I only got to meet Harlan two or three times, and since it was in my position of VP for Los Angeles PEN it was somehow always antagonistic (by his selection, of course). He tried to shout me down when I was announcing something or other. I told him, Why don’t you stand up and defend yourself like the writer that you are instead of just interrupting obnoxiously. He jumped to his feet, stated his case, then sat down. And grinned. It gave me a good feeling.
I loved reading his words, but none more than what he sent me one day when I asked him what he did with “cranks & weirdos” he must deal with even more than I did as an editor. He sent me a mimeographed statement he sent to them, that went substantially like this:
SOME PRETERNATURALLY IMBECILIC ASSHOLE, USING YOUR NAME, SENT ME THE ENCLOSED PIECE OF SHIT USING THE UNITED STATES POSTAL SERVICE AND I AM RETURNING IT TO YOU HEREWITH IN THE KNOWLEDGE THAT YOU WILL NEED IT AS EVIDENCE WHEN YOU FILE A FEDERAL CASE AGAINST THE MORONIC FUCKER. GOOD LUCK WITH THAT!
Being a professor at the time, I didn’t have the balls to actually use it, but I never failed to think about it when I opened a crank missive. If only I could adopt it to email today!
Film Courage: What three things does a great story have to have?
Dr. Ken Atchity, Author, Publisher, Producer: What three things? Well, it has to have a hook that gets people instantly involved in the story and that’s a huge part of the story itself. And it’s got to have a very strong character
in the story that you care about and other than that, it has to have
twists and turns that lead to a surprise ending. If I had to just say
three things, I guess that’s what I would say the three things are.
Every story needs that because a story about nothing is not going to
hold anyone’s interest.
And sometimes writers
when they begin their careers think that if they just write, they can
write about anything but the truth is they need to write from their
heart about things that matter to everyone and if they do that, you can
hardly go wrong. Because stories are really not about words or word
choice or anything like that. They’re about conveying the power of a
character facing a dilemma that you have no idea how he or she will
resolve and when you do that you’ve got everyone’s attention.
And in ancient times there was a thing called The Oral Tradition which I used to teach as a professor of Homeric Greek. The Iliad and the Odyssey
were sung at campfires and everyone in the culture knew the stories. We
are publishing a book right now on Homeric song and how it worked and
how it held culture together. And my first book those…I call those
stories the shield of memory and it was because of those stories that a
person knew how to deal with himself in battle or when facing an
attacking boar or when facing an angry wife or when facing pillagers
trying to burn down his village. He would instantly think of the story
of Heracles who did this or that or the story of Aegean who did this and
that and that’s all they had. They didn’t have books for learning. It
was all passed along through the oral tradition. And I think stories
have never failed to play that role in human life and when you think
about it you know “What’s your story?” is probably the most
human response to any encounter and it goes from the court of law where
the jury is trying to decide which of the two stories do they believe,
to a political campaign where the voters are making that decision, to a
first date where you are going “Do I believe his story? I just don’t believe it? I can’t buy his story?”
That’s the ultimate human turn down, you can’t buy the story. And it
goes through everything. Advertising is conveying stories that people
will want to buy the product. This is how humans operate on a daily
basis so to me it’s absolutely amazing that an industry has been created
where people will pay millions of dollars for stories and where stories
can basically conquer the world and I believe unite the world.
I mean look at all the work we are now doing with China in the movie business. I just saw Lara Croft in Tomb Raider (the new version of it) where the male lead is Chinese and she is Western and clearly as a producer I’m watching it going “This was a Chinese financed movie,” because I understand how it works for the market…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
Long story short, I asked him
what I should do when I grow up which I’d asked male authority figures
all my life basically. He told me after we got to know each other that I
should consider the entertainment business because it was much broader
than the academic world and people can basically do whatever…anything
creative you’re encouraged to do basically. You can find your own way.
There are no rules and schedules and all of those kind of things that we
find in academia. And I love academic you know? The world and the ideas that are
exchanged and all of that. But it was restricting and it was (for me)
suffocating. Which is a word that means a lot to me personally. It’s my
most ancient nightmare being suffocated and I’ve never been suffocated
in the…
Film Courage: Ken, as a tenured professor in your mid-40s, what made you think you could change careers? Dr. Ken Atchity, producer and author: Well, this is America and you can do whatever you want to do. It’s one of the great things about this country. What I was doing was very related to a career I’m in now. It was
developing stories, developing writers, and of course, teaching a number
of things that I no longer teach like classical literature and Italian
literature. So it’s all united by storytelling. I had no idea which world was
sort of the bigger world of ideas, the world of academia that I had been
in for 17 years, or the world I went into. And I discovered that the
world I went into was really the world of ideas, because it’s a world in
which people are tracking ideas across continents to find out who owns
the rights to a story. They pay lots of money to acquire the story (at
least they used to pay lots of money) and they spend millions of dollars
to turn the story into a movie and they’re fiercely competitive about
the world of ideas. The motion picture business is the jungle of ideas
and it’s survival of the best idea and the best business people. I always so it’s called show business for a reason. It’s not
just about show, it’s about the business of how stories get developed
into movies that the whole world can see. Film Courage: I’m hoping we can go back to maybe before
you made this transition to wanting to be in film? Was there something
that happened, was there a time in your life that where you felt like
“You know what? I want a new challenge.” Dr. Ken Atchity: That’s a good question because I’ve
reflected on it all of my life since then and it was actually provoked
by my receiving tenure. I actually belonged to an untenured faculty
committee against tenure. One day when I was a Fulbright professor in
Bologna, Italy, I got a telegraph from the Dean of the faculty at
Occidental College telling me that I’d received tenure in my absence. And my reaction to it was not very understandable to my friends and
colleagues. I became deeply depressed for about a year. And it took me a
long time to figure out why I was depressed and it was because I had
really never asked to be in this golden cage where nothing can happen to
you. It was like the most secure place you could be and I realized at
the time that my father’s chief value in life was security. He was a
child of The Depression and security was all important to him. And I had
to admit to myself that it wasn’t that important to me. I never worried
about being secure. I’d published lots of things and I was in demand as
a speaker and just never had to worry about it. And what I valued was freedom and I didn’t feel and I didn’t feel
freedom when under a structure where you had to behave a certain way and
you had to know a year in advance that on the week of October 12th
you’d be teaching the 8th book of The Iliad. And it was wonderful to be
teaching The Iliad, but that to know a year in advance you were going to
be somewhere. I now live in a world where I don’t know where I am going to be
tomorrow literally and it’s complete opposite, it’s a free world. And of
course I realized that as I got older that freedom is as much an
illusion as security (both of them are illusions), but it was my
illusion. Security was not my illusion and so I’ve lived with complete
insecurity. But with the freedom to express myself creatively and in
every possible way (which is what the film business allows me to do) and
so that was very exciting to me. Film Courage: And do you ever tell people that? If they
are looking to be in a creative pursuit whether it’s being an author or
screenwriter or actor, that security will probably be something that
they will not encounter and to be okay with that? Dr. Ken Atchity: Absolutely. I mean this is not a
career to wish on anyone. You have to have a burning desire to do it and
you have to be willing to sacrifice anything to do it and to persist
despite every setback and I can tell you that this is a business in
which (a career) this never gets easier, I don’t care how many movies
you’ve done. The next one is going to be the biggest challenge you’ve
ever faced, the world changes all the time. It’s been changing ever
since I’ve been in it which is around 30 years now and it never gets any
easier and it never gets any more secure and even if you’ve had
windfalls and lot.
