Bring In The Peacocks . . . or Memoirs of a Hollywood Producer

      When I was a teenager in the late 1940’s, my parents and I lived very near Paramount Studios in Hollywood.  We had moved to California for my parents’ health.  They were older than my friends’ parents: I had been what was then called their “love child,” or as we joked in my house, “the tumor.”  While other kids my age were out playing sports with their fathers, I was given a dime and allowed to spend Saturday at the movies.  Movies became the favorite part of my week, my childhood, my life.  To be able to stroll up the street to the gates of Paramount was like a dream to me.  I would see Marlene Dietrich and all the other Paramount stars enter the studio: Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Paulette Goddard, Betty Hutton, Ray Milland.  I loved watching actors going to work, hoping that one day I would be working with them.  Marlene had seen me often at the Paramount gate and one day she said in her husky, slightly accented voice, “I suppose you’d like to come into the studio.”  Are you kidding?  Marlene was doing a picture called Golden Earrings, playing a gypsy.  Marlene took me into the studio on a few unforgettable occasions and I would sit in the back observing everything.  That was my first taste of movie making, and it was very heady stuff for a teenage boy.  Thanks in large part to Marlene Dietrich, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. 

      In 1954, I became an assistant director at MGM Studios.  MGM was the greatest studio of all, a city within a city.  In addition to the sound stages and all the creative and administrative departments that produce movies, it had its own fire department, police department and hospital.  It had the best producers, directors, writers, cameramen, designers, art directors, makeup and hair, AND the best production department.  The production department consisted of unit managers, first assistant directors, second assistant directors, and script supervisors.  The unit manager was the producer’s link to the stage and the assistant director did whatever the director wanted or needed – and a good assistant director knew what the director wanted or needed even before the director did.  To me, the first assistant director was the force that could make or break a film.  I always said that the best position on a film was the First Assistant Director.  You were there during the creation of the film, often able to interject ideas and suggestions, yet you never had to make the nerve-wracking major decisions.  That was the job of the producer.

      How I got inside MGM was a minor miracle.  I had graduated from the University of Southern California with a degree in Cinema, and I was immediately drafted into the Korean conflict.  My brothers and I were all Army men.  We were all drafted.

      After I served a twenty-four month sentence during which I never left the United States, I returned to California eager to get into the film business, as I had dreamed of since childhood.  I wrote one letter to MGM in care of the production department, determined to start at the biggest and best studio in the world.  I mailed my letter on a Monday morning.  I received a call from MGM the following Thursday morning, asking me to come to the studio the next morning at ten o’clock.  On Friday I was on the MGM payroll.  Simple as that.

      The letter that I had written was a typical letter from someone seeking a job – my educational background, my Army service record and various vital statistics.  I mentioned that I spoke fluent Armenian and fluent Turkish.  My parents were Armenians born in Turkey. 

      The Friday I went to MGM for my ten o’clock interview must have been a day filled with crises.  I came to learn that every day at a motion picture studio was filled with crises.  People were running around from office to office, taking no notice of me.  I sat in the outer office of the head production manager, a man named Walter Strohm.  Strohm’s secretary apologized for the delay.  Ten o’clock came and went.  Eleven o’clock came and went.  Finally about noon, the secretary said that I should go to lunch and come back at two o’clock.

      I discovered the commissary.  I was in a whole new world.  I was shown to a small table.