The Hollywood Ten-Step

Denise Di Novi, Producer

1. Got her first gigs in the '70s in Canada as a staff writer for Canada A.M. and as an on-air reporter and film critic for City-TV News.

2. Worked as a unit publicist on the 1980 Canadian thriller Final Assignment.

3. Served in various production capacities in Canada and L.A. before becoming production VP at New World Pictures in 1985.

4. In 1989, produced the low-budget, high-style, breakout teenage-suicide black comedy Heathers, working with screenwriter Daniel Waters, director Michael Lehmann and young stars Winona Ryder and Christian Slater. (The script had impressed much of Hollywood--but most considered it too offbeat. "When we got the green light," said Di Novi, "we were congratulated by every other studio. They wouldn't make it themselves, but they all said they were glad the movie was getting made.")

5. Teamed up with director Tim Burton in Burton/Di Novi Pictures and produced 1990's Edward Scissorhands.

6. Keeping a low profile behind Burton's eccentric persona, produced Batman Returns (written by Daniel Waters) in 1992, and The Nightmare Before Christmas in 1993.

7. Developed screenwriting team Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski's Ed Wood with director Michael Lehmann with the idea of having herself and Burton produce. Burton ended up wanting to direct and Lehmann coproduced.

8. Left Burton in 1992 to set up her own shingle at Columbia, but continued to work with him on projects like 1996's James and the Giant Peach.

9. Asked by Columbia executive Amy Pascal to produce 1994's Little Women, and called up Winona Ryder, with whom she'd talked about the book Little Women on the set of Heathers, to ask her to take the starring role.

10. Produced the upcoming Almost Heroes, and is currently producing Practical Magic, a dark comic fable originally scripted by Little Women's screenwriter Robin Swicord and starring Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman.

Kathleen Kennedy, Producer

1. With a B.A. in telecommunications from San Diego State University, got her first Hollywood gig as a production assistant for John Milius, whose company was producing Steven Spielberg's 1979 disaster 1941.

2. With poor typing skills, became an assistant to Steven Spielberg in 1979.

3. Received associate producer credit on 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, on which she met future business partner and husband Frank Marshall (whose college roommate happened to have been Mike Ovitz).

4. Associate-produced 1982's Poltergeist and earned her first full producer's credit the same year on box-office champ E.T. The Extra Terrestrial.

5. Cofounded Amblin Entertainment with Spielberg and Marshall and executive-produced 1984's Gremlins.

6. In 1985, executive-produced Back to the Future and produced The Color Purple. Became president of Amblin in 1986.

7. Executive-produced the top-grossing film of 1988, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?

8. Produced 1990's Arachnophobia, which her husband directed. ("I was very used to standing on the set, coming up with ideas. Frank, at first, was like, 'Don't do that to me! You have to realize that movies are made up of a lot of guys, not a lot of women, and these guys are thinking, Oh great. His wife's telling him what to do.' We got beyond that; it was a good growing experience. But I used to always say, 'Look, I do this with Steven. What's your problem?'")

9. Left Amblin with Marshall in 1992 and continued to further her proven ability as a money-making producer with such Spielberg projects as 1993's Jurassic Park and the Oscar-winning Schindler's List. Perhaps as an explanation of Kennedy's ability to oversee many complex projects at once, Ovitz noted of her, "She has the cleanest house and most organized closets in Hollywood."

10. Produced the 1995 releases The Indian in the Cupboard, Congo and The Bridges of Madison County (for Amblin), then produced 1996's Twister and 1997's The Lost World: Jurassic Park (both for Amblin). Affiliated with Disney, looks to keep making big movies with and without Spielberg.

Kathryn Bigelow, Director/Screenwriter

1. In the early 1970s, after studying at the San Francisco Institute of Art, became a Whitney Museum scholarship-winning conceptual artist, producing such work as an installation piece of clanging pipes meant, according to Bigelow, to dramatize "potentiality."

2. Earned a Masters of Fine Arts in film studies at Columbia in 1979, making her first short film in the process and posing for a Gap ad on the side.

3. Codirected (with Monty Montgomery) the 1981 biker "art" flick The Loveless, which marked the acting debut of Willem Dafoe and made for West Coast connections that led to a development deal with director/producer Walter Hill.

4. Made her solo directorial debut with 1987's Near Dark, which chronicled modern-day vampires and featured a massive truck explosion that announced her ability and desire to put action and violence on-screen.

5. Directed her own script for 1990s Blue Steel that Oliver Stone had recommended to producer Ed Pressman; married producer/writer/director James Cameron.

6. Made 1991's Point Break (with Cameron as executive producer), putting Keanu Reeves in his first action role.

7. Upon dissolution of her two-year marriage ("There is always a price for doing what you want, and I guess that price was my marriage"), reportedly had it written into her divorce settlement that Cameron would produce three of her subsequent movies.

8. Directed one segment of the Oliver Stone-coexecutive-produced miniseries Wild Palms (1993).

9. Directed Ralph Fiennes in 1995's ultraviolent apocalyptic Strange Days, which featured a scene in which the audience "experiences" the reality of a man who is raping and murdering a woman. The film was tagged "the most violent film ever directed by a woman." (And Bigelow gave directing a new definition at about this time when she posited that it was "a coordination of different elements in as organic a fusion as possible that's not impositional.")

10. Has developed into a self-styled auteur--the New York Times claimed that "the level of control she retains--from inception to final cut--is absolute and virtually unbending," but has not gotten a film off the ground for the last three years. Is still struggling to get financing for her Joan of Arc project, Company of Angels.

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Wolf Schneider is a senior editor at Movieline; Pat Troise interviewed Johnny Galecki for the September '97 issue of Movieline.

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