[lounge music] ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies] [Narrator] On Story is brought to you in part by the Alice Kleberg Reynolds Foundation, a Texas family providing innovative funding since 1979.

[waves] [kids screaming] [wind] [witch cackling] [sirens wail] [gunshots] [dripping] [suspenseful music] [telegraph beeping, typing] [piano gliss] On Story , presented by Austin Film Festival, a look inside the creative process from today's leading writers and filmmakers.

[paper rips] This week's On Story , the legendary producer behind such iconic classics as Raiders of the Lost Ark , Back to the Future , Frank Marshall.

- Well, I think a producer's a problem solver and a diplomat.

You end up having a whole lot of people coming at you with passion for what they believe in, and you have to know how to manage that.

And as I was saying earlier, it's really about trying to get the vision of whoever your leader is.

[paper crumples] [typing] [typewriter ding] [Narrator] In this episode, multiple Academy Award nominee Frank Marshall traces his career from film neophyte to Hollywood icon.

[typewriter ding] - I was a junior in UCLA.

I was majoring in several things.

I had no idea what I wanted to do.

I was 20.

My dad was a jazz guitarist and composer, most famous for writing the score for The Munsters .

[audience laughing] So, that's how I grew up, in a musical family.

But I didn't really know, I mean, I knew about movies, I liked movies, but I didn't have any idea that you could actually make one.

So, my parents invited me to a party in 1966 at their director, John Ford's house.

It turns out that my dad was in the army with Mr. Ford's daughter's husband, Ken Curtis, an actor.

Anybody know Ken Curtis?

Heard of Ken Curtis?

Yeah, he played Festus on Gunsmoke and he was part of Mr. Ford's Sons of the Pioneers , who did all of, most of Ford's westerns.

They did a song where they were in.

So, Ken Curtis was married to Barbara Ford, who was an editor, and it was her birthday.

And it was over Christmas vacation, and Mr. Ford's house was right there at UCLA.

So, my parents said, "Why don't you come?

There's a birthday party for Barbara and John Wayne will be there, Ward Bond, Joanne Dru, Harry Carey Jr., Henry Fonda."

And I thought, "Oh God, I gotta go to a party with my parents."

[audience laughing] Really, at Christmas.

So, I said, "Okay, I'll go along."

So, anyway, I went to this party and sure enough, there's Duke Wayne, it was kind of like larger than life and it was a very nice party.

And then there was this perky little girl who was closer to my age than anybody else there and I started talking to her.

She loved movies, she knew everything about everybody there.

She was so enthusiastic about movies and how they got made, and how exciting it was to be there.

And I said to her, "Great, well, what are you doing here?"

She said, "Well, I'm here with my husband."

And I said, "Oh, your husband."

[audience laughing] And I was a little disappointed because she was cute, and I said, "But well, who's your husband?"

She said, "Well, we're doing a documentary on Mr. Ford "and we're out here from New York, and he's in the other room."

And so we went in the other room and there was Peter Bogdanovich.

And he was 27, I was 20, and his wife, Polly Platt, and I became fast friends that night, and I just loved their enthusiasm about movies.

Peter knew everything there was to know under the sun.

At that time, he had interviewed all these great directors, he was the film critic for Esquire magazine, and it just seemed fascinating to me that this was a world that one might be able to be a part of.

And so that began our friendship, and I said, "Well, listen"... Oh, and he got very excited because he had just been to the set of Roger Corman's Wild Angel .

And on the Wild Angels , Corman was letting him direct some second unit, and he knew he wanted to be a director.

He had directed on the stage, and Peter just knew, that's what I'm gonna do.

He loved working with actors, he knew all about it.

And he said, "What's really exciting is Mr. Corman "told me that he'd give me some money to make a movie "if I could write a script.

"So, Polly and I are gonna go away and write a script "and we're gonna come back.

"And the two conditions are that Boris Karloff "owes Corman one week of work, no matter what the movie is.

"And secondly, that I have to use at least a minute "of footage from an unreleasable movie that Roger Corman "had made called The Terror , which stars Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson."

- In the name of the Congress of France, I order you to open this door.

[light creaking] - So, as long as he could work those two things into a story, Roger Corman would give him the money to make his first movie.

And so, I said, "Well, that sounds like fun and interesting.

So, give me a call if you need any help."

So, I went back to school, I went back to UCLA and sure enough, three months later, my dad called me and said, "Did you meet some guy named Bogslonovich or something at the Ford party?"

I said, "Yeah, yeah, why?"

He said, "Well, he called, he's out here, "he and his wife, Polly, are here.

"They're out in the Valley renting a house on Saticoy Avenue, and they want you to call them."

So, I called Peter and he said, "Well, we wrote a script, it took us three months.

"Mr. Corman wants to do it and, you know, I wanna offer you a job."

And I said, "Well, what do you want me to do?"

He said, "I don't know, I've never made a movie before.

[audience laughing] "So just come over."

So, I said, "Okay."

So, I went over and I look back on it now and I realize that I, that was the start of my producing career because as much as Peter knew about making movies, he didn't know about how to make them, or how to get things done.

So, I had grown up in the Valley, so I knew how to rent a car, find a place, get a burger, make a sandwich, water the lawn, build a set.

So, I started doing all these things for Peter and Polly, and we became a real team.

And the movie was called Targets , and it was just about the best baptism of fire and filmmaking experience you can have, and I fell in love with making movies.

[vehicles passing] [click] [man grunting] [vehicles passing] [click, slam] [vehicles passing] [typewriter ding] - When I look back, what was really important for me was I learned how to produce a movie from the viewpoint of the creative side.

In other words, I was working for Peter's vision, I was trying to help Peter get his vision up on the screen, as well as Polly.

And again, they are my mentors.

I wouldn't be here without either of them today.

But I saw the creative process, I saw how they worked together, how they would come up with a scene, and then if I had to go, my first job was to go find a hotel or a building that would serve as a hotel for where Boris Karloff was supposed to be staying.

And Polly gave me a little description of what it was, and I went out into Hollywood and I found this building that wasn't a hotel but it was an apartment building.

And I brought back photos, and she said, "Oh, that's pretty good, that's kind of what I had in mind."

So, but then went and found a couple of others, and then when I went and asked, they said, "No, we don't want any filming here."

So, I learned to cut things out that I couldn't, I didn't wanna show them things that I couldn't get.

So, I started learning about how to... And then sometimes Peter would go, "No, I need something else.

It needs to be like this," or, "that."

Or, "Oooh, how about that?"

And then I'd go, "That's too expensive.

"Could you do it over here and get the same effect "or tell the same story?

But we can get this for the price."

And we did a lot of that, so I started learning how to produce from the creative side, not from the budget side.

Just saying no, there are a lot of producers that just say no, I try to understand what the director wants and his or her vision, and try and get that up on the screen for what we have in the budget.

It's a curious, fascinating combination of business and finance, for me.

[typewriter ding] - So, the Targets , could you imagine if you, today, went to a director and said, "You've gotta use this footage I shot "from Back to the Future , and somehow marry it into your story."

I mean, isn't that such a, sort of, an amazing, crazy time period to, and Corman, in general?

- Yeah, I was, again, you know, very lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

But what I think is that a lot of what I find with the filmmakers that I work with, when they're put in a box, they get much more creative.

If they have everything they want, the time, the money, everything, they don't know how to corral it.

So, in this case, here are your challenges, put them into a story and, you know, you only have five days with Boris Karloff and make that work.

How many have seen Targets ?

Anybody, yeah, you know that it was the combination of him being the movie star and it worked so well.

And, of course, unfortunately, a story about today.

[traffic, horns honking] [gunshot] [gunshot] [multiple gunshots] [horns honking] [film rolling, slapping] - Looking back, you don't realize it at the time, but Billy Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Steven, George, all starting their careers as well.

And it was one big exciting time with, sort of, the sky is the limited on the stories you could tell.

But what was important, again, was it was a business and people weren't just going off and making movies at all costs.

So, our target was sort of to find the story, and again, story, story, story.

Peter was always interested in the story.

And that sort of became my mantra as well.

Tell a good story, it's all in the story, it's all in the script.

But it was exciting, we had a little company called The Directors Company for a while, which was Coppola, Friedkin, and Peter.

And we were just allowed to green light our own movies, as long as they were under two million dollars.

So, a couple of movies came out of there, The Conversation , Paper Moon , and Daisy Miller .

But it was, again, an exciting time was also the time that I got to meet Orson Welles.

And that was, again, another gift from Polly.

And I went down and started working on this little movie called The Other Side of the Wind , which is recently, as of two hours ago, I just sent another email about it, about getting it finished.

So, you know, maybe in my lifetime, we'll get this movie finished.

[audience laughing] - Well, so you were working on that with Bogdanovich, right?

Or were you working on the-- - Before he worked on it.

[Barbara] Really?

- Polly and I worked on it in the very early days.

We all lived together in a little house out in Carefree, Arizona, and built the set... Talk about an exciting time.

People have asked me why didn't you write a book about it or something?

I said I never wanted to go write things down because if you'd be away from Orson's side, you'd miss something.

So, it was just, again, working with someone who had the imagination and the creative genius, and was really funny, he was so funny and he had such a great sense of humor that it was a joy to be there and I'll always cherish those times as well.

[typewriter ding] I had met Steven early in the '70s.

In 1972, we were doing Daisy Miller in Rome, and we're at a little studio called Safa Palatino, and I got a call from a publicity guy who said, "I'm touring Europe with a young director "and he's a little bit homesick "and he'd like to see some Americans.

Could I bring him by for lunch?"

I said, "Sure, come by the studio."

So, the way we had it set up was that everyday we'd have a long table for lunch in the cafeteria.

The studio, amazingly enough, you could see the Colosseum outside, it was kind of, really cool.

[audience laughing] So, it was right downtown Rome, it wasn't out of town at Cinecittà or anything.

So, anyway, this one day, this publicist brought this young director and there was a long table.

Peter was there, and Verna Fields, who was our editor, a wonderful, wonderful woman, a couple of the actors, a couple of English actors, Cybil, and there was always a plate of pasta at the end of the table for me.

So, I came rolling in, they were all at lunch, and I came in and there was this guy named Jerry who brought this young director, and the young director was Steven Spielberg.

So, I said, "Nice to meet you."

I went over, I had two bites of pasta.

I asked Peter a question and I went back to the stage.

And a couple of days later, Verna Fields told me that Steven turned to her and said, "That's the kind of guy I need.

The guy who's more interested in the next shot than lunch."

[audience laughing] And five years later, this is a story about always do your best, five years later, Steven was sitting on the beach in Hawaii with George.

And George asked him, they were talking about Raiders, he said, "Who would you like to produce this?"

And Steven said, "Let's see if we can find that guy Frank Marshall."

Five years later.

So, that's a story about always do your best because you never know who's looking.

[typewriter ding] The second half of the '70s, there were a lot of movies being made and I was starting to see that maybe there would be, Peter was slowing down, not making a movie every year.

Because of meeting Marty Scorsese during a musical, an infamous musical that we made called The Long Last Love .

I've had some hits, I've had some misses.

[audience laughing] I got a chance to work on The Last Waltz with Marty, and so I was starting to see, oh, there are other directors.

I was just happy to be with Peter at that time.

And so, that's when I got the call from a secretary over at Universal saying Mr. George Lucas would like to have a meeting with you.

Do you think you could fit that into your schedule?

And I go, "Well, let me check my schedule."

[audience laughing] Yeah, I'll be right over.

[audience laughing] So, that's when I met George and he told me of his dream, which was to have a production company, a Lucas Film Production Company where he had three producers working all the time.

Each went in a different phase of production.

One would be in development, developing the script, one would be shooting, and one would be in post production.

And at that time, he had two movies.

He had More American Graffiti , I think it was, I'll get this wrong, but that was in post.

And Empire Strikes Back was shooting or in post.

And he had this third movie that Steven was going to direct called Raiders of the Lost Ark that would be in development.

And would I be interested.

Again, let me think about it.

Yeah, and I said, "Oh, look, it sounds great and everything."

And he said, "Well, hold on a second because Steven's coming in."

Now I hadn't seen Steven for five years.

And Steven's coming in and he's bringing in someone who he wants to write the project.

So, I said, "Okay, I'll stick around."

So, 10 minutes later, in comes Steven with this fellow, Larry Kasdan, and George gets up and in the other door came um, came Howard Kazanjian, who was producing More American Graffiti.

And George said, "Howard, you know Steven."

And George said, "This is Larry Kasdan, he's writing Raiders of the Lost Ark ."

And they shook hands, and he said, "This is Frank Marshall, he's producing Raiders of the Lost Ark ."

I kind of went, okay.

[audience laughing] And so, about two weeks later, I had a beer with Larry and I said, "Was that a weird meeting when we all met each other a week ago?"

He said, "Yeah."

I said, "Did you know you were writing the movie?"

He said, "No."

[audience laughing] I said, "Well, I didn't know I was producing it."

[audience laughing] It's kind of how George is, I think he was trying to see if we had two heads or something, and as long as Steven wanted us, it was okay.

And that was the start of what continues to be a beautiful friendship.

[typewriter ding] - You've clearly gone on to producing many projects at the same time.

And how does that work for you?

I mean, like, how do you...

It's a lot of juggling and they're huge projects.

- Yeah, I found that over time I've become a multi-tasker.

I like to dabble and do a lot of things.

When we made Raiders, and we had such a great time, and that's when I met Kathy.

And she was working for Steven.

And the three of us kind of became the three amigos on the movie, and then Steven came to us and said, "You know, I've got two more movies coming."

One's called Poltergeist and the other's this project that he was developing at the time called ET .

And he said, "Frank, why don't you do Poltergeist , and Kathy, why don't you produce ET ?"

And we said, "Okay."

And it's really not this simple, by the way.

[audience laughing] So, we did that summer, that year we produced those two movies, and ET was, as everybody remembers, Steven's little personal childhood movie, and Poltergeist was gonna be the big movie.

And we worked, all three of us, worked on both movies.

And then they came out, and they were both successful, one much more than the other.

And Steven said, "You know, that was really fun.

"We made two movies, I got to direct one, we produced another, and why don't we make a company?"

And we said, "Okay, how do you that?"

He said, "I don't know."

Sort of like Peter, I don't know.

So, we formed Amblin and called... named after Steven's first movie.

And we sort of then started developing, then we started looking for stories, and we love books, we read a lot of books.

And we started reaching out to filmmakers.

So, Steven called his old friends, Bob Gale and Bob Zemeckis, who he had done I Wanna Hold Your Hand with.

He had produced, he said, "You know, we're starting this company.

"You got anything?"

And they said, "Well, we've got this script "that nobody wants to make.

"They think it's really too weird and really out there."

Steven said, "Well, send it over.

"What's it called?"

And they said, " Back to the Future ."

[audience laughing] So, they sent over the script and we read it, and I gotta tell you, it was fantastic.

[loud explosions] [exciting intense music] - What did I tell you?

88 miles per hour!

[clink] The temporal displacement occurred exactly 1:20 AM and zero seconds.

- Ah, gee, Christ.

Jesus Christ, Doc, you disintegrated Einstein!

- If you're looking for a template or a bible on script writing, get Back to the Future .

I'm sure they have it at SC, get it and read it, it's the perfectly written script that sets up and pays off every single thing by the end.

It's an amazing script, and that's kind of how we started.

And then Joe Dante came, and all these young filmmakers came and we, sort of, became a haven for young filmmakers getting their work done.

And that went on for quite a long time.

[typewriter ding] - Well, so you've gone from working with this first round of directors, who are doing a lot more small, personal stories, I mean, documentaries.

And then you hook up with these people who are making these films that are whole other worlds.

I mean, that had to be a big process of shifting how you had to look at creatively producing.

How did you make that jump?

- I think a lot of it, you know, certainly learning going along, and I've also been fortunate enough to be in the studio system most of my career.

We made a couple of independent films, but I like knowing that I can go to sleep at night and not have to worry about mortgaging my house to get another day of shooting.

But, um, so, I've fit well into the studio system, and I liked working with other people, and sort of being the go-between.

But you wouldn't say that Back to the Future was gonna be a franchise blockbuster, but it turned into that.

And then, we got the request for their sequel.

And then that was too big, I remember we went to see Lew Wasserman and Sid Sheinberg with a script, and it had been budgeted, you know, like 100 million dollar budget, which at that time was insane.

And, Zemeckis in the room said, "Well, why don't we just make two movies, and then there will be 50 million each."

[audience laughing] I said, "Okay."

He said, "Well, that's never been done before."

Bob likes to do things that have never been done before.

So, we shot both movies at the same, you know, one right into the other and he was posting Back to the Future II in this train station we had.

And we set up like a mixing stage in this train station up in Saint James, California, and he was listening to the dub while he was shooting outside.

It was crazy, but it was really fun.

- So, your job, really, was to go back and figure out how to do that.

- Yeah, I love the logistics and how you put it together.

I don't like to say no, and yeah, we can figure this out.

And then that just kind of rolled into the bigger and bigger movies, as the ideas and the stories got larger.

I don't think we ever... And, of course, there's Raiders, which turned into then Temple of Doom and then Last Crusade , which were big movies for those days.

And tent pole movies, we'd call them today.

But we still tried to, as I said, I think that some filmmakers, especially Steven, works better when he's given some parameters to work within.

And that's the budget and scheduling.

He prides himself in shooting these movies in 67 days, and you know, it all comes together.

[typewriter ding] [Narrator] You've been watching a conversation with Frank Marshall on On Story .

On Story is part of a growing number of programs in Austin Film Festival's On Story Project, including the On Story PBS series now streaming on-line.

The On Story radio program and podcast in collaboration with public radio international and the On Story book series available on Amazon.

To find out more about On Story and Austin Film Festival, visit OnStory.tv or AustinFilmFestival.com.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ [projector clicking] [typing] [typewriter ding] [projector dies] In this week's On Story , Frank Marshall, the legendary producer behind Raiders of the Lost Ark , Back to the Future, Poltergeist, and Jurassic World traces his career from film neophyte to Hollywood icon.