Bob Balaban reflects on lifetime achievement award from Guild Hall

The secret, it seems, is momentum.

At least that’s the way Bob Balaban sees it. The Bridgehampton resident—who has worked, and continues to work, as an actor, producer, director, developer of television series, and author of children’s books—is this year’s winner of the Performing Arts Lifetime Achievement Award from the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts. This year’s awards dinner is scheduled the night after the Academy Awards, on Monday, March 8, at Cipriani, on 42nd Street in New York City.

Mr. Balaban, who started coming out to the East End some 30 years ago and became a year-round resident in 2001, said in a telephone interview last week that being singled out for the honor by the Guild Hall Academy of the Arts is “daunting and impressive.”

Noting that he and his wife, Lynn Grossman, have been going to events at Guild Hall ever since their introduction to the East End—among the highlights: a favorite Andy Warhol exhibition, special films like Louis Malle’s “Au Revoir, les Enfants,” last summer’s “beautiful Amy Irving production of ‘The Glass Menagerie’” directed by Harris Yulin, bringing his stage pro-

duction of “The Exonerated” to the John Drew Theater in 2003, hosting the closing awards ceremony as a member of the board of the Hamptons International Film Festival—he conceded that a fair number of the membership of the Guild Hall Academy “are my friends.”

Notwithstanding his connections in the arts world, Mr. Balaban asserts that career momentum is “very, very important” in any consideration of a body of work and achievements over an extended period of time. He said he had modeled his work ethic to some extent on what he has learned from Susan Sarandon, whom he most recently worked with and then directed in “Bernard and Doris,” a film about the relationship between heiress Doris Duke and Bernard Lafferty, played in the film by Ralph Fiennes, the man who started out as her employee and became her confidant and, eventually, caretaker.

“You can’t stand still,” Mr. Balaban said. “You have to show up whenever you can, and keep showing up. There are a lot of people who would love to show up for things you have a chance to do. You have to keep showing up, or those things will go to other people.”

No one could accuse Mr. Balaban of standing still. Many television fans remember him from appearances on “Seinfeld” in the early 1990s, or “Friends” in 1999. He has been a regular member of the ensemble in Christopher Guest’s popular so-called “mockumentaries,” including “Waiting for Guffman” (1996), “Best in Show” (2000), “A Mighty Wind” (2003), and “For Your Consideration” (2006), and was featured in such major films as “Absence of Malice” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” In fact, his 81 feature film and television credits on IMDb.com stretch with few interruptions from 1965 to the present—and that’s just as an actor. The internet database also includes 22 director credits, 10 producer credits, seven writer credits, and 26 occasions when he played himself.

Most recently, he directed a film about the artist Georgia O’Keeffe for television, and played the judge at the obscenity trial of poet Allen Ginsberg in the film “Howl,” starring James Franco, Jeff Daniels, Mary-Louise Parker, and David Strathairn, which was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize at Sundance 2010 and also earned acclaim at the Berlin Film Festival. His current acting assignment is in a film titled “The Convincer,” shooting in Minnesota and starring Greg Kinnear, Billy Crudup, Alan Arkin, and Leah Thompson.

Mr. Balaban clearly enjoys making films with such distinguished casts. “It’s wonderful to meet people,” he said, “and ask them to be in my movie someday.”

He is already planning his next directorial and producing effort, “The Eustace Diamonds,” based on a novel by Anthony Trollope, first published in 1871 as a serial in the Fortnightly Review, with a script by Julian Fellowes. Mr. Fellowes wrote the script for “Gosford Park,” which Mr. Balaban produced, based on an idea by Mr. Balaban and director Robert Altman.

During almost unimaginable down time from his work in film, theater and television, Mr. Balaban has already created a series of six “McGrowl” books for children, published by Scholastic, which have sold some six million copies. He is already at work on another children’s book series, this one for Viking, called “The Creature from the Seventh Grade,” about a nerdy student who becomes a somewhat nerdy monster.

Conceding that January and February, “when there is no one around,” might be his favorite time of the year on the East End, the author said that he is typically most productive when he is “sequestered in Bridgehampton.”

Asked to pick his own top five list of achievements over his career, Mr. Balaban, after making it clear that he would only be considering his business life, started off with “The Exonerated,” the play and subsequent film he directed based on real case histories about six people sentenced to death whose innocence was proved before the sentence could be carried out. That experience “changed my perspective on so many things,” he said, “and had some influence.”

He went on to talk about: working with Robert Altman on “Gosford Park”; developing “Hopeless Pictures,” an adult animated TV series that showed on the IFC network; being directed by Steven Spielberg and spending 10 months with Francois Truffaut on the set of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”; and producing and directing “Bernard and Doris” on a shoestring budget of $500,000.

Talking about the huge success of “Close Encounters,” but referring to many of his favorite jobs, Mr. Balaban said that “you can’t control what happens to a film, but it’s the experience that you remember: It’s the people you meet and get to know. Watching the people work ... is an amazing experience.”

Musing about his latest award, Mr. Balaban was philosophical. “You have to be sure, when considering a lifetime achievement award,” he cautioned, “not to think that ‘lifetime’ means the end of one’s lifetime.”

“You don’t look back,” he said. “I have no scrapbook—my archive is my appointment book. I’m looking forward to a very productive next 20 years.”