And I think being a good director is being able to be completely tyrannical and you?ve got to be an absolute dictator while at the same time, you have to listen and see everything because it can all change on a dime.
And now when I meet directors that I admire, I watch them carefully, not just to see how they plan a certain shot or what crane they were using, or what lens they were using, or how they?re blocking it, I watch all that stuff, but mostly, I?m trying to figure out the wellspring.
But obviously as television began, it so undercut movies that he was trying to think of a way to combine seeing these special things, and the fact that people were just captivated by the magic box.
God, I'd love to do a big commercial movie that made a lot of money and whose plot was interesting too.
I always think that a director who knows about the technical side, but cares about the acting performances and casting as well, is ahead of the game.
I have a 92 year old father whose doing beautifully who lives in Chicago and a sister and a nephew and a niece and I love coming back and try to do so fairly often.
I loved being in Close Encounters, just to watch Steven Spielberg working was exciting.
I mean, the whole idea of movies was it was special to go to see - you went to a movie theater to see something that was magical and amazing, in a very special location.
I produced and directed a movie a couple years ago that won some awards that Samuel Goldwyn released called 'The Last Good Time'. I wrote, produced and directed it, but I wasn't in it.
I saw Peter Pan when I was 4 years old in the National Company on its way to New York, that Mary Martin was starring in.
I think some of the special effects in Close Encounters hold up better than the new more expensive special effects is because they were better actually.
I was born on Wellington Avenue and my family that remains lives in the Lake Shore Drive area.
I was very much in my room with my marionette stage, you know, creating these incredibly boring things that I felt were so fascinating, and forcing my relatives to come, and charging money for them to see my little productions.
I?m from Chicago, my family started a chain of movie theaters in Chicago that were around for 70 years and then one of them became the head of Paramount and the other was the head of production at MGM and we all came out of Chicago.
I'm from the Midwest, and I loved my family. I had a very good time as a child, but I was also - I have a theory about Jews growing up in the Midwest, that there is an ultimately sort of wonderful avoidance of a lot of things, and a great acceptance of whatever is happening.
I've directed a fair amount of television series - so I'm always trying to learn new things. One episode was all hand-held and I'm trying to get better at when you should do things and when you should just shut up and watch what the people are saying.
If anyone would have been paying serious attention to my puppet shows, I would have been sent to therapy very young.
In my senior year I got into a Broadway show that Mike Nichols directed and, obviously, he offered me my first movie role which was in Catch-22.
Maybe I was 7 - I probably am exaggerating a little - and immediately was plunged into the fact that there was an official place to put your fantasies. Up until then I didn't know what I would do with them all. It was very exciting for me, and I began very, very early on.
My dad was born in Chicago in 1908... his parents came from Russia. They settled in Chicago, where they lived in a little tiny grocery store with eight or nine children - in the backroom all together - and my grandmother got the idea to go into the movie business.
My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative.
My family was loving... they were very supportive and very affectionate, and basically I could do what I wanted, and basically it wasn't anything dangerous, thank God.
Oh, I was completely hooked on movies and plays and theater from the time I was a day old - I was very, very early on in love with movies and I loved plays.
People so far have been very fond of the Robert Altman movie, as I am, and when one things goes well it shines light on your other projects and now I seem to have a number of projects that are moving forward.
Yes I try to do everything I can not to fail hideously.
You have to remember - the theaters were in Chicago, my parents always stayed in Chicago... as did most of the relatives.
Cousin of director Burt Balaban and nephew of Barney Balaban.
Played the head of NBC in both "Seinfeld" (1990) and The Late Shift (1996) (TV).
Son of Elmer Balaban (1909-2001) who was last surviving of seven Balaban brothers who dominated the theater business in Chicago and much of the Midwest. The Balaban boys, sons of immigrant Jewish grocery-store owners in Chicago, built city's first "supercolossal" theaters, the 700-seat Circle and the 2,000-seat Central Park. Bob's Uncle Barney became chairman of Paramount Pictures in Hollywood and wanted to pass the torch to Elmer, but he declined. Elmer has been credited with devising an early version of pay TV, based on a set-top box that would show first-run movies at home by accepting quarters.
Published a diary of his experiences working on the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
His first cousin, Judith Balaban Quine, is author of "The Bridemaids", a book about her friend, Grace Kelly.
Was nominated for Broadway's 1979 Tony Award as Best Actor (Featured Role - Play) for "The Inspector General."
Uncles Barney and A. J. Balaban owned ornate movie theaters with Sam Katz, the Balaban & Katz theater chain. Renamed Publix Theaters in 1925, it was acquired by Paramount Pictures. The theater chain became so important to Paramount's fortunes that the company name was changed to Paramount-Publix in 1930. Paramount-Publix went bankrupt in 1933, and was reorganized as Paramount Pictures, Inc. Sam Katz forced co-founder Adolph Zukor to resign, but after Barney Balaban became Paramount president in 1936, he appointed Zukor chairman of the board. Barney Balaban was president of Paramount through the tumultuous years following the 1949 Supreme Court-mandated divestiture of movie production companies from their theater chains. President of Paramount for 28 years, Barney coined "Balaban's Law," which held that a film had to gross three times its negative cost to break even. After the failure of Samuel Bronston's "Fall of the Roman Empire" (1964), which cost $20 million (approximately $115 million in 2003 dollars), Balaban was eased out of Paramount.
Uncle Barney Balaban, president of Paramount Pictures from 1936 to 1964,was one of the movie magnates who attended the Waldorf Conference in 1946, in which the blacklist against communists was implemented. A deeply religious man, when asked by his daughter about his complicity with the blacklist, Balaban told her, "I don't think it's okay. There's something about it that's okay, but there's something about it that's terrible, and I don't quite understand it all yet."
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