Marykay Powell
Producer

Those who know Marykay Powell as a Long & Foster realtor may be surprised to know she’s also an Emmy and Golden Globe award-winning producer. Although the sixty-something Bozman, Md., resident now calls Talbot County home, for decades she was part of the Hollywood glitterati.

“People always ask me, ‘How did a girl from Baltimore end up as a Hollywood producer?’” she says.

It all began at WBAL-AM, where she was a production manager and music director. As her radio career grew, she moved to stations in New York and to California in 1970, where she began doing publicity for films. Her big break came when her promotion of the L.A. Film Festival drew the attention of Ray Stark (producer of films such as Funny Girl and Steel Magnolias), who hired her to handle his public relations in 1976. In the ’80s, she wrote her first treatment for a film called Violets Are Blue, which starred Sissey Spacek and Kevin Kline. “From then on, I was a struggling girl producer,” says Powell.

Powell set about making films with impact, such as White Fang, with Ethan Hawke, and Harriet the Spy, which created a strong heroine for young girls. She won awards for the HBO film Barbarians at the Gate. But she’s pragmatic about her success. “I’m most proud of my work in the process,” she says. “The successes happen along the way.”

While filming Random Hearts with director Sydney Pollack in Washington, D.C., she rented a home on the Eastern Shore. After one month, she bought some land and built her own place. “I just wanted to do something different in life,” she says. “At first, my friends were all horrified, but now they visit and say, ‘If I could find a place to love like you love this place, I would do it too.’”—C.M.

David S. Hamburger
Producer, Production Manager,
Assistant Director

David Hamburger has had a run in the movie business most would envy. The sixty-two-year-old Easton resident spent thirty-five years in feature and television motion picture production, working with the likes of Shirley MacLaine, Clint Eastwood, Tom Cruise, and Angelica Huston. Despite being from a film family (his great-uncle, David Abel, was cinematographer for all of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rodgers musicals, and his uncle, Leon Shamroy, won four Oscars in cinematography), Hamburger made his own way into film.

As a twenty-five-year-old, the Phila- delphia native parlayed his experience in the prestigious Directors Guild training program into jobs on TV series, such as the early “Mission Impossible” shows, before moving onto film. “There wasn’t any defining ‘I made it’ moment,” he says. “It just kind of evolved.”

Perhaps the most recognizable films Hamburger worked on as first assistant director were the Burt Reynolds Smokey & the Bandit (I and II) capers, as well as Hooper and The Cannonball Run. “It was a moving party,” he recalls. “I mean, the movies were lighthearted and making them was a reflection of what was in the movies.”

His favorite film is Being There, starring Peter Sellers and directed by Hal Ashby, a movie he worked on as first assistant director. “Ashby’s movies were very counterculture,” he says. “He had a string of hits that were very popular, although they were what may have been called ‘renegade films.’”

Hamburger bought a boat while living in L.A. and, upon advice from the seller, landed in Oxford, when he and his wife discovered Easton. They moved there permanently in 1995 to raise their daughter far from the Hollywood hills. “I don’t see a lot of movies now because we live in a place that doesn’t have access to them,” he says. “I’m on about a one-year lapse with Netflix.”—C.M.

Carol Flaisher
Location Manager

Thirty years ago, Carol Flaisher was a suburban housewife volunteering at the Kennedy Center. After working on events like the Kennedy Center Honors, she realized she had a gift for details and organization, and thus, a career as a film location manager was born. “I wanted to be a movie star when I was a little girl,” she says. “Didn’t everybody? But I love the behind-the-scenes work, and logistics is something I’m good at.”

So what exactly does a location manager do? Say a movie takes place along the Chesapeake, like Wedding Crashers, one of the last films Flaisher worked on. It’s her job to find just the right location that will suit the needs of the director, designer, and the script itself, while, at the same time, balancing the logistics of parking or city ordinances or anything else that gets thrown in her path. “It’s basically a collaboration with the people who make the look of the movie,” Flaisher explains. “The details are endless; I’m the nuts and bolts.”

The hours can also seem endless. Flaisher often gets up at 3 a.m. to reach the set before the hair and makeup people, who arrive at 5 a.m., and she’s the last one closing down the set, sometimes twenty hours after work began. All the more reason to have a getaway home in Talbot County.

Flaisher’s husband had wanted to build on the Bay for years, but it wasn’t until she worked on Wedding Crashers, filmed in St. Michaels, that she fell under the region’s spell. They bought property on Tarr Creek in Bellevue, just across the Tred Avon River from Oxford. “Even Owen Wilson loved the Bay,” she shares. “And Jane Seymour is a painter, and she fell in love with the Bay, too. During her free time, she would take off just to paint here.”

“The Bay is a special place,” Flaisher says. “The people are nicer here. It’s an undiscovered area of the country. It just has a different look from other places.

“Besides,” she adds, “I can eat crab every day—and some days I do.”—M.K.Z.

Bill Gordean
Film Editor/Producer

“I was brought up in a motion picture family in Beverly Hills,” says Bill Gordean, film editor for movies such as Dragnet, Legal Eagles, and the first two Beethoven films. Gordean’s father, Jack, a film agent, represented Hollywood stars like John Wayne, William Holden, and Susan Hayward. “We had a household with movie stars all over it,” says Gordean with a laugh.

Every second or third Friday night, for instance, his father had a running card game with film bigwigs including directors Billy Wilder and William Wyler, producers Fred Kohlmar and Harold Mirisch, and actor Dean Martin. “They played gin and bridge,” Gordean recalls, “And I used to sit up on the banister and listen to the repartee.”

The men talked about business, women, you name it, Gordean says, even politics occasionally. And with this kind of exposure as a child, Gordean felt the tug of a film career early, albeit one behind the scenes.

He began his career working as a production trainee at 20th Century Fox after graduating from college. From there, he found his way into film editing, and although he’s done a bit of producing for films including Burt Reynolds’ 1985 film, Stick, it’s the editing that he loves. “Editing is wonderful,” he says. “For me, it was a tremendous
challenge: How do you make this work? How do you make that emotion? I was never bored, and I was always solving a problem—and getting paid for it.”

Now retired, Gordean was particular about the films he chose to work on, tending to pick projects based on the people involved rather than the storyline. One of his favorite jobs was working with Mel Brooks as an assistant editor on Young Frankenstein. “It was a great experience,” Gordean remembers. “Mel’s one of the most naturally funny guys I know. He can turn it off and on like a spigot. He was very demanding, very specific. But, I laughed most every day, a lot.”

When he decided to leave the movie business, Gordean was as choosy about location as he had been about his work. In 1997, when he and his wife were deciding where to relocate, they remembered a couple from St. Michaels whom they had met seventeen years ago while sailing in the Caribbean. “You must come and visit,” the couple told them. “That stayed in my mind for seventeen years,” Gordean muses.

He and his wife moved to St. Michaels in 1997 and completed their house in 2000. “We wanted to move back East, wanted to live in a small town, wanted to live somewhere we could have a dock,” he says. “We love it here. We really enjoy the small community, and the fact that you can leave your door open.”—M.K.Z.

Laura Ambler
Screenwriter

Laura Ambler is proof that you don’t need to leave home to reinvent yourself. The former advertising executive was bored in her industry and looking for something new to stir her creative juices. In 1998 at age thirty-five, she enrolled in a screenwriting class offered at Johns Hopkins University and a year later had launched a career in Hollywood—without ever leaving her hometown of Easton. “In a way, screenwriters are a lot like surrogates,” says Ambler. “You come up with this idea, and you give it life, and then you turn it over to the people who are going to make it.”

Ambler’s first screenplay to be picked up was The Theory of Chaos, which was bought by legendary movie producer and director Roger Corman, who never made it. After Corman saw the children’s videos that Ambler wrote and produced (Horses A to Z, Airplanes A to Z, and I Love Horses), he hired her to write The White Pony, the biggest-grossing Corman production to date, which aired on Showtime and HBO. “It’s unbelievable,” she says of seeing her words put on the screen. “It’s equally horrifying and exciting. It’s like seeing your children perform for the first time.”

Ambler has written approximately twenty-five screenplays (she’s currently turning one into a novel) in genres from horror to action adventure. She keeps a large corkboard in her office filled with clippings from newspapers and magazines that could make their way into her next feature, including one entitled “Drunk Driver Drives Home with Decapitated Body.”“Anything that sparks interest in me, I save it,” she says.

She travels to Hollywood a few times a year but is perfectly happy to work from Easton and leave her screenplays in L.A.

“I think it would be miserable to live out there,” she says. “I think I’m lucky as all get out to live here and travel there and do the fun stuff—stay in nice hotels and meet really interesting people. And then I get to come home.”—C.M.