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That’s why in this movie when he attacks Stanley Tucci, for a second you’re thinking, ‘Oh, he’ll have to do ten years in prison,’ because that is what he does so well, you don’t ever think we’re being tricked. Bob is really good at this, because it’s not him and yet it is him. As a person, he’s extremely powerful, successful, he does not take shit from anybody, and yet he became completely absorbed in playing someone totally unlike himself. Bob, just from being around me and doing this thing, he instinctively, he saw this man hanging on for dear life.
    PB : Your character is dying to get back with his ex-wife, played by Robin Wright, but there’s that scene in the restaurant where a young wannabe actress comes on to him, gives him her phone number, they sleep together, and then she disappears from the movie. What was that about?
    AL : I put that in as a moment of showing that this guy is not clean. To me the irony—a bad word for Hollywood, a death word—theirony of it was, well he is bitching about the fact that some writer may be sleeping with his ex-wife, but he has no problem fucking this girl, like it’s completely a separate issue. There is this kind of odd double standard, don’t you think? Guys have it and they’ve always had it: I’m getting laid and all that stuff, but you’re fucking my ex-wife!
    PB : You started producing in the early seventies with
Car Wash
and your career spans nearly four decades. Is the picture you paint of the producer’s life, the producer’s job, the same as it would be now for a kid in his midtwenties, say, who comes out to Hollywood and wants to produce?
    AL : The business has changed. When I started, studios never lost money, so you could make movies like
Car Wash
or
Melvin and Howard
or
This Boy’s Life
. Those would have to be independently financed today. After
Car Wash
came out, Lew Wasserman buttonholed me on the Universal lot. You almost fall to your knees, ‘Mr. Wasserman, sir.’ He said, ‘I just want you to know we made all our money back in two nights. Thank you.’ Today, there are no Lew Wassermans. The studios are part of multitiered, multinational vertically integrated corporations, so the guy over here who is making the decisions, it only works for his career if he attaches himself to a Johnny Depp megahit like
Pirates of the Caribbean
. I’ve never met Dick Parsons. He’s not interested in making $5 million on
This Boy’s Life
. It’s a waste of his time. These big distribution companies just want to make sequels, and they sort of opted out of the other business. That’s what’s changed. But that’s created an opportunity for these smart business guys who have made their money elsewhere and have suddenly seen an opening in Hollywood that they haven’t seen in the last ten years. They’re going, ‘No, no, there are some real good movies we can make, and we can make money on these movies, and the studios don’t want to do this anymore and they no longer understand that business.’ Sean Penn’s movie on Harvey Milk with Gus Van Sant directing is being independently funded by MichaelLondon’s company. So for somebody like me, who has to get things made, that’s great.
    PB : But is the ‘getting things made’ part the same as it used to be?
    AL: It’s one thing if you’re one of those trust fund babies with $30 million in the bank, and you don’t have the pressure to make money, but to do it the way I did it is the same. You’re still saying, ‘I find that book or that newspaper article or that script interesting, let’s option it. In other words you’ve found something that you think is going to work, then the producing takes over and this is where the real craft begins, if there is a craft, which is, ‘Okay, how do I take this idea and nurture it in a way to get it