Even
in Hollywood, the allure of the written word still calls to
Scott Aversano
by
Blaise Nutter
The producer leans back in plush chair, embracing his luxurious
surroundings. "I had no ambitions to be in the film business,
frankly. It wasn't where I thought I was going. I thought, when
I left college, I was going to do Teach For America or something…"
He speaks at a quick tempo, an electricity pulsing through his
voice as he speaks. The President of Production at Scott Rudin
Productions and responsible for such big budget movies as School
of Rock, Changing Lanes, and the upcoming remake
of The Manchurian Candidate, Scott Aversano is the brain
behind the scenes, an executive who oversees every element of
production from script development to post-production. A gifted
storyteller who, even in casual conversation, tells his stories
with a natural gait, sketching characters, locations, and dialogue
in just a few concise sentences, Aversano is also prone to wild
outbursts of thought, jumping from one subject to another with
a startling alacrity and thematic continuity. Like so many of
his peers, however, this wasn't the plan; he flopped into the
entertainment industry in the most unnatural way, only finding
his place here in Hollywood through accident, chance, and the
ability to coax the best out of writers.
Under
the watchful eye of the Viacom water tower, a reminder of
the gods we all serve, and guarded by a replica of the Triumph
Gate in Paris, the famous Paramount Lot seems to stretch off
into infinity in all directions. A blue-sky backdrop reaches
three stories into the air before coalescing into the real
clouds above. Eighteenth century street urchins wander the
walkways between buildings, carefully avoided by the golf-cart
messengers zigzagging around them. Aversano's office itself
looks like something straight out of Fitzgerald's Last
Tycoon, a spacious grand room with an expansive oak desk,
a gigantic television, deep plush furniture, and bookshelves
stacked with scripts. Posters line the walls of the office
as they do in the hallways outside, both a declaration of
accomplishment and a reminder of the ultimate goal around
here, to make and sell movies. But Aversano, now a producer
of considerable power, was once a struggling graduate student
at the University of Michigan, teaching introductory English
courses at the University while trying to finish his dissertation.
Accusations
and Unemployment
"I
was actually writing a dissertation on the emergence of review
culture, essentially where did Siskel and Ebert came from."
In the early 1800s, the previously prohibitive costs of publication
fell, allowing individual writers to escape the editorial control
that came from their financial dependency on wealthy patrons.
With the rise in content, "there was this explosion of
magazines, reviews. Writers who were in the cultural know were
talking about what the distinguished reader should read."
There was a need for opinions, a desire to know what was worth
the reader's time. "Right around the end of the century,"
Aversano explains, reviewers separated literature and Literature,
with "literature with a little 'l' meaning anything published
and Literature with a capital 'L' meant culturally rarified,
valued, meaningful words that were somehow supposed to be distinguished
from all other writing."
Aversano wanted
to know why. He asked, "At the birth of review culture,
why did people decide thumbs up or thumbs down? What were
the criteria?" For one reason or another, these reviewers
decided they had the superiority—whether moral, economic,
or philosophical—to judge the writing of another, it
begs the question of how one individual can name another immoral.
Aversano realized their judgments were only moral "in
the way the United States government says it's immoral to
protest the war in Iraq because you're not supporting your
troops. Well, in fact, it's not in fact immoral. Just because
you declare it immoral doesn't mean it is immoral. It's a
use of the term to paint people into a corner. Somebody says
you're an anti-Semite, are you really an anti-Semite? Or is
that an effort to position you so you can only say certain
things or that the things you say are heard, undermined or
understood by the brush with which they paint you?" The
reviewer's thought process brings to light certain dangers
to the modern writer, namely the peril of unilateral judgment
without considering other points of view. Reviews need to
be understood for what they are—opinions, neither right
nor wrong—and, just like all writing, can be very convincing
when well articulated.
As he neared the
end of his time at Michigan, Aversano realized he had a problem.
In the 1990s, universities figured out what corporations had
in the 80s: rather than hire long-term, tenured lecturers
and provide benefits, it was far more cost efficient to hire
part-time lecturers who got paid on a per-course basis, making
the year Aversano was to enter into the job market the worst
year ever for the American academy. And being a white, straight
male from a middle-class background didn't help much. At that
time, however, a former student of his asked for his help
in writing a screenplay. With no experience in film whatsoever
and little motivation to finish his dissertation, he accepted,
not knowing this would be a turning point.
And Hollywood said, "Brush!"
The script won a competition
at the university, funded by a successful alumnus who headed
one of the major Hollywood talent agencies. Only later did Aversano
discover that the submissions had been so bad, the judges pleaded
with the alumnus for no award to be given out that year. While
he thought the script was a profound revelation at the time,
now he freely admits the script was unspeakably bad. A friend
in the film school then suggested he apply for the Sundance
Producers Fellowship. The application consisted of short answer
responses and, since the one thing he knew he could do was write,
he filled it out and sent it off. He was selected as one of
ten finalists and flew out to Los Angeles to meet with the selection
committee. While quite impressed, they told him, quite simply,
that the contest was designed to give someone a leg up in the
industry; it wasn't for an inexperienced Ph.D candidate from
Michigan. He was runner-up.
Returning to Michigan,
Aversano went back to teaching a class on poet laureates,
waiting tables at a pan-tropical bistro, and writing his dissertation
until a member of the selection committee called him up to
offer him a job as a production assistant. The only hitch;
he had to be there the next week. Tossing out years of Ph.D
work, he packed up his bags, sold what he could, and drove
out to Los Angeles. He knocked on the door of the producer
who'd called him, announcing he was here for the job. The
producer sent him to see a line producer, who would give him
a broom and tell him where to sweep. Unfortunately, the line
producer had different plans and none of them involved Aversano
touching a broom. There was no job. He was stuck in Los Angeles,
with no friends, no job, and $207.47 in his pocket. Finally,
his life as a producer had begun.
A Familiar World
When he thinks back
to his days of teaching, Aversano finds a great deal in common
with what he's doing now with screenwriters. "The best teachers
know how to take what a student is saying, challenge [it], have
them refine and clarify their thoughts, and [teach them to]
to articulate it with real force and conviction. The bad teachers
say, 'No, you're wrong, what I say is right and what you say
is wrong,' and the good teachers say, 'Well, I disagree, but
here are the things that are giant holes in your thinking. Can
you fill them up? Can you substantiate your work?' The same
is effectively true for Hollywood screenwriting." While many
people do his job badly, Aversano thinks that to really get
the best from writers, a producer must engage them in a sort
of respectful dialogue, as would any good teacher, to find out
exactly what the writer is trying to say.
As with relating
to his writers through his teaching experience, Aversano has
found that the intellectual world of academic research and
the commercial world of big budget Hollywood filmmaking aren't
all that different. "I made this horrendous remark to a colleague
in grad school. I said, 'I'll move to Hollywood and I'll never
have another substantive conversation again,' and I look back
and I think, wow, what a gigantic jackass I was for the simple
reason that Hollywood is filled with some of the most engaging,
well-read people anywhere." The simple fact is that these
Hollywood producers spend all their intellectual energies
on very tangible questions, such as can the movie get made,
who will star in it, and who will direct it. Making a movie
is a difficult thing, a huge venture with an average investment
of $80 million at risk. Because of the risks, Aversano argues
you can't separate the commercial and the intellectual if
you want to create a great movie. "When you look at The
Hours, it's based on a Pulitzer prize winning novel by
Michael Cunningham. It is a story told in the style of and
starring Virginia Woolf. Nothing could be more intellectual
in its origin. And that movie did $100 million worldwide.
Is it intellectual? Is it commercial? It's both. It has to
be." Even populist movies like School of Rock repel
this concept of the separation of popular and intellectual
art. While the movie appears on the surface to be a broad
comedy about a washed-out musician teaching pre-teens, the
anti-establishment message underlying the whole movie couldn't
be more rooted in our intellectual and literary history.
The Chameleon has landed…
Despite the fact that
Aversano now runs a movie company and no longer has time to
read Oscar Wilde and Thomas Pynchon, he still understands that
his ability to write got him in the door in Hollywood and his
ability to analyze story structure and properly communicate
with writers got him where he is today. Stories fascinate him
and he insists the intellectual power of the word still exists.
"Writing continues to have an incredible amount of authority
and writers, by and large, haven't embraced this fact… With
cable television, the internet, and all this other stuff, some
how or another writing—in that there's a candle by the
desk and I've got my quill pen and I'm scribing—has [changed
to] this polymorphous thing where it takes place in so many
different ways and so many manifestations of writing, from the
email to the blog... The written word still has the sense of
'I believe this, I've thought this through, I crafted this thing,
and it has weight, it has purpose and meaning.' The thing I
lament is that people talk as if writing is dead… It's not true.
It's just that reading and writing have been so transmogrified
by various technology that I just think we need to remember
that writing still has real authority."
The same thing
applies to the films he makes. Movies may be a visual medium
but every artist working on the creation of a film, from the
actors to the light technicians, all add their own perspective
on the story being told. They tell a story with a shot or
a montage or even a slight gesture of the hand, just as a
writer would tell a tale on paper. Like never before, storytellers
and writers have become increasingly difficult to define.
To ask, 'what is a writer?' is no longer a question of pen
and paper; the medium of expression no longer matters. Rather,
the question is 'what are you saying?'
Whether you approve
of Aversano's films or not, you can't argue with their popular
appeal. And they all start with the writer's words. Words
are power and, despite an illiterate president and an alarming
number of books about chicken soup, the words we write, when
formed with care and conviction, can still change the way
people think. They can still create understanding and compassion
where there once was none. Even in Hollywood, a city built
on dreams, those dreams still need an author, someone with
something relevant and important to say and, somehow, that's
comforting. Aversano now accepts his unexpected fate as a
producer, living a life in search of other writers and crafting
movies from their stories, and that's got to be better than
waiting tables at even the best bistro in Los Angeles.
