Casual notes on show-biz books, memoirs and studies, dust gatherers, and hot off the presses.
Book Review by Samuel L. Leiter . . .
Julian Schlossberg. Try Not to Hold it Against Me: A Producer’s Life (New York: Beaufort Books, 2023). 350pp.
26th Edition.
Last year, Julian Schlossberg published Try Not to Hold it Against Me: A Producer’s Life, a memoir written in what we might call his anecdotage (he was 81). Julian who, you ask? That’s a question Schlossberg—apparently no relation to Carolyn Kennedy’s husband, Edwin—himself might have asked, as intimated by self-deprecating comments scattered through his entertaining time-passer. For example, when he once stood alongside Shirley MacLaine after a show and she was besieged by autograph seekers, someone asked who he was. He replied, “I’m nobody.” Immediately, the refrain, “He’s nobody,” was repeated down the line from fan to fan, inducing him to leave because he “could only take so much anonymity.”
Schlossberg, however, is, without question, a somebody. If you’ve been actively involved in the film, TV, or theater world for the past half-century, you’ve likely come across his name, although not in an above-the-marquee way. His career has been mostly behind the scenes, as a producer, film distributor, and exhibitor. A recognized cinema buff, he has also been a highly successful host on talk radio, where he interviewed countless celebrities, many of them subsequently forming close friendships with him. These connections served him very well for the many stories he recounts.
Here you will meet his closest friends, especially Elaine May (who wrote the foreword) and Marlo Thomas (whom he calls his sisters). Then there are the numerous stars of page, stage, and screen with whom he bonded during projects, only for time to thin the connection. There are also the many others—like Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer—with whom, like ships in the night, he interacted only once—but sufficiently to provide a story.
These friends, companions, business associates, dinner party acquaintances, and coworkers are often world-class figures, from A-list movie stars to Hollywood studio heads to distinguished politicians. Several of the stories they inspire are highly interesting, but, for the most part, little is revealed that celebrity hounds don’t already know. If anyone else were the subject of these tales they’d likely receive a “so what?” shrug; being who they are, you can’t deny the palpable interest in what they said or did, banal as it might have been. Although it may not have been Schlossberg’s purpose, his comments on his subjects—even when he’s in awe of them (which is frequently)—do serve to humanize them.
Schlossberg, born in 1942, grew up in the Bronx (Aqueduct Avenue, for those who might be interested), the son of a strong mother, who was one of the New York Board of Education’s first full-time guidance counselors, and a weaker dad, who gave up a career as a potential professional baseball player when his parents objected to such a career for a Jewish man. Much of Julian’s early life (including a stint in the Army) suggests that of other New York kids of similar backgrounds and similar times, like Mel Brooks. It’s no surprise that he spent endless hours at the movies (from the nearby Kingsbridge Theatre to those of Washington Heights where his grandma lived to the movie palaces of Broadway), absorbing everything on screen.
Although he had multiple boyhood jobs, he showed an early interest in making money from show business-related work under his own initiative, as when he obtained free passes to events at the Kingsbridge Armory from local merchants and then sold them to opening day visitors. At 10, he was a regular reader of Variety. He habitually attended live TV broadcasts and rehearsals and even approached stars like Jack Paar for their autographs. He did some acting in summer camp and in college (Harpur College, CCNY, and NYU) before he joined the Army in 1962.
Later, he talked his way into a low-level TV job at ABC and, before long, was moving up to the junior executive level. He was then hired by the Walter Reade Organization, selling movies to TV stations in small markets. This was the basis for a very successful career in distribution and exhibition. Schlossberg’s descriptions of his work, selling movies, and, later, promoting movies in NYC, as well as his explanations of how the industry functioned have definite historical value. (He eventually taught college classes on these topics.)
Soon enough, his contacts included such Hollywood bigwigs as Warren Beatty and Elia Kazan, when his efforts on their behalf made money (as, for example, a revival of the movie McCabe and Mrs. Miller, a flop in its original showing). By his 30s, he was an important player in the industry, both domestically and internationally. Cannes was on his yearly itinerary. Ultimately, Schlossberg became a film producer himself, beginning with Ten from Your Show of Shows, a compilation film of sketches from Sid Caesar’s early 1950s TV show.
Schlossberg touches on his high-profile positions at places like Paramount and Columbia (he came to hate the studio system), the creation of his own distribution company, Castle Hill (from the German “schloss” and “berg”), and many other facets of a brilliant, if not widely known career. Projects with Robert Duvall, Mia Farrow, Renée Taylor, Joe Bologna, Peter Falk, Tom Courtney, Eileen Atkins, Alan Bates, Al Pacino, Michael Palin, Mike Nichols, Twiggy, and on and on are introduced, as are documentaries produced under his vision, like Going Hollywood: The ’30s and its 1940s follow-up. His sole indie commercial film was In the Spirit, whose promo trailer (on YouTube) was written by Elaine May and is worth a viewing on its own. Still in progress is his planned 14-part series Witnesses to the 20th Century, for which he interviewed a humongous number of leading contributors to modern history, their names provided in long lists.
On and off Broadway, Schlossberg co-produced a quality list of plays, including three one-act programs whose writers included Woody Allen, Elaine May, David Mamet, and Alan Arkin. Also significant were his productions of straight plays like Fortune’s Fool, Vita and Virginia, If Love Was All, and The Unexpected Man. The biggest of them all, his sole Broadway musical, Bullets over Broadway—based on Woody Allen’s film—was a disappointment.
Try Not to Hold it Against Me is loosely structured around 86 chapters, some only two pages long, some only a collection of brief memories, some more substantial. They breeze by, with his personal life brought in indirectly. You learn, for example, of his three marriages, but the details are sketchy, although it’s clear his third, to a British woman named Merryn, is successful.
Sometimes he skips blithely through his life just for the sake of dropping household names and relatively innocuous anecdotes; other times he gets into the weeds of his professional work in much-appreciated detail, as when he discusses the casting difficulties he had when producing a revival of Larry Gelbart’s Sly Fox. If you’re not sure what a producer does, Schlossberg provides a useful explanation. Surprisingly, its rewards aside, he finds being a Tony voter bothersome because you have to see every Broadway show, the good, the bad, and the ugly. At the end, he includes a chapter offering his life philosophy in bite-sized chunks, with headings like: “It’s rarely black and white”; “Decisions on the spur of the moment”; and “Strike while it’s hot.”
Schlossberg admits to having been present at a celebrity-filled party after which he called his mother to inform her that “Merryn and I were the only people there we’d never heard of.” Lots of people who feel similarly about them will not be able to say so after they read Try Not to Hold it Against Me. And if they need to know more, Schlossberg has just published a follow-up volume. Stay tuned for its review next week.
Coming up: Julian Schlossberg. My First Book—Part 2: A Producer’s Life Continues.
Leiter Looks at Books welcomes inquiries from publishers and authors interested in having their theater/show business-related books reviewed.
Photos Courtesy of www.julianschlossbergproducer.com
