(Alan Ladd Jr. has passed away at the age of 84. In his honor, we're republishing Todd Garbarini's interview with him which originally ran in November, 2020.)
BY TODD GARBARINI
If you ask the average movie fan who Alan Ladd, Jr. is, you will
more than likely be greeted with a blank stare. Some might say, “Oh yeah, he
was in Shane!â€, erroneously thinking of his movie star father. If you
asked a movie fan who Laddie is, they would probably think you were referring
to that old TV show about the border collie. The truth is, “Laddie†is an
affectionate industry nickname for Alan Ladd, Jr., a man who grew up in and
made his profession in the movie business and has produced some of the greatest
and most successful films of all-time, including the Oscar-winning films The
Omen (1976), Chariots of Fire (1981) and Braveheart (1995). Arguably
his greatest professional decision was saying “yes†to George Lucas when all of
Tinseltown said “no†to his science fiction tale of a young man looking to
battle the Galactic Empire using a mysterious power known as The Force. The
Oscar-winning Star Wars (1977) paved the way for another film
green-lighted by Laddie, Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).
A man of few words who prefers to work quietly under the radar and
on his own terms, Laddie is the subject of a new, award-winning documentary, Laddie,
The Man Behind The Movies, directed by his daughter, Amanda Ladd-Jones,
containing interviews with George
Lucas, Ridley Scott, Sigourney Weaver, Ben Affleck, Ron Howard, Morgan Freeman,
Mel Brooks, and Richard Donner to name a few, and has won the Best Documentary
Award at the 2019 Julien Dubuque International Film Festival, as well as
received nominations for Best Documentary and Best Film at both the 2018 Milano
International Film Festival Awards (MIFF Awards) and the 2018 NewFilmmakers Los
Angeles.
I spoke with Laddie about his career and Amanda on how the project
got started and became a reality.
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Rabbi Jacob, wow, I don’t even remember
what that was about!
Amanda Ladd-Jones: I never even heard of that movie! (laughs)
Todd Garbarini: It’s a hilarious slapstick comedy starring a very funny
French film actor, Louis de Funès, who unfortunately
passed away in 1983 at age 59. The film was subtitled, though I don’t recall
being able to read at the time! I was five years old and I just responded to
the onscreen action. The film revolves around all these shenanigans that he
finds himself in. It played here and there on the film repertoire circuit in
the 1980’s in New York, and I managed to see it again in August 1995 at the
Walter Reade Theatre near Lincoln Center.
Alan Ladd, Jr.:I’m glad that you liked it!
Todd Garbarini: Given
that your father, Alan Ladd, was a prominent film actor, do you personally feel
that it was inevitable that you would follow him into the film industry in some
capacity?
Alan
Ladd, Jr.:I guess so, since I was around it, and he sort of led me in
that direction. However, I never received any encouragement from him. I
always felt that I would be involved in movies somehow, but I didn’t know
exactly what it was I was actually going to do. I tried to be an assistant
director, but I couldn’t get into the Directors Guild. I tried to get into
editing, but I couldn’t get into the Editors Guild, either. So, I basically
ended up where I ended up through sheer luck more than anything else. There
weren’t any real options available, so I started off as an agent and then
worked my way up to film producer and then ultimately to studio head (of 20th
Century Fox).
Amanda Ladd-Jones: It’s probably safe to say that the Directors
Guild and the Editors Guild are lamenting the decisions that they made. They
probably could have collected some dues off of you!
Alan Ladd, Jr.:Well, they could have collected the dues,
yes, but I don’t know how the hell else they would have gotten anything else
out of me! (laughs)
Todd Garbarini: You’re described by Wikipedia as being a “film
industry executive and producer.†How do those roles differ?
Alan Ladd, Jr.:Well, an executive and a producer are
essentially the same thing. You basically have to try and find good material
and put it together and ultimately try and make the movie.
Amanda Ladd-Jones: The big difference between the two is that as
an executive, you have a steady paycheck!
Todd Garbarini: What would you say are some of the more difficult
aspects of being a producer, from your experience?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: For me, finding good material is ultimately the
most difficult aspect of the job. Once you do find really good material, then everything
else more or less just falls into place.
Todd Garbarini: In the pre-Internet days of mining and sourcing potential
material for a film, how did you go about finding good material? Did you sort
it out by reading books or reviews of books? Did you sort through
screenplays?
Alan
Ladd, Jr: It was a combination all of that, really. I
began my career as an agent in 1963 and I did that for a long time. It was
something that I enjoyed very much. As an agent, you learn a lot. You learn a
lot about how good deals are made and how bad deals are made. You learn to work
with the talent you represent, and you find out early on that they are just as
insecure as you are. These people may be famous stars, but they had their
insecurities and problems just like anybody else does.
Todd Garbarini: The 1970’s is, for me, the greatest decade in the
history of the American Cinema and William Friedkin’s The French Connection
from 1971 is my favorite movie of all-time. The outpouring of exceptional films
that were produced during this time was unbelievable. Star Wars was the
obvious watershed and May 25, 1977, the day of its release, is also known as
The Day the Movies Died, which I don’t feel is a fair assessment of the film’s
artistic accomplishments and intake at the box office. How did you come to meet
the film’s director, George Lucas?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Well, Universal sent me a print of a movie he just
finished called American Graffiti. Universal didn't like the movie at
all and they had absolutely no desire to release it. So, they sent me a print
because they were really interested in getting the movie off their hands. They
wanted to sell it. So, I took a look at it at seven o’clock one morning, which
is really too early to be watching anything. I was very impressed with
it right off the bat. I thought the casting was terrific and I really liked the
way that George put the music in. So, I was impressed with the whole thing and
I called his agent and told him that I wanted to buy the film. Of course, once
I said that, Universal suddenly decided that if somebody wanted to actually buy
it that must mean that it must be good! So, they held onto it and decided to
release it themselves. It went on to be a very successful movie and made a lot
of money for Universal. Regardless, I still wanted to meet with George. We went
out for a drink and had a nice conversation. I asked him if he was working on
anything at the moment, and he told me that he had this idea for a movie that
was called Adventures of the Starkiller as taken
from the Journal of the Whills, Saga I: The Star Wars. It went through many variations and had different titles. He later
wrote several different drafts which I heard about, but I never read them. He
wrote one draft that featured a lot of little people. That eventually morphed
into (Ron Howard’s 1988 film) Willow. So, eventually he produced Star
Wars, which is the script of the movie that we now have. At the time, though,
he gave me an earlier draft that ran nearly two hundred pages. I said, “George
this is ridiculous. This is going to be a five-hour movie!†He said, “No, it's
going to be two hours.†I said okay. He obviously knew more than I did! So, we
shot the film and it did come in just a few minutes over two hours. It was
obvious to me that he had written a script that was more for a director than it
was for me. I saw the film as it was being made. Several times, as I flew to
London to watch them shooting it.
Todd Garbarini: How difficult was it to get Star Wars made
at a time when science fiction films just weren’t big box office draws?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: It wasn't very difficult, really. It did go
considerably over budget which was difficult to explain. I mean, how do you
explain Wookies and droids to a board of directors? They don’t have any idea
what the hell you’re talking about. I’m sure it all sounded very crazy to them.
The film kept going over budget and the board kept demanding explanations for
that. At times, it was more difficult to keep the movie going than it was to just
get it going.
Todd Garbarini: That sounds like Jaws and what Steven
Spielberg went through on the set of that film, with Richard Zanuck and David
Brown trying to keep production afloat, no pun intended! What was your
reaction to the initial and explosive successive of Star Wars?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: It was wonderful. I remember thinking at the time,
Wow!
Todd Garbarini: Blade Runner was a film that initially
received lukewarm reception from the critics and audiences alike in 1982.
Alan Ladd, Jr.: That's for sure.
Todd Garbarini: Now it’s rightly regarded as one of the greatest
science fiction movies ever made, and it’s revered alongside Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Why do you feel that the movie was not initially embraced?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: I really don’t know, it’s hard to say. It wasn’t
accepted here at all. It really did start to take off, however, many years
later when Ridley (Scott) came out with his director’s cut. That was the version
that he did without Harrison Ford’s narration.
Todd
Garbarini: I spoke with John Carpenter about The
Thing and I asked him similarly why he felt that that film was so reviled.
He felt that it was because the U.S. was in the midst of a recession in 1982,
and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was the feel-good movie at the time.
Plus, with The Thing, he felt that people were turned off by the special
effects. I always felt that it probably should have come out in October of
1982, around Halloween.
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Ridley really did a fantastic job on Blade
Runner. He was breaking new ground with it. It was all Ridley, he knew what
he was doing. I had no idea what he was doing.
Todd
Garbarini: What did it mean to you to win the Oscar
for Braveheart?
Alan Ladd, Jr.: Well, it meant a lot. I was very pleased, and very
surprised as well. When you're at the Oscars and they call your name and the
title of the movie, you're really in a state of shock. They always allow just a
little bit of time for one person to talk. I didn't think one way or the other
as to whether or not the film would win or if it wouldn't win. I remember just
showing up at the time.
Todd
Garbarini: Amanda, tell me about the new documentary
film that you’ve directed about your father, Laddie, The Man Behind the
Movies. Is there a companion book to go along with it?
Amanda Ladd-Jones: Well, it’s really interesting that you ask me that,
because the original idea behind this project was actually to make it a coffee
table book. In 2000, somebody gave me a book by Cameron Crowe called Conversations
with Wilder and it was all about Cameron meeting with and talking with
Billy Wilder, discussing all the movies that Billy had made and so forth. And I
remember thinking how cool that would be to do a book like this with
conversations on Laddie. We wouldn’t do conversations with Laddie
because he isn’t much of a conversationalist! (laughs) But, it was
originally going to be conversations about Laddie. At that point in my
life, I was just becoming an adult, and I was meeting so many people who were
telling me all these incredible stories about my dad that I didn’t even know
about. So, I really thought it would be a very cool and great idea to create a
book, and I had the whole thing planned out in my mind, visualized. One side of
the page would be a photograph of the person being interviewed, essentially the
interviewee, and the other side of the page would be their interview about my
father. Strangely, I never thought about making it as documentary! Somebody then
told me that I should really get these interviews on camera, because if you’re
going to speak to all these incredible people it would be really cool to see it.
The light bulb went off and I thought, What a great idea! That was
around 2002. It essentially marinated for a very long time until I really
started on it in earnest in late 2009 into early 2010.
Todd Garbarini: Thank you both for your
time!
Alan Ladd, Jr.: You’re welcome.
Amanda Ladd-Jones: Thank you!
Laddie, The Man Behind The Movies can be seen through many online
outlets, as well as here on Amazon.
Other links are provided on the film’s official Facebook page here.
It’s an excellent documentary and I
urge die-hard cineastes to watch it.