Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
I never met Ted Ashley, and I never talked to Dean Riesner, but my life as a moviegoer was enriched by both men, and I am sorry that I’m never going to get to properly thank either of them.
Ted Ashley was one of the men who steered Warner Bros. during its remarkable run of pictures in the ‘70s, one of the richest eras of creativity this business has ever known. He passed away from leukemia on Saturday. Right now, Robert Evans is being lionized thanks to the release of his performance piece, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE, but Ashley was just as instrumental in steering some of the classics of the era. He started at the William Morris Agency in his teens. It was later that he had his real impact, once he was an executive at the studio.
What films? Well, his work with Frank Wells and John Calley gave us A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, DIRTY HARRY, BLAZING SADDLES, DELIVERANCE, THE EXORICST, ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN, SUPERMAN, THE OUTLAW JOSEY WALES, DOG DAY AFTERNOON, KLUTE, and more.
You won’t find a listing for him on the IMDb, a real shame, but he lives on in the legacy of those amazing pictures from that amazing era.
If it seems sometimes like Harry and I pick on Warner Bros., there’s a reason for that. It’s because there was a time when it meant something to see that shield in front of a film. It meant that there was something potentially wonderful coming. Ashley believed in cultivating relationships and letting people try things. He helped bring Stanley Kubrick and Clint Eastwood to the studio, two of the longest-term studio/talent relationships anywhere in town. He was also directly responsible for developing WOODSTOCK as a cinematic event, something that proved enormously profitable for the studio and that continues to have a healthy life as a DVD title. The films he touched endure.
Our condolences to his family in this sad time. Ted Ashley was 80 years old.
Dean Riesner worked on some of the films that Ted Ashley helped bring to the screen, films like DIRTY HARRY and THE ENFORCER. He helped create the mini-series format with his enormously successful adaptation of RICH MAN, POOR MAN for ABC. He wrote the amazing CHARLEY VARRICK, and is responsible for a line of dialogue in that film that never fails to make Tarantino fans gasp when they first hear it. And he did a fair amount of uncredited work, too, on films like HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER and BLUE THUNDER. He also wrote the English language dub for DAS BOOT, a pretty cool gig, all things considered.
He passed away on August 18th at his home in Encino of natural causes. And he’ll never know how directly responsible he is for my learning how to write a screenplay.
Y’see, the very first film set I ever visited was John Carpenter’s STARMAN. The film is credited to Bruce A. Evans and Raynold Gideon, the same writers as STAND BY ME. But when I left the set that day, a 12 year old who was dizzy from how great unit publicist Peter Silbermann was about answering the questions of this movie-crazy kid, I had a copy of the screenplay tucked under one arm.
For me, it was the Holy Grail. It was a real Hollywood script. I didn’t even care if it was good or not. All I wanted to do was crack the code of the thing. INT. EXT. XCU. All the strange numbers and margin tricks. It was fascinating to me. Whoever was responsible for that incredible document, that blueprint from which I started to unravel the language that I still use every day in my own work, they were to be admired and respected as far as I was concerned. They were screenwriters.
And one of the names on that title page was Dean Riesner.
Again, my personal sympathies to the family, and all of us here at AICN will remember his work with great fondness.
"Moriarty" out.
