by Gerry Conway
Alex Kurtzman is in the news right now, obviously, because he’s the director of the much-reviled “The Mummy” reboot. For what it’s worth, I kinda liked the movie, probably because my expectations were lowered by awful reviews, possibly because I generally like popcorn movies, and possibly because I worked for a year with Alex and his former partner, Bob Orci, when we were a lot younger and far less grey. But I’m not here to discuss the merits of The Mummy. I’m here to relate a story about Alex Kurtzman at 25 which proved to me that he and Bob were (and are) blessed by the Goddess of Good Luck.
In 1998 I’d been working in TV about nine years, and had experience as a mid-level producer on a number of network TV shows, most recently, at that moment, on an NBC show called “Players,” which introduced Ice-T as an actor in the Dick Wolf universe. I’d worked on the pilot for the show, though I ended up receiving no credit, and as a result I developed a relationship with the head of TV development at Universal TV. When the show ended, Universal wanted to keep that relationship alive, so they offered me a pilot deal, along with a role as consulting producer on “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.”
Ostensibly, the reason I was hired as consulting producer was to provide “guidance” to the two new, and very young, co-executive producers who were acting as writer-show runners: Alex Kurtzman and Bob Orci. This was ridiculous on several levels. First, at that point, Alex and Bob had been on the show for several years and already knew more about it than I ever would. Second, though I was older than Alex and Bob, and had worked in TV a few years longer, I was by no means better qualified than they were: Alex and Bob had been to film school, knew the technical end of filmmaking much better than I did, and Alex, at least, had been part of the film community his entire life– his father was an agent. Third, while I’ve always been realistic about my particular set of skills (I’m a skilled craftsman possessed of moderate talent), Alex and Bob were extremely bright and talented, and already as skilled at the craft of TV writing as anyone I ever worked with. So, despite my ostensible “leadership” position I recognized immediately the only guidance I could provide Alex and Bob was the reassurance that yes, indeed, they knew exactly what they were doing.