The Ringmaster Behind the Oscar Show

It’s early Friday morning, three days before the 64th Academy Awards show, and the pattern for producer Gil Cates’ day has already been set.

He’s been interviewed by the “CBS Evening News” for an Oscar advance to run Sunday night. He’s assigned an assistant to find out if they can use the music of a song for which emcee Billy Crystal has written some new lyrics. And he has just learned that Crystal, who’s been fighting a cold, is too sick to make the afternoon’s rehearsals.

“We probably won’t see Billy now until the dress rehearsal Sunday,” Cates says, hanging up the phone in the ABC-TV trailer set up outside the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. “He’s really sick. I’m worried about him.”

Cates stares ahead in the dark, facing a wall that is a mosaic of more than 50 lighted TV monitors. Sitting at the console in front of them is the show’s director, Jeff Margolis, and his assistants. On the TV screens, shown from a variety of angles, is singer Bryan Adams, who is inside the auditorium rehearsing “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You,” his nominated song from “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.”

Midway through the song, film footage appears on one of the monitors, clips from movies showing heroes doing dashing things for heroines. Cates has been called into the trailer to decide where in the song the 30-second clip should begin. After watching it a couple times, Cates makes the decision, then retreats to his office inside the Chandler.

“This is like a circus,” Cates says, rifling through the messages that have piled up on his desk. “I love it.”

The messages are little fires to be put out. Requests for tickets to the show. Denied! All 2,600 are gone. Requests for tickets to the Governors Ball that follows in the tent set up outside. Nope. None left. An agent whose nominated client declined a courtesy limo wants to know if he can use it. Hell, no!

“Most people are really easy and understanding about our problems,” Cates says. “But some are just jerks. What are you going to do?”

Cates, the gray-bearded 57-year-old dean of UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television, handles what he calls his “ringmaster” chores with the calm that comes from more than 30 years of directing for stage, TV and the movies--three disciplines that merge into one on Oscar night. This is his third year, following the Allan Carr spectacle that embarrassed so many members of the academy, when a committee was formed to look into ways of improving the show.

Cates has produced a leaner, swifter-paced show, coming up with themes that the production numbers and presentations are packaged with. This year’s theme, with the recession very much in mind, is selling the escapism of movies.

But, before the night arrives, thousands of decisions have to be made, and hundreds of problems surmounted. They pop up all the time, large and small, expected and not.

“Gil, this is Elizabeth Taylor’s bodyguard,” says one of Cates’ assistants, introducing the two men inside the auditorium where Adams continues to rehearse. Taylor and her “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” co-star Paul Newman are presenting the best picture award, and the bodyguard wants to know exactly where Taylor’s task will take her.

Moments later, a woman who works with Adams approaches and asks if Cates is serious about running that film clip over part of his number. Cates explains that they often use movie scenes with songs to connect the theme to the medium being celebrated.

“Well, he’s going to hate it,” she says emphatically. “I just want you to know that.”

Back in Cates’ office, another flurry of messages. Kevin Costner, who’s presenting the best director award, is faxing over changes he’s made in his script. Mike Seligman, the show’s associate producer, calls to say that they’ve gotten an OK to use that song Crystal has rewritten. A TV station in New Delhi, India, wants to know if it can use videotape of Indian director Satyajit Ray receiving an honorary award. The head of a Hollywood PR firm wants to know if it’s OK for her clients to wear red ribbons as they step out of their limousines.

The ribbons signify support for people stricken with AIDS, and Cates expects most of the presenters to be wearing them this year. He says they will be available backstage to any of the presenters who want to wear them.

Cates says he’s made no effort to stop anyone from making a speech. “I can’t tell the nominees what to say,” he says. “I just hope that whatever they say, it’s brief.”

Of greater concern are threats made by gay and lesbian organizations to disrupt the broadcast, in protest of what they say is Hollywood’s continuing demeaning depiction of homosexuals in film.

“We have a lot of security, as we do every year,” Cates says, after attending a half-hour meeting with the show’s security staff. “We’ll just keep going. It’s a live event. If there’s a disruption, security guards will take the person out. It will only take 20 or 30 seconds. If there’s something outrageous, we’ll cut to a commercial.”

Cates acknowledges that the protesting groups’ claims that they have infiltrated the Oscar show organization may be true.

“There are 300 backstage people,” he says. “Fifty musicians, 50 singers and dancers. There’s nothing you can do about it.”

Cates spends his day scurrying from his office to a large room down the hall where the show’s three hour and 15-minute program is being organized in computers, to the ABC trailer outside to the auditorium, where stand-ins sitting in the nominees’ seats are rehearsing--nominee by nominee, category by category--for the camera crews.

“And the winner is, for this rehearsal only, Harvey Keitel, for ‘Bugsy.’ . . .”

Meetings are on the wing. The show’s veteran writers, Hal Kanter and Buz Kohan, pop in to get his approval for late script changes. Someone else reports that Thing, the disembodied hand pulling a wagon in the movie “The Addams Family,” has arrived but isn’t working. The remote-control operated prop is to carry the envelope out for one of the awards, but the technicians forgot to bring the transmitter.

More interviews: the Washington Post, CNN, a Los Angeles radio talk show. A reporter from Variety calls to get Cates’ reaction to a complaint from a Spanish-language paper that there aren’t enough Hispanics on the show.

In fact, Cates says, glancing at the color-coded board on his wall charting the entire program, there are two Hispanics scheduled as presenters--Edward James Olmos and Antonio Banderas, the Spanish actor who co-stars in the current film “The Mambo Kings.”

“I went out of my way to get more than one,” he says, “in case I ever run for the Senate.”

Late in the day, Cates reaches for his Vitamin C bottle again--”10 a day!,” he declares--and then makes the rounds of the Chandler photographing everyone for his own pleasure with a Sony camcorder.

“I just realized I’m the only one here allowed to have a camera,” he says.

Cates, who won an Emmy for last year’s show, says this one is probably his last.

“I’m happy doing it,” he says, “but three years is enough. It’s better for the show if the same person doesn’t do it year after year. I think you need a certain amateur enthusiasm to have it sing out.”