by Elise Nakhnikian
In the past, only a handful of Armenians have been major players in L.A.'s movie scene. It's hard to say how many, since for every one like director Rouben Mamoulian, there were others like actors Cher, Mike Connors, David Hedison, Akim Tamiroff and Victor French who changed or abbreviated their names. But Armenians clearly were a minuscule minority both in front of and behind American movie cameras.
Lately, though, that seems to be changing. Levon Chaloukian, president of Ryder Sound and the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, says he sees "a lot of Armenians in the business now." And now that ethnic differences have come out of the closet, it's easy to spot the names as credits roll. It takes no inside knowledge to recognize that producers Howard Kazanjian and Robert Papazian or actor-director Richard Sarafian (who played the frightened gangster Warren Beatty humiliated in Bugsy) are Armenian. As producer Hank Moomjean remarks, "I see lots of Armenians in the business, especially in the independent end. Absolutely hundreds. Assistant directors, electricians...I don't know them, but I see their names on the rosters."
Although even their peers don't recognize most of the newcomers' names, Chaloukian believes that will soon change. "I think as time goes on, they're going to be a great influence on the industry," he predicts. "They're young and they're energetic and they're sharp-they're really sharp."
Now it's Mister
Levon Chaloukian worked his way up from the bottom to become president of a sound production company and the academy of television arts and science.
As president of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, Levon Chaloukian has overseen the awarding of the Emmys, American TV's most prestigious prize, for the last four-and-a-half years. But Chaloukian knew Emmy long before he became her guardian. Over the years at Ryder Sound, the sound recording company of which he is now president and owner, he has nabbed three of the golden girls himself.
Chaloukian's company is named for Loren Ryder, who started it 44 years ago to produce soundtracks for TV shows and feature films (credits include the Lassie shows, a slew of National Geographic TV specials, and the movies Easy Rider, Platoon, and Wall Street). Hired in 1954, Chaloukian started "at the bottom, making coffee, doing whatever needed to be done," he recalls. Before long the gofer was working on production and helping his boss introduce the Nagra, a sophisticated Swiss recording system now standard in Hollywood, to the industry. Ryder then moved Chaloukian into administration, anointing him to take over when he retired.
It was hard work, says Chaloukian, but it was rewarding. "When I first got into this business, it was exciting, it was fun, it was clean-none of the stuff you see now. Oh sure, they drank, but there were no drugs or anything like that. And the industry was working more like a team But, like all teams, it had its kidders-some of whom may have been only half joking. Being Armenian was always the root of all jokes. Things like 'camel driver' and 'grape picker.' Making remarks like, 'Behave yourself or we'll get a Turk in here to take care of you.' Some of them, I'm sure, were meant as a joke, and others maybe differently. It's funny," Chaloukian adds, "how that all changes when you get into a position of power. They don't do that any more. Now it's 'Mister.''
Chaloukian believes the advice and introductions he has offered over the years have helped bring more Armenians into his industry. He always urged the people he counselled to get a college degree, though he says his own lack of a college education was not a handicap. But lately, he admits, "the young people who get jobs starting at the bottom and learn as they work are doing better than the poor individual that went to college for four years and got the degree." Nonetheless, Chaloukian is reluctant to change his counsel. It may be easier to get into the movie business without a degree but harder to go far, he says. "As you go on, if you want to go up the ladder and get into administrative work, a degree comes in handy. "
"But this is a tough time for any young person to get in," he adds. "This business has always been recession-proof, but not this time. It hit us hard. Movies are too expensive, especially when you can rent a video for a dollar ninety-nine or whatever and watch it at home. And television-it's unfortunate, being in the position that I am, for me to have to make a statement like this, but there's nothing but junk on there. Nothing but junk. It's a shame."
At 65, Chaloukian wants to retire soon. His son Dale has worked at Ryder for the past 13 years, starting at the bottom and making his way up to general manager. So will he follow his father's footsteps the rest of the way up the ladder? "I wouldn't want to wish it on him," Chaloukian says. As moviemaking has become less a seat-of-the-pants craft and more a bottom-line business, it has become increasingly difficult for Ryder to keep up with bigger players. When Chaloukian joined the company, it was one of three independent sound recording companies in L.A. "As time went on, there ended up being about twelve," he says. "And now, out of all those independent companies, I'm the only one left. They've all been bought up by big corporations or they've gone out of business. Wall Street got into the business and the whole thing changed."
It's a Wonderful Life
The end of the star era was the beginning of an exhilarating career for producer Hank Moomjean.
The first thing a visitor to producer Hank Moomjean's Mulholland Drive home notices in the photos crowding his tabletops are the stars whose effortlessly dazzling smiles shine out from them-Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, Burt Reynolds, Sally Field, Debbie Reynolds, Lily Tomlin... The next thing one sees is that Moomjean is in every shot, often with an arm draped around a smiling star, always flashing a delighted, clearly unrehearsed grin. "It's colorful," says Moomjean of the movie business. "It's a lot of fun. What's great about it is there's no routine. You work very hard on a movie, but then it ends and you're starting another one-and you get to travel. I've been all over the world making movies. Been in Europe, the Orient, Tahiti, Pakistan, Egypt, all over America."
Moomjean, who changed his name from "Moomjian," was born in this country to parents who both came from Aintab. While he was in high school his family moved to L.A., much to his delight. "We lived one block from Paramount Studios, and I was in my glory," he recalls. "I got to meet Marlene Dietrich-she took a liking to me. Greta Garbo I met. She liked me because I was Armenian. She was very, very pro-Armenian-knew about Armenian cooking and Armenian food, and Rouben Mamoulian, the director, was a good friend of hers."
The starstruck young man went straight from high school to L.A.'s University of Southern California, where he earned a degree in movie directing. He then signed on as an assistant director at M-G-M, where he worked on several Elvis movies, among other things. "What I learned at college in five years I learned at M-G-M in five months," he says. 'It was a great period, the beginning of the end of the star period. It was busy and it was very exciting. I worked with some of the greatest directors in the world: George Cukor, Vincent Minnelli, Sir Carol Reed, John Ford. And all those big stars of the 50s and 60s-Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly and Elizabeth Taylor and Ava Gardner. It was great training. "
Though he loved the business, Moomjean decided he was in the wrong end of it. He switched from assistant directing to assistant producing, learning the ropes under veteran Pandro Berman and finally striking out on his own in 1972. Along with the director and the writer, he explains, the producer is one of the three most crucial players on the team that puts a movie together. But the writer's role usually ends when shooting starts, whereas the producer's and director's work continues through the hectic weeks of filming and post-production work. "People tell me that the reason why I'm successful (as a producer) is that they find me a calming influence; I don't panic," says Moomjean. "And it's a business full of people who panic. Everything's a crisis."
As a producer, Moomjean made most of his reputation-and most of his money-with Burt Reynolds, with whom he shot seven films, including Hooper and Smokey and the Bandit. But he produced a number of other movies as well, ranging from The Great Gatsby to The Incredible Shrinking Woman and including his most recent and most prized production, Dangerous Liaisons. Now 62, Moomjean has a few possible deals in various stages of development, but, he says, he's basically "taking it easy." He's not interested in doing a movie if it's not of the same caliber as Dangerous Liaisons, and scripts that good are hard to come by.
Another script he says he's always longed to produce is a warmhearted story about his own people. "I wish some of these young filmmakers would do stories about Armenians," he says, "but everyone that talks to me about it wants to do something against the Turks. I understand that-I mean, every family's been touched by that-but why not do All in the Family with an Armenian family? You could make a lot of subtle points through things like, 'Grandpa Sarkis died in the Holocaust.' There's a wealth of stories amongst Armenians. They're very family-oriented, they're very religious. And the food! I remember when I was a kid I used to take dolma (rice filled vegetables) sandwiches to school. Half of us were Armenian, half us were odars (non-Armenians). And all the other kids would be looking at us as we were eating our dolmas like, 'What are they eating?' I mean, that's very funny. If I were younger, I'd go right into a subject like that."
Moving Up
Writer/director Alek Keshishian has come a very long way in a very short time. But each step up the ladder, he says is as hard as the first one.
At the ripe old age of 27, Alek Keshishian has been granted more respect and artistic control than most writer-directors get in a lifetime, but he has no patience for those who think he has "made it." True, he was just a cocky kid with a Harvard degree and a few eye-catching rock videos to his credit when Madonna, the high priestess of pop, picked him to shoot some concert footage for her. True, he convinced the Blonde One, who is notorious for her canny control of her own image, to loosen the reins and let him expand on that assignment, taking the camera everywhere she went for weeks and then turning what he got into his first feature film. And true, his beautifully shot, intelligently edited, and highly entertaining film was such a hit, not only with Madonna's many fans but with critics and Hollywood insiders, that it gave Keshishian the clout to pick and choose from among hundreds of offers for the projects he plans to do next. But, he insists, "People who imply that one has arrived kind of miss the point, which is that it's always a journey and you're still walking. And while you may be closer to your initial vision, the vision gets larger, so the distance one needs to cover remains the same. Each step up that you're taking is as hard as the first step. It's just at a different point in the ladder."
Keshishian chooses his words precisely and enunciates clearly, radiating a confidence that borders on arrogance. But he has earned that self-assurance by proving his abundant talents for more than two decades. When he was five, the year after his family moved from Beirut to the United States, he took up the violin; he was soon good enough to study at the Boston Conservatory. Meanwhile, he discovered acting and toured with the American Children's Theater. And although he didn't take up ballet until high school, he showed enough promise to be offered positions with the Joffrey and the New York City Ballet.
Keshishian credits his parents, Cecile and Kevork Keshishian, with being very supportive of his artistic leanings, though he thinks the idea of his making a living as an artist may have taken them some getting used to. "I think what happened was, when I was very young, between violin and dance and acting, it became pretty clear that I was going to be involved in the arts. So the big Armenian saga of the fact that their kid was not going to become a doctor or a lawyer-regardless of the fact that he was going to Harvard-was something my parents had time to digest when I was 14 and 15 and 16. I think in general, partly because of where we come from and how insecure we often were, Armenians tend to value the professional jobs, the 9 to 5, the doctors, the lawyers, the investment bankers, whereas the arts is a much more dubious proposition. But my parents are, I think, unique."
Keshishian now has three projects in various stages of development. One is a movie about the American poet Hart Crane that Keshishian is slated to direct for Stonebridge, Michael Douglas' production company. Another is a coming-of-age film about four Harvard students that he will direct for Warner Brothers. When we talked, Keshishian was casting the Hart Crane movie with his cohorts at Stonebridge and fine-tuning the rewrite of the Harvard movie with playwright Israel Horowitz before submitting it to Warner Brothers for approval. And so, although he will eventually do both, "those projects are on a collision course; one of them will knock the other out in terms of what I'm doing next," he said. Meanwhile, Paramount Pictures had just hired a director and producer for Keshishian's third project, a story he wrote and will executive produce about a bohemian young woman in New York who suddenly finds herself responsible for three little girls.
Keshishian passionately believes in each of the films he's developing. The Hart Crane story, he says, stood out from among the "four hundred scripts that were given to me. It reminded me of something that David Lean would have done. It was cinematic, yet psychologically complex." The main thing he looks for before committing to a movie, he says, is that "it needs to say something about the human condition. To me, that's what a good movie does-it illuminates as well as entertains. The Harvard movie is about four seniors who are on the fast track to getting out. Then, through a series of events, our main character learns that graduating with honors is different than living life with honors."
Meanwhile last summer, Keshishian shot a video for Madonna of a song she recorded for the soundtrack of A League of Their Own. He put in some grueling overtime to squeeze it in between his other projects, but he wouldn't have considered turning down the singer. After all, he says, "we're best friends. On a professional level we're similar-we're very, very detail-oriented, we insist on control and autonomy, and we tend to put in a lot of emotion into our work and get wrapped up in it. When she's in town and I'm in town, we'll eat together four or five times a week. It doesn't matter if she's on a date, you know. It's like my coming is kind of an unspoken right."
Hye Hopes
Actress Adrienne Barbeau has played Italians, Jews, and Native Americans. Some day she hopes to play an Armenian
Actress Adrienne Barbeau got her name from her French Canadian father, but her ethnic identity came purely from her Armenian mother. "My parents divorced when I was really young," she says, "and all of the holidays and all of the summers were spent on my grandparents' little 20-acre grape farm in Selma [California]. Fresno was the hub of the family. Almost all my aunts and uncles and cousins have remained in Fresno."
"I identified wholly with the Armenian side of my heritage." she adds, "I think in part it was because when I was growing up, until the earthquake, who knew what Armenian was? It was a very unique thing, and I took pride in that. And then there were the history and family stories, things like that." Being Armenian may even have had an effect on her career, she muses, "in terms of the way I turned out as a fairly strong woman who plays survivors and doesn't usually play a victim."
The strong women she has played include Barbeau's Tony-nominated portrayal of tough-girl Rizzo in the Broadway production of Grease, the title character's daughter in the long-running TV show Maude, and Sandy Stern's sister and the killer's wife in the recent TV miniseries Burden of Proof. Even in the voice-over work she often does for TV, Barbeau is no pussycat: she's the voice of the redoubtable Catwoman in Fox TV's new animated Batman series.
Barbeau's dark hair and eyes have often led her to be cast in "ethnic" roles, playing women who were Jewish, Italian, or Native American. But her looks worked against her on Maude, she says, where they (network executives) thought we were all too ethnic. They didn't want any Jewish overtones, so they tried to lighten my hair, which didn't work. Not something you want to do to an Armenian. It turned orange."
Besides acting in network TV, cable, and feature films and in regional theater, Barbeau sometimes sings in L.A. clubs, performing "some folk, some country, some blues-anything from Joni Mitchell to Nanci Griffith." And, like many actors, she stays on the lookout for material she can turn into a starring vehicle. She and a partner have a production company they call Hye White Bread "because my partner is an odar (non-Armenian)." Although they've successfully collaborated on a few productions, including a movie they developed and then sold to HBO Productions, "the company's not really active any more; my partner and I have gone in different directions," she says. But Barbeau is toying with a few ideas on her own. "I was approached by Susan Dworkin-she's a novelist and screenwriter who wrote a book called Stolen Goods in 1985 or '86," she says. "It's a wonderful novel about an Armenian woman and her family-it's really well written. We've been talking about the possibility of bringing it to the screen."
"I'd love to see a Roots for Armenians about the pogroms," she adds. "Scratch every Armenian and they've got a story-my grandmother wandering in the desert and putting her two-and-a-half-year-old son down and never seeing him again in the hopes that the Turks would think he was Turkish and let him live. You know, there's all that tragedy."
Larger than Life
Actor Buck Kartalian has done more than survive in a tough business-he has thrived.
As he spreads his arms, raises his eyebrows, and leans forward to make a point, it hits me: Buck Kartalian looks like Mel Brooks. "I get that a lot," he acknowledges with a laugh-and no wonder. Taken one by one, their features aren't all that similar, though both have bushy eyebrows, substantial noses, and wide, elastic mouths. But the reason Kartalian could pass for Brooks' brother is the ebullient energy that animates his gravelly voice, stocky body, and expressive face. Punctuating conversations with enthusiastic cries of "Yes! Yes!" and peals of laughter, or breaking into a wide grin that transforms his entire face, Kartalian is always larger than life.
Though he is a born performer, Kartalian had no thought of acting when he got out of the Navy after World War II and came home to New York City. In fact, he says, he wasn't particularly interested in anything except a Times Square gym with an intriguing mix of people. "There was a guy in the corner juggling, there was another one doing head-to-heads, one guy had a monkey on his shoulder and was riding a tricycle, a couple of guys were wrestling in the corner-fake wrestling, like what you see on TV." Kartalian learned all the moves and developed a few of his own. Running circles around his much larger opponents, he added a humorous touch to their act that they liked, so Kartalian soon joined a troupe of his friends on the road, wrestling under names like The Perpetual Motion Machine and Mighty Mouse.
One day, a couple of actors he knew from the gym asked him to come along when they went on an audition. He was surprised, he says, when the casting director asked him to read, and even more surprised when he got the part-in a Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet with Olivia de Havilland as Juliet. Playing one of the soldiers in the opening act, he had "a nice little scene, about a three-minute thing. On Broadway!" When the play closed, Kartalian hung up his wrestling suits to go on the road with Mister Roberts, playing a tough little sailor named Sam, who he later played in the movie. From then on, he stayed in theater, doing summer stock and appearing off Broadway with the likes of Geraldine Page. Then he got married and he and his wife, Margaret, moved to L.A. in 1961.
There, Kartalian has done mostly TV and movies. He played an ape named Julius, the keeper of the cages ("I was the one that beat up Heston") in Planet of the Apes; a gleeful grocer who collects photos of dead lawbreakers in The Outlaw Josey Wales, and a prisoner in Paul Newman's chain gang in Cool Hand Luke. On TV he was a series regular twice (in Here Come the Brides and a children's series called Monster Squad), but more often he guest starred, putting in countless appearances as a gangster ("I did about eight or ten Untouchables, and I got killed in every one," he says cheerfully) and two as an Armenian haunted by the Genocide (on Lou Grant and Cagney and Lacey), among others. Lately, Kartalian has been doing more Armenian projects. For the past three years he was drama chairman of L A's Armenian Allied Arts Association, and doing the three plays in the AGBU's L A. production of 3 Acts of Love was his idea. "I guess in my old age I've been diverting to the Armenians more," he says, "I enjoy it, and I have more spare time-though I'm still working. "
So he is, and so he has been for about 40 years in a highly competitive industry. That's quite an accomplishment, but perhaps even more impressive is how well Kartalian has maintained his perspective through the inevitable ups and downs. It has undoubtedly helped to be married to Margaret, who is one of his most appreciative fans, and to have three children (Aram, 32; Julie, 30; and Jason, 25), two grandchildren (both Aram's) and his 93-year-old mother all nearby. It also helps, Margaret believes, that he is involved in her jewelry business, polishing and casting the pieces she has designed for years. "It's been good for him to have that always going on, I think, because a lot of actors don't know what to do with themselves between jobs," she says.
Kartalian agrees. "It's a strange business-you're always on the brink of making it really big," he says. "You're always depending on other people for employment. And [the reasons for rejection are] so intangible: you're too short, you're too fat. You've got to have a sense of humor-it's so important. I know people in New York who have actually died of a broken heart, actors who have died of despair for not being able to show their talent. Not knowing that other things are more important: the sun's shining, the flowers are in bloom, you're got a wife, you've got a family."
