Informative feature in tomorrow’s NYT’s magazine on James Schamus. Talk about hyphenates. He’s a producer, studios executive, screenwriter and academic whose writing credits include The Ice Storm, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Taking Woodstock. Some excerpts from the article:
During a break at the midpoint of the four-hour seminar, Schamus checked his BlackBerry. There were, as usual, lots of messages pertaining to his other job: for the past nine years he has been C.E.O. of Focus Features, the specialty unit of Universal Pictures. As the head of a successful movie studio owned by a giant corporation, Schamus finances, produces and distributes movies that are “independent” to the extent that that label describes a style, a target audience, a price tag. “They make smart movies for low budgets,” as Tim Gray, who oversees Variety, put it. Focus’s Oscar winners include “Milk,” “The Pianist” and “Lost in Translation,” among others.Schamus has also had a prolific career as a writer and producer. He has made 11 films with the director Ang Lee, including “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain.” Along with two partners, Schamus ran Good Machine, a production company that between 1991 and 2002 made and distributed a series of important indie films like “Safe” and “The Brothers McMullen.” Until he got too busy with Focus, Schamus, who is 51, also did uncredited rewrites on the kind of expensive popcorn movies that Focus Features doesn’t make (but he wouldn’t tell me which ones).
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“I’m in this weird corner of the business,” Schamus told me, “where the capital’s just low enough that the only way to succeed is to throw out the focus groups and make a compelling case that our stuff is different.”
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David Bordwell, the distinguished film scholar, says of Schamus: “He’s very good at figuring out the sweet spot, that middle range where independent cinema has to be. Ideally you have some stars, strong content, often from good books, and it needs to be offbeat enough to seem fresh, but it has to be still recognizably part of a familiar cinematic tradition, something challenging but not too challenging.”
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There is a middle way; think of it as the moment of perfect overlap at twilight. He said, “If we can make it profitable to use the common language of film, a language that addresses a public, to say something worth saying that was previously unsaid or unsayable, then those things get said.” That such movies have to turn a profit in order to exist, a condition of truly public utterance in a capitalist society, just adds another element to the puzzle, one more rule to the game.
There’s the old line about the problem with movies as art is they’re a business. Given his multiple jobs and personal aesthetics, perhaps no one working in Hollywood has to confront this reality more directly than Schamus.
There is a middle way; think of it as the moment of perfect overlap at twilight. He said, “If we can make it profitable to use the common language of film, a language that addresses a public, to say something worth saying that was previously unsaid or unsayable, then those things get said.” That such movies have to turn a profit in order to exist, a condition of truly public utterance in a capitalist society, just adds another element to the puzzle, one more rule to the game.—-
Between classes at Columbia on a lovely September afternoon, Schamus found a spot in the sun behind Dodge Hall to smoke a cigar. “For me,” he said, “the happiest place on earth is a well-run school. If I have a false nostalgia, it’s for an ongoing conversation in which anyone can say anything interesting, a conversation you have in public, and that includes people who are dead. To the extent that I have a management style, I try to replicate that environment.”
His conversations with students and filmmakers have in common a desire to get them to stop trying to please an imaginary internalized Professor or Studio Head and free themselves to say something original, fresh and useful — something constructively weird.
He realizes that his current arrangement, with one foot in the movie business and the other in the academy, is not necessarily permanent. “I would be happy to run Focus for the next 20 years,” he told me in an early conversation, “but I have to be ready for that not to happen.” His role model, he told me half-jokingly, is the poet Su Tung-p’o, an 11th-century Chinese bureaucrat who served faithfully until he fell out of favor and was twice sent into exile. “Some of it is the translation,” Schamus said, “but you read him and it feels so weirdly modern, as if he were talking to you today.” (Here, for example, is a portion of “On First Arriving at Huang-Chou”: “Funny — I never could keep my mouth shut;/it gets worse the older I grow/ . . . An exile, why mind being a supernumerary?/Other poets have worked for the Water Bureau.”)
As we sat in the sunny quadrangle amid the eternal rhythms of the university, I asked, “If that happens to you, if your run in the movie industry comes to an end, do you come back here?”
He said: “This isn’t exile. This is work. I don’t see the university as a retreat from anything.”
For more of the lengthy feature on Schamus, go here.
