Today on a very special Womb to Tomb…

Sentimentality Alert! Today’s post contains liberal doses of nostalgia with a sprinkling of schmaltz. Please feel free to skip it and move on to something a little snarkier if you’re not in the mood.

Still hanging around? Good for you.

On this day, November 6th, Ethan Hawke was born. The well-tousled actor made a big splash early in his career with the likes of Dead Poets Society and Alive and continues to output fairly solid, intriguing work in movies that are watch-worthy, if not entirely blockbustery.

• One of Hawke’s pretentious-but-not-bad performances was in Great Expectations in which he costarred with Gwyneth Paltrow.

And one of Paltrow’s earliest roles was in a movie called Flesh and Bone, produced by Mark Rosenberg. He passed away on this day, November 6th.

Mark is being featured in today’s Womb to Tomb because you probably know his work even if you don’t recognize his name.

I’m also including him because Mark was my boss on the day that he died.

(this is from Jeff Bridges’ collection of Widelux photography that he shoots behind the scenes of every movie he’s made.)

I started working for Mark and his wife Paula Weinstein in 1990 when they formed Spring Creek Productions at Warner Bros. as a part of a new first-look deal. They were riding high from the success of co-producing The Fabulous Baker Boys, the amazing directorial debut of the then-unknown Steve Kloves. I was the company’s production assistant, a job that in most places like this in Hollywood means the absolute bottom of the heap. Lowest rung on the power ladder. Photocopying, fetching lunch and spending 80% of your time in L.A. traffic. The guy who gets yelled at the most for misperforming all of the most unwanted tasks.

But working at Spring Creek was different, and Mark and Paula were not typical Hollywood bosses.

More strolling down Hollywood Memory lane, after the jump.

Mark was away when I first started working for him, so we didn’t meet until I had been doing the job for about a month. At the moment that we did meet, he tossed me the keys to the black Porsche 911 he drove, a car that probably cost about 150 times the monthly rent of my bug-infested Hollywood apartment. My assignment was simply to get the car washed and bring it back in one piece, but I think Mark’s other motivation was simply to gauge my reaction.

He did that a lot. He was one of those guys who would poke at you a bit, prod you into a response of one kind or another, but it was never because he was being mean or belittling you. Mark’s agenda was always – well, usually – to teach you something, to let you in on the process of story development and the behind-the-scenes work of a Hollywood producer. He mentored a lot of the people in that company, and many of us stayed at Spring Creek for 3-5 years and more – an unheard-of length of time in terms of Hollywood production companies.

Mark and Paula engendered that strong loyalty; they were tough and demanding, but at the same time encouraged input from everyone in the company in creative meetings and story development. Some of the people I worked with at the time are still with Paula; after Mark’s death in 1992, she ran the company for a number of years before later partnering with Barry Levinson and finding great success with the likes of Analyze This, The Perfect Storm, Bandits and more.

Mark was a man of great appetites – for food, wine, cigarettes, big producery cigars and for life. Ever seen Barton Fink? At the time it was made, the rumor was that the Coen brothers based the loud, bombastic producer character played by Michael Lerner on Mark Rosenberg, and even considered having Mark play him in the movie. And he was that guy; he liked to yell and laugh and tell big stories. He liked to order food for everyone in the office when we’d have a big lunchtime meeting. He liked to pick little quarrels with his wife or his assistant, and then give you a little smirk or glance to let you in on the joke.

He passed away while filming Flesh and Bone in Texas. Kloves had become a good friend of Mark and Paula’s, and called Paula from an ambulance after Mark collapsed on the set. A few weeks after his death, a memorial service was held for Mark in Hollywood. It was an amazing, standing-room-only event in which lots of people gave heartfelt speeches and remembrances – from Sydney Pollack all the way to our company’s story editor. I remember hearing that Warren Beatty showed up late and couldn’t find a seat. At a gathering at Paula’s house later that day, one of my bosses was amazed to see me talking to Barbra Streisand (it actually wasn’t me, just someone who kind of looked like me. I did, however, have a surreal moment with James Woods that day.)

I only worked for Mark for about two years before he died, and I always regretted not getting to know him better and not taking greater advantage of what a terrific filmmaking resource he was. But I think that we learn a lot from the losses of people in our lives, even if those people aren’t our best friends or family. The fact that I still think about Mark from time to time tells me how much the experience of Hollywood and moviemaking has informed my life, my interests and the things I find important to contemplate. And I think we probably all have had people like Mark in our lives.

Maybe I’ll give The Fabulous Baker Boys a spin tonight, or maybe even Flesh and Bone or Fearless. Hollywood lost a good one 14 years ago today.

Okay. Maudlin Time at Burbanked is over for today! Feel free to mock me in the comments if you like.

(by the way, if you haven’t seen any of Jeff Bridges’ photography, you owe it to yourself to check it out. His Web site features some of his recent work, but I found the above shot of Mark and Jeff on this page which includes an excellent gallery from the making of Baker Boys.)