see what the prospects are, and how he wrote the encyclopedia in the first place.

Katz, who is 58, came to the United States in 1959 from Israel, where he had been a precocious film journalist, writing reviews when he was still in his teens, working also as a reporter and feature writer. In New York he began making documentaries for CBS television and later NBC. One, “The Taste of Sunday,” he thinks may have been the first color documentary CBS ever ran.

He decided to pursue advanced film studies at NYU, with an eye to teaching. It was there he discovered there was no single film reference book that pleased him. He took the idea of an encyclopedia to publishers, who were interested. Even he, Katz admits, didn’t fully realize what he was letting himself in for.

“It was before computers,” he says, “I typed it all myself. And I’m a lousy typist.”

The publishing history has been tangled: Random House was first involved but the book went to Crowell and Harper & Row before it actually came out. Putnam’s did a paperback edition under its Perigree imprint in 1982 and now Harper-Collins has reacquired the rights for a fresh paperback edition. It has also, at last, authorized Katz to go ahead with a revised edition. The original has sold consistently well over the decade and still does.

“It’s long overdue, I admit it, and very frustrating for me,” says Katz. “This time I want to do it all on the computer for them, but so far they just want hard copy. But the computer can make it so much easier to update the book. I don’t think publishers realize how much readers demand current information. Movies are such a lively art, you’ve got to be up to date.”

Katz says he’s now working 16 or 17 hours a day. He has one principal helper, a retired furrier named Benjamin Laba, who like Katz is a lifelong movie fan. One of Katz’s daughters, who started helping with the book when she was 9, is now away at university and unavailable to lend a hand. His other daughter is an actress, busy with her own career.

“What I love is satisfying my curiosity, tracking down a fact and saying, ‘Aha, elementary my dear Watson.’ ” He once estimated that it takes him 10 hours of research to get to an hour’s worth of writing. The thing about using a computer, he says, is that you never want to stop writing.

There is much to write. The encyclopedia has entries on national cinemas and, Katz says with some embarrassment, “I left out Spain. How could I do that? And Australia. Poor Australia, just when all those exciting things were happening in the movies down there. Don’t think I haven’t heard about that. They complained bitterly.”

In the dozen years since he was compiling the book, much has changed. “The bulk of the personalities in the book are no longer with us,” he says sadly. “Cary Grant, Fred Astaire, Welles. . . . For the domestic people getting the information is no problem. For the people abroad there is only Variety.”

A significant change, Katz says, “is that there now there are hundreds of directors who have made only one film, or maybe two. That’s very much a reflection of the times. The same thing is true of screenwriters, another reflection of the times.”

He isn’t a monopolist at heart, Katz says, but he finds there was much to be said for the studios owning theaters so they were assured of at least a basic level of income for their pictures. And the studios had their stables of writers and directors, who gave even the B pictures a high level of competence. “It was reliable entertainment. I don’t find the movies as thrilling as in the days when the directorial talent manifested itself, and the writing. Now someone says, ‘We’ve got Kevin Bacon for a movie,’ and an accountant says OK.”

Before he got the go-ahead for the revised edition, Katz had begun work on a new book, a compendium of information on 5,000 to 7,000 films, less extensive than Halliwell’s “Film Guide” but, like the Encyclopedia, offering much more information on each entry. “Everything I can find out about the making of the film will be there--conflicts, injuries, difficulties, anything special, a Herculean task,” he says, with the satisfied smile of a man who would settle for nothing less. He has put it aside for now, but he’ll get back to it.

“Revising the encyclopedia is heartbreaking in one way,” says Katz. “I’ll have to sacrifice some of the people who are in it now. There’s no way I’ll have room for them.” The new edition is due out late in 1991 and, as they say, not a moment too soon.