E-mail a friendLaura Ziskin
airdate August 15, 2008
Starting as a writer for game shows, Laura Zisken went on to become a feature development exec. She's served as president of Fox 2000 and an independent producer, enjoying success with such films as No Way Out, Pretty Woman, As Good As It Gets and Spider-Man. She was also tapped as the first solo female producer of an Oscar telecast. Zisken is exec-producing the historic simulcast program, Stand Up To Cancer—a groundbreaking initiative aimed at raising funds to accelerate cancer research and enable new therapies.
Producer tells Tavis the why and how of her upcoming three-network fundraising special that she doesn’t want to call a telethon. (3:12)
Full Interview. (9:44)
Laura Ziskin
Tavis: Laura Ziskin is a very successful film and TV producer whose credits include "The Spider-Man" franchise, "Pretty Woman" - oh, my God - and "As Good As It Gets." She is also a breast cancer survivor who will be producing the upcoming three-network cancer fundraiser, "Stand Up To Cancer," the live special broadcast on Friday, September 5. Here now the public service announcement for "Stand Up To Cancer" featuring one Sydney Poitier.
[Clip]
Tavis: What an ambitious project. Live on not one, not two, but three networks at the same time.
Laura Ziskin: And I have to make cancer entertaining.
Tavis: Yeah.
Ziskin: On top of it, yeah. It's very exciting. It's a great opportunity.
Tavis: Yeah (laughter). The entertaining part you can handle. How you pulled off the three networks at one time is another issue. The idea comes from?
Ziskin: It was really interesting. There were a group of women and, you know, you want something done, ask women to do it.
Tavis: My mother always told me that.
Ziskin: That's the truth. So there were really seven of us working on separate things with the idea of trying to raise awareness about cancer and trying to put it on the national agenda. It was Sherry Lansing, whose mother died from, I think, ovarian cancer; Ellen Zifrin, whose mother is a lymphoma survivor and she's married to Ken Zifrin, who's an entertainment lawyer; Lisa Paulsen who runs the Entertainment Industry Foundation. They do a lot of philanthropy where they organize the media and media figures. She's lost both her parents to cancer.
Me, I'm a breast cancer survivor; a woman producer named Noreen Fraser whose husband is Woody Fraser who started "Good Morning America." She's also a breast cancer survivor, and her partner, Rusty Robertson who helped start the Komen Foundation. Then, of course, Katie Couric who lost both her husband and her sister to cancer and has been very active in the cancer community.
All of us wanted to use the media, so we went to the networks and, with Ken Zifrin's help, they agreed to give us this roadblock show. Of course, they, the network chiefs, like everyone else in this country, are also touched by cancer, so Jeff Zucker is a colon cancer survivor. Anne Sweeney's mother had breast cancer and I'm sure Les Moonves has been touched as well.
Tavis: So how is this show - give me a little bit here - how is the show going to work?
Ziskin: Well, I don't like the word "telethon," so I offered a bottle of champagne to anyone who could come up with a better name for it. So the offer is still open if you can come up with something.
Tavis: (Laughter) What kind of champagne?
Ziskin: Well, the best.
Tavis: Okay, okay, all right.
Ziskin: So I call it a national televised fundraiser. It's really two-fold. I was very influenced by "An Inconvenient Truth." I produced the Academy Awards a couple of years ago when "An Inconvenient Truth" won for Best Documentary.
Tavis: The Al Gore documentary about the environment, yeah.
Ziskin: Yes, correct. I went to Barney's where I do all my market research and I got -
Tavis: (Laughter) I like how you say that, market research at Barney's. All right.
Ziskin: Right. And I got a shopping bag and it said, "Have a Green Christmas." Green six months before would have meant something completely different and I thought, boy, that really tells you the power of the mediums in which we all work to tip the conversation, if you believe in tipping points which I do, and as a cancer survivor, someone living with cancer, I thought I have to use what I know how to do to raise awareness in this country about this disease that kills 1,500 Americans a day.
So 1,500 Americans will die today from cancer and tomorrow and yesterday. If you opened up your newspaper and it said, "1,500 Americans Dead Today" from anything and that this was gonna happen day after day, 9/11, every other day, as a nation, we would rise up and say, "This is a crisis. We have to do something. We have to do better."
So a lot of the show is about trying to get everyone to recognize that every single person in this country is affected by this disease. One in two men and one in three women will be diagnosed with cancer in their lifetime and, if you haven't personally experienced it, had cancer yourself, and the odds are what I just suggested, then you know somebody, a friend, a relative, who's been touched by it.
Surprisingly, the cancer community is very divisive, so there's this kind of - someone called it the balkanization of body parts. So breast cancer people are fighting for research for breast cancer and prostate cancer people are fighting for prostate cancer, but we're all in it together. In fact, the science tells us that pretty soon cancers won't be characterized by body parts. They'll be characterized by the type of cancer because that's what we're learning about the biology of cancer.
So we need to come together. We're a huge, huge constituency and, you know, we have political power too, so we want to raise money. There's a very specific research we want to fund, but we also want to raise awareness and suggest to people, as with global warming, that movie didn't fix the problem, but it changed peoples' attitudes. It made people have a kind of awareness that they didn't have before, so they're making incremental changes and pretty soon the big changes will come.
Tavis: The Al Gore example is probably a good example, Laura, because I was just about to ask how it is that you get people to be hopeful because, on the one hand, you want to raise money, you're trying to inspire hope, but those numbers that you just laid out are so damning and so disparaging for people. The problem seems so massive and, to your point, there's so many different kinds of cancer.
I mean, it's as troubling for me as it is for you, I suspect, when somebody dies and you say how they die, you expect somebody to say nowadays "cancer." It doesn't even matter what kind of cancer. It's just that everybody seems to be dying of some form of cancer. How do you inspire, with a project like this, as massive, as ambitious as it is, when the problem just seems too outsized?
Ziskin: Well, I think you inspire hope in two ways. One is the statistic I didn't give you is that there are almost eleven million cancer survivors today.
Tavis: That's important.
Ziskin: That's people who survived cancer, who may be living with cancer. A wonderful doctor who treats me said, "We don't have to win the war. We'll take a tie." So there is now the current thinking about cancer therapy that we can make cancer a chronic manageable disease, a disease that you can live with. So cancer isn't gonna kill you. When cancer metastasizes, then it can kill you, but there's a way to live with cancer and we're starting to understand it. So I think that's one way that we're hopeful.
The other way that we're hopeful is look at all the incredibly difficult problems that we've solved. This is a world-wide epidemic, cancer, but American ingenuity. Think what it's led to. You know, we thought it was impossible to go to the moon, but someone challenged us to go there and we went there and we went beyond. We created an IT revolution that changed the way the entire world lives, changed all of our lives.
So I think the first step is acknowledging the problem and the second step is saying we are committed and we commit the resources and the government gets committed and the drug companies and the scientists get committed to solving it. The other thing that's very, very hopeful is that technology has put us on the brink of understanding the biology and the genetics of cancer.
So in 1971 when Richard Nixon declared war on cancer, we didn't really understand cancer. We didn't really understand what the mechanisms are. Now we know so much better. We can actually look inside cells and see what's the biological process that's causing it. If we can figure out what causes it, we know because there are certain cancers that are more treatable than others, when we can find the pathways, we can block them and we can cure it.
Tavis: I've got about forty-five seconds here. Let me ask very quickly how your own personal experience with breast cancer has made you want to do this rather than making you bitter.
Ziskin: Well, I'm not someone who says cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me because it wasn't. My cancer went undiagnosed for a long time and it was found at a very late stage. So can I say it sucked? Yeah, it sucked.
Tavis: I think you just did.
Ziskin: But, I mean, I feel better. Someone said to me, "Well, if you have cancer, how do you feel working on this every day?" I said, "I feel good." Because I feel like I'm just the same thing that I'm encouraging everybody else to do. Get engaged, get involved and demand that the problem can be fixed because it's within our power to do that. So I feel empowered and I want the people who watch the show to feel empowered too because I do feel positive about it.
Tavis: The word "historic" gets so over-used these days. We use the word "historic" so loosely, but this is historic. This may very well be the biggest single event to try to stand up to cancer at one time that we've ever witnessed. It happens on September 5 on ABC, NBC and CBS. Laura Ziskin and friends are behind it. Thanks for coming to see us and we wish you all the best on the telethon.
Ziskin: Great. Thank you.
Tavis: The fundraiser, the giving campaign. I'm still working on it. I want that champagne (laughter).
Ziskin: Okay.
Back to August 15, 2008