March
15So who's this Guy, Peter Rice?
The TV community wants to get a fix on the man who last week became the new overseer at Fox Broadcasting. How do they pitch this reserved Brit who comes out of the art house world and is an unknown on the TV landscape?Rupert Murdoch clearly respects Rice and may be grooming him to share the top spot with son James, or perhaps even daughter Elizabeth. So Peter Rice is someone worth knowing.
Well I know him. And I can reliably report that, after various lunches, dinners and even a few serious arguments, I don’t know him at all.
Peter Rice is the sort of person you meet in your first year at Oxford and say to yourself, maybe, by the time you graduate, you may figure him out. But you won’t.
Given his distanced demeanor, Rice may have initial problems getting acclimated to the TV world. TV types like to shmooze. Rice doesn’t give good shmooze. TV types like to gossip about rivals. Rice doesn’t give good gossip.
Though everyone knows about Rice’s successes – “Juno,” “Sideways,” “Slumdog” et al. – I’ve spent time with him during problem times. A couple of years ago he spent weeks patching together a high-profile star vehicle that was about to shoot on location. Despite Rice’s tact and perseverance, the movie kept falling apart. I encountered him right after he returned, exasperated, from his final trip as he unburdened himself of his post mortem: “Fucking director wouldn’t fix the fucking script.”
Now, for Rice, that constituted an encyclopedic analysis, and an unusually candid one.
Rice tried to help the cause of Baz Luhrman’s “Australia” and expertly got out of blame’s way on that one. His adventure at Fox Atomic has not been felicitous – witness the invisible opening last weekend of “Miss March.”
But to his credit, when one of his films triumphs Rice diligently avoids the spotlight: He never plays the scene-stealer.
When reporters from Variety (or anywhere else) phone or email him with questions, Rice sends forth a polite “no comment.” I once petulantly emailed him a phony notification that Variety was preparing a detailed front page story about him, only to get the predictable phone call.
“You want to hear me beg, don’t you,” Rice said. The story never ran.
Will Rice warm up to his new gig? TV is a garrulous, noisy, edgy business. I can see Rice getting edgy. Not noisy.
And I suspect he’ll do fine.
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