Hollywood Priest Was an Insider

While Hollywood’s reputation was being flogged before a Senate Commerce Committee hearing in Washington recently, some of those back in the den of iniquity were mourning the loss of one of their own--a priest.

The death of 71-year-old Father Ellwood E. “Bud” Kieser was both sudden and striking--striking for the way it coincided with one of the more high-profile political assaults on the entertainment industry.

Kieser injected himself into this culture war, and his death was seen by some in Hollywood as a sad, less-talked-about postscript to the nationwide referendum on movies, television and video games. He died Sept. 16, around the time a report released by the Federal Trade Commission revealed the extent to which movie studios market R-rated films to underage teens. The Senate hearing, complete with condemnations and threats of federal legislation, followed.

Kieser would not have defended Hollywood’s right to sell gratuitous sex and violence to minors, but neither would he have wagged his finger at the industry. Kieser’s lifework was everything that a splashy political hearing isn’t--tireless, methodical--undertaken by a man dedicated to changing an industry he was drawn to precisely because it was a hotbed of lapsed spiritual belief. By the end, his philosophy appeared to be working, if by small, barely perceptible degrees.

Certainly he was a beguiling figure--a man of the cloth and a moral conscience who ventured into the den and mingled, sans collar, forging long-lasting and complex relationships with actors, writers and producers. His stated aim was to open their eyes to the good work they were already doing as a means of encouraging more, an approach that would have seemed naive had Kieser not been fully equipped with street smarts as well. He flattered writers and performers, and in flattering them carved a unique position of moral leadership.

In the process, Kieser became an insider himself. He ran his own company, Paulist Productions, out of a grand-but-faded former restaurant and cabaret on Pacific Coast Highway once owned by the sometime actress, Lola Lane. And he founded the Humanitas Prize in 1974 to honor TV and film writers for work that promoted human values.

These “human values” were not code words for G-rated content. Among the Humanitas winners were Mike Leigh for his 1997 film “Secrets & Lies,” in which a working-class British woman discovers her long-lost illegitimate black daughter, and episodes of “NYPD Blue,” the long-running ABC police drama whose characters fight alcoholism and various other demons.

With the Humanitas, which awarded cash to writers, Kieser played on two classic entertainment industry precepts--narcissism and greed--but in the process he set an artistic bar for writers.

“Certainly in TV, the Humanitas award . . . became a way to defend yourself with executives who didn’t feel there was a responsibility to do that kind of writing,” said John Wells, executive producer of the NBC hits “ER” and “The West Wing” and among Kieser’s closest industry confidants.

“He said to us, ‘Look, politicians are scoring easy points [over depictions of sex and violence], and parents are concerned,’ ” remembered Wells.

Of course, over the years entertainment industry figures had girded themselves against the preachings of moral leaders. But Kieser was hard to dismiss. He may have been a priest, but he also possessed the qualities of a producer, the quixotic and self-important tendencies you need to get the attention of the show business world.

He spoke regularly with top television writer-producers like Wells and Tom Fontana, whose credits include “St. Elsewhere,” “Homicide” and the gritty HBO prison drama “Oz.” To driven men like Wells and Fontana, Kieser was maddeningly stubborn and ego-bound, but also as irresistible as a character out of their own imaginations and guilt complexes. Into their lives walked a 6-foot-6 priest who badgered, cajoled and loved them, promising if they wrote a script for one of his projects that he’d give them “10 percent of the grace.”

“As opposed to being some minister somewhere who has never been near a set, he actually had stood on the same stage, and had the same quarrels with networks or studios, so you did feel like he [understood] you,” said Fontana, who wrote the script for “Judas and Jesus,” a TV movie Kieser had in development at ABC.

“Even when he was convincing you to do something you had no interest in doing . . . I’d say, ‘No father I can’t,’ and I’d give him 10 million reasons [why] I couldn’t do it,” Fontana said. “And he’d say, ‘Well I’m going to pray.’ And I’d say, ‘Oh don’t pray. I got no shot if you pray.’ ”

Priest Became Hollywood Insider

Sometimes, the most vocal critics of pop culture have a way of betraying their depth of entertainment knowledge. Asked recently to name some top young comedians, for instance, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman--who has made regular swipes at Hollywood--named Bill Cosby, 63, and Billy Crystal, 53.

Kieser got his nose a little dirtier. He served as a consultant on the short-lived animated NBC sitcom “God, the Devil and Bob,” which drew protests from church groups when it debuted last March and led some NBC affiliates to freeze out the show altogether.

In some ways, this role of Hollywood insider was chosen for him. A native of Philadelphia whose father owned several garages, Kieser as a young priest in the 1950s was assigned to become a pastor at St. Paul the Apostle Church in Westwood. As a Paulist, one of the most liberal orders in the Catholic Church, Kieser was dedicated to working with non-Catholics and fallen ones. Enter Hollywood. He seized upon the chance to use television to fulfill his Paulist mission, producing an anthology series, “Insight,” which ran from 1960 to 1983.

He began by talking to the camera but soon realized a talking head/priest didn’t make for compelling TV. As Kieser wrote in his memoir, “The Spiritual Journey of a Show Business Priest:” “Christianity and Judaism are both storytelling religions. Historically based, they chronicle the ups and downs of the human family’s wrestling match with God. And television is preeminently a storytelling medium. It is what it does best.”

Kieser needed actors and writers for his “Insight” programs, and here he went about the less likely business of wooing show business people to work for him. “The part of God can be attractive to actors,” Kieser once wryly observed.

His writers included Rod Serling and Michael Crichton (“Jurassic Park”), and directors such as Arthur Hiller. The televised plays were organized around a central theme--poverty, racism--and strained to illuminate the human condition, but not preach. A 1977 “Insight” titled “This Side of Eden” examined Adam and Eve’s guilt over Cain’s murder of Abel. It was a comedy, starring Carol Burnett as Eve, Walter Matthau as Adam and Ed Asner as God.

As writers and performers would learn, saying no to Kieser and “Insight” came with a price: He wouldn’t go away. Patty Duke--who would later turn to Kieser for private counseling before she was diagnosed with manic depression--recalls Kieser showing up at her doorstep with an “Insight” script when he couldn’t get her on the phone. “At the time I was not a practicing Catholic, and yet the child Catholic in me was cowed. Here’s a priest at my doorstep. And he happens to be 8-foot-3.” She called him Bud; he called her Anna Marie.

“I think he envied us in some ways,” Duke said. “But he didn’t live vicariously through us; he championed us, and he made it very clear that he felt payback on our part was in order. That you should work for ‘Insight’ was a given.”

“Would he have gotten away with some of his tactics if he weren’t a priest? Probably not,” said Silvia Gambardella, senior producer of “The Jesus Project,” an 8-hour documentary in the works at Paulist Productions. “There’s something about that when you’re a Catholic. You don’t want to go to hell. He used that.”

In an interview last year with Written By, the magazine of the Writers Guild of America, Kieser said, “There’s a story that goes around that the thing that makes [the Humanitas Prize succeed] is the Irish and Jewish capacity for guilt, and my Teutonic insensitivity to inflict it.”

Commercial Forces Doom ‘Insight’

Kieser managed to keep “Insight” on the air for two decades, during which it was carried by as many as 200 stations across the country. But the loosening of federal guidelines mandating that stations give back time to public service programming eventually doomed it.

Commercial forces steadily mounted against an independent priest producer selling spiritually enriching programs. Kieser produced several movies of the week and two features: “Romero,” the 1989 film starring the late Raul Julia as the martyred Salvadoran Catholic archbishop Oscar Romero, and “Entertaining Angels: The Dorothy Day Story,” the 1996 film about the Catholic activist devoted to New York City’s poor. But “Romero” grossed just $1.1 million. “Dorothy Day,” with a script written by Wells, had a very limited release. Along the way, various script deals for TV movies went awry.

“He had disappointments like anyone,” said Charlie Hauck, who met Kieser in 1974, when he was a writer on the CBS sitcom “Maude” and Kieser was making “Insight” at the same studio. Like others, Hauck found himself befriending Kieser and then doing his bidding--which is to say he emceed Humanitas luncheons and wrote an “Insight” episode. He also participated in writing workshops that became a regular feature of Kieser’s work with Hollywood.

Kieser had three projects reaching fruition when he underwent surgery Aug. 28 to remove a cancerous tumor in his colon. A 90-minute documentary on St. Paul for the History Channel and the more ambitious “Jesus Project,” which explores the artistic and theological role of Jesus in eight different cultures. The TV movie “Judas and Jesus,” in development at ABC, explores the relationship between Jesus and his Biblical betrayer.

Doctors discovered that his cancer had metastasized to his liver and stomach wall and was terminal. Father Frank Desiderio, the Paulist priest who now heads Paulist Productions, says Kieser planned to undergo chemotherapy and was home recuperating a week later when his condition worsened. On Monday, the night after the Emmy Awards, he was readmitted to the hospital. Two days later, he slipped into a coma. He died that Saturday.

Many came to see him as he lay on his deathbed, including some of the writers and actors with whom he’d forged bonds--actor Martin Sheen, writer-producer David E. Kelley, writer David Milch, who used the Humanitas prize money he won for “NYPD Blue” to buy a racehorse.

“I won the prize, and I didn’t take him very seriously,” Milch said recently. “He let people find his truths or miss his truths at their own pace, and that was his great gift.”

In Hollywood, where personal relationships beget professional opportunities, Kieser inverted the principle; for him, the professional tended to become the personal. And so, not long after Kieser pitched “Judas and Jesus” to Susan Lyne, executive vice president of movies and miniseries at ABC, they were comparing notes on Lyne’s disconnect from the Catholic Church and a familiar quandary for many parents: How could she expose her children to a spiritual life?

After Kieser died, there was a wake and a funeral at St. Paul’s. Father Tom Ryan said, “In promoting deeply held human values, [Kieser] did the best public relations job possible for the Catholic Church.” He was also remembered for his mission to Ethiopia in 1980 to aid famine victims, and his attendance at services in South Central Los Angeles after the 1992 riots because he believed the Westside was in denial about conditions there.

But Kieser’s show business friends wanted to have their say, too. They gathered one recent Tuesday, at the WGA theater in Beverly Hills. “Insight” writers recalled the way Kieser strong-armed them into writing scripts--gratis--while more than one winner of the Humanitas Prize noted the bait and switch inherent in taking the honor. Sure, winning a Humanitas meant getting a check for $10,000 or $25,000, but it also meant Kieser felt free to call on your services in kind. As writer John Sacret Young, who wrote the screenplay for “Romero,” put it: “He wanted the check back.”

One writer thanked Kieser for saving his marriage, another for seeing him through a divorce. They were young and older--from Lan O’Kun, who estimated he wrote some 40 “Insight” episodes in the 1970s and ‘80s, to Steve Zaillian, whose screen credits include “Schindler’s List,” “Awakenings,” “Mission: Impossible” and the forthcoming “Silence of the Lambs” sequel “Hannibal.”

“Father Kieser was on a lifelong mission to remind us writers that we could do better communicating ideas that matter,” Zaillian said. “He did this not by criticizing us when we forgot, but by applauding us when we remembered.”

The week before, sitting in his office at Paulist Productions, Desiderio escorted a visitor into Kieser’s office. It’s a large room that looks out toward the ocean--the same ocean Kieser was swimming in when he hit upon the idea for the Humanitas Prize some 25 years ago. On his desk, which remained largely undisturbed, rested an old copy of Daily Variety.

“There are a lot of people in the entertainment industry who are spiritual,” Desiderio said later. “And their spirituality may be Catholic or Protestant or Jewish or 12-step, but Bud was able to minister to that spiritual side of people. He recognized that it was there.”