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Producer Scott Rudin believes in quality movies

By Behind The Scenes TV on Feb 19, 2008 in Producers

 

Scott Rudin met one of the key role models for his life when he was a teenager. In the early 1970s, when other kids were playing guitar, shooting hoops or just seeing how long their hair could grow, the 15-year-old Rudin spent his days working for theater producer Kermit Bloomgarden, a legendary Broadway impresario who produced Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman,” a host of plays by Lillian Hellman and “The Music Man.”

Bloomgarden often worked at home, so Rudin, as a young assistant, found himself handling a variety of chores not normally associated with developing great theatrical works, like picking tomato bugs off the plants on Bloomgarden’s terrace. “I did everything,” Rudin told me the other day over breakfast at the Hotel Bel-Air. “When I’d come home, my mother would ask, ‘How was your day?’ And I’d say, ‘I made lunch for Burt Lancaster.’ ”

One day Bloomgarden handed his young assistant a Jules Feiffer script to read. Supremely assured of his taste in material even then, Rudin pronounced it ready for success. “I said, ‘It’s funny, and I think it could be very commercial.’ And Kermit blasted me. He said, in no uncertain terms, ‘You do the play because you believe in what it is. Anything that follows comes from what you saw in the original material.’ ”

(Source: LA Times)

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