When I Stop Talking, You'll know I'm Dead

Not a bad title that for a memoir and the content of mega-producer and superstar manager Jerry Weintraub isn't bad either.

He managed Elvis and everybody else who mattered in the seventies before going on to produce a string of major movies, including Nashville and Karate Kid. There's a line in his book where he explains what exactly it is that a producer does. In fact, it's how genius director Robert Altman describes a producer. Seems to me to be the type of career they didn't tell us about in careers' class at Scoil Mhuire back in the mid-seventies (nor at Queen's where the careers' officer asked had I consider a career with the forces. Yes, thought I, but not the forces you're thinking about.)

He (Robert Altman) asked if I had ever produced films. I told him I had not. "Well, you should consider it," he said. "You would make a great producer. You have just the right personality."
"What kind of personality does it take?"
I was trying to figure out if I was being complimented or put down.
"It's temperament," he told me. "Smarts and all that, but also the ability to sell an idea, attract talent to the idea, bring out the best in the players, while, at the same time keeping everything in line. If you can talk to people, get them to do things because they think it's their own idea, you will be a great producer."

Just the sort of job I'd love to do when I grow up.