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On August 6, 2002, I interviewed producer Dennis E. Doty, business partner of director Gil Cates, at their office in Westwood.

Luke: "Where did you grow up?"

Dennis: "In Newhall, now Valencia, an hour north of Los Angeles. When I was growing up, Newhall had 7000 people. It now has about 300,000 people. My father worked for Lockheed on the U-2 and other things.

"I went to William S. Hart High School. My grandfather knew the actor William Hart. I have two sisters and one brother, all younger.

"I went to USC 1959-63. I was going into dentistry. I went to the first indoctrination at USC prior to the school year, and I see that they have a department of telecommunications and cinema. And at that moment, I decided that I didn't want to spend my life looking into other people's mouths. I'm going to do what I love to do - television.

"I would coerce my folks into taking me to television shows. I'd sneak around movie lots and watch people make movies. I told my parents and they accepted it.

"I was a child of live television [in the 1950s and early '60s]. Sid Caesar, The Show of Shows, Producer's Showcase and the great live dramas and variety shows. Gil and his late brother Joe produced some of those shows including The $64,000 Question.

"I was at ABC from 1963-76. I wound up as the last vice-president of what was called variety programming. It's now called reality programing.

"My first low-level job in the industry was as a part-time page at ABC. In the first few months, I learned as much as I did at USC.

"I spent six months full-time in the Air Force Reserves and then spent five years in the Air Guard as a public information officer.

"I always wanted to produce and I moved up the ranks. I became a production manager at age 23 on General Hospital and American Bandstand."

Luke: "Did you know Edgar Scherick?"

Dennis: "When I was a page, Edgar was ABC's head of programming. He was a major executive and a volatile character. New to the job, I was assigned to be the page/gopher at a theater they'd just remade in Hollywood. It was called The Jerry Lewis Theater. Formerly, it was the El Capitan. It became The Hollywood Palace. It is now the Vine Street Theater. It was a legendary theater that they did radio out of in the thirties.

"They were renovating the theater to do this big new Jerry Lewis Live show. It was ABC's big thrust into Saturday night. A two-hour live extravaganza with Jerry Lewis.

"My first vision of Edgar was on opening night. The smell of disaster was in the air. I was told to take something back to Jerry's dressing room. Edgar was behind the spiral staircase in the corner, looking like he had seen the future and it was grim.

"Edgar was a great character. Shortly thereafter, I was assigned to go to the Beverly Hills Hotel. The big potentates from New York were coming out. ABC was short on money then. Leonard Goldenson, the chairman, Tom Moore, the president and the corporate counsel were sharing bungalow seven to have a confab about the season. My job was to sit in the corner, answer the phone, and do gopher work.

"I was terrified. I was on the job only a month. All these legendary people were coming in to town. I was befriended by the VP of West Coast Operations, Vince Francis. They were awaiting the arrival of Edgar Scherick so they could have their first meeting.

"It was like the coming of Mohammed. He was late. I was working the phone. 'He's on his way from the airport.' 'He's not at the front desk yet.'

"Then later, 'Mr. Scherick is at the front desk.' 'Well, is he coming right out?' 'No, he's going to his suite first.' 'Tell him to get out here, we're all waiting.'

"I'm going to tell dynamo Scherick? So I said, 'Mr. Scherick, they're all waiting for you a little anxiously out here.' So he arrives with Douglas Cramer in tow, his assistant out here.

"Edgar came in like a whirling dervish. He took all the air out of the room.

"Edgar and Douglas were on the sofa. All of a sudden, Douglas sneezed. Edgar rips out a handkerchief. 'You have a cold! You have a cold! Get away from me. Sit over there.'

"I thought, 'Oh God, this is going to be exciting.' So I had three days of watching and learning from these guys. And over the years, I wound up a good friend of Edgar.

"In 1968, I joined ABC's programming department on the West Coast after being the head of the unit managers. I knew that programming was better paying, you had bigger expense accounts and a different kind of responsibility and power.

"When the East Coasters came out for meetings, we'd hang out at the Bel Air Hotel. Michael Eisner had replaced Barry Diller as the chief of staff of the programming department, the assistant to program director Marty Starger. Barry engineered himself into V.P. of East Coast development.

"Michael determined that I was the perfect fit to replace him so he could then become the head of daytime programming. One night we were sitting at the Bel Air. Michael said to me, 'I'm going to make your career.' I said, 'You will?' He said, 'Yes. You are going to take my job and I am going to take the daytime job.' I said, 'Gee, that's nice but I don't want to go to New York.'

"After ten weeks of his selling and cleverness, I moved to New York and was there until Starger left. I became the head of early morning programming. ABC didn't have any programming at the time until 10:30AM. I started AM America, which became Good Morning America. So Michael did change my career, as he does for lots of people."

Luke: "Didn't Michael and Barry invent the TV movie?"

Dennis: "The TV movie has many fathers. Barry was the first anointed head of movies for television. It was a de facto experiment that had no head. Now Michael and Barry are sharp. One of Barry's domains when he was vice-president of East Coast programs was acquisition of features. He extended his connections, cleverly, into all the studios as the buyer for feature films.

"When the television movie business looked like it was going to be a business, Barry's connections, plus logic, dictated that it should go under his domain.

"The real parents of TV movies were program directors Leonard Goldberg and Marty Starger. It was then fostered into success by Barry. Michael was mostly doing other things."

Luke: "Why is the producer, particularly the executive producer, king in television?"

Dennis: "Who else is there? Directors don't nurture TV projects along. TV directors say 'action' for a living. It's got to be somebody who finds it, believes in it, ties it up, molds it, sells it, get the second and third writer if necessary, sell it again, rewrite is a long bridge, and then make sure that it gets done for the $1.10 that you have to do it. Cable executives are assuming this role. But at the end of the day, they go on to the next meeting and the next phone call. Somebody has to be sitting watching the stove all the time.

"The show-runner theory of episodic TV. David Kelley is the arch-example of the god emperor of show-runners. Directors come and go on series. One of the battles that the DGA is having now is that TV directors get script changes while they're shooting, which they say prevents them from doing good work, which it does. How can you prepare if you don't know what you're doing? Then if you don't make the requisite number of shots, the producer screams at you. Maybe that's good writing but it is bad producing. It's not good for the enterprise to not let everybody do their best work. Actors and directors need time to do their best work. They don't read TelePrompTers like newsmen."

Luke: "Why did you leave ABC?"

Dennis: "It's a burnout business there. In my last year, I realized that the people I met with were doing what I wanted to do. They would leave the room and go produce the shows. And I would sit here and deal with network stuff. Fred Silverman came in, and, rather than firing me, gave me a great promotion. He made me vice president of East Coast and European programming. Mike Eisner came to the West Coast as head of primetime programming and my boss."

Luke: "What do you mean by European programming?"

Dennis: "Finding European formats. One of the guys who sold to me was Don Taffner. He had the franchise to sell formats from Thames Television in England. You'd sift through their pilots and pick out which ones looked interesting. Fred said to me, 'I want you to be in London once every six weeks. Nose around. Talk to the people. See what's going on.'

"I went to London. I had the obligatory lunch upstairs at Thames. I went down to the screening room and ran these shows. It was about 4PM. I'd looked at three of the four shows from a new series. It was now late enough to call the West Coast. I phoned up Michael. I said, 'I have just looked at three of the four episodes of this thing, Man About the House. We should absolutely buy it. It smells good. It's a menageatois. This guy lives in a house with two girls. It's a little nasty and funny.' He said, 'Don't even watch the fourth episode. Make a deal.'

"So we made a deal and it became Threes Company and it made Don Taffner a quarter of a billion dollars. I worked for him years later.

"Our objective as network executives was not to produce the show, but to buy the right show and give it whatever support or kick in the pants it needed to achieve whatever it was we thought we'd bought. You'd only go in there if there'd been some calamity. I can rarely think of a time when a producer's suggestion was not agreed to.

"We [Cates and Doty as producers] had an experience of an incredible film editor who'd done several movies for us who was not approved by a CBS senior executive. We couldn't figure it out. But no, they had a bad report on her and wouldn't let us use her.

"This editor came from the Ann Coates old style school of editing.

"An executive should only come into an editing room at the request of the filmmakers. She had an experience where an executive bullied his way into the cutting room and bullied the director about some changes he wanted. She said to the executive, 'You really are some fu--ing jerk. This is the worst idea. Where does it come from? I can't listen to it anymore. It's a terrible idea and I am not going to do it.' So the executive determined that the network didn't do business with her anymore.

"She has done four films for us since then.

"As producers we feel that if you don't want to do business with us, don't. But if you do, let us do our business. Don't barge in. Don't be meddlesome or dictatorial."

Luke: "What are the biggest jams you've ever gotten out of?"

Dennis: "I went through three movies in a row where I had to fire the cameraman. One of them was Marlo Thomas doing Consenting Adults. There was a huge personality problem between Marlo and the Academy Award winning cameraman. He had no bedside manner for a star who was concerned about being middle aged. She's a perfectionist. You could smell it coming. You'd put a problem back in the bottle and it would blow up again.

"The cameraman she wanted finished his assignment and we brought him on. Then Marlo, that night, threw the original cameraman a huge party after being responsible for driving him off the movie."

Luke: "Would there ever be an instance where the star would be replaced because the cameraman is too powerful?"

Dennis: "No. Once you have one day on film, everyone knows where the money is.

"Firing hair and makeup people happens. The day starts and can be made or broken [for the stars] in the makeup trailer. When I make my rounds in the morning and jolly everyone up, you can get the drift right off the bat. If stars have a problem, that's where it will come out. It's like a confessional."

Luke: "Do you ever have to replace a star?"

Dennis: "We were shooting the "The Return of Marcus Welby M.D." movie (1984). It was supposed to become a series and the load would be carried by Darren McGavin. He'd become the new Marcus Welby and Robert Young, because he was rich and old, would do a few walkthroughs in each episode.

"Darren McGavin was not easy. A week before shooting, I was in a meeting on another project. I was told that it was urgent that I take the phone call. It was Darren McGavin's agent saying that Darren had withdrawn from the movie. I said, 'What? What do you mean? They're rehearsing. I'm leaving here in ten minutes and I'm going to his house. Tell him not to do anything. I will be there in an hour and we'll talk this thing out.'

"He was being a star. He threw the ultimate glove on the field because he was determined to win this point, a script change. And he did. By the time the sun set, he was back in the movie.

"The new James Brolin character came down with a flu. The next morning he can't work. So we scramble to put a day together. Then another actor comes down with the flu. So we're scrambling to put out fires. The next day, after putting Universal and the insurance on notice, and we have a couple of doctors on set, we're trying to figure out what we can shoot. We got going and I left the set.

"I'm in my office. I get a phone call from the production manager who says, 'You better get up here real fast, Robert is sick.' I go up to the stage in my golf cart. The studio ambulance is there. Robert, who's about 80 years of age, is in his dressing room. I go in there. Robert Young is on a gurney with IVs going into him. He'd now been stricken by a terrible case of the flu and had to go to the hospital.

"We go off to St. Josephs Hospital. I keep thinking, 'I made the movie that killed Robert Young.' We get to the hospital. The press is there. By the end of the day, he's able to walk out and go home. But the doctor won't let him work tomorrow.

"We had eight shutdown days on that film. I had to fire the cameraman. It turned out to be a good film and I became a friend of Robert Young."

Dennis: "TV movies was an opportunity for many of us to tell real stories about people. It's a faster business than features. You either develop and producer or you develop and abandon, but you don't spend your life running around the world with a feature script that will never get done. TV movies was also a business where you could own the copyright.

"It's a harder business today for entrepreneurial producers because you seldom can own your negatives. You become work for hire. Some of the lust to fight for your story becomes diminished because the business has changed.

"At Cates-Doty, we're lucky that half of our business is doing huge television specials, such as ABC's Ford's Theater and the Oscars. We just did a big show for McDonalds and CBS on Memorial Day weekend - we mounted a big entertainment show on the aircraft carrier Harry Truman in Florida."

["Rockin' for the USA: A National Salute to the US Military" was hosted by Cuba Gooding Jr with Celine Dion, Marc Anthony, Clint Black and Jessica Simpson.]

Luke: "That signals a dramatic change to the entertainment industry's approach to the military. We wouldn't have done this a year ago."

Dennis: "Probably not. And there were some forces not so hot about doing it."

Luke: "Which forces?"

Dennis: "I wouldn't even say because some of them cut close to your home, heart and pocketbook. I think 9/11 put a new twist on a lot of stuff and suddenly patriotism, in the form of being respectful and proud of not only firemen and policemen but of the military, is coming back into vogue. I think that's a good thing. I think that pride in country is a healthy symptom.

"As a studio executive, one of the first pictures I oversaw was the first story on the Vietnam War made for television [1979's Friendly Fire based on the book of the same name by C.D.B. Bryan]. The executive producer was Marty Starger.

"The Vietnam War had left a terribly sour taste in people's mouths. It was like, 'Who wanted to see a story about something we didn't want to acknowledge existed?' The respect for the fighting people out of that war was at a bad ebb. It was a horrible place in our memory and people didn't want to go back there.

"This story found a domestic approach into the war without being a war movie. It was a family domestic drama.

Yovivo writes on Imdb.com: "Riveting film about a family torn apart by a death in Viet Nam. The son of a farmer goes to war in an infantry unit and is killed by his own men by accident. The grief suffered by his family was hard to take as I watched the movie. Carol Burnett was brilliant as the shocked and angry mother."

Dennis: "Until that time, television wouldn't touch the Vietnam War. We fought for it. We fought to get Carol Burnett cast in it against ABC's better interests. Then she got all kinds of awards and it began her dramatic career. It was a benchmark Emmy winning, Golden Globe winning movie.

"Then Gil and I did another pioneering movie, Consenting Adults [1985]. It was one of the first stories done about homosexuality in a family. That Certain Summer was the first one several years before with Hal Holbrooke and Martin Sheen."

Texguy writes on Imdb.com: "I saw this movie back in 1985 when it premiered on television. Marlo Thomas plays Tess Lynd a mother whose son announces that he is gay. Tess' husband is not accepting of the son and a battle ensues. Tess is torn between the love of her son and her husband. Marlo Thomas gives a great performance!! I was a bit shocked though, parts of this film are pretty risque for the time and television! I can remember vividly how the viewer almost was part of the sexual activity the son was having, but it was done tastefully."

Dennis: "It was based on Laura Z. Hobson's acclaimed book and how it devastated her family when it didn't have to.

"Escape from Sobibor (1987) is the biggest picture I've ever done, about the only successful uprising and overthrow of a concentration camp in WWII. That picture was developed at ABC. We went with their writer of choice. It was a year in development and this guy couldn't get a script together. He got too far into the people in the story that he couldn't find the drama.

"We regrouped. We got Reginald Rose, Academy Award-winning writer, and started all over again at CBS. The total development lasted four years. It was a three-hour powerful drama with a cast of thousands. It was a hugely expensive production that we had to sell off to Chrysler to get it made."

From reviews on Imdb.com: "The film deals with some weighty issues which prisoners in Auschwitz also grappled with: 1. what sort of moral compromises did the prisoners have to make to stay alive in Sobiblor 2. where was God when this was going on 3. differences among Jews (eg. the differences between the Dutch, Polish and Soviet Jews in Sobibor)."

"This is one of the most terrifying accounts of the atrocities which took place during World War II. In terms of realism it far surpasses Schindler's List, to the extent that it's quite frankly hard to sit through."

Dennis: "We did two movies over the past two years, A Death in the Family (2001) and Collected Stories (2002) on PBS by Pulitzer winning playwright Donald Margulies. It was a two-woman play that largely takes place in one room. It was like going back to TV's Golden Age."

DeanNYC writes on Imdb.com: "Linda Lavin is the mentor and Samantha Mathis is the student in this two person stage play adapted for the small screen. Mathis is nervously in awe of Lavin's author at the start, but as the piece moves on, we see both writers growing to care about each other over the years, Lavin seeing her pupil as the daughter she never had, and Mathis growing as a writer, soon to overshadow her teacher.

"Lavin confides in Mathis a story about a previous lover, a mentor she had, and the affair that they began in the 1950s. Mathis takes the tale and makes it her own, writing her first novel based on it. The questions of trusting someone as a family member and what is fair game to tell as "your story" serves as the heart of the film."

Dennis: "Then we did A Death in the Family, based on a classic Pulitzer-Prize winning piece of literature by James Agee."

Escaped writes on Imdb.com: "This fine production is a beautiful and faithful adaptation of the classic novel "A Death in the Family" about a 1915 Tennessee family with an almost idyllic life that is shaken with tragedy. In the lead role as Mary Follett, Annabeth Gish gives an amazing and touchingly real performance showing all the facets of this sensitive but strong woman who is a wife, mother, daughter, niece and sister to the other characters who are also excellently portrayed."

Luke: "Which of your projects most broke your heart?"

Dennis repeats my question to his assistant Peggy Griffin, who often gets an "associate producer" credit on his movies.

Neither of them can think of a disappointing project.

Dennis: "Everything I've done I've had pride in but Escape from Sobibor was as memorable as anything I'll ever be involved in. It was a big film canvas with extraordinary characters facing impossible odds of survival, and they did it."