You Can't Fall Off the Floor by Harris Katleman & Nick Katleman

Author:Harris Katleman & Nick Katleman [Katleman, Harris & Katleman, Nick]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2019-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

A New Company and a New Scandal

1977—1980

With a new studio, new bosses, and a new job, I was back to producing. This time, I wasn’t fighting the leash of Goodson Todman’s game show brand. Nor was I working for a studio looking to do business on the cheap, as I’d experienced under Kirk’s regime at MGM. As an Emmy-winning writer and the former president of MGM Television, Harve and I were the white knights at Columbia, and Alan Hirschfield made sure that our treatment reflected that status. The studio spent thousands on the offices of Bennett Katleman Productions, giving us half a floor in the television building on the Columbia/Warner Bros. lot in Burbank. We had secretaries, private bathrooms, kitchens—you name it. Hollywood had never tasted any sweeter. In those years, Alan and I were scoundrels together—two executives savoring the pleasures of Hollywood. I remember him calling me with a trickle of shame in his voice one afternoon.

“Spit it out,” I said.

“Do you remember a girl by the name of Blake?” he asked. Blake was a drop-dead gorgeous model whom I had dated a few years prior.

“Of course I do.”

“What would you tell me—hypothetically, of course—if I told you I was seeing her?”

“Go with God,” I said.

Alan was madly in love with his wife, Berte, but when it came to women, he couldn’t help himself. He was like a kid in a candy shop with all of the starlets and sirens of Hollywood. Berte had heard whisperings of his adultery, but she overlooked his peccadilloes time and time again.

A few weeks into Alan and Blake’s fling, Alan’s father flew into Los Angeles to stay with the Hirschfields for a week. Of course, he wasn’t privy to Alan’s philandering, and Alan wasn’t going to stop seeing his girl of the month just because his father was sleeping in his guest bedroom. My number must have been lying around the Hirschfields’ house, because Alan’s father called around 2:00 a.m.

“Where the hell is Alan?!”

“I haven’t a clue—probably the office,” I replied.

“I know your game,” said Alan’s father. “If he’s not home in thirty minutes, I’m calling the cops.”

My suspicions were confirmed when I dialed Blake; Alan was shacked out at her condo in West Hollywood.

“Blake, can I speak with Alan?”

“He’s indisposed at the moment,” she said, stoned out of her mind.

“Do me a favor and tell him his daddy wants him to come home,” I told her.

At the office, I had one political problem to deal with. Remember David Begelman, the New York–based MCA agent that I fired for embezzling money under Lew Wasserman’s nose? He had managed to fail upward, and now he was running Columbia’s motion picture department. In fact, his run of smash hits had kept Columbia afloat since Alan Hirschfield’s takeover of the company. Having green-lit titles like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Taxi Driver, and Kramer vs. Kramer, David was operating at a peak level.

Considering that David’s last words to me had been “I’ll get you back, mother fucker,” I figured he probably harbored some resentment toward me.

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