The Misfits

Finally, through the intervention of longtime friend Bill Horberg, at Sydney Pollack’s company Mirage Productions, and writer Jerry Stahl, who had approached him for notes on his long-planned adaptation of Budd Schulberg‘s What Makes Sammy Run?, Cornfeld came to the attention of Ben Stiller, just then bathed in studio attention from There’s Something About Mary and looking for someone to run his production company, Red Hour.

“He‘s just a very interesting guy who has a really eclectic background and interests,” says Stiller. “I liked his sensibility and I liked his taste. He’s really good at working with writers and understanding how to make a script better, in both a specific and a general sort of way. Because he‘s a writer, he has a real respect for it.”

For his part, Cornfeld consistently downplays his own efforts and denies having any overriding agenda. “I like movies,” he says. “It doesn’t go too far beyond that. I‘ve always looked at myself as a footnote in other people’s films. I do outsider stories -- that‘s just kind of my fundamental paradigm. I don’t know if it‘s because I was a fat kid or what, but you look at the times that the movies were really good, it was in the ’30s, when the European emigres came over who had a view of America that was both cynical and optimistic. They had an outsider‘s perspective, where they felt detached enough to comment on what was going on. The ’70s was the same thing, because of the them-and-us countercultural fault line that was in place. Once again, these were outsiders saying, ‘This is not what I’m a part of.‘”

It is Cornfeld’s enduring wit that makes him both a friend to writers and the front-runner to be the modern Herman Mankiewicz, whose bons mots once summarized an era. Many of Cornfeld‘s best lines border on the aphoristic: “If you want to see how well someone can write, take a look at their arbitration letter.” “The blank page is God’s way of letting you know how difficult it is to be God.” Or the enigmatic: “I‘ve got plenty of irons in the freezer.”

“He’s also the king of the obscure metaphor,” says screenwriter John Hamburg (Zoolander, Duplex). “When I first got to know him, I would nod like I understood, but it would never make sense to me. Or anybody you mention, he‘ll say they’re the smartest, the best, the whateverest in Hollywood. Harold Ramis: ‘Hands down, smartest person in Hollywood.’ He does this completely seriously, under the assumption that everyone knows this. ‘The thing about Ben Hecht is, he had the smallest hands in Hollywood.’ ‘David Cronenberg makes the best seared tuna in the business.’”

“He knows every musician, every band, every book, every writer, every author, every random figure,” says Nancy Juvonen, president of Drew Barrymore‘s company Flower Films, which just co-produced Danny DeVito’s Duplex with Cornfeld and Red Hour. “And literally, casting with Stuart is like being dropped off in Taiwan and trying to find your way around. It‘s all these names, to where you’re going, ‘I don’t know this person. Please let me know just one.‘” Screenwriter David Goyer, Cornfeld’s longtime neighbor, adds, “Stuart has had one of the most storied lives I‘ve run across. Anybody who is remotely interesting, Stuart’s a good friend of: Ricky Jay, David Lynch, Jerry Stahl, Karen Finley -- whoever they are, they know Stuart. One time I asked him what‘s the strangest thing he’s ever seen, and he was apparently playing poker with Barry Levinson and Herve Villaichaize one night, and they decided to go fishing, so they rented a boat off the Santa Monica Pier. And Stuart looked up at one point, and Herve Villaichaize had caught a barracuda, and he was wrestling with the barracuda in the boat, stabbing it with this big huge knife he used to carry, this life-and-death battle going on. And Stuart kind of nodded and said, ‘Yeah, that was pretty weird.’”

Yet after 20 years in the film business, Cornfeld resolutely declines to lay blame with either those who make the decisions or those who prosper by them. “Over the course of my career,” he says, “I‘ve only met two studio executives who were really stupid. Everybody else was smart enough to get in the room. So I don’t look at it like I‘m this great guy with amazing taste. It’s just that my real enthusiasm is so much better than my fake enthusiasm. I just can‘t get it together to be that kind of cheerleader, because when I do, my voice and my eyes totally fucking let me down. I just broadcast desperation. If you make some morally corrupt film that makes a shitload of money, if you give $600,000 to Cedars-Sinai that’s going to save kids with cancer, [then] at the end of the day you‘re not really beating yourself up for having done a movie that’s all about things going boom.”