Don’t worry -- be happy

IN the public imagination, there are three kinds of successful producers -- the schemer, the screamer and the extremer.

Certainly there are actual people who embody these characteristics -- uber-schmoozer Robert Evans is, as he lately informed us, still in the picture; Scott Rudin’s assistant body count is legendary, and though Jerry Bruckheimer has calmed down significantly since the overdose death of partner Don Simpson, his name is still synonymous with the era of the Bad Boy.

But mostly, these are archetypes, attempts to capture the mixture of ambition, narcissism, talent, greed and good old fear that has always been the hottest cocktail in town. In no figure is it more combustible than the producer.

Mark Gordon is a successful producer who is neither a schemer, screamer or extremer, which may explain why he is not a household name like Bruckheimer. In fact, if he walked into a restaurant, a stranger would have no inkling he was in the industry at all. Soft-spoken, with a tendency to slump so far into a chair that he becomes one with the fabric, he has been known to cut short a meeting with studio executives because it was time for him to pick up his kids. He has a habit of asking other people their opinions and then actually sitting still -- no peeking at the BlackBerry, no shouted conversations with his assistant in the next room -- long enough to listen to it. When people ask him for money, and they often do, he tells them yes or no. Using those words.

“People appreciate directness and honesty,” he says with a shrug, as if several tenets of Hollywood were not crashing around his ears. “The best bullshit is truth because it’s totally disarming.”

Unusual traits in a power player.

Yet with more than 40 films to his credit, including big action hits such as “Speed” and critically acclaimed dramas such as “Saving Private Ryan,” that he is. With 20 or so features in various stages of production and still others in the inevitable “development,” he recently migrated to television, where he is currently executive producing two hits -- “Grey’s Anatomy” and “Criminal Minds” -- and “A House Divided,” a hopeful of pilot season. He is, his friends and colleagues like to say, building an empire.

Which doesn’t mean Gordon, 49, is some kind of local saint. He spent the first part of his career behaving, if not as badly as some of his peers, then certainly with the same ferocious ambition.

He second-guessed everyone he worked with, certain that whatever he thought was somehow better. Too often, he says, the voices in his head drowned out the voices of those around him. Then one day, he noticed that he wasn’t having any fun. “My shrink said, ‘You have a nice family, good friends, a good job -- why don’t you try enjoying yourself?’ ”

It didn’t happen overnight. He had kids, and that helped, especially when he became a single, shared-custody dad. Slowly, he says, he learned that having a real personal life made him more successful in his career, not less.

“The more grounded I am in my personal life, the better I am in the office,” he says. “I’ve got nothing to prove. I’ve made successful movies, and not-successful movies. I’ve learned that you really never know which way it’s going to go, so you might as well enjoy it while it’s happening.

“In the early part of my career,” he adds, “I was so focused on the carrot, I didn’t appreciate the process. Now I have much better results if I’m not focused on the end.”

Which would seem to be, well, building an empire.

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The grind behind the glitter

THE thing most people outside the movie and television industry don’t realize is that as glamorous as the finished product, with its ambient premieres, festivals and awards shows, may be, the actual making of a movie or a television show is, in most cases, a long, difficult, often tedious, always meticulous, series of try-it-agains.

Pitch meetings lead to script meetings lead to drafts and rewrites. Deals are made and fall apart, actors and directors attach then detach themselves, deadlines are made then modified, and this is all before you have to figure out how to get a cast and crew of 200 up to Toronto or down to Texas and keep them on schedule and budget.

Then comes post-production, with its 14-hour days holed up in an editing room, piecing different takes together -- the close-up, the side angle, the one with the added dialogue, the one without the dog.

The only person who is part of every single stage of this process, which can take years, is the producer. “Most people think, ‘Oh, the producer’s the guy who gets the money,’ ” says Gordon. “And that’s part of it. But the producer also develops the script, brings in the director, works as an editor, is involved in the marketing ... it’s really hard to define.”

So hard to define that the effort to do so has spawned at least three sub-categories -- producer, executive producer and co-producer -- and countless lawsuits, including one involving credited producers of “Crash,” most of whom were not deemed eligible to receive an Oscar when the film took “Best Picture” earlier this year.

Maybe the best way to describe what Gordon does is “multi-linguist.” Gordon can speak Studio Head but also Screenwriter, he can call shots with the director but also cut to the bottom line with the investor types.

Director Roland Emmerich first worked with Gordon on “The Patriot,” and he was impressed with the way Gordon developed the script, so when he had an idea for a post-apocalyptic movie, which turned into “The Day After Tomorrow,” he took it to Gordon.

“I have very low self-esteem about my scripts in English,” he says. “In German, I think they are fine but ... Mark and I work the same way. We sit in a room with a writer and talk for hours and hours and then the writer has a week.”

Emmerich, currently shooting “10,000 B.C.,” which Gordon is producing, refers often to the producer’s growing sphere of influence. “I don’t know how much we will see him [on the set],” he said jokingly. “He has Hollywood to run. I tell him he is trying to be the next Jerry Bruckheimer.”

On a recent Wednesday, Gordon was displaying some of his talent for multi-linguistics, not to mention multitasking. In the dim recesses of his Santa Monica editing room, between bites of a very late lunch, he explained his role as liaison between the talent and the studio, even as he watched audition tapes for one of his upcoming films on his laptop.

“The trick is to know what the problem they’re having really is,” he says. “Sometimes they don’t even know. Sometimes an exec will say, ‘Oh, this scene is boring,’ but it isn’t that scene that’s boring, it’s the scenes that lead up to it that went too long, and so this person was bored going into the scene.”

In the case of the scene he had just been working on, one of the notes had been that the scene did not play intimate enough. “This means they want more close-ups. There are certain folks who always want more close-ups, so you give them a few more close-ups. That’s easy.” “Look,” Gordon says, slipping an actress’ CD out and inserting one belonging to a cinematographer, “sometimes you get good notes and sometimes you get terrible, horrific notes which make you want to scream and sometimes you flat-out refuse, but mostly it’s up to you to try to meet people’s needs without screwing the thing up, you know?”

“I really like this guy a lot,” he adds, ejecting the cinematographer’s disk. And with a few words spoken into his earpiece phone, the cinematographer hire is OKd.

Of course, it doesn’t always go as smoothly as this sounds. Peter Horton, who directs many episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” still remembers working as the director on an after-school special that was one of the first films Gordon produced. At one point, Gordon threw him out of the editing room. “I was furious,” he says. “We fought the entire time. The entire time.”

Yet they still became close friends -- so close that Gordon was one of the first people Horton asked to look at a new show in which he was starring called “thirtysomething.” “Mark said it was stupid and that no one would watch it,” Horton says with a laugh. “Which just goes to show that he can actually be wrong sometimes.”

Though he has an impressive track record, Gordon doesn’t always get his way with the studio. During a recent pitch meeting, screenwriter Hanna Weg mentioned how much she had enjoyed “Casanova” and how surprised she had been when it disappeared without a ripple.

“They opened it in a few theaters on Christmas Day,” says Gordon, of the film which Disney’s Buena Vista Pictures distributed. “It was terrible timing, terrible marketing and it just broke my heart. Because it is a really good film.”

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Brainstorming sessions

GORDON is happy to talk to directors, actors, studio executives and other producers, but the conversations he invariably likes best, he says, are those with the writers. It is a rare week that goes by without him meeting with a handful of writers, for everything from the standard pitch meeting to a more detailed conversation about a script to a casual get-together with someone whose work he admires.

“You know what I want to do?” he asks, in the middle of a brainstorming session with Leslie Bohem (“The Alamo,” “Dante’s Peak”), currently working on “Nine Lives,” Steven Spielberg’s latest Sci Fi Channel offering. “A movie about trains. What is it about trains? They’re always cool and exciting in a movie. You got any ideas with trains in them?”

Their conversation ranges from the age-old draw of the heist movie to a mutual ode to the outdoor epic -- “I want to do a big, outdoor love story,” says Bohem. “There really hasn’t been one since -- what? ‘Out of Africa.’ ”

“Well, there was ‘Brokeback,’ ” says Gordon.

“Right,” says Bohem. “So there, there’s an audience for it still anyway.”

They talk about the pros and cons of a racing movie, of remaking “The Day of the Animals,” of messing with Hitchcock -- “They cannot remake Hitchcock,” Bohem says flatly. “That’s just wrong.”

In the end, Bohem leaves with several ideas and the promise of a book that Gordon is interested in optioning being sent his way. “We’re going to do something,” Gordon says, “we just have to find the right thing.”

Originally, Gordon wanted to be a photographer. He grew up in Newport News, Va., and in Newport News, he says, you don’t think about becoming a producer. He went to Boston University for a few semesters before dropping out and moving to New York, where he fell in with friends involved in theater. He helped one of them with a play and another friend suggested he become a producer. So he enrolled in film school. “I wanted to learn how to be a filmmaker, but unlike everyone else, I really didn’t want to be a director.”

After graduating, he came out to Los Angeles, where he did what you do, which is work production assistant jobs. Then a friend convinced him to come back to New York to help produce his play, called “The Buddy System.” He got the financing, worked as the production assistant and even ran the teleprompter. “I had to load it, carry it and run it,” he says. “And that thing was heavy.”

The play got terrible reviews, but when the director suggested ending the run, Gordon bristled. He took out an ad in the New York Times suggesting that the critics didn’t know what they were talking about and offering free tickets for two nights to whoever showed up and promised to tell at least two friends about the play.

“The Buddy System” ran for one more week and closed. But Gordon was officially a producer, and that ad hangs on a wall in the offices of the Mark Gordon Company.

There, on a recent afternoon, Gordon occupies a small slice of time between meetings when the phone is miraculously silent. He is using it to go through a list of screenwriters and directors with some of his associates in search of those he thinks would be appropriate, and/or available, and/or interest for an upcoming project.

Steve Kloves, Sofia Coppola, Michael Chabon, Zach Helm, Ann Peacock -- Gordon calmly, methodically moves through the wish list -- “yes, yes, no, not going to happen, yes” for each one.

“Michael Mann is not going to do this picture,” he says, with a laugh. “Roland is not available, as we know, yes, yes, this is not right for him,” another line through a famous name, “yes, no, God no, yes, yes.... “ He moves ruthlessly through the names, which is pretty much the Top 40 of the DGA.

Finally come the actors.

“Jesus,” he says, flipping through the pages, “how long is this list? Couldn’t you cull through some of these?”

“I asked you for a conceptual meeting on this,” says Creative Executive Lindsey Liberatore, a hint of impatience showing, “and you never would. So here is the list.”

“OK, OK,” he says. “But not now. I can’t go through another list now. I’m too fried.”

Not surprising since he just came out of an almost-two-hour pitch meeting during which he discussed three, no, 3 1/2 , films that he’s “really actually excited about.” He has a story meeting in five minutes -- the writer is outside waiting. After which Gordon will drive to Pasadena for a preview of “Hoax,” a film starring Richard Gere as Clifford Irving, the man who sold a bogus biography of Howard Hughes in the ‘70s. (“That one took us six years to make,” Gordon says. “ ‘No one wants to see a movie about Howard Hughes,’ they said. ‘Wait, there was just another movie about Howard Hughes,’ they said. Never mind that it’s not about Howard Hughes.”).

When the film and the chatting are over, around 10, he’ll head back to Santa Monica -- to do color corrections on “A House Divided” (which ABC didn’t pick up for its fall lineup).

“So what’s the fastest way to Pasadena -- the 405 to the 134 or the 10 to the Harbor?” asks the big-time producer.

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Pet project

ALL successful producers, like all happy families, are essentially the same, at least in one respect: They always have many irons in the fire. Still, Gordon seems to have a more diverse collection of irons than most -- it’s hard to imagine the same person being behind the unabashedly chick-friendly “Grey’s” and the lock-jawed Mandy Patinkin vehicle “Criminal Minds.”

But then the man behind macho action classics including “Speed,” “The Patriot” and “The Day After Tomorrow” also recently helped bring you “Paulie,” “Prime” and last year’s Emmy Award-winning “Warm Springs.”

And if you ask him which was his favorite film to work on, he will answer quickly and with apparent sincerity: “Swing Kids,” the 1994 film about a group of young swing dancers in Nazi Germany, best known for helping launch the careers of Noah Wyle and Christian Bale.

“I had a lot of fun making that picture,” Gordon says. “And the older I get, the less the idea of failure has any meaning. Just because something doesn’t work, doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It wasn’t a perfect film but I really believed in it. I still do.”

An unlikely attitude for an emperor. But that’s exactly what friends and colleagues fall all over themselves to point out -- the thing, they say, that sets Gordon apart. “The miraculous thing about Mark,” says screenwriter Margaret Nagle, “is that he’s successful without being a jerk. Which in this town is pretty rare.”

Nagle saw both sides of Gordon’s personality three years ago when she brought him a project she wanted to produce, a biopic about the years Franklin Roosevelt had spent recuperating from polio at a spa in Warm Springs, Ga.

Gordon loved the idea and encouraged Nagle to write it rather than produce it. “I had never written a script before,” Nagle says, “but I thought about it and said, ‘OK, will you give me some money?’ And he laughed, and said no. Because he’s an unbelievably nice man, but he’s also a very good businessman.”

Eventually, Gordon did produce “Warm Springs,” which won five Emmys, including best movie, and was nominated for three Golden Globes. Nagle remembers particularly one summer day when a posse of HBO execs were making a set visit to the actual spa in Georgia. They were shooting a sequence using the special car Roosevelt drove. The actual car. Which, of course, broke down, requiring a special mechanic and hours of repair, while the sweltering studio execs slapped mosquitoes and quickly learned that they were out of cellphone range.

“I freaked out,” Nagle says. “The entire crew was freaking out. But Mark managed not only to keep [the executives] entertained for three hours, he went up to each crew member, every one, to assure them that everything was going to be fine. After that, the entire crew were his devoted slaves.”

On the other hand, Gordon will certainly pull rank when he needs to. Recently, when an editor working on one of his shows seemed to be taking an inordinate amount of time over a fix, Gordon quickly made his impatience known.

“Give me five seconds here,” the editor retorted.

“I’ll give you two,” Gordon answered, lightly but literally.

“What you pray for in a producer,” says Horton, “is someone who can govern the area around them with calm. A lot of people can maintain personal calm, but few can govern with calm. Mark can.”

That calm was earned over time. Gordon’s been at this for 25 years, has worked alone and with partners -- most recently Bob Yari and Mark Gill in Stratus films -- and while he is dutifully grateful for a career that pays him “an extraordinary amount of money” to do the things he loves, he acknowledges that it came at a certain cost.

“Up until about 10 years ago, I was very caught up in outcome,” he says. “I wanted to be a member of the Big Hit Club, and then I wanted to stay a member of the Big Hit Club. So instead of enjoying, or even noticing the process, I was always racing ahead to see what would happen next.”

Then Gordon had kids, daughters, now 8 and 5, which is always a good lesson in humility.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m not working hard enough,” he says, adding that it’s easy to measure yourself by Hollywood’s standards, which can be a bit warped.

“There are always going to be people making a bigger movie, making what seems like a better deal,” Gordon says. “But you can’t spend your life thinking about it. Or I guess you can, and some people do, but,” he adds with a laugh, “I am trying to not be one of them.”

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