{"id":299,"date":"2007-05-20T12:16:30","date_gmt":"2007-05-20T19:04:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=299"},"modified":"2010-11-05T15:52:51","modified_gmt":"2010-11-05T23:52:51","slug":"authorscreenwriter-ronald-suppa-used-to-live-with-michelle-pfeiffer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=299","title":{"rendered":"Author\/Screenwriter Ronald Suppa Used To Live With Michelle Pfeiffer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I call Ron Suppa (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.com\/s\/ref=nb_ss_b\/002-6670616-6841610?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&amp;field-keywords=%22ron+suppa%22&amp;Go.x=0&amp;Go.y=0&amp;Go=Go\">books<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0839495\/\">movie credits<\/a>) Thursday, May 17 (<a href=\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/Images\/photos3\/ronsuppa.wav\">Audio<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/Images\/photos3\/ronsuppa1.wav\">Audio<\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/Images\/photos3\/ronsuppa2.wav\">Audio<\/a>).<\/p>\n<p>Ron: &quot;I was an entertainment attorney. I left that to produce some movies.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;At the time of Paradise Alley, the reason I left the [Universal] lot was that I was producing six movies at the same time in Australia for the Australian Broadcasting Commission [which showed first on television in Australia and New Zealand]. I had a three-picture deal at Fox. I had problems with Stallone with the lawsuit. I had a long talk with Lew Wasserman who was the best friend of my partner John Roach&#8217;s father-in-law <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.kir.com\/archives\/002186.asp\">Corbin Robertson<\/a>, who was one of the richest men in the United States.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Wasserman advised me to move off the lot. &#8216;Let&#8217;s just stroke everybody here.&#8217; It was not a big deal.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I moved to England. I still have two homes in England (Surrey and Regents Park). I have a home in Iowa. I have 1800 acres of a wood farm in Nicaragua. I&#8217;ve moved on. I&#8217;m not sitting around trying to produce movies. I&#8217;ve taught screenwriting at UCLA since 1988. I&#8217;ve written three books on screenwriting. I script doctor for the studios. For me that&#8217;s a hobby. It&#8217;s all nonsense.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I graduated first in my class from University of Wisconsin Law School in 1973. I joined Mitchel, Silberberg, &amp; Knupp on the West Side [of Los Angeles]. They were entertainment-oriented. They had film and television divisions. I practiced in the film division. We represented Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn, Steve McQueen.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Henry Winkler handed on to me a script that Stallone wrote &#8212; The Italian Stallion.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>In 1975, Suppa formed Force Ten Productions with John Roach. It lasted until 1980.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You never realize when you&#8217;re young how difficult it is to make movies.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The only feature film the company produced in the United States was Paradise Alley.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The deal was [with Australia&#8217;s ABC] was that we would use American stars above the title and American talent behind the camera and all the below-the-line talent would be Australian. We were trying to build the Australian film industry.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/title\/tt0113784\/\">Maui Heat<\/a> was made for Showtime and Playboy. We made three films in Hawaii. Shot them all at the same time. It was a gig. Nothing more. All I tried to do was make sure everybody had a good time and made the movies on-time and on-budget.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I could put a crew out in 24 hours&#8230;and they would all be major veterans. I got some directors who had good credits in feature films [who then used pseudonyms]. I had lighting people from ET.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The feature film business doesn&#8217;t make enough movies. There&#8217;s a lot of down time. For cash flow, these directors sometimes need to make a mortgage payment and three alimony payments. You bring them in on a project and give them $10,000 a week for three weeks&#8230; They&#8217;re happy. They don&#8217;t want their name on it. It&#8217;s a new car.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;It was the same thing for my pictures ($1.5 million budgets) in Australia. How did I get major people? I said, &#8216;What are you doing for a few weeks? How about I take you and your entire family and half your friends and fly you first-class to Australia for a few weeks? I&#8217;ll put you up in a nice hotel. Once in a while, you do some acting. When you come back, I&#8217;ll give you a car.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The egos of big stars can be astronomical. Look at my experience with Stallone with Paradise Alley. He was a new star. We&#8217;d be in the office talking and he&#8217;d hear the sound of the tram that carries the tourists around the lot and he&#8217;d want to go outside and pretend he was looking at a building or something so that the tram would come by and say, &#8216;Look, there on your left is Sylvester Stallone, the star of Rocky.&#8217; Then he&#8217;d give a little nod.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Making these little films was such a joy&#8230;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I had a project for a while but he would deny it. Why? He&#8217;s a big name. I had a project with John Travolta. You can&#8217;t just go and say that they are going to do my little project. They&#8217;ll say, &#8216;I&#8217;d love to do it but don&#8217;t put my name anywhere.&#8217;&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;You&#8217;re trying to attach people [to a project] who are unattachable unless you put a check on the table and you have a director that they like and the studio is going to put up $50 million&#8230; Otherwise they are risking their reputation. If that project doesn&#8217;t happen, then it&#8217;s Dustin Hoffman got turned down at Warner Brothers&#8230; Those stars can&#8217;t put themselves in a position to be embarrassed.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;There was an altercation in Sly&#8217;s office betwee me and him over the fact that while I was in the hospital for two weeks with a foot problem, Sly had started casting the picture (Paradise Alley). I had come back and I had gotten a lot of complaints from agents about casting couch.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I went to Sly&#8217;s bungalow. He had all these girls in there. I said, &#8216;Girls, I&#8217;m sorry, but go home. We&#8217;re not casting right now.&#8217; Sly came out and we had an altercation.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;Sly had his head up in Rocky II.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#8217;m currently separated from my wife. I have two kids. I dated a lot. I was in a lot of the gossip columns. I love beautiful women. I lived with Michelle Pfeiffer.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Ron dated actress <a href=\"http:\/\/www.imdb.com\/name\/nm0833519\/\">Marcia Strassman<\/a> from Welcome Back, Kotter.<\/p>\n<p>Luke: &quot;What other famous women did you date?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Ron: &quot;I&#8217;m sorry,&nbsp;I just don&#8217;t go there.&nbsp; I felt funny mentioning Michelle, but that&#8217;s  kind of out there already and for some reason I thought you knew or were  bringing it up.&nbsp; I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve dated people you might know about as much as any  other&nbsp;man&nbsp;who spent most of his career making movies and representing talent.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I came to realize that dating actresses or models will not necessarily lead you to a lasting relationship. The woman I married was neither an actress nor a model. I met her at a gym.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&quot;The women I date now are predominantly not in the entertainment business.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Suppa married in 1995 at age 46 after dating hundreds of women.<\/p>\n<p>&quot;I&#8217;ve never had a problem meeting women. I&#8217;m fairly confident. I was more confident then than I am now.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Luke: &quot;Where are you from?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Ron: &quot;South Philadelphia.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Luke: &quot;Do you come from money?&quot;<\/p>\n<p>Ron: &quot;No. If someone comes from South Philadelphia, you don&#8217;t ask them if they come from money.&quot; <!--adsense--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I call Ron Suppa (books, movie credits) Thursday, May 17 (Audio Audio Audio). Ron: &quot;I was an entertainment attorney. I left that to produce some movies. &quot;At the time of Paradise Alley, the reason I left the [Universal] lot was &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=299\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[98,97],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-299","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-herb-nanas","category-ronald-suppa"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=299"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25369,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/299\/revisions\/25369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=299"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=299"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=299"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}