The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer Page A

originating in a disinterested friend, it resonated, especially when she followed it up with, “Why don’t you sit down with Harve Bennett over at Paramount? He’s in charge of producing the next Star Trek movie and I think you’d like him.”
    I must have stared at her.
    â€œ Star Trek? Is that the one with the guy with pointy ears?” My experience of and exposure to the series had been limited to my Iowa City friend and since then had consisted only of seeing those ears flash by when channel surfing. One look and I kept going. The whole idea that, contrary to all scientific understanding and evidence to date, the cosmos was filled with other “life-forms,” most of them walking around on two legs, speaking English, and always landing on planets with breathable air, seemed utterly absurd to me.
    â€œYou’ll like him,” Karen insisted, meaning Bennett, not Spock. With her earlier advice still ringing in my ears, I agreed to meet the man.
    Each of Hollywood’s studio lots has its own personality and feel. Warner is perhaps the most attractive, with a gardened, country-club sort of atmosphere; Universal most resembles a factory, while Fox and MGM are shadows of what they once were. Most of Fox’s territory is now occupied by the high-rise office buildings known as Century City, while MGM, in some sort of irony, is now the home of another company entirely, Columbia (in turn owned by Sony), once known, due to its puny size, as Columbia the Germ of the Ocean.
    The Paramount lot was the most “Hollywood” of the bunch, due to its location in the heart of that zip code, even though it shared space, eerily enough, with a cemetery. Aside from a “Western” street and some New York facades, there never had been a real backlot (exteriors had typically utilized the Paramount ranch in Agoura). In fact the smallish studio had actually been cobbled together from Paramount and what was formerly RKO, before it had been bought by Lucille Ball and turned into something called Desilu, combining Lucy’s name with that of her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz. Before the Desilu incorporation, RKO had been largely owned and controlled by someone named Howard Hughes. RKO (for Radio Keith Orpheum) was the place where they filmed Citizen Kane , and where Fred and Ginger had cavorted, personifying pure happiness. Over the wall that separated them, Paramount was home to Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder.
    Studios concentrated on different fare—MGM was wholesome and musical, Warner made gangster melodramas, biopics, and “premature” anti-Nazi propaganda, Fox concerned itself with great domestic social issues, Universal with Frankenstein et al., while Columbia relied on Frank Capra populism and Rita Hayworth.
    Paramount went for Marlene Dietrich, European sophistication, and DeMille historical hokum, before going on to Hope and Crosby, then Martin and Lewis. By the time of my arrival that day in 1982, the wall that had separated the two studios had been long since been breached, and all was now Paramount.
    Film studios not only don’t look like one another, they tend not to look like anything else, either, with their huge soundstages and intermittent “bungalows.” Although periodically gutted and refurbished with the latest decor and technology, the old wood and stucco exteriors at Paramount look pretty much the way they do as Billy Wilder showed them in Sunset Blvd .
    In one of those bungalows, after I finally located it among its lookalike neighbors, I found myself chatting with an unpretentious gent some years older than myself. Harve Bennett had thinning light reddish hair, a friendly smile, and a keen, analytic intelligence he was at some pains to conceal under the cloak of “I’m just a regular guy” affability. Perhaps he saw himself in this light—or at any rate, wished to see himself in it—but if so, he was kidding