Having worn many hats during his long career, Bart delights these days in wearing several at once. When he wants to attend a Writers Guild of America meeting that is closed to the press, he dusts off his screenwriter credentials. (He claims to be the only editor who is an active voting member of the WGA.) When he wants to cast a vote for Best Picture, he activates “the part of me that’s an Academy voter.” (His Academy membership is a holdover from his years as a producer.) When he wants to collect a speaking fee, he turns into a paid adviser, giving tips–to cite one recent example–to the film division of cable network HBO.
“I have lived a split-level life in Hollywood,” he wrote in the introduction to his 1999 book, The Gross: The Hits, the Flops–the Summer That Ate Hollywood. But he will commit to neither one. His “dualities,” as he calls them, are not liabilities but the keys
to his success. “I enjoy the fact that my relationships with people have so many different colorations,” Bart says. “I’ve never thought of myself as just a whatever-I-was. I always think it’s fun to try and reinvent yourself.”
On the weekend of the Academy Awards ceremony, Bart’s many identities come out to play. Three days of self-congratulatory events unfold like so many garish, pungent flowers. Some on the A-list grumble about the chaos of Oscar-party fever — the long waits for valet parking, the glut of hors d’oeuvres — but those who are not invited are so mortified about what their omission implies that some leave town to save face.
Variety’s top man doesn’t have to worry. It all begins with Friday night’s annual celebration at the Beverly Hills mansion of agent-to-the-stars Ed Limato. The dinner is a magnet for Oscar nominees as well as Limato’s top-drawer clients. The embossed invitations are hard to come by, and the media are, officially, not welcome. Bart is an exception. This year, as every year, he RSVP’d yes.
Saturday afternoon, literary agent Bob Bookman throws a garden party for screenwriters and agents at his Hancock Park home. Bart makes an appearance. Then he stops home, dons a cobalt blue dress shirt and black blazer — the dark-on-dark uniform of Hollywood’s male elite — and heads back to Beverly Hills for Miramax’s bash at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. The event is known for skits that spoof the Oscar contenders, and to gain entrance the media must agree to leave all spoofing off the record. For Bart the restriction is moot: He never carries a reporter’s notebook.
He pushes through a ring of admirers who surround the night’s host, Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein. Barrel-shaped and garrulous, Weinstein is one of Bart’s favorite sources. He is also a principal in Miramax/Talk Books, and he has bid to publish Bart’s books. Bart and Weinstein shake hands, but there are others waiting, and Bart backs away. “There’s something kind of primitive about him,” Bart says. He means it as a compliment.
Bart scans the crowd and heads straight for movie producer David Brown, whose many films range from Jaws to last year’s Chocolat. Brown contributed a blurb to the jacket of Bart’s most recent book, calling it “must reading for all who care.” Bart greets Brown warmly, then maneuvers toward producer-director Irwin Winkler. Their friendship dates to the 1970s, when Bart — then vice president of production at Paramount Pictures — set up Winkler’s movie The Gambler. A quick hello, a pat on the shoulder, and Bart keeps moving. Near a buffet table piled with crab cakes and Peking duck, he makes a lunch date with Ted Field, a music and film mogul to whom Bart gave his first break in the movie business. It was the early ’80s, and Bart was senior vice president of production at MGM.
“When I was at MGM I said to Ted, ‘Why don’t you get a picture going? Here’s an idea. If you want it, it’s yours,’” Bart says, explaining how he sold Field a treatment that he had written with his youngest daughter, Dilys. The treatment became the 1984 film Revenge of the Nerds, and the sale helped pay Dilys’s way through Stanford University.
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