Dining alfresco with an esteemed member of academe? Tres chichi, so the locale should equal the moment:
A sidewalk café in Paris? An elegant outdoor portico in Rome?
Try a slightly wobbly table next to Einstein Bros. Bagels, separated from the UNLV campus across the street by the swirl of screaming fire trucks, screeching ambulances, bus-horn blasts and car exhaust fumes that is Maryland Parkway at lunchtime.
But our interview subject is perfectly at ease in these surroundings. And this is a man whose résumé, under professional references, reads: "Ted Danson, Patrick Stewart, Colin Callender (president, HBO Films), Michelle Manning (president, Paramount), Joseph Sargent (director/producer), Joan Plowright, Noah Wyle, Alfre Woodward and others."
And others? Show-off.
Just kidding, Bob—as in Robert Benedetti, 66, a veteran Hollywood producer/director/screenwriter with a cluster of Emmys, a Peabody award and the Humanitas Prize to his credit for producing such socially thought-provoking HBO films as Miss Evers' Boys and A Lesson Before Dying, and Showtime's Aldrich Ames: Traitor Within, among many others.
An author of books on acting and a well-traveled teacher at such institutions as the Yale Drama School and Carnegie Mellon University, his latest incarnation is at UNLV, where he's in his first semester as a tenured associate professor of playwriting, replacing the late Davey Marlin-Jones.
Between quick bagel bites before heading back to class, Benedetti held forth on Vegas, Hollywood and artistic commitment.
What do you bring to UNLV?
I represent a directorial point of view within the writing program. And I spent 15 years as a film producer, so I was involved a lot in the development process, and I'm able to work with writers on the development of their scripts. But I'm also an acting teacher and a directing teacher, so eventually I'll do some of that as well.
What's your impression of UNLV's playwriting and acting programs?
There is a very high level of selectivity here. All of our playwriting students are on scholarships, and we only take two or three a year. The MFA actors, there's only a class brought in once every three years. The thing that made the name of a place like Carnegie Mellon or the Yale Drama School was the level of selectivity. It wasn't just that these places trained better than elsewhere—they did—but it was more important that they attracted the best students to begin with. Otherwise, it's garbage in, garbage out.
Please, keep eating. I know you've got a class to get to. You mentioned, when we were in line getting our food, that your wife, when she first visited here, was impressed with our cultural life. But many Las Vegans complain about the lack of it. What did she see that others are missing?
I can understand people's complaints because you're living in the shadow of the Strip. She was here with the Art Library Society Association, so they were relating mainly through museums and libraries, and there are some really top-notch museums here, art and otherwise. Certainly NCT (UNLV-based Nevada Conservatory Theatre) is getting better and better and is aimed at serving the community. For people who are willing to associate themselves in an ongoing way with some of the arts organizations and museums in this town, they would be surprised at the resources that are available here.
Local theater often has trouble getting decent community support. Do you see any way to improve it?
You have to find out what they want to see, and that requires going out and asking them, which not many theaters do. The show I'm about to direct, Inherit the Wind (by NCT in February), being about the debate between creationism and evolution, is very relevant now, and we'd like to get the word out through church organizations and other ways because I would love for it to spark debate within the community. We'd like to have lobby displays that will present materials on both sides of the issue, and I'm trying in some minor ways to update the script a little bit.
I've worked at theaters, for instance at Santa Maria, California, the Pacific Conservatory of the Performing Arts. Now that's a town that's roughly half agricultural workers and half Vandenberg Air Force Base personnel. And yet that theater has been enormously successful for over 30 years because it made a real effort to relate to its community in direct ways. It took several years, but they began to build a subscriber base. There are a lot of ways to relate to the community besides the shows. You can have workshops and seminars and talk-back sessions and meetings with the cast. It takes all of those ways of becoming an active and relevant part of the immediate community.
For instance, one of our students has written a wonderful play about the building of Boulder Dam that I'm hoping we can do soon. Local history would be one way of appealing to audiences, especially here where there's sort of a transient population and growing so quickly that some people have only been here a short time. I think that using theater as a way to let them know about the rich history of this place, which is really extraordinary, would be great. The rest of the country is fascinated with Las Vegas, like that PBS series on the growth of the Strip, and Martin Scorsese's movies. It's kind of strange to me that Las Vegas is not equally fascinated, and that the theaters are not using that fascination to best advantage.
You're returning to teaching after a long hiatus. What took you away from it and why did you return to it?
About 15 years ago, I took a sabbatical from theater. Ted Danson, who had been a student of mine at Carnegie Mellon, had a production company at Paramount, which I ran for five years. It was part of the Cheers deal. When Cheers ended I produced movies mostly for HBO and Showtime. Then about three years ago, the nature of the film business changed with all the corporate takeovers and consolidation. I found it increasingly difficult to set up the kinds of movies I was interested in, things that would promote social justice.
And at this point in my life, I was feeling a really strong need to share what I had learned. After 15 years away from theater, I was eager to get back to it. When the job opportunity here came up, the fact that the NCT is on campus is really important to me. That gives me a serious, professional-level outlet, creatively. It's been really enjoyable.
Why is it no longer possible to do socially relevant work in Hollywood?
Now that almost all the media outlets, the cable companies, the networks and the studios are owned by huge conglomerates ... the bottom line was always important, but now it's the only thing that's important. An industrial mentality has taken over. And because it's been going on for a few years now, because of the policies of this administration and the previous administration, the changes in the FCC rules which permitted media consolidation allowing these big corporations to not only take over newspapers and television channels within the same community, but also to produce their own product ... the executives who make the artistic decisions about what gets done are coming up out of the corporate and marketing culture. They're not theater people, they don't usually have a strong literary background. Their taste is the taste you have to deal with when you go to get them to do something. And if they don't immediately see the salability in 25 words or less, well, they think in terms of 10-second spots, and if it doesn't make its appeal evident right then, it's not going to get done.
The kinds of movies I was committed to doing, things like A Lesson Before Dying and Miss Evers' Boys, you can't sell in 10-second spots. HBO is the only place in town doing the kind of things I'm interested in, but I can't maintain a whole producing career just on a relationship with HBO.
Are you then pessimistic about the future of Hollywood, or do you think it could turn around and you might go back to it?
I don't think I'd go back to it at my age. It really is a young man's game. As a producer, it takes an enormous amount of energy and application to just keep pushing at these projects and keeping them going. They can get killed at any stage of the process. Just because you get money to write the script and the script is accepted and the casting is approved doesn't mean the movie is going to get made. I'd say one out of six movies that are developed actually wind up getting made. That's why big producers like Jerry Bruckheimer and John Wells and Scott Rudin are really dominating because they have these big factories and can have 30, 40 things in development and can afford to have that kind of fallout. An individual producer like me really can't afford to do that.
I'm not really optimistic about the quality of stuff because as soon as a cable channel starts doing well, it gets gobbled up by one of these corporations and the same thinking starts to apply. But meanwhile, there are nooks and crannies—ESPN is starting to do movies, so is Court TV, FX is doing some interesting movies—but it's a very small percentage of the total volume.
When Ted Danson was your student in the late '60s, did you see his potential?
Yeah. The students I've had that ended up doing well, Ed Harris, Don Cheadle, people like that, it was clear even then that they had a special talent and a special level of commitment and a special integrity. They really did their work, and they did not have a consumerist attitude. That and their tenacity.
Is that attitude less abundant today?
When I decided to stop teaching in the early '90s, it was partly because the students in that period came into the school regarding themselves as commodities to be prepared for sale. They didn't have any particular artistic or even psychological need to do what they were doing. They just wanted to be rich and famous. That had no relationship to art or education, and so I left it. But I think now, students are swinging back to the way students were back in the '60s when I first started teaching, where they have a commitment to a higher sense of purpose, and as a result, I think they may not be more talented in performing skill, but they have a higher ethical sense, more integrity, from which comes courage and tenacity.
The one thing that makes me hopeful for theater in this country is this change in the young people that are going into it. I've been doing what I could to inform the kids here of what theater was like in the '60s and '70s, when I was active in it, in hopes it would spur them to revive some of that activist attitude where theater was used as a means to an end, and that end had something to do with social justice or spirituality, and not just commercial considerations.
Couldn't the change at the acting level alter the bottom-line attitude in Hollywood?
I don't think corporations are influenced in that way. They just regard everybody as the hired help. What might arise are some alternative distribution means in order to provide the opportunity for more serious work within the realm of independent films.
In the same way that United Artists was started by D.W. Griffith and Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin and John Barrymore, they created it as artists because they needed to have control over the product they wanted to do. And you see that in the independent film movement. But as soon as the good work gets done, one of the studios buys it up through one of its subsidiaries like Sony Classics or Fox Searchlight. Almost all of the studios have created a subsidiary specifically to buy and distribute independent movies. Thank God they have the good sense to allow the independent filmmakers to remain independent and do their work and are willing to buy the results.
Even so, it's so hard to get one of those things made that it's got to be a labor of love. No one is going to make one of those as a commercial entity, even though there might be money to be made from it.