The Wizard of Oscar
After ten years behind the curtain, the producer of the most-watched awards show in the world discusses Oscar's return to Hollywood, how he hooked Martin, and why length matters.
By Steve Pond
Photographed by Sye Williams
April 2001
After ten years behind the curtain, the producer of the most-watched awards show in the world discusses Oscar's return to Hollywood, how he hooked Martin, and why length matters.
To paraphrase Orson Welles, this is the greatest train set a kid could have,” says Gil Cates, who this year is laying the tracks for the tenth time as producer of the Academy Awards show. After watching from the audience last year as Richard and Lili Fini Zanuck produced the Oscars, an experience he says he found “really odd,” Cates is back to grappling with the problems of trying to control Hollywood’s biggest—and longest—night: from dealing with the egos and demands of dozens of movie stars (and their publicists) to trying to hand out two dozen awards and present five songs and still keep the event from turning into a four-hour marathon.
“Without any entertainment, the show could be done in three hours and ten minutes,” says the 66-year-old film, theater, and television director. “Don’t sing the songs, don’t show any film packages, reduce the opening set with the host, and don’t show the best-picture nominees. But I like the idea of trying to make the show entertaining, regardless of its length,” he says.
When Cates is not producing the Oscars, he serves as the producing director of the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles, and he has had a 40-year career directing a variety of films, ranging from 1970’s acclaimed (and Oscar-nominated) I Never Sang for My Father to the upcoming PBS production A Death in the Family. He began his Oscar stint after heading an internal Academy panel in the aftermath of producer Allan Carr’s glitzy yet widely panned 1989 show, and since then, only twice has his schedule kept him from producing the Oscars: in 1996, when Quincy Jones took the baton, and last year, when the Zanucks put on a high-tech (but record-length) program that Cates says he liked.
Figuring that people always love to criticize the Big Show, Cates says that he long ago stopped worrying about public and critical opinion. “The best bit of advice that I got when I did my first one was from [two-time Oscar-show producer] Samuel Goldwyn Jr., who said, ‘No matter what you do, a lot of people are not going to like it. So do the show that you’d like to do.’ ”
Of course, to do that, you’ve got to find a host who’s acceptable to the Academy, the network, and the worldwide viewing audience, which the Academy enthusiastically pegs at a billion people. “When you get down to it, there are only about eight, nine people whom all the power interests feel comfortable with,” Cates says. “It’s got to be someone who can control a big room, who can think on their feet, who’s funny, who works clean. . . . It’s a very small group.” Past hosts Billy Crystal and Whoopi Goldberg make Cates’s list, as do Tom Hanks, Will Smith, Jay Leno, and actor-comedian Steve Martin, who’d turned down Cates a couple of times in the past before agreeing to be this year’s emcee. “People have given me great credit for getting Steve Martin,” Cates laughs. “But the truth is, it was very simple. I just called Steve at home and said, ‘Would you like to do it?’ and he said yes.”
This year also marks the last time the Oscars will be held at the Shrine Auditorium—or, for that matter, from any outside space. Beginning next year, the show will emanate from the Academy’s own Kodak Theatre, which is currently being built in the heart of Hollywood. “It will be great for the Academy to do the show in its own theater,” Cates says. “And it’s exciting trying to revitalize a part of the city that really gave birth to the movies, 80 years ago. But what’s special about the Academy Awards is that it’s the Academy Awards. It’s been around for 73 years; you watched it with your parents and your grandparents, and we all share hundreds of images that we’ve seen in the movies. That’s what the show is. I think the show would be the show wherever it was.”
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