Neal Gabler: The Triumph Of Entertainment

The film scholar and critic Neal Gabler is the author of two highly acclaimed books, is within days of finishing a third, and has a biography of Walt Disney down the road and a growing presence as a commentator on American culture.

His first book, "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for History and was cited by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the most important books ever written on the movie industry. (A documentary based on the book will air on the Arts and Entertainment Channel March 22, the night before the Oscar awards.)

"Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity," Mr. Gabler's second book, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Time magazine named it the 1994 nonfiction book of the year.

Total Command

"Empire" was favorably reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review - "a very happy moment," said Mr. Gabler. The book's success allowed him to pursue the fastidious research and thought-provoking prose he has become known for - "Winchell" is 681 pages long, including 126 pages of notes, bibliography, and index.

"I want to produce something extraordinary," said Mr. Gabler. "I front-load everything. I work and I work and I work until I'm in total command of the material."

Circumstances have not always afforded him that privilege. Early in his career, he wrote press releases and worked for a Michigan newspaper as a film critic (filling more column inches, he was told, than anyone else in its 150-year-history).

After graduating from the University of Michigan Mr. Gabler taught film and literature there, and film at Penn State. Shopping around his still-unfinished dissertation as a possible book, he found a friend with a friend in publishing.

This editorial assistant was less than enthused about the Ph.D. thesis - "Illusion as Accommodation in Robert Altman's Films" - and asked the young scholar if he had any other ideas.

He ad-libbed what later became the core of "Empire," and the publishing contact seemed impressed. Months later, though, Mr. Gabler was told he needed an agent before a contract could be signed.

A Deal

"How does one find an agent? I didn't know the first thing about it so I asked for the name of someone classy, someone I could trust." He found Elaine Markson, who told him to send her a book proposal. "I said, what's a proposal?"

Within a week of receiving it, Ms. Markson agreed to represent him, and a week later she had a book deal. Four and a half years later, Mr. Gabler finished "Empire."

A "tiny" advance gave him the means - barely - to move to New York City, where he and his wife picked up extra money by sharing a job reading scripts and books for film companies. A 1,500-page tome would arrive in the mail, he recalled, and she would read the first half, he the second.

"We were a reading machine," he laughed.

"Sneak Previews"

Christina Gabler eventually became vice president of Sydney Pollack's Mirage Enterprises and head of his New York office. But in 1982, the couple was just scraping along when Mr. Gabler's mother called one day from Chicago.

Siskel and Ebert had bolted from PBS's "Sneak Previews" show, she reported, and the station was searching for replacements. She urged her son the professor to apply, and called back periodically with updates from the local papers on the search.

He flew to Chicago at his own expense for an audition and was paired with a feminist film scholar. They were assigned to critique "Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid" and "Poltergeist."

When the feminist announced she would never see a horror movie, Mr. Gabler knew he had moved up the list. His second audition was at PBS's expense.

Pursuit Of Excellence

He got the job and kept it for three years, working on his book in the meantime. He was not happy, however.

"I didn't like television and the things I was required to do. I thought I was a lot smarter than I was allowed to be on the program."

He quit when he realized he could end up "50 years old and still giving 30-second film reviews. That was not how I saw myself."

How Mr. Gabler sees himself has in part to do with the public high school he attended in Chicago, a gigantic institution of 6,000 boys which, he said, exacted an unrelenting quest for excellence from its students. The school challenged him in ways that public schools no longer do, he said.

"We had an honors program and my classmates went to the best colleges . . . . The culture created a sense of the value of academic excellence, and that was as important as athletic excellence."

The Gablers decided on the spur of the moment in 1994 to make Amagansett their year-round home. After renting summer houses here for years, they bought a renovated farmhouse near Barnes Hole in Amagansett and enrolled their two girls, now 13 and 11, in school, all within a week.

It was not long before Mr. Gabler, who believes fervently that "good education is a product of high expectations," became involved in local school affairs. He co-chaired the search committee that recently found a new principal for East Hampton High School - something of a baptism by fire when the committee split, at one point, into hostile factions.

He hadn't had "any sense of the political quagmire I was getting into," Mr. Gabler said last week. "I was like the guy who goes for a stroll through an open field and doesn't know there's a war going on."

"Life: The Movie"

Mr. Gabler's third book, "Life: The Movie," tentatively subtitled "How Entertainment Conquered Reality," holds that "entertainment is the primary value in American life" and "in the process, life itself has become an entertainment."

The subject matter represents a graceful progression beyond his first two books, which weave biography with cultural history to show how entertainment has affected Americans and vice versa.

The author lightly calls this his "unified-field theory of American culture," but cautions the subject matter of "Life: The Movie" is not light-hearted.

Take Monica

"I'm proposing in one single and, I hope, persuasive context that everything that has happened in this country in the last century and a half has been increasingly judged by its entertainment value," he said.

Take Monica Lewinsky. "She has absolutely no impact on policy, but it's so entertaining. It's a sign of the public's maturity that we want to know all about it but we don't confuse that with the President's ability to run the country. The press just hasn't realized it yet."

"Entertainment has conquered everything: capitalism, politics, education, sports, art, celebrity. When you understand that, you understand everything: How politics are conducted. How much business is dedicated to providing the props for the movie we all live in."

Individual self-identity has been altered, too, said Mr. Gabler, his own included.

"I have to implicate myself - I hate people who are at one remove and never implicate themselves - as someone who comments on the movie and is within the movie."

Mr. Gabler admits his theories are complicated but prides himself on the clarity of his writing.

"I want to be regarded as a certain kind of writer. But, of course, the critics are part of the movie and they may not like the movie I've created."