Crashing Hollywood’s Locked Doors

Godfathering.

That’s the word the young independent film director Andy Wolk uses when he tells how his first movie deal with HBO was made.

Judy Chaikin, a television coordinating producer for “FBI: The Untold Stories,” uses a kinder, nongender word:

Mentoring.

Whatever the term of endearment, mentoring, that oldest of teaching forms where the knowledge of one generation is not ignored or tossed away but is passed along to a younger generation, has become the newest and perhaps most effective way for some to crash the doors and glass ceilings of show business. It uses the resources, contacts and experiences of veterans.

Mentor programs in movies, television and the theater help the haves meet the so-far have nots, the veterans with the rookies. It works more directly than cocktail-hour networking or playing shortstop in an industry soft-pitch league and for that reason mentors are increasingly in demand.

Mentor/godfathering comes in a variety of forms.

* The Directors Guild of America uses some of its heavyweight members to help nurture careers, especially those of women and minority members mired in their jobs or seeking adventure upward. Last week’s employment nose count by the DGA--8% of the working days going to women, 3% to minority directors--in effect became a facing up by the union and indirectly by the movie/TV industry to a serious challenge: how to get more women and minorities into top-rank, enduring jobs.

The DGA mentor program is designed to help change those numbers, or at least give the impression that something is being done. “It is another attempt to integrate women and minorities into the system,” says Glenn Gumpel, DGA executive director. “It helps get them contacts while being in a learning experience.”

* Cable television networks (HBO and Showtime) and some production companies (Chanticleer Films, for one) have found that godfathering is one way of giving young writers and directors a chance to produce their works.

But that comes with a proviso. The would-be director has to find an experienced godfather figure, an executive producer willing to help out. The cable network benefits by getting an eager young writer-director with an imaginative project but with smaller salary demands. At the same time it gets a big-name producer to supervise and one who can give the network some bragging rights.

* The 25-year-old Center Theatre Group--busy these days celebrating those increasing years and its various theatrical programs at the Music Center--uses a youngish, little-known playwrights mentor program to develop what it hopes will be the stuff of its future, producible scripts.

Hollywood’s mentor programs would bring smiles to poet Robert Bly’s “Iron John,” the current, mythic, hairy role model of mentors.

When Andy Wolk, with some experience in New York theater and television, presented his idea for “Criminal Justice” to HBO’s adventurous Showcase division, he was told the idea was acceptable but he would need an executive producer, someone who could guide him through his first-time directing effort.

How about Michael Apted?, he said.

Get him and the deal is yours, he was told.

Wolk had worked with Apted before and the veteran English documentarian and film director agreed to godfather Wolk’s project as he had previously done with another writer. Other experienced directors--Jonathan Demme and David Mamet--had also guided new HBO directors.

“It was important for me to have the help of an experienced producer,” Wolk says. “Michael created an atmosphere that allowed me to make my own movie. He was protective yet creative in my getting my image on the screen. He would never go on the set, but we would meet regularly and he would give me advice, like which locations to use, what might work, what might not.”

The experience worked for Wolk, giving him the credit he needed. He is now finishing the feature film “Traces of Red” for the Samuel Goldwyn Co.

It worked in a collateral direction for Apted, who formed a company, Osiris Films, in large part to make cable and low-budget movies, many for first-time directors in need of a godfather.

For Apted, “godfathering is an informal process. As the executive producer, I can’t take over the picture. The purpose is to develop the new director, to bring talent in and possibly up. I worked through the English system, which is different from America’s where the tendency often is to make a killing by getting to direct without experience, especially if you’re a writer or an actor with some leverage. In England, you have to come up through something. You have to learn the business. I worked nine years before my first directing job. This godfathering process can provide some necessary training here.”

A similar godfather project, called the Discovery Program, has been in place at Chanticleer Films, which serves as executive producers for first-time directors. This program is largely sponsored by Showtime and this year feature-length projects were added to its short film program and a similar project may start for writers. In large part, the Discovery program helps actors and others in the film business get directorial experience in a studio setting, being supervised and in effect mentored by the company’s executives.

Training and experience are part of the DGA’s contribution to mentorhood. The union has been lining up its assistant directors and unit production managers with mentors for career development. This year, it went wider with an ambitious program for directors.

Judy Chaikin, who heads up the mentoring committee, says that show business people are often pigeonholed. Figuratively, once a go-fer, always a go-fer. Once a segment producer, never a director. And for women and minorities, the chances to move in any direction except sideways is too common for comfort.

Thus the mentoring program, which through a committee of 12 matchmakers regularly connects experienced directors, its volunteer “Iron Johns,” on a one-on-one basis with less experienced members. Chaikin, for example, hopes to work with director Paul Krasny as her mentor as she attempts to move toward dramatic directing.

Participants are limited to listening, watching and asking questions while on the set. They are there to shadow the director, to observe, to sit in on pre-production meetings, writers’ meetings, location scouting, wherever the director works. They are there to gain a full range of experiences, to make contacts, and perhaps move beyond that.

That’s what Melissa Jenkins, who has directed commercials and short films, got when she worked with her mentor, director Richard Donner, during the making of “Lethal Weapon 3” where she was a director-observer.

“I picked his brain,” she says.

That experience and the contacts she made are helping her complete the 30-minute film she is now editing and which will become her “director’s reel,” literally her showcase for film festivals and possible directing jobs. Her mentoring experience has been educational in another sense. Her working title, “Are You Lonesome Tonight?,” will have to be changed. One of the major studios owns that title, another slice of Hollywood life.

Guillermo Real, a Cuban-born commercial director, has had a different mentoring experience. His directorial idol and mentor, the legendary Robert Wise, meets regularly with him to discuss the short film that Real wanted to make and had written based on a story by Felix Marti Ibanez, “At Night the Sun Shines.” The sessions with Wise helped him as he moved through the movie script’s several drafts. Contacts with the veteran director also put him in touch with a studio that donated space, a company that provided cameras, and an agency that helped him in casting.

Real’s project is now in a modern classic mode, credit-card financing. But he is determined to complete his film this summer.

“This movie will be my door,” he says.

The open door. That is the purpose of these mentor programs, and a chance to meet some people who also have a way with doors.

Next: How a new mentor program in the shadows of Hollywood hopes to attract writers not for movies or TV but for the stage.