Article By: Julia Dawidowicz
At Suffolk University, the classroom is not the only place where students have the opportunity to learn interesting, often life changing new things. The CAS Distinguished Visiting Scholars Program was created in 2004 with the mission of, according to Suffolk’s website, “bringing prominent, nationally and internationally renowned scholars, artists, and intellectuals to the Boston campus.” The program’s most recent featured guest was leading Hollywood film producer David Hoberman. Hoberman has been responsible for over 100 productions, including movies Raising Helen, The Proposal, and George of The Jungle, as well as the hit television series Monk. After spending several days meeting individually with Suffolk students to look over their screenplays, Hoberman met with James Carroll, acclaimed author and Boston Globe columnist, for an insightful discussion about screenwriting and success in the film industry. Last Thursday, students and visitors filed into Donahue’s Studio Theater to hear the discussion and view a screening of four scenes from Hoberman’s latest movie, The Fighter (Mandeville Productions, 2010), which will hit theaters next fall. The screening was followed by a brief Q and A session, allowing audience members to get involved and learn more about the details of the filmmaking process.
According to Carroll, Hoberman “is in a position every one of us is influenced by and envies.” Hoberman is also currently the CEO of Mandeville Productions, which he re-formed in 2002 after spending three years working for MGM Studios.
“I’m one of those mailroom stories,” Hoberman said, which he claims is the best way to get a foot in the door in Hollywood, along with “sitting on an agent’s desk.” (Hollywood lingo for being a secretary.) After dropping out of UCLA his senior year, Hoberman’s father got him a job at the ABC mailroom and the rest was history.
His key to success? “Hard work, and taking advantage of the opportunities that came to me. I made a lot of really good choices, and for the right reasons,” Hoberman said. “My success has been in developing screenplays in a studio where people are willing to give me money to make them.” Simple as that may sound, it can’t be that easy to achieve the amount of success Hoberman has, or to be in the position in where people are willing to pay you millions for editing screenplays.
Hoberman’s film The Fighter, which up until Thursday had never before been publicly screened, stars Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale, the latter of whom Hoberman predicts will earn an Oscar nomination for his performance. The movie is based on the true story of Lowell’s legendary WBU Light Welterweight champion “Irish” Micky Ward, and his half-brother Dickie Eklund, who trained him.
Ward, who is played by Wahlberg, is best known for fighting in one of the greatest boxing trilogies in history against Arturo Gatti. Bale portrays Eklund, who was also once a great boxer, his most notable fight being when he beat Sugar Ray Leonard in Boston in 1978, before he became a crack-cocaine addict and received a 10-15 year prison sentence for armed robbery and other drug-related crimes.
First the audience watched 33 minutes of the HBO documentary High on Crack Street: Lost Lives in Lowell, on which Hoberman’s film was based. The documentary consisted of old boxing footage and interviews with Eklund and Ward, and was often reminiscent of the A&E show Intervention, showing evocative clips of Eklund and other addicts smoking crack in Lowell. When Eklund got out of jail, he managed to clean up his act and helped his brother get to the top of the boxing world in the mid 1980’s.
After the documentary, the audience watched four scenes from The Fighter, which Hoberman confessed he would not have selected himself, were it not for the director’s paranoia regarding illegal piracy. Nevertheless, the footage was quite intriguing and it seemed to be like it should be a pretty great film, especially for anyone who knows someone from Lowell, is interested in boxing, or is a Marky Mark fan. It was interesting to watch Bale and Wahlberg play Ward and Eklund immediately following the clips of the brothers themselves: their depictions were dead-on, from their mannerisms to their accents. The Fighter looks like it will be a movie that is artfully filmed and well-developed; one that is both dramatic and often very funny.
“We set out to make a film about the people. We didn’t set out to make a boxing movie,” said Hoberman. “It’s a film about redemption. The American story of a family that was up, went down, and then came out winning. ”
The film, which was shot on location in Lowell, also stars Amy Adams as Ward’s girlfriend and actress Melissa Leo as their mother. During the Q & A session, Hoberman reflected on the idea of Boston becoming a more common location for moviemaking, becoming a sort of new, “East Coast version” of Hollywood. While he doesn’t see this happening any time in the very immediate future, he said that “ideally, Boston will get to the point where they don’t need to bring people from L.A. because there are talented people here and it’s cheaper.” Perhaps The Fighter will be another step in that direction.
