OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE
Outrageous Fortune
Arthur Hiller got into directing by accident, but has decades of moviemaking to prove it wasn't a mistake
Sheli Teitelbaum Los Angeles
ARTHUR HILLER HAS MORE than a few things in common with the Hollywood sign. Both were born in 1923; both have weathered their share of tectonic shifts; and in a town that loathes age and venerates impermanence, both have endured as Hollywood landmarks.
You can't, admittedly, see Hiller from outer space. But spend a little time orbiting even the fringes of the local film industry and you're bound to run into him: at a Motion Picture Academy function of the kind he hosted while chairman, from 1993 to 1997; at an American Film Institute seminar, where he heads a center for advanced studies; or at a Jewish community function, the annual Israeli film festival, or last October, at the First Annual Jewish Image Awards in Los Angeles, where Hiller received a lifetime achievement award.
Underwritten by producers Steve and Jonathan Tisch, and by Israeli kidvid magnate Haim Saban, the awards are dedicated to outstanding work reflecting the Jewish heritage in film and television. Other Jewish Image awards this year went to ABC's "Anne Frank," Warner's "The West Wing," (for Richard Schiff's portrayal of Communications Director Toby Ziegler), and Rachel Weisz as Tania in Paramount's Stalingrad sniper feature, "Enemy at the Gates."
One could go for the cheap turn of phrase and call Hiller's long-running Hollywood dalliance a virtual "Love Story," to mention just one of the dozens of well-known projects that bear his imprimatur. In fact, it's been more of a love/hate relationship, with films like "The Man in the Glass Booth," "Plaza Suite," "The Out of Towners," "Man of La Mancha" and "Outrageous Fortune," which have often done better at the box office than among the critics, for whom Hiller is the quintessential journeyman, and nobody's auteur. But critics come and go, as indeed do filmgoers and their varying tastes. At 78, however, Arthur Hiller is still making movies. He leaves for Eastern Europe this May to shoot his first effects-laden film fantasy, a feature adaptation of the classic tale "Puss 'n Boots" with Gerard Depardieu and Judi Dench.
"My work isn't explicitly Jewish," he explained to The Jerusalem Report during an interview in his Beverly Hills office, "but it has a lot of Jewish values." These, he says, include "social awareness, respect for other, and a concern for community." Indeed, Hiller earned the ire of Hollywood liberals in 1995 after siding with Los Angeles Cardinal Roger Mahony's clarion call for moral content in feature films.
Hiller has involved himself in various Jewish cultural and charitable projects over the years, including work on the Chabad Telethon dating back to the mid-80s, after the Chabad House near UCLA burned down; for the Commission for Soviet Jewry, and for the Los Angeles Jewish Federation. He also directed an audio adaptation of an outtake from Saul Bellow's novel "Herzog" for the National Public Radio's Los Angeles affiliate KCRW, for their award-winning "Jewish Short Stories Series."
"These are values my parents imparted to me as I was growing up in Edmonton, reading Shalom Asch and Sholem Aleichem, attending a Yiddish school they started, and participating in Yiddish theater, which they also started. So this award is both welcome and appreciated."
To hear Hiller describe it, pre-Depression Edmonton, in Alberta, Canada, was the "Little Shtetl on the Prairie." Hiller's father was a barber by trade, but he moved into odds and ends, which he peddled in a small second-hand shop. Hiller didn't have a bar mitzvah, but he hastens to recall that "I could have if I'd wanted one. We didn't have a kosher house, but we ate kosher meat and celebrated all the holidays. My mother would make the Shabbat wine."
As a youngster, Hiller worked with his parents behind the stage of the local Yiddish theater, preparing props, helping with set design, and occasionally standing in for absent performers. In high school, he excelled in the debating club, and believed he was headed for a career in law. During his senior year, though, he fell under the tutelage of a drama teacher, who in turn introduced him to a professor from Ohio State University then in Edmonton. Short two actors for a college production of "You Can't Take it With You," he cast Hiller as a black servant. But Hiller turned down Ohio State's offer to study acting there because "drama was what you did on weekends, not what you did for a living."
With the start of World War II, however, Hiller found himself devoting weekdays and weekends in Europe to the Royal Canadian Air Force as a bomber navigator. Upon his discharge, he attended the University of Toronto, where he began working toward a graduate degree in psychology.
One day, the 24-year-old Hiller walked into the headquarters of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation looking for a job. When asked what he had in mind, Hiller blurted out that he wanted to be a director. "I don't know where that came from," he says. "I had never directed anything. I went in thinking I might be an announcer, or an actor. It just came out."
After schmoozing with the supervisor for public affairs broadcasting, Hiller got a job producing public affairs talk shows for radio, and eventually found himself segueing into radio drama. "It was a wonderful time to be in radio," Hiller recalls. "You could direct 17 different things a week and no one would tell you you couldn't. I remember, for instance, directing Ted Allen's "Lies My Father Told Me," with Lorne Greene. "I went back to some of the people who worked there during the early 50s, and asked them whether things were as golden as I remember. They said I had lucked into three or four of the best, warmest years ever experienced by the network."
Breaking into TV proved equally serendipitous. After several years producing low-cost dramas for CBC's fledgling TV network, Hiller's name came to the attention of the vice president for programming at NBC, who asked him to send in a resume and, if ever in New York, to look him up.
Six months later, visiting a sister who was living in New York, Hiller called NBC. "An hour later, I'm on the 27th floor of the RCA Building talking to the director of a TV show called "Cameo Theater," which I had never heard of. They asked me to send a reel over. I was going to send them this live show we had once done, something called "The Swamp," about a bank robbery, with guns, and shooting - very American, I thought, and precisely the wrong thing to send for "Cameo Theater," which consisted of an actor working against a backdrop, no sets, maybe one or two props." Fortunately, as it turned out, fellow Jewish Canadian Bill Shatner, later of "Star Trek" fame, had swiped it from the file to send to someone else in New York, so Hiller sent them an adaptation of a Mickey Spillane story.
"Incidentally, it consisted of tight shots, lots of close ups, under-the-arm shots. The guy who ran it in Hollywood said, 'Ten minutes into the reel, they were ready to marry you.' Shatner, of course, now tells everybody he's responsible for my coming to Hollywood."
Hiller distinguished himself in TV, winning an Emmy in 1956 for "Massacre at Sand Creek," a telefilm about a U.S. Cavalry attack on Native Americans in Colorado, and directing the live television anthologies of "Playhouse 90" as well as such well-known series as "Naked City," "Alfred Hitchcock Presents," "Gunsmoke," "Ben Casey" and "Route 66." Hiller directed his first theatrical film "The Wheeler Dealers," in 1963, and found himself at the helm of such big budget productions as "The Americanization of Emily," and, in 1970, "Love Story," which nabbed him an Oscar nomination.
DEMONSTRATING AN ACUMEN for light comedy, Hiller proved himself to be a superb technician. His later movies, which include "Silver Streak" and "The Lonely Guy," were slick, efficient entertainments that did reasonably well at the box office, further cementing his reputation for dependable craftsmanship, but not much of a stylist. His last film, however, "Burn Hollywood, Burn: An Allan Smithee Film," penned by Joe Esterhaz, and released in 1998, has won pride of place in lists of Hollywood's greatest stinkers. (Indeed, Hiller removed his name from the credits, attributing the film to… Allan Smithee.)
"Hollywood has avoided Jewish characters for many years," says the Jewish Image laureate of his trade. "But it's easier now, certainly on TV. I think what happened too is many, many Jewish people in Hollywood were concerned about the community, the country, internationally, but they could only get involved in causes that affected everybody, so they avoided parochial issues. They wouldn't put themselves out for their own community. In the last 10 to15 years, people have begun to realize that you can care about everyone but don't have to neglect your own."
Today, says Hiller, that kind of reticence seems confined to the events surrounding the Twin Tower detonations, and to the frivolity and cynicism that had been Hollywood's trademark prior to the attacks. Nothing about September 11, he says, bodes particularly well for his fellow Jews. "I can see the moment's sensitivity, you have to be careful because no one knows how we should be handling things. It's not easy. If you don't want to upset people, you should maybe avoid comment. But I think Jews may ultimately take the rap. It just seems to me it doesn't matter what goes on, Jews get blamed."