Alec Baldwin

October 25, 2013 World Screen

This interview originally appeared in the MIPCOM 2013 issue of World Screen.

Alec Baldwin is so much more than an award-winning actor. Highlights of his prolific career include his work on stage (A Streetcar Named Desire, Macbeth); the films The Hunt for Red October, The Cooler and It’s Complicated; the TV show Knots Landing; and, more recently, his role as television executive Jack Donaghy in 30 Rock, which garnered him three Golden Globes and two Emmys. He has also hosted Saturday Night Live 16 times, more than anyone else; voiced Thomas the Tank Engine; hosted the Academy Awards ceremony; and narrated or presented the high-end documentaries Great Migrations and A Night of Exploration for National Geographic Channel. Beyond acting, he has campaigned for Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy. He is the radio announcer for the New York Philharmonic, where he indulges his passion for classical music. He writes a blog for The Huffington Post, hosts the show Here's the Thing for public radio, and supports the Hamptons International Film Festival, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) and People for the American Way. A recent interview with World Screen demonstrates just how wide-ranging his interests are.

WS: How did your association with National Geographic begin?
BALDWIN: My association with National Geographic, like [that of] most people who are my age,began with my grandparents collecting the magazine. My grandfather put all of his magazines so lovingly into chocolate brown slipcases. And National Geographic has its place in the anthropological overview for children, especially when they are getting to be a certain age when animals aren’t just toys, they’re not cartoon figures; when kids get to about 7 or 8 years old, [they have] an interest in dinosaurs and the world and National Geographic becomes a part of that. As I got older, in the ’80s, and the world of cable tele­vision [started to develop], there were only a couple of publications that were successfully able to morph into a cable channel. Playboy was one of them, oddly enough! [Laughs] National Geographic was the other, but on a really successful level. I don’t get to watch a lot of TV. I wish I could, actually, but I just don’t have time. And if I’m not watching by appointment a ball game or the news or the debates or 60 Minutes or something that I’m fond of, if I’m home and I’m just dead and I want to relax, I think the only channel I can put on that I’m guaranteed there’s going to be something I want to watch is the National Geographic Channel. So I’ve admired them and what they’ve done.
 
I get approached all the time. Many major, very serious cable [channels] would come to me and say, Would you do this program on camera or voice-over? Something very prestigious, something with great people involved, smart, academicians, and so forth. I would say no because I was on TV for six and a half years [on 30 Rock], then the show went into syndication, and now I do these commercials for Capital One to fund my foundation (we give all the money away to charity). I was dreading that kind of fatigue. I thought, People are going to be so sick to death of seeing me on TV all the time. But I did Walking with Cavemen and Frozen Planet for Discovery and then I did Great Migrations with National Geographic. And when they came this time [for A Night of Exploration], even though my answer to everybody had been no, and I told my agent, “I’m authorizing you that the answer now is no. I just can’t do it.” And she said, “Well, National Geographic wants you to host their program for their 125th anniversary,” and I was like, damn! [Laughs] I had to say yes! I did, and I am an admirer of theirs and I am a fan of Nat Geo and Nat Geo WILD. And the National Geographic Channel is in 170-plus countries around the world, so it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.
 
WS: You’ve also been a champion of documentaries for a long time.
BALDWIN: I don’t know if the word is “champion,” but I’m a fan of them. I produce a program for the Hamptons Film Festival. The artistic director of the festival, David Nugent, and I produce a summer doc series. This year is our fifth year. We try to have a mix of the more purely cinematic [films]. Last year we showed Alma Har’el’s movie Bombay Beach, about these communities along the Salton Sea and at the terminus of the Colorado River and so forth. It was a beautifully haunting, weird movie. Then we’ll show something that is much more of a pure documentary, like How to Survive a Plague. We showed the Kunstler sisters’ biography about William Kunstler, their father, which was a beautiful film. We showed The Cove, where Louie Psihoyos went on to win the Academy Award. That was a weird moment for me to screen the Psihoyos’ movie in August of that year, interview him afterward, and then seven months later I hosted the Oscars and handed him the Academy Award for Best Documentary [Feature]. I am a boundless fan of the Maysles brothers [Albert and David], and their films Gimme Shelter and Grey Gardens. I love documentary film.
 
WS: Tell us about Seduced and Abandoned,the documentary you made to show how to get a movie financed outside the studio system.
BALDWIN: Jimmy Toback and I had wanted to make a movie and we had thought a lot about it. We had three ideas for movies we wanted to do. In one of the movies we were writing, the two central characters were movie actors. It became difficult to figure out how to shoot the movie within the movie; that becomes very expensive, whenever you have moviemaking as part of the film. So we went around and around with the ideas of these three different films, and finally I said to him, “The Cannes Film Festival is coming; why don’t we make a movie about getting a movie made? Why don’t we make a movie about going to Cannes and to the Marché and [show] that aspect of pitching a film and trying to raise money?” That’s just ostensibly what it’s about; really, this is an homage to Cannes. We’re going to have the sweet and the sour. We’re going to show how the sausage is made to one extent, but also talk about the glory of it. And we did get [Bernardo] Bertolucci and [Roman] Polanski and [Francis Ford] Coppola and [Martin] Scorsese to talk to us. And the movie came out really well.
 
WS: There’s a constant struggle, isn’t there, between art and commerce?
BALDWIN: That’s an understatement. The movie business is in a tough place now because it’s like the food business. In order to feed Americans three square meals a day, there are a lot of corners we’ve got to cut. In order to get a mass audience that can help the movie turn a profit, in what is the octopus of the film-distribution system today, there’s homogeneity of the product. The movie business is in the potato-chip business now—it’s not a nutritious meal.
 
WS: Hasn’t a lot of the great stuff that used to happen in independent movies moved to television now?
BALDWIN: Everybody says that. [The answer to that question] leads to a long dissertation about the kinds of people that run these companies now and they don’t know anything about films, they don’t even like films. Years ago [Harry] Cohn, [Irving] Thalberg, the Warner brothers, and so forth, were purported to be people who, if they themselves didn’t make films, if they didn’t have that talent, they recognized people that did and they facilitated them. Now the people that run the major studios have no ability whatsoever to make films. They’re in the potato-chip business. They want to get the saltiest, fattest snacks they can and feed them to people and make money.
 
And independent film struggles with a lot of the economic stresses that used to go into making good films. Let’s say you had a script and they finally agreed to let you direct it, and they get everybody on the hook and they say to you, “We thought we could give you $4 million. You’re going to have to do it for $3 million and cut more corners.” And eventually you’re incapable of making the film you promised yourself as a filmmaker you would make. You see countless people in the independent film world going off and making a film for the sake of making the film, and that’s the triumph. The triumph is, I got it made! Was that the film you promised yourself you were going to make? And it’s not, which is where tele­vision comes in. Television is faster, you’ve got to move a lot faster. It’s a muscle you have to develop, but people are able to. Terry Winter was a lieutenant of David Chase’s for years on The Sopranos and now he’s got Boardwalk Empire. Scorsese was his executive producer. [Vince Gilligan] develops Breaking Bad and Matt Weiner has Mad Men. All these people who develop these shows, like Jenji Kohan, who did Weeds [and Orange Is the New Black], they birth these shows and they don’t seem to be any less happy than the people who are successful in the movie business.
 
WS: How did 30 Rock get away with so much?
BALDWIN: The networks have all gone through cycles like this, where they find somebody who has the hot hand. CBS let Norman Lear do what he did and they didn’t interfere. NBC let Steven Bochco and Dick Wolf do what they did and ABC let Aaron Spelling do what he did. Lorne Michaels [was 30 Rock’s] protector. Lorne is a person who has the ear of the people right at the top. And what Lorne did was say, Tina’s going to go off on this little island of hers with her writing staff and their kind of crazy and funny view of the world and they need to be left alone. I’m sure that 30 Rock would have made more money, it would have been more profitable, and a lot of cuts would have been made, if the network had been more intrusive and more customary in the way that they dealt with [writers and producers]. But they didn’t. Lorne protected Tina. For example, if I’m in a scene with Tina and say, “How was your date?” and she says, “Well, we ended up snowshoeing,” wham, cut to Tina with some big parka on, huffing and puffing snowshoeing across the floor in the studio in Queens, and they’re blowing dry ice into the ring. Now, other people would have said, isn’t it funny enough just to tell it? But Tina didn’t, she wanted to show it. And that was the thing I always used to just marvel at—how Tina and company, they shot everything and showed it. And that cost a lot of money. Even for a little interstitial cut like snowshoeing, it wound up being three seconds of film of Tina huffing and puffing over the ice fields. And that was Lorne making sure she could do that.